I might wrong, but I thought I read at EnWorld today that they were going to start switching over to pdf due to customer demand.

The watermark won't help much if at all. There are plenty of ways around it for the determined pirate. I won't go into them here, as I don't want to give the honest ones that might share files any ideas

The best thing any form of copy protection can hope to do, is keep honest folks honest.

There are solutions though!

As a community we could actually help out with things like this. Someone could put togeather several fake files (containing nothng but jibberish). Share them with us here. We run the various file sharing programs, and share the bogus files. If you make it so someone looking for the world works products has to rifle through page after page of fake files to find the right one, they are likely to give up. Only the people so determined they never would have bought it anyway will download enough to find it.

Again, all copy protection can hope for is to keep the honest people honest. Much like locks on your cars, etc. Saying "cutting down on car theft will increase new car sales" is only true to the point that you keep honest people from stealing cars. People that would have bought cars if they didn't steal one. We achieved this long ago in most of the civilized world.

Beyond that is good money thrown after bad. A good secruity system in your car might stop your car from being stolen..... but it is going to have zero impact on new car sales either way.

Watermarks can send an important message. If I was to receive a file that was watermarked with a statement like "STOP! This product is not Freeware! Did you pay for this product? If not, then you may be in violation of commerce laws," I would certainly refrain from using the material. Sure it is not perfect, but it part of the arsenal to inform the public about copyright laws and such.

I do like the idea of sending false sharing files. I believe the music industry has tried various ideas among those lines.

Also, this board is a great addition to protection. I feel I know the designers and owner personally by reading their communication directed at us: the customers. I know what they look like. I know they work hard. We all come together to share our common hobby. It would be unthinkable for me to rip off the man or the company or any of you. WWG has a face attached to it. We should never see on this board (as I have seen on many newsgroups) someone asking to send them a .pdf because they lost their first one.