those guys are sad. they make windows users look bad. when linux and mac users say windows users are mindless sheep its because of guys like them. there's hardly any decent ms-style themes that aren't ports.

> it was just a matter of time. there aren´t that many Mac artists to rip, now it´s WindowBlinds...
i mean people there are presenting wallpapers they extracted from a Mac *.sit file as their "conversions".

It happened with BBX and Milk. They figure that once they start working on it the original artist has no choice. Actually it's all coercion, "ask the author" if he says no we'll release it anyway. I think all skinners need to email Neowin and just ask for the skinning forum there to be shut down. At least until Neowin sets some rules for the skinning forum and more importantly enforce them.

I've talked to Neowin about this sort of thing in the past. He's a good guy and definitely has no love for the parasite minority that tends to make a lot of noise on some of those message boards (there's a lot of places to talk about stuff on Neowin and the vast majority of the message boards are full of intelligent people).

The problem with the sections you're seeing is a demographic one. "Unreality" is a 17 year old for instance. Many of his cheerleaders are of similar age. It's not that being young is the issue, but that understanding intellectual property takes time. When I first got into skinning, I didn't see what the big deal was in porting a skin and giving it credit (without permission). It was only over time that I really grasped the importance of protecting the intellectual property rights of theme/skin authors.

What people don't realize is that the truly great skinners/themers aren't legion in size. You eliminate say 20 individuals from all platforms and we'd be much poorer for it. Imagine skinning without Grayhaze or Treetog or Alexandrie or Dangeruss? You can't just treat skin authors as if they are a disposable commodity. Until the msstyles "community" gets a grip on that, it'll always just be mostly ports. And they have a lot more to lose - you could write a script to convert an msstyle to WindowBlinds but not vice versa. It's in that community's long term vested interest to protect artists because their skins are much more vulnerable to porting.

hehe, sure they will all upgrade to a new warezed update of XP, wether they need it or not. but i do not think that will help that much, somewhere the skins have to be stored and all binary data can be hacked. or will microsoft remove the native skinning?

read here: http://www.neowin.net/bboard/showthread.php?s=275bcc9f68dccfe23b443eb4edaa6bef&threadid=30126&perpage=15&pagenumber=3

may be we WILL see some legal action now!!!

http://www.neowin.net/bboard/showthread.php?s=&threadid=29814&perpage=15&pagenumber=1

http://www.neowin.net/bboard/showthread.php?s=&threadid=28971&perpage=15&pagenumber=22

2 more...it seems that those guys really don´t have any criativity >

I'd say the opposite would happen. It would just fuel rippers.

Grayhaze: the only two people that i can imagine to fit your categories are Arhra and Chaninja. but those two are original artists whose work was also ported to WindowBlinds, so i could imagine they would be rather interested in doing their own stuff. i see also a little danger in here, because i think as soon something is done for visual styles a lot of people there consider it as some kind of public domain
well i think getting in contact with Arhra or Chaninja is not such a bad idea. here are their sites at Deviantart:
http://chaninja.deviantart.com/
http://arhra.deviantart.com/

Renato: well the first one said, he would not release it without permission given. if that is true is a different story. since you are providing the link, i guess he did not contact you yet
on the second: this Outcast person offers to send a rip of Metal-X per e-mail if you ask him for it. if it is true what Frogboy said that this Neowin is a "good guy" i think it is upon time to get this person and his IP banned. that would probably hurt him most. should i ask for a copy of this rip (in my best ghetto speech), so we have proof about this?

Neil: i don´t think that this will help. they often port just from screenshots (Pixtudio themes for example). this is just one reason for the low quality.

The major sites police rips pretty well. Greg at ThemeXP is a good guy too for instance. I've already contacted him regarding this MetalX port and "Unsanity" will have some difficulty getting away with rips.

Him passing some rip to his d00d friends might get it into hundreds of people's hands but that's nothing compared to being on a skin site.

Porting from a screenshot is harder than just using the original source graphics included in the skin directory.

Anything that makes it harder seems like a good thing given the number of rips that have occured over the past 6 months.