My bet is Frogboy would be simply 'bemused' rather than 'offended', and is more than capable of saying so.

It is I who is offended by such cavalier dismissal of considered opinion, hence my response. 

This 'I pay or else you wouldn't exist' is a hackneyed stance.....it's a 'the-cart-before-the-horse' statement.  Wincustomize.com would still exist if it's members didn't contribute financially....it would just be 'different'.  Now, if Stardock did not exist due to IP theft making it financially non-viable then Wincustomize.com would not exist, nor would a significant slice of the  Windows-skinning software that is the basis for the skinning community itself.

It is a safe bet that this thread topic is of significant importance/relevance to our community's viability that it has been well read and [most of] its responses are learned and astute.

As for 'Frogboy DOES NOT know how and why bittorrent was created'... I take it you do?  Lead on, McDuff.

Everyone on the planet is free to create his own skinning site if he's of the belief he can handle 'the current Intellectual Property situation' any better than Wincustomize.com.  Go for it...and God's speed....

Hmmm...cache issue, I think....I thought my last comment would have been #48...

Oh, well....

Bakerstreet -- let's get to the brass tacks, do you think fan art (or whatever you want to call it) is realy the same as pirating stuff? Do you really think the guy who decides to make a Superman wallpaper is in the same category as the guy who puts up a cracked copy of Photoshop?  Because if you do, there's no point in us trying to discuss this as we're living in totally different worlds, if you donk't think they're the same then why bring it up?

In my mind, the difference is massive.  When someone puts up and distributes Paul Boyer's Orion icons, they're effectively taking money away from Paul Boyer. He worked hard on those icons and has provided countless free icons to people.  Yet some people have no qualms about taking his hard work that he made in the hopes of making some side-income and distributing it.

Similarly, I see a huge difference between the guy who excessively quotes an article on JoeUser.com and warez.  I think most people would too. 

But let's take it further -- the primary use of WinCustomize.com is not to distribute copyrighted material. THIS is a link to the current most popular items on WinCustomize.com. None of which is fan art or even remotely problematic from the most stringent intellectual property point of view.

By contrast, the principle use of Kazaa and their ilk has been to engage in the illegal distribution of copyrighted material. 

The issue at hand has to do with the INTENT of a given service.  What is the primary use of a given service.  P2P is a neutral technology on its own.  It's really the packaging of P2P and related technologies that become problematic.

Yes, if you want my opinion, using the superman trademark and pirating a CD are relative degrees of the same sin. In both, the owner of the IP has been denied the right to say when, where, and how his IP will be used. Your Paul Boyer example is a good one. Not only does wincusto do that for Paul Boyer, but I know, beyond a shadow of a doubt, that if one of my works was "borrowed" without permission, you'd take it down in a heartbeat.

My quandry has always been, why doesn't EVERYONE, including commercial interests, get that same consideration.

Look at the excuse most people use for distributing mp3s. "It's good advertising for the artist, and I probably wouldn't buy it anyway... and it's not like I am selling it." They are just fans out spreading the messgage. You know that is bunk as well as I do. Yet, when we apply that to Adobe icons, or the wallpaper you mention, There's a difference? Nope. We are just providing IP that doesn't belong to us because people can't get it any other way.

If I made a Superman wallpaper where Superman was a gay, axe-wielding pedophile, the trademark owners would be unenthused to say the least. That's an easy call, but who is to say what they might deem damaging to their trademark? It's for them to say what is flattering, or beneficial, or "fan art", not us. That's why we get permission.

I'm NOT attacking wincusto, and I'm NOT differing with your take on Kazaa and such. My problem is while we are shuffling over to the corporate camp to champion their rights, they are trying to tie down the loose ends of the Internet so that they will remain the eternal middlemen between artists and the public. God forbid the Internet get perverted into a medium where an artist wouldn't NEED a publisher, an agent, a PR guy, and every other leach that has a square inch to latch on. That's a point for a blog of my own, I guess.

The icon thing is a jab, I admit that, because I, subjectively, see a double standard. Otherwise I meant no attack, since I am about as big a Brad Wardell fan as a healthy heterosexual guy can be. (i.e. I'd talk you up to strangers but I wouldn't hang an open-shirt poster of you on my wall.) We're at odds about this, no surprise after 6 years and arguments on skinz.org, wincusto, and finally here. You see fan art as a good thing, I see it as a double standard. It's no biggy to me.

Yet another history lesson, kona0187.

There's a lot of different threads going on in this single discussion.

1) The ruling.  The ruling is essentially states that if the intended or primary use of a given service is to do illegal things then that company is liable.  This is important because it marks a distinction between say guns, which CAN be used to commit illegal acts and Kazaa whose primary purpose is to commit illegal acts.

2) Bit Torrent.  I understand P2P technology and Bit Torrent.  There are two pieces to Bit Torrent -- the software, which I'm okay with, and the guy's search engine, which I'm not okay with because it is, IMO, primarily used to engage in illegal activity.  I'm totally okay with companies using P2P technologies like Bit Torrent to distribute things.  Good for them. 

3) WinCustomize and copyrighted material.  Simply put, there is a big difference between a "copyright violation" that quite literally takes money away from someone else and one that does no harm.  Someone making a Star Wars boot screen is doing nothing that any reasonable person is going to say harms Star Wars. If anything, it promotes Star Wars. There is no negative financial impact.  By contrast, when someone takes someone's icons that are for sales for $8 and distributes them for free, they are stealing.  We're not talking stealing in some quasi-intellectual sense, we're tlaking good old fashioned theft.  Theft in which you are literally causing an individual or company a direct loss in dollars.  Arguments that comparing allowing fan art and software piracy as being related are like saying speeding an mass murder are related.

4) P2P based skin sites -- If someone wants to set up a P2P skn site, go for it.  It's easy for other people to sit around talking about what other people should do.

I didn't say it wouldn't be a good idea for WC.  We've not really investigated it.  But I do think it would be quite a bit more work to set up than it appears on the surface.