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August 21, 2005
Truth in the Dis-Information Age
Never has the old adage “just because you say so don’t make it so” been more true than on the Internet. But with so much information bombarding us every hour, every day, how many take the time to fact check?
Yes, I have an agenda. My agenda is my reputation and products are important assets to my company and I believe in affecting the Internet community positively. Therefore I actively police the Web for illegal usage of my products and I am an editor at the Open Directory Project.
It is obvious that many do not understand how the unauthorized use of intellectual property might hurt an artist, or a company. It is also obvious that the "If it is not tied down..." rule applies even more to the Internet.
There are many artists who just don't get that they are responsible for taking reasonable action to stop the infringment of their property. The courts are practical, and it IS a defense that the content is seen all over the Internet.
Content creators make their money by licensing the use of the products they create. The highest licensing value is for exclusive usage. If your intellectual property is strewn about the Internet for free or with too much non-exclusive licensing, you will not be able to land the lucrative deals.
I don't want to ruin anyone's life. In fact, my company's mission statment has been "We Bring Joy into People's Lives" since 1994. However, I will not allow the unauthorized usage of my work and I have spent considerable time learning how to track down and review websites.
I am losing faith in the general populations ability to not believe everything they hear and less of what they read. I see too much evidence that people simply believe whatever they want to believe and this philosophy is just dangerous.
Posted by photocartoonist at August 21, 2005 5:10 PM
Comments
You know wha tyou can do to stop people from stealing your content? put code in your flash files to check and see the location of the swf and if it's not on yoru site redirect them to your site. It's easy to do. then all you have to do is ad an htaccess to your folder where the swf is kept to make sure noone hotlinks it and your set. There's nothing anyone can do to get around it. It would take like an hour for you to setup once and forever and noone would steal again. Why not do it??
Posted by: Eddie at August 24, 2005 1:27 AM
Thanks for the comment but most of the theft is from licensed sites but I am still interested in this concept. Is this an actionscript? Plus the htaccess code?
I have found inherent issues with the htaccess code that prevents hotlinking, are there similiar issues with this swf code?
Is the setup an hour for each swf? I do hope to hear back from you Eddie. Thank you.
Posted by: Kat Caverly at August 24, 2005 8:46 AM
if(_URL != "http://www.yoururl.com/flash.swf")
{
getURL("http://www.yoururl.com/");
}
Just gotta stick that in the first frame of your animation. Then if it's not at your site then then you get a free visitor.
If you license a file just throw the licensed url in there I suppose. I'm sure you could even check just for the base url if you wanted to license it to a certain domain. Just hire someone for 50 bucks who's an expert at this type of thing and get them to create foolproof code for you. swf's shouldn't cause a problem with htaccess. But you could also create your flash files to load a txt file from your site to find licensed domains and then you'd control access the the flash file from your own site.
You could always set up a system of renaming the directory your flash file is in to stop hotlinking. That's probably the best way to do it but would require a site design that could handle it.
Seriously, hire a coder for $500 to set up the system for you and you will never have to worry about copyright infingement or talking to lawyers again.
Posted by: Eddie at August 24, 2005 11:42 AM
This is really cool Eddie and I will talk to my actionscript programmer about this. And I will talk to my distributors. It seems easy enough and will really be preventative...up to a point.
There are SWF compilers that would allow a thief to remove this actionscript BUT the good news is then they would have no defense that they innocently infringed my copyright.
I do believe in doing whatever I can and I honestly didn't know about this. I am a producer/director, not an actionscript programmer. I produce my animations with programs from Toon Boom but I do know how to use Flash and I do have a brilliant programmer I work with when I need actionscript done.
This seems simple enough for me to do however and I will test it. Thank you.
Posted by: Kat Caverly at August 24, 2005 12:57 PM
Plus if they do decompile it and remove it you can sue them under the DMCA as they are trying to circumvent copyright protection. There are tosn of cases like this.
Posted by: Eddie at August 25, 2005 1:09 AM
I can sue them under DMCA for circumventing the simple "protect from save" function I already use on all of my Flash files.
I have been using Flash to protect images from right-click download since 2001 when I was protecting photos and photocartoons. I seldome use JPEG or GIF for graphics but I did start when I discovered the benefit of Google and Yahoo! Images databases.
I had some indepth discussions about this with my advisors and worked on the code with my actionscript guru, and although I was right about the decompiling issue and I am still considering some form of obfuscation, we all agree there will always be a way to get at our content as long as it is visible on the Internet.
Yes you can protect yourself right away from the real advantage of the Web - promotion.
So we are back to remedies, as well as prevention. And the DMCA in the United States is a powerful tool and the EU has its version of this kind of law.
The fact is the copyright © notice on the page eliminates any innocent infringment claim but of course this is why some thieves remove it. A copyright notice on the content is helpful, but not always possible. For example, in greeting cards it interferes with the product, so the copyright notice is put on the page.
And by rule of law, the copyright notice is not required, but we do what we can to knock 'em over the head with HEY THIS BELONGS TO ME and then it is their responsibility to read it.
Actionscript programmers try to protect their intellectual property, but since Flash is open source many believe it is a battle that cannot be won. But you can slow them down. Java and .net programmers have used obfuscation to great results, so this may be part of the solution and we are investigating developing an encryption procedure.
Whatever it is it must work without special programming on the site because we license our content and do not have control over the distributor's sites. so the solution must be the SWF file itself.
Posted by: Kat Caverly at August 25, 2005 11:33 AM
Problem is the nature of the web is in the basis of how it functions. When you surf, you copy the file from a server to your computer. So one stealing could say they did not circumvent anything they just looked in their internet cache and there it was. If you have that code in a flash file then you are protecting yourself no matter how they obtain the file.
You can at least make it difficult to steal and then people will be deterred and won't steal. A copyright notice on the bottom of a page doesn't cut it. I think it's a better solution then suing people all the time. If you REALLY want to preven tpeople from stealing you can find a way to make it almost impossible to circumvent. Such as a handshake at the beginning of playing between yoru server and the file to make sure it's allowed to play.
Posted by: Eddie at August 25, 2005 10:18 PM
Unfortunately you cannot make any protection almost impossible to circumvent. Flash is open source and decompilers stay on top of whatever gets in the way of decompiling an swf file. This is just a fact and an artifact of open source, which is a good thing.
That being said, I will always do whatever I know is possible to slow the unauthorized usage down to a crawl. An ounce of prevention as they say. I have developed the code to authenticate domain and thank you for the idea of redirecting the request.
You are right about the technology of browsers, but access is no defense for copyright infringement. However I agree, and so do my attorneys, staying out of court is a policy.
Posted by: Kat Caverly at August 25, 2005 10:46 PM