Well considering the SM tutes are very reasonably priced for what you get, its pretty lame to see people pimping it on p2p. I think it's fair play to bring it to their (SM's) attention. Even if they can't do anything about it.

As for babbling, isn't that what the lounge is for?

And I'm not saying my amp is worth his life. His life is/was worth nothing. My amp wasn't. Therefore my amp is worth MORE than his work-dodging benefit-claiming sorry-ass life.

babbling.., bad choice of word.., sorry. you are correct.

every life is worth as much as the next guy. seaons change and people change.., No one is perfect and we have all done and been things we are not proud of. NO amp is worth an
life, even if it is 'unempolyed'???

and anyway, back to the subject at hand, the 'news' about P2P and dobbing them to the mods?? I understand your anger, believe me, I understand it more than you know.

welcome to the dark side...

NOOOOOOO (While clutching severed hand)

Hahaha class : D

my...uh...saber slipped:ninja:

my tongue slipped as usual :) :eek:

and may the shwartz be with you all...

i dont hack to rip people off i hack programs for the fun of it i have never hacked to ruin or give away or take away someones work but i have never left a game unhacked:ninja:

what do you mean, i thought hacked was when people look for credit card numbers and stuff like that, no game I ever heard has 'credit' except a pinball machine?

no like umm... example: hacking grand theft auto so that by pressing a combination of buttons certan vehicles spawn and making vulnerability toggle able, stuff like that :ninja:

far out, thats amazing, really.., did you learn that at school, I know some people learn that at school?

I am of the opinion that whenever someone downloads from here their user name should be burnt into the video on the dvd (if that's possible) that's what our clients do to us it says "property of disney" for example and then a big watermark on it says "Framestore-CFC copy". Makes sure that if there's a leak then they know where it came from.

Maybe a bit heavy handed, but it would stop that kind of stuff

:ninja:
A

?? presuming they use a name rather than a generated one like hotmail does, like the spammer does.

would that mess it up, you would have to ask for ID??? nothing can be done, if the music, DVD industry can not fight it, what can be done?? good idea, dont get me wrong.

My opinion mirrors Pure_Morning's in it's entirety. There is another site around the traps that sells video training for various packages, C++, Maya, XSI, MAX, Delphi, UT2003 and many, many more.

It has been their policy to watermark each and every video set that is purchased and mailed with the buyer's username. If there was ever to be a leak to a P2P network, the perpetrator could be instantly identified and all further service denied.

The scheme in use is apparently two-fold, with both a video water-mark, faint but permanent, along with a more sneaky audio fingerprint, that is inaudible..

I'm yet to hear of an occurance of somebody being banned for trading their videos, their system appears to really work. Videos are still shipped the day they are ordered, so one can only presume it is an efficient and automated process.

I guess the biggest pain would be doing the coding for the encoder, even still - with the availibility and cheapness of mpeg libraries these days, even that may prove to be reasonably trivial. Encoding the audio fingerprint may well have been the trickiest part of the operation.


I'm with both David and Acid44 on the hacking issue though, once it was known as the art of reverse engineering and dissasembling somebody else's code to understand how it works, and make modifications to the way it operates. Eg - creating a patch that side-steps Windows Activation schemes is hacking. Copying the disc and then passing it on is Pirating. The two often go hand in hand, although are quite distinct from one another.

I used to do it years ago for the intellectual challenge and euphoria of knowing that you'd used a debugger and traced your way instruction by instruction through a 1.5 MB file to find the one instruction that checks the result of user input to some predetermined hash or key-value. It's also a way of getting around losing your legitimate key for a product you have purchased. As I did some 15 years ago with both Qemm386 and with UniVBE - memory management and SVGA bios extenders, respectively. It was also a handy way of buying extra time to do work at home in Uni, rather than use the University only copy at uni, one could get it to operate at home. The hours were still required, but could be spent in the privacy and comfort of your own home, at 3am if that was your prefference..

Some do it for the intellectual challenge, others do it to profit, and yet others do it as an "up yours" gesture.
I'm entirely against the latter 2 of these..


Just wondering Tweety, what can you get via P2P that is legal? :p

Simon.

I think that watermarking every tutorial would create a few problems. The big one that I'm thinking about is what if somebody steals a video off a person who has paid for it and then posted it all over the net? The person who paid for it would be banned because of something someone else did.


enhzflep > '...Copying the disc and then passing it on is Pirating.'

Umm, my understanding of pirating is breaking the copy protection, copying software and then selling it, where as breaking the copy protection and then using it as a backup or for any other personal reason is just getting your right back as a customer to have a few backup copies.

Certainly, the possibility of having somebody steal one's videos cannot be discounted. But is somebody really able to argue that the content was read from the CD/DVD and trasnmitted over the internet without their knowledge or consent?

Similarly, there are always exceptions to the rule - but methinks you won't find a terribly large number of burglers that go to the trouble of uploading any CDs/DVDs they steal from a person's house. A simple copy of the police report filed for the burglary would show this to have possibly happened and not be just some fabrication.

Also, while copy and selling software that one has purchased legally is a form of piracy, it is by no means the only one. There are many different definitions and interpretations of the term, varying both from person to person, and in cases from country to country. Some third world countries have no official policy on the matter, and at the site I spoke of before these countries are on the 'We Do Not Ship There' list.

For a more definitive explanation of the legal and moral issues involved, please feel free to browse the following link.

Copyright infringement of software

S.