JD on EP

Me too! A company in Portugal is stealing my blog and forum with 4 domains!

Link here.

Thanks,
aSH
Adobe Community Expert

Hmmm, in fact JD, what do you think about my situation ?

Thanks,
aSH

That's funny, Pablo, I was just going to leave an update here mentioning that you've been seeing the same text-swiping and have been dealing with it this week... and you beat me to it in comments here. ;-)

I had been reading your posts, and empathizing, but I hadn't clicked through to the offending sites, and wasn't sure whether it was closer to splogging or closer to resume-stuffing.

It was when I saw the posts from Matt and Aral next to each other that I realized it was the same problem, of people wanting to protect the bits they create, but it was the reasonableness of the implementation that was the issue.

I think your reaction is justified, myself. I didn't comment on it at the time because I wasn't sure what I might be able to add.

Thanks JD !

All the best,
Pablo "aSH"

I've done a fair amount of research into protecting my code, only to be ultimately faced with the futility of trying. All you can ever hope to do is put technological hurdles in place, and prosecute those who you happen to catch. So a real solution ends up being a legal one, when it's all said and done. With that in mind, I think what's needed is really an improved system for catching and prosecuting offenders.

Although we are all endowed with rights to our material from the moment of its creation, we are not all endowed with equal means to enforce that copyright. It's simply not cost-effective for small business (and big business, in many cases) to police the use of its products and prosecute copyright violators.

I end up asking myself the question "what is my copyright worth to me?". If it's just my blog - yeah, it burns me if someone uses my stuff without permission. But it's not like they're taking money from my pocket - my blog is free for all. If it's some software, and I have already sold 2 million copies, I'm not likely to prosecute a handful of pirates. If I've sold 1 million copies and know of 1 million pirates, I'm still not going to prosecute them all, because it would be too expensive.

So if there's no legal solution, what then? Maybe there's a cultural one. If there were some shame in being a software pirate, that might be a deterrent. But it's actually cool to be a pirate. People give you respect, think you have secret knowledge, think you can get them something for nothing. If you steal software, you're sticking it to the man.

This is getting too long to qualify as a "comment" so I'll stop. Interesting subject though.

You could make your text (relatively) immune from (easy) swiping by reading from a text file into a .swf but the .css support and text engine in the nine player isn't as good as most browsers yet. Any chance the flash 10 download will increase its size and add in some better typography support? We _know_ Adobe has what it takes to show properly kerned letters on the screen. And is there a road map for which things out of .css 2 are going into player 10? Don't have a killing need to know this, but it would be interesting none the less.

[jd sez: That's for the Player product team to discuss, not me... I try to keep a distance from stuff teams haven't announced, because I've seen expectations change midcourse before. I do know there's a lot of examination of how SWF, PDF and HTML can all work together, but that's the only context I have now.]