I *think* this might be an illegal download site

[RAMWolff]

IT seems nefarious of me to suggest this but wouldn't it be nice is a virus code writer were on OUR team and wrote one that devastated web sites like this? AND kept them coming until they had to set up their rip off sites in the Dark Web where they belong! The audacity to come and rip off folks and then if they are approached about it they have a flippant attitude about "Prove it" and then sends out trojans and viruses on the attack and they are the f'ing criminals. WTF!

 

[Rae134]

Those kind of sites wont take things down but if you can see the link of where the stuff is hosted (like rapidshare etc) then you can send them a DMCA and THEY will take them down (the broken link still stays at the illegal site tho until someone uploads it again). I know because I've done it.

 

[Ken1171]

Every now and then, someone contacts me about my products being pirated somewhere, where even my gallery renders get stolen and sold elsewhere. This has been going on forever, and will probably never end. According to Phil Cook (PhilC), this is how Poser Python scripts died out when all devs finally gave up on it. The Poser Python scripts market was not big enough to survive piracy in that scale.

So Rendo is not only trying to revive Poser, but also Python scripts for it. Both were DEAD when Rendo acquired Poser. The purchase verification was their attempt to make it viable again. I know this won't stop piracy, but it will make it harder. It's better than nothing at all. Before this, it was just a matter of copying the script to a folder, but now that won't work anymore. Desperate times require desperate measures.

So far the community has understood the severity of the situation, and has been supportive. This is important when Poser and its market is now walking on thin ice, and needs all the community support it can get. This includes Python scripts, since I am the last dev still active on it. This is probably why Rendo has called their ads campaign "Poser pulse is getting stronger". It's still on ER, and it needs all the community support it can get.

So even if you are against copy protection, and even when I know this has never stopped piracy before, this is like a last stand. If I can't make it succeed, it might be the end for Python scripts for Poser. The next few months will be decisive. It can only succeed if the community supports it.

 

[Hornet3d]

Every now and then, someone contacts me about my products being pirated somewhere, where even my gallery renders get stolen and sold elsewhere. This has been going on forever, and will probably never end. According to Phil Cook (PhilC), this is how Poser Python scripts died out when all devs finally gave up on it. The Poser Python scripts market was not big enough to survive piracy in that scale.

So Rendo is not only trying to revive Poser, but also Python scripts for it. Both were DEAD when Rendo acquired Poser. The purchase verification was their attempt to make it viable again. I know this won't stop piracy, but it will make it harder. It's better than nothing at all. Before this, it was just a matter of copying the script to a folder, but now that won't work anymore. Desperate times require desperate measures.

So far the community has understood the severity of the situation, and has been supportive. This is important when Poser and its market is now walking on thin ice, and needs all the community support it can get. This includes Python scripts, since I am the last dev still active on it. This is probably why Rendo has called their ads campaign "Poser pulse is getting stronger". It's still on ER, and it needs all the community support it can get.

So even if you are against copy protection, and even when I know this has never stopped piracy before, this is like a last stand. If I can't make it succeed, it might be the end for Python scripts for Poser. The next few months will be decisive. It can only succeed if the community supports it.

My view of the copy protection is probably clouded by my animosity to the way SM sneaked it into Game Dev and then let it's customers find out about the deactivation feature six months down the road. Even admitting to that bias I still don't like it much but do see copy prtection as a necessary evil and if we are going to attack someone we should be attacking the pirates themselves.

Drinking and driving has been illegal in the UK for many years but today it is not only illegal it is also seen as being anti social and the number of people reporting such cases has risen massively. What has this to do with Poser? Well it shows the attitude of a wider community can have an effect. The Poser community not only needs to support Renderosity and the vendors but also make it clear that they find pirating to be repugnant and voice that view in an attempt to at least make some potential pirates think twice.

 

[MEC4D]

Stopping piracy is only possible if people stop illegal downloading or share the stuff with friends , and nothing else will do that . When you have a community , you will have a friends, and that's how the cookie crumble...

They should find a way to add automatic customer's name and email into each product they purchasing as they do with digital books , it would not stop anything but slow down the illegal distribution , what is made by humans can be cracked by humans .. the rest are only ethnic and what side they choose to be on .
I saw a lot of people doing it because they hated the creator , others doing it to destroy the creator's business , and other doing it for making their business run better , I saw it all ! that are very dirty business tactics

 

[Ken1171]

Piracy has happened for as long as software has existed. I have been in the software industry for decades, where even my FREE web games were hacked. There are several established hacker groups out there that compete with each other on how many software they can hack and pirate. They make a living out of it, and some have survived the software industry more than real companies that actually produced something.

Windows is not a secured operating system, Poser is not a secured software, and Python is not a secured programming language (it wasn't designed to be). Without copy protection, the entire Poser Python business was pirated to oblivion. It was just too easy. A downloaded ZIP could be given to anyone. It makes sense that Rendo would not just keep doing the same and expect a different result. The DRM was required, where the very effort would be pointless otherwise because we already know how it went without it in the past.

Would this stop piracy? Probably not, but at least we already know from past events that going without it would be pointless. To put it in a nutshell, it went from child play to now requiring a qualified hacker to pirate. And to tell you the truth, this niche is so small that most hackers have bigger fish to fry. It is so small and fragile that any amount of piracy was enough to kill it even before I joined it. It is up to the community if they want more scripts or just let it die.

 

[MEC4D]

In my times soft piracy was something else , they mostly target big companies that don't even noticed the lost , but today it is trash and nobody should be proud for styling food from a child or hard working Individuals that trying to survive , and what the point of it ? to be proud criminal ? trash ! not piracy

 

[MEC4D]

I found another illegal website .. this is just straight download website with full catalogs of each vendor .. this is ridiculous already submitted legal paper work ,for removing this domain from all search machines ..

 

[Ken1171]

Ouch... Entire vendor catalogs?? Perhaps things like that might force Rendo's hand to put DRM in more than just Python scripts. Some people have been asking if Rendo would do that, but I see that as a much harder task, because scripts have just began with Poser 12, but all other contents would have to be converted, repackaged and resubmitted.

With Python scripts, DRM is totally optional. I added it to my scripts because I wanted to. Maybe Rendo could offer this only to 3D content vendors who volunteered to do it. Nonetheless, it would be a huge undertake from both sides.

With Reallusion, they not only added DRM to everything they sell, but contents also ship with high level encryption, so even if the DRM is hacked, the resulting data is still unreadable. iClone has existed for a long time, but DRM was only introduced in version 7, the current. I know people in general don't like it, but it gives vendors more confidence to invest in that market. It definitely gives me more confidence to sell scripts for the Poser market, considering the ones who came before me were defeated by piracy.

 

[RAMWolff]

DAZ tried that but there was such an uproar about it not sure what they did to secure products better!

 

[Ken1171]

DAZ tried that but there was such an uproar about it not sure what they did to secure products better!

I remember something about that around DS 4.10, right? Rumors that it would introduce DRM. I don't use DS, so I don't know what happened to that.

 

[RAMWolff]

Well you sorta use DS Ken, you make your products work on that platform! LOL I think it was a few years back but THEY MUST have some sort of thing that keeps things safer! If not I guess they resigned to the fact that there are thieves in the world and that's just the way it is! I don't believe that giving in to this bullshit is the way to go. Not cool and I hope there is a solution in time so we can all breath easier

 

[Ken1171]

Well you sorta use DS Ken, you make your products work on that platform!

I did in the past, but I haven't made any 3D contents in months - since the HW store closed, so I don't even know what's happening in DS anymore. I have released 6 new Python scripts for Poser 12 in the last 3 months, and have 3 others in the making. Python scripts have been outselling my 3D contents by a large margin, so even when I made that new "Athena" body sculpt for Dawn 1 and 2, low sales on my "Body Type" series are telling me that's not what people want from me anymore. If I can't make a dent on the 3D content market, maybe I can on the scripts side - and those are for Poser 12 only. I haven't touched DS since last year, so it has been a while.

 

[MEC4D]

There is nothing .. the products getting sometimes released on illegal website the same day , I don't know how they do that , probably from beta testers and other PA's how else they get it that quick .
The same reason why products at DAZ store have so short life span, it make the money on day one then forgotten forever , it is already free somewhere else , also saw a copy of DAZ store in China , just not buy button but direct download ..
They really are so open with this BS , It is just insane and so arrogant ..
why someone will want to spend a dollar if they go to a website and download stuff without even the need to register , everything on a silver plate beautifully collected under each vendor name .. blowing my mind
It almost looks like I am offering it for free , and half of the people downloading the stuff have no idea it is illegal , then later come to me asking for commercial license without having standard license order on record ... maybe I am starting doing like Artstation, offering very little price for standard license like 2-5 dollars and then regular price for commercial usage ..

 

[Ken1171]

What I thought DAZ would do was to only allow installing contents through their Install Manager. Reallusion has transitioned from ZIP downloads to that in iClone version 7, so there are nothing you can download after a purchase. More recently, Reallusion has introduced their "Smart Gallery" plugin for both iClone and CC3, where anything you have purchased from the store can be downloaded and installed directly from the programs, just like Rendo has done with the embedded store in Poser 12.

When installing Reallusion contents from the embedded store, it does all the authentication automatically, so the process is 100% seamless to customers. Poser 12 already has the embedded store, but is not enforcing installation only from there, since older Poser versions don't support that. The way Reallusion has dealt with that was only allowing downloading ZIPs for legacy contents, while everything else can only be downloaded and installed directly from the embedded store.

The biggest difference is that all newer Reallusion contents come packaged with DRM, which includes encryption. Only the embedded stores know how to open, decrypt, and authorize these products, which is a huge difference from how Rendo is handling this, since encryption doesn't need to call home to protect contents. Reallusion DRM is so sophisticated that protected assets automatically start a trial period with watermarks on renders for all non-authenticated contents we install. This allows customers to "try before you buy". Some contents never expire, but we cannot render without watermarks.

Considering Rendo sells contents for several different programs, I don't see how they could unify all that into a single DRM system like Reallusion did. Maybe they could only do it for the platform they own - Poser. However, I suspect Poser is only a tiny chunk of their market, which seems to be dominated by DAZ contents. That's something Rendo will eventually have to deal with.

 

[MEC4D]

I tell you the best thing is to put the customer name and e-mail into the files , it would slow down the sharing as nobody will want to share own info or know how to find it and where to look for . It would be easier to trace and track things and sue the shxt out of them for a lesson .
I lost so much money in all the years of work I could be on early retirement already . before I could make 1 product every 3 months , now I need at least 3 products every month , that why I prefer commission work as nobody can take this from me ... not a cent

 

[Ken1171]

I lost so much money in all the years of work I could be on early retirement already . before I could make 1 product every 3 months , now I need at least 3 products every month , that why I prefer commission work as nobody can take this from me ... not a cent

That's the story of my life! There are months when I make much more money out of commission jobs than from store sales. In a way, that was in part because HW sales weren't so great in the recent years, but they seem to be doing much better at Rendo, which also has a much bigger customer base. It's even funny that DS versions that never sold well at HW now sell more than the Poser versions at Rendo. I kind of predicted that would happen last year, since their public is obviously DAZ oriented.

But with bigger sales come increased piracy. People have claimed to see my products at pirate sites more often now than they did when I was with HW. I guess that is to be expected, but so far none of my DRM protected scripts ended up stolen yet, which is a good sign, since they are my new bestsellers. This is probably the FIRST time in the last 17 years that piracy is not taking a chunk of my sales - at least on the P12 scripts side. If script sales continue like this, I might not want to do 3D anymore because, in addition to the usual piracy plague, the effort vs reward is quite unbalanced. Especially when supporting Poser and DS in every product, where the DS version is basically given away for free, while making materials for 4 different rendering engines. In contrast, Python scripts seem like a much better use of my time, especially when I look at the sales numbers. Same for commission jobs.

 

[eclark1894]

of course not .. one best thing to do is not share the links in public , how less people know about it how better.
I will let the professionals to deal with stuff like that .

I don't share links like that for another reason. You don't know what you're getting. Sure you might be getting some pirated software, but I always wonder what are those guys getting out of it? If they're not selling it, then why do it for free? So all I can think of is, it's a scam to gain access to your computer like an email with a "worm" or something.

 

[theschell]

I've long since given up even trying to deal with piracy of my stuff... even following proper procedure and sending properly correct take-down notices very seldom gets results; in my experience most pirate/warez sites will either simply ignore you, or worse, will try and say that you're the pirate and that they don't have to remove said items as they're property of what every thief posted them to the pirate site. Most of the sites sharing content illegally are located in countries that don't have or don't follow international copy rights laws, and don't have any laws to uphold copyrights... Sad truth of the matter is that the people stealing your work, and the people downloading the pirated items from a pirate site never intended to legitimately acquire anything in the first place, if they did then they would have paid for the products instead of stealing them from the get-go, unfortunately there is a large segment of the population that seems to believe that they're entitled to have what ever they want free of charge and don't care that they're stealing someone else's hard work...

 

[Hornet3d]

I've long since given up even trying to deal with piracy of my stuff... even following proper procedure and sending properly correct take-down notices very seldom gets results; in my experience most pirate/warez sites will either simply ignore you, or worse, will try and say that you're the pirate and that they don't have to remove said items as they're property of what every thief posted them to the pirate site. Most of the sites sharing content illegally are located in countries that don't have or don't follow international copy rights laws, and don't have any laws to uphold copyrights... Sad truth of the matter is that the people stealing your work, and the people downloading the pirated items from a pirate site never intended to legitimately acquire anything in the first place, if they did then they would have paid for the products instead of stealing them from the get-go, unfortunately there is a large segment of the population that seems to believe that they're entitled to have what ever they want free of charge and don't care that they're stealing someone else's hard work...

Which in the long term means people stop creating content, software companies stop developing software and everyone loses, including the pirates, as there is nothing being developed to be purchased or ripped off.

Take a look at the high street where people used to go to look and handle goods and then buy on line, not so easy to do now is it. These days you have to travel a long way to get any decent advice on buying a camera for example as one by one they camera shops have closed as they cannot pay to employ experts and compete with the Internet.