Rant: [censored] unbelievable *DELETED*

[admin]

Post deleted by admin

[admin]

He responded, and then I sent him this

In reply to:
Hi Scott,

Well im glad to know it wasnt your direct intent. I do get ripped off daily and I spent months testing and fiddling with things to get them right -- so when people just copy and paste my end result it is very frustrating.

Here is what I am referring to:

YOUR TAGS: http://www.3dexcellence.com/tutorials/mayatutorials.php

------------------------

<meta content="text/html; charset=ISO-8859-1"
http-equiv="content-type">
<meta name="keywords"
content="Maya, XSI, Jig, Softimage, Alias, Studio, Renderman, Sumatra, 3D, News, Artist Gallery, Shaders, Bookstore, Tutorials, Mel Scripts, Plugins, Tools, Contests, Jobs, Digital, Polls, AWGUA, Alias|Wavefront, Tips, Tutorials">
<meta name="description"
content="Maya, Softimage, Alias, Studio, Renderman, Sumatra free 3d resource and community website with Tips, Tricks, Tutorials, Mel Scripts, Plugins, Shaders, Tools, Jobs, Contests, Artist Gallery and Listservs">

Maya Tutorials

------------------------

MY TAGS: http://www.highend3d.com/maya/tutorials/

-----------------------

Maya Tutorials, Tips, Tricks & Tutorials

------------------

My code has all been copyrighted every quarter but its pretty obvious just by seeing Sumatra and Jig in there (since our code is old now ).

I know the drop down menus are opensource now, but it is also just not cool to copy someone's decisions so closely on such a similar site -- at least thats my opinion. I've taken inspiration from other sites, but never used their same code out of creative respect.

Thanks for addressing this issue.

Will

At 12:51 PM 2/18/2005, you wrote:
Hi Will,

No attempt has been made to copy your site in any way. I did not write
any of the meta tags, but paid another programmer to do it. I did
modify the tags for that article when I wrote the article and don't see
any relationship between them and yours. The keywords are all related
to the article. The rest of the stuff in the tags and descriptor are
all related to the article as well. I wrote all of that from scratch.
As for any similarities anywhere within the site. I appologize, but the
people I hired to create the site framework asked me what my favorite
site like this was and I told them it was highend3d.com Maybe they
tried to optimize the site for search engines and got things close? I
don't know.

Here is the metatags from that article.

[joojaa]

Hmm... i dont think you can defend your right to protect this peice of code.

[admin]

of course I can... if someone takes 10 frames from one of your animations its still stealing. Doesnt matter how much it is.

[joojaa]

hmm no actualy you can steal a bit of text... howmuch is actualy stealing is considered case by case (for example you can photocopy about 30 or so pages of a 100 page book without stealing atlkeast under our legislation). In this case youd probably win but theres nothing that states you would.

NOTE: HTML is not code per see its markup, and as you might know neither of theese are protected very well overseas.

[admin]

not in the US 30 pages would be plagerism. 1 paragraph would. Any work that is copyrighted and copied is actually. You cant use one trademarked sentenced or logo. That is why people trademark, patent and copyright.

the site gets completely ripped off once a week or so. entire graphics etc. nothing i can do about it -- only most of those guys dont ask for links back. HTML is protected if you can prove it was copied exactly. in most cases that is impossible. If he had changed just a few words I would have never known. But this was blatant. If some kid wants to use the html to build their own site and learn from it who cares. But when people who want to compete, who essentially want to take away from this site by building their own instead of contributing to it, by stealing the code, that is what pisses me off.

Regardless of protection capabilities HTML is a lot of work. Its terrible that people feel its not.

[joojaa]

Wether or not it becomes plagerism has much to do in what context you use it.

And by the way the laws here are atleast still far more interested in personal freedoms than keeping the sides of big firms. I mean it used to be totaly leegal to copy things for perosnal use, wich menat if i borrowed a copy of a film from my firend it would have been completely legal for me to copy it for personal use.

yes i know ist hard to keep something protected thats so easy to rip ooff as html. Indeed, they never tought of this vhen it was deviced. (not that you could do so in any sane way by the way)

[admin]

yeah... this is why so many people have gone to flash. we have a few flash components on the new site. I used to say it doesnt matter but obviously the site has suffered from my inability to be able to change things as quickly as possible and most of that comes from all the protection that needed to be put in.

for instance, movie tutorials would be great and easy to have added in before. Except when I found sites in chinese and other languages linking to all our files ... so our bandwidth was being killed. Well protecting movies that are dynamically submitted from being linked poses a similar problem. So it had to be held off until it could be fit into the new system that is more protected.

theres a difference from preventing someone's use of a technology to better something (like lots of crazy patents) and stoping someone from trying to make money strictly off your work. While you may have been able to watch that movie it has always been illegal for you to take a segment of that film, slip it into yours and then sell it as yours to make $.

[joojaa]

Yes offcourse but if you mention its stripped then its another matter altogether.