Copyright abuse - who do I contact?

[group b]

Excuse my English, I write through the translator.
What to do against pirates?
Try it the other way!
Do not cancel your own free site, but exactly the opposite!
Agree with other authors who offer free models and exchange each other.
There will be 1 author and his website at the beginning of the pirate, and his models will be on tens, maybe hundreds of sites. When someone searches for a model such as Ariane 6, it will find 20 pages where it is freely downloadable and one where it is for money. Which one should you choose?
The more pages the models will spread, the less likely the pirates will be to sell and profit. Eventually they find that piracy is not worth it.
Is not that the way?

[whulsey]

That's an interesting approach. Too bad there isn't a web equivalent to the back on the old block show up at the door with a baseball bat and take out the kneecaps.

[Kevin WS]

Group B - very interesting idea!

[herky]

sooooooooooooooooooo give it away before some one steals it,different appproach i guess

[airdave]

Originally Posted by herky

sooooooooooooooooooo give it away before some one steals it,different appproach i guess

well this was my argument with Uhu.
I never criticised Uhu, or his work, or anything about him (contrary to the lies spread by certain people)
I only criticised the method Uhu used to combat piracy of his models.

He made it extremely difficult to get his models, and still does to this day.
And I didn't think it was ever going to work in his favour.

Hiding them away in a locked vault, limiting entry by secret code known only to a handful of forum members
or just restricting access in general, forces people to look for an easier way to get their hands on his models.
And the more he restricted access, the worse the piracy got!

If they had been retail models, I could understand the methods...but not with supposedly free/public models?

I limit access to my free models by requesting that they only be distributed from my own website.
This is just my way of getting people to my site and is something I am very up front and honest about.
No using other people's photos and creations in a "gallery" as a deception to get them to my store!

Unfortunately Alice isn't trying to pirate and distribute Uhu's models.
Alice is trying to sell product (in this case, printed model sheets).
So they don't fall into the same category of pirate that is normally redistributing Uhu's models.

Uhu making his models more accessible for free, isn't going to affect Alice's sales.
They offer easier access to preprinted, ready to build versions of Uhu's models.
This is even attractive to me!! Most probably aasume they are getting some sort of "professionally" printed model that saves them time and effort and money!
And the fact that they are also regionally isolated just inspires their "piracy" activities.

[group b]

Originally Posted by Kevin WS

Group B - very interesting idea!

Definitely yes.
Open the Internet, write to the search engine "Ariane 6 paper model"
and there are dozens of links, one of which is paid - Aliexpess, all others are on free sites.
Imagine how many modelers are willing to distribute these free models (or rather, links to the author's home page). I think it could significantly reduce the sale of stolen models, they just would not be interested.

[ETG]

AliceModels offers a service no-one else has : they can print the models in a large variety of sizes !
Many people own an A4 printer. Only a few own (also) an A3 printer. But who owns a printer that can print on A2, A1 or A0....??? Those are very large,
very expensive printers. Not to mention the paper and the ink.

Your idea might work, but only for a small part.

And what does Internet look like, on a Chinese computer? Which sites are easily found and which ones are (partially) blocked ?
If those pirates are paying a search engine to have their website always show their webshop, first, they draw all the attention AND the customers.

The only two good ways to stop these pirates is to somehow destroy their website or to literally bomb their print shop.
Take them down the hard way. Literally use physical violence.
And how do I do that, with my little bank account, sitting here, on the other side of the planet.........????????

I removed my website because that is the best thing I can do, right now.
Alas.... it is the ONLY thing I can do right now.............
_______
Erik

[group b]

If you think this is the best option, then you lost the fight.
It is not important how the internet search engine looks in China. You can never influence the Chinese market. It's all the rest of the world.
If someone wants to build a model in Argentina, Russia, or Egypt, they will not search for a Chinese search engine but Google.
And if your site does not exist, find Aliexpress or Alice paper. Nothing else. A model buys. Canceling the site you sent customers sent directly to Chinese pirates!

[Lex]

I think it helps to have a Chinese member chime in this discussion. For now I volunteer myself. In theory I could provide translation to mediate correspondences if required, but I must say the prospects of that working the way you imagined is not very high.

First I fully agree with Dave. Making models harder to get will NOT solve the problem and I was about to bring up UHU, but he beat me to it. I advise on the contrary, to make your designs more widely known. Taking down one pirate only makes another take its place, so the best way to fight is always to stay in the game and making yourself known. Dave also nailed, yes, nailed the point about printing, which I too mentioned below.

For me, I always encourage my models to be shared across any website. If I wanted my kits to be spread far and wide, this is the way to do it. It doesn't matter if somebody downloaded it from a Russian site, the file still has my name on it.

If Alice is a domestically-oriented site, we have ways to pull strings or file complaints where it hurts, to have the site torpedoed by Ali as they really do care about customer experience. Sadly Alicepaper is not made for the Chinese market, as far as I know few if anyone in China knows the place at all. Just to mention that firewall business. It doesn't block any cardmodel related site, that would be too much of a hassle for anyone managing the blacklist. It does block Google, and the replacement Chinese search engine, Baidu, was never known for its rudimentary ability to interpret languages other than Chinese (adding to the cash-for-ranking thing mentioned above). And, the average Chinese person is never known for their ability to understand English either. So chances are few in China actually knew your models existed, much less try to find it.

A few related, but not entirely relevant words about the situation in China. Say I tell people you can find freely available models from here here and here. They download, go to a local print service, and have it printed for a small fee, as their home printer is less than stellar. I do so from time to time when I require specialised paper. I am very sure this would be legal in every respect in any country, i.e. paying for a printing service to print whatever document I bring. But look at it this way, for them it's difficult to understand the difference between this and having someone sell printed kits wherever the kit came from. To them, the price tag may well be from the service of printing. (Someone actually asked me this question, that why one is acceptable and the other is not, and I couldn't put together a coherent answer.) To whoever is on the buying end, the two situations are factually the same. They both pay a small sum and get a physical copy of a kit. i.e. In a few words, I can't explain why THEY need to be the one downloading a kit and not the print shop.

Then there is the added problem that rather than a free kit, the document they are looking at may be a pirated scan, and they couldn't tell. Sadly, in order to curb piracy as a whole, we had to advocate buying only those from established publishers in Eastern Europe as physical copies. As a designer myself, having to say that we discourage building digitally distributed kits is extremely sad. On the upside, once someone becomes an established hobbyist, the community will educate them about what's good, what's bad and what's very bad. Around the world, the core players are never the issue, it's always those who just wandered into this hobby and happened to step into the wrong site.


(A point to Rick, this forum IS being blocked right now. Are you using some kind of Google-sponsored service anywhere in here?)

[rickstef]

Lex,

I do not know, Jason, the owner will be able to answer that question better than i can