I would venture a guess Moymoy and Tomtyl could be one and the same . It is possible every post has been stolen from somebody or another. There can be no confidence that they have upoaded one original effort.

This upsets me (let alone the people that have been ripped off) because I really admire the creativity of the Skinners on Wincustomise. To see their many hours of toil benifiting a thief and another site/s is bloody outrageous.

Having said that, I have no idea how to put a stop to the practise and that's also bloody frustrating. > >

I guess this will never stop. >

I worry about sophisticated rippers in the grey areas of international law. The law is very, very iffy in some countries in terms of free-use, copyrights, and reverse engineering. It would be damned difficult at this point to prevent a company based, say, in China from selling skins or artwork derived from skins, and they could sell to users in teh US or anywhere via the internet. The days of the predominately-english internet are waning. What happens when a big foreign language portal uses our skins for the UI? I dunno how anyone could stop them.

with billions of new users in asia, the middle east, etc., I think we are going to have to assume that we are gonna be ripped, and that it could quite possibly be out of our hands. With casual reverse engineering laws in russia and elsewhere, I would expect to see ripped APPS as well. How would one stop a WB clone in Russia or China, where it is practically legal to reverse engineer? Monitoring foreign language sites won't be easy, and stopping them will be next to impossible.

*PLEASE* don't think that I mean people from these areas are more apt to rip. That is NOT what I am saying at all. My point is that rips on foreign language sites are difficult to spot, and in countries with lax or different laws, there may be nothing we can do. If it is not illegal in their country, the moral delimma is far less, and we can't even keep k1dd13s from doing it here... with no money involved. I have great respect for users from all over the world. I don't though, have any illusions about being able to sue a company of any size in Russia or China, and frankly I am unsure if even ISPs in those areas would be willing to cut off sites that distribute. We have been fortunate that Geocities and the like have been so responsive, but when sites like them spring up all over the non-english speaking world, it might be more difficult to make our case.

Forgive my paranoia, but any of the old-timers here will remember people coming onto messageboards and saying "HEY! our skins are in a japanese magazine!" Somtimes even without permission. If it is this hard to spot/address when the perpetrator is in Japan, I am really worried about the explosion in the other, less UScentric areas of the web in the next few years.

jafo: while I would agree that that is how things have been in the past, I think it is becoming innaccurate. The last time I went trolling for my skins (after I had removed them from sites I had control of), I found many, many on non-english sites that I had never heard of, and I found them only because they retained the english filename. Times are changing. I understand that there are unsavory types everywhere, but at least here there are legal hinderances.

I know this sounds xenophobic, and it is not intended as such. There seems to be warez sites (distributing full versions of WB all day, every day) that that are untouchable, and I assume it is their geographical location. I won't list the name here, because I assum that Stardock knows and I don't want to give them advertising. What would prevent them from reverse engineering it, branding it themselves, and distributing it, freely or for pay? Reverse engineering is legal in many places. The same could be said for any of our skins, wallpapers, scripts, etc. Could any of us, even stardock, put forth a legal effort intimidating enough in places like this to stop them?

I know of some efforts to move illegal activity to servers in openly antagonistic countries like Iran, as well. I am troubled. There is a feeling by some opposed to western influence and economic power, that hacking and piracy are legitimate ways of 'evening the playing field'. I dunno. It may never be an issue. China has an ongoing programming effort to produce their own version of windows 98, which could seemlessly integrate with MS's software and file formats. Could MS even stop them?

This isn't prophesy, just things to consider.

Is themesxp even doing anything about this?

I keep looking and seeing rips still up there...

http://www.themexp.org/forums/viewtopic.php?p=25205

There ya go...

I went and started a stink