Speaking of pirates and pirating. Remember what I was saying about the classic:

“Hey, I found this really cool website that makes awesome paper models. I picked up CWU and it’s amazing! If anyone wants a copy send me your e-mail”.

Heres a prime example of idiots who promote piracy while supposedly showing support for WorldWorks (Does anyone speak Spanish? I'd love to give "hojaoscura" a piece of my mind): LINK REMOVED

Im so sick of crap like this. If only these people knew how destructive piracy is to the little guy trying to get by.

Wow.. that's freakin' ballsy. Is there no kind of legal follow up you can take?

Sucky Denny, that is one prime example of piracy, and yes, as CapnG said, "Balsy" ! With it being so blatent, is there no way you can get this guy, it's pathetic how little respect some people have (Shaking head smily).

From what I've observed, there are four kinds of pirates:

1. The accidental pirate: a witless individual who inadvertently stores paid downloads in the same folder that he/she shares with P2P networks...

2. The pathetic loser: someone who buys PDFs and shares them in the hope that they'll gain a measure of popularity on a mailing list for forum...

3. The well-meaning friend: someone who buys digital content and shares it only with a small circle of friends (like a gaming group, for instance), not realizing that the people he/she shares it with are even more likely to redistribute the content further because they have no investment to protect...

4. The wannabe anarchist: a person who believes all information wants to be free and who refuses to buy any digital content or software on principle, and who aggressively redistributes digital content to advance that agenda...

5. The freeloader: a person who happily downloads commercial content for free because it's there, and why pay for it if you can get it for free?

Types 1, 2, and 3 are the most common piracy entry point for digital content. In fact, unless your server is hacked or the URI of your file stash is made public somehow, Type 1, 2, and 3 pirates are often the only points of origin for pirated content.

Type 4 pirates promulgate the piracy of digital content by further propagating and disseminating content which they acquired secondhand from Type 1, 2, and 3 pirates. However, the key word here is "secondhand", these pirates never buy content, and therefore cannot be the point of origin for piracy.

Type 5 pirates are the most common, and have the most passive role of all in that they just slurp up free downloads available on various P2P networks, mailing lists, or forums. Like Type 4 pirates, Type 5s are never the point of origin for piracy.

So there are three actual points of origin for piracy. I'm not including hackers, search engine bots, and so forth because any proper digital content shop keeps their downloads off the webroot and restricts access to valid customer accounts. It's those three types of pirates who represent the biggest threat, even though the majority of financial damage is caused by the Types 4 and 5 pirates...the Types 4 and 5 pirates can't hurt you if they *don't* get the content from the Types 1-3 pirates in the first place.

So you have to figure out a way to protect yourself from the Type 1, 2, and 3 pirates. This is where having your own shop pays off...if you can trace the point of origin, you can cut off that person from their downloads and ban them from the storefront. That's one thing RPGNow can't do for you.

There are other ways of doing that, but ultimately there's no surefire way of stopping the first three kinds of pirates without making things harder on your honest customers. So my rule of thumb is to make it easier and more rewarding to actually be a customer than a pirate, and that's also a lot easier to do when you have your own shop.

-Mel

I speak Spanish. What do you want me to say?

Spanish isn't my strong point - god, English isn't either but what does this chap say in the forum? I couldn't work out if he had bought the set and was showing off the props or if had copied and pasted other peoples work, *deep breath* or if he was showing what you could download for free from him or the site.


Can someone do a rough translation (not babel or google please), Mech' if you can it would be great.


I did notice that the poster did link with WWG site.


No causing waves but I cannot see the source of alarm, but then I don't speak Spanish.


Lord Abaddon of Wormwood

The "Decorando el Dungeon 6" post is not the problem, take a look at the "Decorando el Dungeon 1-5" posts. Notice that there is a zip-file attached to each of them? Now guess what those zip-files contain?
Yup, props from WWG sets.

Denny, All:

The best (only?) option in cases like this, is to contact the ISP of the forum, and tell them about the piracy. They will "fear da' reaper", in most cases, and remove the illegal content, as well as possibly banning the offender's IP address/account.

Contact the ISP, inform them of the copyright infringement, and politely ask them to remove the illegal content.

Granted, the idiot can move it, but at least it will have disappeared from that particular site... Periodically, I would recommend doing a Google search on your stuff, and see what comes up. Compose a standard informational e-mail, and post it to every offending ISP, as needed. Do some follow-up's, and, if necessary, get a lawyer friend to write a legally intimidating message, and add the appropriate names, as needed, and post to the offending ISP's.

It's worth a try, Denny. Wish I could offer better assistance. Cheers, Denny & Company! You folks do some incredible work. Keep it up!

Your friend,

Sgt. Slag (a.k.a., Bruce Laue, game author, small businessman, and a huge fan of WWG)

Just an aside, I recently ran across a complaint about pirate editions of print books, with the United States being the worst offender... By Rudyard Kipling.

I guess the problem has been around for a while.

The Auld Grump