The main problem for us is to stop thieves nicking our clips/images, and various systems are on test.
I fail to see why websnatchers could be considered your, "main problem". So they use your stills and images? No, its not good, no I don't condone it, but you are just taking yourself too seriously to suggest that it poses a problem for the continuation of your site.
You could of course watermark your caps, but we know how you feel if the BBC dare to put a DOG in something you are trying to capture...
I run it off my forum's members table; registering for the forums also registers you on the site. Unregistered users cannot download any files but, once regsitered, the site is "unlocked" and they begin downloading. Initially they are limited to 20 downloads per month - the counter is reset on the first Monday of every month. As their post count within the forums increase and they get more involved in the community, the number of allowed downloads also goes up, to a maximum of 999. However, this does mean that my moderators and I have to be even more vigilant for people flooding the forums in the sole effort of reaching 999 downloads as fast as possible. Another way to do it, as suggested by one of my members recently, would be to tie the number of downloads to how long they've been registered on the site rather than to their post count. If you need any more info on all of this, just holler.
I fail to see why websnatchers could be considered your, "main problem". So they use your stills and images? No, its not good, no I don't condone it, but you are just taking yourself too seriously to suggest that it poses a problem for the continuation of your site.
You could of course watermark your caps, but we know how you feel if the BBC dare to put a DOG in something you are trying to capture...
Can I ask, are you involved with a TV web site? If not you probably won't realise the sheer amount of work that goes into sourcing material, capturing clips, writing pages and keeping the site regularly updated. Not to mention the cost of hardware/software needed to make it happen.
It's not websnatchers who are stealing our clips but evil scum lifting the entire site and selling CDs of the clips on Ebay! This is illegal, as you know, and if it went to court TV Ark would get the blame. Plus, every time someone rips our site they are taking us massively over our bandwidth quota; to the frustration of our hosts.
So as you can see, there's more to it than just a few pics being lifted.
Frankly I think the word "scum" was over-stating it.
Simon, yours is an enjoyable website for the likes of us. You, I trust, gather the same amount of pleasure from it, topped with more than a little satisfaction I shouldn't wonder. And you deserve it.
My experience in site building and maintanence is nil, as you brilliantly deduce; but it sounded to me that you find the whole experience intensively time consuming and costly.
In that case, being that you have no contract to honour with us, you could try my patented, "Work was hard, so I quit". Not that I want you to. Nor do I think you will, (see paragraph two) .
As for eBay - where there are gullible people with too much money in their pockets, there will always be people unscrupulously miss-selling things of dodgy origins on it. Its the fault of stupid people.
You have displayed your wares in a sensible way on the internet, with an implied 'nod' from the broadcasters. You can keep an eye out for cheeky websnatchers of course, but you can't police the downstream use of your material from all the downloaders. Nor do I think you should try to.
I won't get into the curious paradox about copyright ownership, but I will say that the vast majority of downloaders just want to sit in their rooms and listen to the clip. And again. And again. I would be quite upset if I found I could no longer download for the sake of the few. Have any of the broadcasters told you that you would be liable for onward usage? Have they taken any action against those eBay item sellers? I think such action would be unlikely to be honest, but I stand to be corrected.
And finally, stick a pay pal button on. You never know about these industry bods. Rich as Midas most of them, I hear.
Woops. Well, that's what you get for not reading the earlier pages, Gavin.
I have just read you, Simon, saying
exactly
what I just said about ebay, and your site visitors, but you said it several days ago. I'm
mortified
to note we are in almost complete agreement.
Apologies. You could still stick a pay pal button on. I'll bung you a quid if you never mention our harmonious moment again.
Gavin, gonna have to back Simon up on this one; unless you're "in the game" (so to speak), it's very difficult to comprehend the sheer frustration that comes when you find someone's ripped your website's content down and distributed either as their own collection or for their own gain. Yes, this is a hobby and, if we didn't get some satisfaction from it, we wouldn't be doing it but it is also costly and time-consuming. With all the man hours and money that go into maintaining sites like TV Ark & MeTV, I think you can forgive us the strong words and rant style postings when someone pulls something like this on us.
I agree totally with Simon, TCB having experienced similar problems - it's a legal issue as well as a moral one.
The advice we've had is that if we, as webmasters, don't take all possible steps to prevent unauthorised distribution of this sort then we could be seen as facilitating or even condoning this illegal practice.
We're still assessing the steps we've taken to make this more difficult to see if it's enough - after all, there's only so much you can do as a hobby site without financial resources.
I never really got too worked up about the legal issue, meself, given the nature of what we do on MeTV; it would be a bit hypocritical to go 'round screaming about copyright violations. The moral issue is what gets me, years of hard work have gone into MeTV, TV Ark and all the other TV & movie media related sites out there and to see this ripped in a few hours by some jerk off with a download manager in a matter of hours can be very disheartening.
Unfortuantely, there's very little we can do to prevent it; if it's on the interweb and someone can find a use for it, somebody's gonna rip it. All we can do is try and limit the occurences by deterring theose responsible without disrupting the 99.9% of people who don't abuse our services which can be very difficult to do.
