[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?)