Hey, after something on one of the STAI servers, I thought of a way to stop skin stealing.

Simply put, it'd put a watermark on any skins, possibly a digital one when it uploads the file, whenver anyone tries to use that skin, it sens the uploader a message, possibly an e-mail or LFSW message, such as

'player X used <skin name> at <server name> at <time>'

It'd help a lot with team skins as well IMO

DK

Easiest way I can think of is if you had a seperate couple of slots for private or teamskins, with a whitelist of accounts that can use the skin. By this I mean that it would only autodownload if one of the whitelisted accounts were using it.

Of course, if people have already downloaded it or a whitelisted player is on the same server then this all falls apart.

hmm...if ur skin would be popular ur email would be full in 2 days

The music industry has spent millions trying to stop copying of digital files, I'm not sure the devs will be able to solve it, or they should expend the effort to do so. Someone would just figure out how to rip the file as it transferred to you, or pull it out of memory.

Quote from Bongle :

The music industry has spent millions trying to stop copying of digital files, I'm not sure the devs will be able to solve it, or they should expend the effort to do so. Someone would just figure out how to rip the file as it transferred to you, or pull it out of memory.

Yes, as long as the file has to be ine the memory, there is no use in any anti-steal attempt...

Encrypt it? And make it only an LFS.exe can read it? Or something along those lines?

Edit: Meant Encrypt, not encode

If you upload it to LFS world you accept that it will be available to everybody. If you really don't want anyone else to use it then don't upload it, just pass it round between your friends.
Or just take it as a compliment that someone likes your skin enough to use it themselves.

Deleted because I posted undiluted spam. Thank you DieKolkrabe for showing me the error of my ways.

That works

But then you get people saying your team needs better skins

spam!

DK

How many times did we have this before?

I had another idea not really to prevent skin stealing but to kind of expose stealers:

We'll make a topic, something like "these are MY private skins", and you put screenshots of your skins in there. I know you can't remember hundreds of skins and the respective driver, but if you remember only one skin and you see it used by another driver, you can point your virtual finger on him and let everybody on the server know that he's a thief of intellectual property.
you can even upload the replay to show everybody on the forum.

Quote from sinbad :

If you upload it to LFS world you accept that it will be available to everybody.

to look at it, not to use it. is this so hard to understand?

Encryption of the stored skin files is something that could work. Not because it would make skin stealing impossible, but it would take considerably more effort just to get the skin, compared to copying it from your skins_x/y folder. Sure this would bring a few lowlifes on the plan who'd take this encryption as a challenge, but I think the actual skin stealing is most of the time done unknowingly and/or because it is just so easy to do.

Quote from Bandit77 :

to look at it, not to use it. is this so hard to understand?

But that's not how it is, is it? If you upload to LFSworld, you know that your skin will be in jpeg format on a lot of people's computers, and would be easy for them to use if they wished. Nobody can steal anything, you've already given them it. There's no license agreement or terms of use agreement or condition stipulating that you cannot use skins which are automatically saved on your computer.

To be honest mate no offence, there is no need in this.. at the end of the day there just jelous of your skins.. and they think they can take full credit for it when they know the truth, they can't.. trust me this won't work out.. sorry..

tox

i find that steering clear of indians works best

Why not just make the Skins_X folder hidden by default?

I watermark all of the skins I make in the .psd layers :P thing is you cant tell either.

Skin stealing?

You make something nice for everyone to see and is shared for everyone freely to use, yet you want to tell someone else not to use it.

I don' t want you to ever use linux. Sounds stupid? I think so

Quote from KeiichiRX7 :

Why not just make the Skins_X folder hidden by default?

Simple yet effective.

I don't think watermarks will work, and you can't do a temporary solution because that's just a lot of bandwidth used for no reason.

I mean, turning them into dds was a fairly simple, unintentional may be, but I have to say I haven't heard nearly as many complaints since they were converted to dds from jpegs.

I think Keiichi is in the right direction though, making it hidden will cause even less people to see it making it even less of a problem.

If that's done, then we've gone from open jpegs which were every now and then stolen, now we are at open dds' which not everyone can open, making it harder to steal, and using Keiichi's idea we would have closed dds' probably cutting it in half again.

You're the mod, you will have to deal with the "where did my skins_x folder go? :'(" posts. Fine by me

I'll hax teh int3rn3t and make it so everytime the word skin and letter x is in the same sentence you'll be directed to a lolcatz picture that says "i'm in ur lfs eatn ur skinz"

^ Now THAT is a way of showing them who is boss

DK

And amazingly enough he managed not to fall back using "lol" as punctuation even though he posted in l33t. Congratulations