10-10-08, 03:28 PM | #41 | ||
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10-10-08, 03:44 PM | #42 | |
Point 2 - Probably won't kill all addons. But it will kill addon hosting sites. The community and tools provided by these sites greatly enhance the quality and quantity of available addons. These sites are almost entirely ad supported. (And most aren't really profitable) I don't think you realize the insane amount of bandwidth and server resources we're talking about here. I don't have permission to publish numbers, but recall that both Curse and Wowui were offline for the sunwell patch. Ace and wowinterface survived, but the traffic was huge. If authors of popular addons had to pay for their own hosting, I suspect we'd lose quite a few of them. I am a Mac user and an addon author, and I update manually. I certainly don't update every day! Why would I risk breaking my interface every time I play? I understand the convenience of auto-updaters. But none of them have met my standards for useful/trustworthy yet. |
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10-10-08, 03:55 PM | #43 | |
Redistributing copyrighted material without the authors consent is illegal. There is no gray area. Now bandwidth theft, you're going to have issues there because there is no Internet law that covers bandwidth theft. The only hope a web site owner has is to contact the offending sites web host and pray that host respects their reputation enough to do something about it. Unfortunately, there are a handful of hosts out there that could care less about bandwidth theft. No, most hosts will not deactivate an account. There are different circumstances with every situation (and I've seen and heard just about all of them). I have and always will take those things into consideration when I deal with my own hosting clients, as do most hosting companies. |
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10-10-08, 03:59 PM | #44 | |
Therefore, your statement that it has "has been ruled against so many times it's not funny" is, at best, uninformed. While you are entitled to hold an uninformed opinion, you are not entitled to make stuff up and call it a valid argument. |
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10-10-08, 04:13 PM | #45 |
In addition, transparently hot-linking media files and generally content other than a simple web page (aka without providing or showing the actual link anywhere, thus "deceiving" the person that receives the data, while circumventing the actual site entirely) is also something that is frowned upon and rightfully so.
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10-10-08, 04:53 PM | #46 |
Question to the legal experts: whenever you upload your addons to UI sites you explicitly agree to their own terms of service regarding the content. Right?
Then for instance for WowInt if we have a look at paragraph 11.III under ZAM Network ToS tell me how this will hold against a third-party distribution of said addons? This has nothing to do with intellectual property or copyright (unless otherwise explicitly mentioned), just distribution path with UI sites acting as a "proxy" between authors and end-users. From what I can read basically at that point the issue is between the UI sites and whoever is providing the auto-updaters harvesting from them. And so far the only staff statement I have seen here is from Cairenn saying there was no endorsement of the tool, but not making any formal complain about it either, whether technical about the bandwidth or moral about crediting authors. No?
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Kaomie "WE LOTS OF PEOPLE FROM STRONG SERVER GUILDS" - Trade Channel Last edited by Kaomie : 10-10-08 at 04:56 PM. |
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10-11-08, 01:40 AM | #47 | |||||||||
Fortunately, the integration of WowAce and Curse means that you will no longer be burdened by an "update" every time an author commits a change to his or her addon's development repository. You will now only see updates when the author feels there are actual changes that deserve being posted as a release. This "problem" is only a problem due to lack of user understanding, and poor planning on the part of WowAce, but it won't be a problem in the future.
Other than the aforementioned wowace.com "problem", most addons really aren't updated all that frequently. I use about 150 addons, plus around 100 libraries. About half of those are available here on WoWInterface. I have them marked as favorites, and have enabled email notification for updates. On average, I see 0 to 2 updates each day, and I'd estimate that 2/3 of those are only applicable to WotLK.
Now let's say you go visit a relative in another city. While you're there, you decide to stop by an art gallery there and see what's popular in that area. To your surprise, you discover that the gallery there is also selling your painting! But instead of using FedEx and UPS, they deliver each print themselves. You did not grant this gallery permission to display and distribute your painting. Would you say that their role in this is the same as the role of FedEx or UPS in delivering prints from your local art gallery? Of course not; they are actively displaying (hosting) your painting (addon), soliciting buyers (users), and selling (distributing) your painting (addon), without involving the gallery you actually contracted with to promote your work. Now let's go a step further and say that the second gallery, which is showing and selling your painting without your consent or even knowledge, is sneakily avoiding paying postage on deliveries of prints of your painting that they sell, by dropping their outgoing deliveries in the shipping bin of the first gallery. Now you have a relationship between the second gallery and the first gallery that is fairly similar to the relationship between WoWMatrix and WoWInterface. Hopefully taking the "virtual" out of the situation will better illustrate the problem.
- data you store on Zam servers, - data being sent from you to Zam servers, and/or - data being sent from Zam servers to you, without your knowledge or consent ("unauthorized"). The "access to data you store on Zam servers" part does apply to WoWMatrix, but only to the effect that Zam/WoWInterface isn't responsible for WoWMatrix doing that. |
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10-11-08, 02:09 AM | #48 | |||||
Let me change your example slightly so it does accurately reflect the real world. (exact copy for the first part) Let's say you're a painter, and you paint a lovely forest scene. You choose a local art gallery, and display your painting there, and sell prints through them. When someone in a distant location orders a print of your painting, they can choose to have the painting shipped via either FedEx or UPS. Would you, the artist, object to this and say you did not grant FedEx or UPS permission to distribute your painting? Of course not; that's absurd. In this scenario, the painting is an addon, the gallery is WoWInterface, and FedEx and UPS are the browsers users visit and download with. (corrections here to make it accurate) Now let's say you go visit a relative in another city. While you're there, you decide to stop by an art gallery there and see what's popular in that area. To your surprise, you discover that the gallery has a list of paintings available from the gallery you are selling your paintings at! But instead of using FedEx and UPS, they deliver prints with their own special shipping company that specializes in delivering paintings. You did not explicitly grant this gallery permission to list your paintings, however they give a wonderful description of it and even give credit to you! (Most likely covered under fair use in copyright law) Your gallery is still getting the sale, but this time you have to use their delivery service and not FedEx or UPS. Would you say that their role in this is the same as the role of FedEx or UPS in delivering prints from your local art gallery? Pretty Close!; instead of shipping anything, they only ship paintings, and since they like your paintings so much, they've gone so far as to have a catalog at their gallery showing off your work! There -- This example is now pretty close to what is actually happening with wowmatrix. I've pointed it out on the wow forums...and I'll do it again here really quick. Wowmatrix is not re-distributing. To do that, they would first need to download it to their website (ie, take it and have it in their gallery) which they don't do. They simply provide a list of addons (a line or two in a catalog) and provide a specialized downloader that only downloads addons (delivers paintings exclusively) . The distribution goes directly from wowinterface to you via wowmatrix (from the gallery to you via the specialized shipper).
I've considered writing some addons in the past, but I haven't come up with any specific thing I'd like to do, I'd be more apt to contribute to another project honestly. And yes, I would absolutely want my project listed on something like wowmatrix to expand the audience it could reach and reach easily.
http://forums.worldofwarcraft.com/th...sid=1&pageNo=5 (Page 5, post 89) Basically the best I've come up with that wowmatrix is doing wrong (well not me, but what I've concluded based on other people's discussion) is that they might be going against the terms of use of the addon listing websites. Which most likely means the user is at fault and not wowmatrix. However I'm pretty sure the Java program you linked to above would run afoul of the same lines on the curse/wowinterface TOU. The only difference I see between the two is wowmatrix was nice enough to provide the list of links to download whereas you have to manually input them into the java program. Either would be fine for me, I 99% want a program to keep stuff up to date. For all of the new addons I go search around curse.com or wowinterface, or google it etc and do some research, look at some screenshots, and then at the end use wowmatrix to install it because I can't be bothered to save it, and navigate to ~/.wine/drive_c/Program Files/World of Warcraft/Interface/Addons everytime I want to install a new addon. Last edited by Disaron : 10-11-08 at 02:11 AM. Reason: Stupid typos/grammar mistakes due to being sleepy |
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10-11-08, 03:28 AM | #49 | |
You have brought nothing new to this discussion.
It is a good idea to actually read the thread you're posting in so you can reply in context. (It's not exceedingly long, in fact your post is the longest one). I blame whoever linked this thread on the official forums, last thing we need is the usual wow forums standards invading wowi. You came from a thread starting with the misconception that wowmatrix is "redistributing" addons and that's what's wrong with it and you have built a whole defense on the "not redistributing" part. Go back and read the present thread from the start. We're very well aware that they're not re-distributing addons as that would require them to upload addons to their servers first and then allow them to be downloaded by users, incurring the bandwidth costs in the process along with the manpower costs of verifying said addons and their servers are free of malware etc. If that were the case they'd only have a beef with authors instead of how they're pissing both addon authors and legitimate addon hosts at the same time now. Do we really need to explain how wowmatrix =/= a user's internet browser? Or how linking to an addon's page =/= hotlinking to an addon's file? I hope not, although you keep using those two arguments as if it was plain as day it's the same thing. Edit: I could sort of sympathize with users that project an attitude of "I understand it a dubious practice that makes most addon authors + addon sites unhappy but give me a better or equivalent alternative without those issues". That could spark a creative process. Maybe the addon sites coming to an agreement that would allow their respective updaters to pull stuff from each other? Maybe a list of pre-requisites that 3rd party updaters could follow to be allowed access to the site's content? This effort to legitimize wowmatrix and use of it by any means necessary is both extremely annoying and self-invalidating. That site owners/program authors(?) are obviously following the discussions. Changes are happening in their program as the discussion continues. Whether they take it far enough to actually make a difference or it will remain a pretext not touching the core of the issue is yet to be seen. At the moment it seems to be the latter as one wowace poster put it their recent changes can be summed up as:
Convince them everything was fine already (link references to them - go crazy) and they need to revert their recent changes. Last edited by Dridzt : 10-11-08 at 04:54 AM. |
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10-11-08, 03:47 AM | #50 | |
Ok, the second gallery is only displaying a list of paintings that you can get from them. The fact still remains if you order from them, they go to the first gallery and take the painting from them without asking. And even though they aren't using FedEX/UPS, the first gallery still has to pay shipping and handling charges as though they did ship it. Now add to the fact, Let's say the ads are an admission fee. The first gallery is no longer getting a fee for some (a lot) people browsing the paintings, but still have pay shipping and handling for each painting going out. And the second gallery even has the nerve to ask for added donations from people looking at their list of paintings from somewhere else, in addition to their admission fee. |
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10-11-08, 06:18 AM | #51 | |||||||
JWU requires the user to first visit the addon's on the site that hosts it, get the unique identifier from the URL (WoWInterface uses a number), and enter that identifier into the program. In this regard, it is much like a web browser; prior to the user giving the program the addon's URL, the program has no idea that the addon exists. Additionally, JWU does not make money. It is a program written and distributed for free by a hobbyist, and is hosted on GoogleCode.
WoWMatrix now lists the addon's author... but only if you click on it in the client. At the time of the original post in this thread, the author's name was displayed nowhere on the website or in the client. WoWInterface does not "get the sale" when a user downloads an addon through WoWMatrix. WoWInterface pays the "shipping cost" and gets nothing in return.
Fashionabull pretty much said everything else I wanted to say about this, so I won't repeat it.
If you use Firefox with AdBlock to download an addon, you are using WoWInterface's bandwidth without viewing their revenue-generating ads, but you explicitly instructed Firefox to download the addon from WoWInterface, and Firefox's creators do not profit from the act. If you use JWoWUpdater or a similar program to download an addon, you are using WoWInterface's bandwidth without viewing their revenue-generating ads, but you explicitly instructed JWU to download the addon from WoWInterface, and JWU's creator does not profit from the act. If you use WoWMatrix to download an addon, you are using WoWInterface's bandwidth without viewing their revenue-generating ads, but you did not explicitly instruct WoWMatrix to download the addon from WoWInterface -- it offered to download the addon, without revealing a source, and you accepted the offer -- and WoWMatrix's creators do profit from the act. Do you see the difference? |
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10-11-08, 07:00 AM | #52 | |||||||
So you want me to read through 70 changelogs before I decide to download an Addon each day? *shrug* It's the distribution site together with the authors which provide those minimal and sometimes unnecessary updates for free. Is it allowed to download these updates? Yes. Each one of them? Yes. A solution would be to only make major updates available to the public.
You know, there is a lot of arguing ongoing about: 1. Does WoWMatrix distribute something? 2. Is there a copyright infringement? 3. Is it possible to 'steal' bandwidth? And if somebody looses bandwidth, who is responsible? 4. Does WoWMatrix really link to the addons? Everybody who says that all this is clear and obvious makes the same mistake as the guy above. It's relatively clear that the Addon authors have the copyright for their work (however there are also a lot of pitfalls here).
Then, I always have to walk to them whenever I wish to get a picture and I want a lot of them! That's not very convenient.
Btw this second gallery is much more comfortable than the first one. It also provides prints from other galleries which are also very nice! Oh, I love those pictures! Did I already tell you the story from the artist which told me: "You don't need that many pictures! And I don't care if you have a convenient way to get the pictures!".
Who is responsible for this problem? Is there a limitation of daily downloads somewhere here in WoWInterface.com? Do they keep users from using such tools? |
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10-11-08, 07:19 AM | #53 | ||
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10-11-08, 07:55 AM | #54 |
I don't care about fedex / ups and paintings analogies.
They only serve to cloud the issue which is very clear cut already. Phanx shouldn't have tried to "dumb down" an already extremely simple thing. It opened up the potential for you to skirt the real questions and bringing into this thread more weak analogies only confuses the issue further. (which seems to suit you guys just fine). The relevant arguments have been posted and your last post is a rehash of the same misinformation. Your questions have all been answered in this thread, go back and read again (pay attention this time). If you're getting lost in all the side arguments and analogies I suggest you follow the link to post from our host here that you'll find on the first page of this thread; that's the equivalent of a "blue" post in these parts. Last edited by Dridzt : 10-11-08 at 08:14 AM. |
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10-11-08, 09:16 AM | #55 | |
Bandwidth is extremely expensive when you go over your quota. It can run into thousands of dollars if you are not watching where your bandwidth is going, not to mention that neither WoWI or Ace/Curse is running on a simple hosting account. I would venture to say that they may very well lease an entire server(s) just to keep up with the traffic. Servers are not cheap by any means especially if you have to pay extra for bandwidth overages. Bandwidth is not free. |
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10-11-08, 09:34 AM | #56 |
Just wanted to let you guys know (if you dont already) that wowmatrix now displays the Author of the addon.
I belive they still get the addons from the dev's pages and not their own but at least one part of the problem is solved. |
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10-11-08, 10:45 AM | #57 |
Since it seems that a number of addon authors posting in this thread are strongly opposed to wowmatrix, and it's been mentioned a few times that the hosting pages authors submit to (wowinterface, curse, etc) could change the way they generate download links by putting in randomly generated URLs or something of the like, has anyone asked the hosting sites to include a measure of protection against leeching/deep-linking to files like this?
I've no idea how much or little work/cost a change of this sort would be, but if the hosting sites want to stop wowmatrix from operating in the way it does, and the people running wowmatrix appear to be unwilling to listen or change the way their program operates, why haven't authors been asking the hosting sites to protect their work by changing the way downloads function to block wowmatrix from leeching? It seems such an obvious question I'm sure there must be an obvious answer, so apologies if I'm derailing the thread by asking how the internet works...
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Two plus two equals five. |
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10-11-08, 11:56 AM | #58 |
Of course it's not. By posting this here you are stealing this sites bandwidth whenever someone is opening the thread? Really?
Do you feel like a thief? Look, I (and you) cannot steal bandwidth from this site because they are giving it to us for free. I cannot steal something which is free. It's their decision to do so. There is nothing illegal in using their bandwidth. Btw, your analogy with electricity is wrong. Nobody is paying for the bandwidths of servers except the server owners itself. And they are responsible for the servers finances, nobody else. If it's not profitable they either have to be a nonprofit organization (and somebody else is going to pay the bill) or better don't bring the server online at all. There is however an unfortunate problem in using their bandwidth. This problem occurs as soon as their business model does no longer work. And, read my lips, I clearly see that loosing this business model would destroy most parts of the Addon community and their distribution chain. However, there is nothing illegal going on here. And, if this is the main problem, then all automatic updaters are bad. One way to solve this dilemma is shutting down (obfuscate) the links for automatic tools. For me this is the worst solution because you are taking away the benefit of automatic updaters. Maybe there are other ways: Ask WoWMatrix if they support the sites they are getting the links from? Ask the end users for more contributions (heck, the users currently think everything is fine, there is little pressure for them to donate. But this might change)? Maybe Blizzard itself jumps on the band wagon? Or any other people with money and interest, e.g. magazines and the like? Write your own Updater which beats WoWMatrix and get the income from partners and ads? Use GoogleCode instead of WoW Addon sites? On the other hand I'm not sure if the problem really exists. I'm using WoWMatrix and I still frequently visit the Addon sites. In fact all players I know do. As someone with a job, a family and playing WoW you only have that much time to surf the web, but I still go to Curse, WoWUI, WoWInterface and WoWAce. |
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10-11-08, 12:12 PM | #59 | |
This thread is pretty much ran its course I think as nothing beneficial can possibly come from it. |
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10-11-08, 12:37 PM | #60 |
You know I really hate to go off subject but I saw this at the start of reading the thread today. I am the one who linked this conversation to the wow forums. I'm sorry I brought someone in that had the wrong idea about this whole thing. I for one thought you guys could explain to this guy he was wrong and do a better job at it. I linked what someone had said because i couldn't have said it better and it brought him here. So yea I guess I am sorry for bringing "the filth" to the forums.
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