How stop unity3d asset store hackers!!

Hello Every one
Now days I find some websites that sell most of unity3d packages for free or lower prices !!
I want to stop them but don't know how can I do that?
this is against copy right laws ! but some of the websites are in countries like I.R.IRAN and they haven't any copy right law !!
what can I do?
if unity3d want I'll link them in private message! but for now want to know how can I stop this ...

 

Well probably for a start don't advertise their sites in the Unity forum for all to see?

Probably not much you can do but hope that most people will want to pay for assets from the real developers so they get paid for their hard work?

Also you could tell people that the Iranian site has loads of secret military viruses in it to scare people off.

 

Really this is near to impossible, the only way (not 100% sure) is implement a type of web activation in the compiled (plugins) assets, with not compiled assets (scripts) is nothing to do, remember that almost digital security measures can be break.

 

You cant stop piracy when people distribute stuff for free. However you said some are selling stuff? usually they have to use some kind of payment platform which you can contact about the subject. That is if they are selling to everyone.

 

The secret is DRM. Make your work so difficult to use that even the legitimate purchasers can't use it. Then nobody will be able to pirate it either.

 

Inquiry to the payment platforms is not effective, certain platforms as Clickbank allow scamers.

 

Sadly it's just a fact of life with any kind of digital development. Even the big companies that have all the fancy methods of dealing with that stuff get it done to them. I would think most people would want to use the official store though over some shady iranian site just for peace of mind.

 

Is anyone really going to buy stuff from organised criminals from Iran? Who knows where the money will end up? I credit most people with some amount of morals.

 

God I hope you are being sarcastic.

 

Just about every digital product and other content is available illegally for very low cost or free out there some place.
There are people who are proud to say they have never paid for anything or at least not anywhere near the full price. It's the rest of us who buy legit that keep the world spinning as normal.

 

No I'm being totally serious.

(That was sarcasm)

 

On a serious not this doesn't universally apply. Maybe if you are US based. Probably in certain parts of the Europe. But there is much of the rest of the world that doesn't give any where near as much credence to the war on terror or American morals.

 

The best solution is to just let people know that it's not ok to purchase from those sites. People will always find a way around DRM and pirate your assets - the question is would they have become customers otherwise? My guess would be no. And the ones that would - are they worth the effort? They obviously don't value your work.

DRM solutions have got to the point now where they are annoying real customers, and it can only get worse. Built-in activation is acceptable to most people, but I wouldn't go overboard trying to find a solution - it can't be prevented.

Focus on your legitimate customers - they're the ones that will support you. And don't offer support to users without valid proof of purchase.

 

I don't know from where they could find assets but for now they have more than +100 assets for free and low prices one of them for example :


Some filtered pictures :




Also I find the Admin home town and name and picture if unity3d wants I'll send them to unity3d to stop this Guy !!
I think we can stop this with report to Mozilla Firefox , some other web browsers or other places to do not show this website

 

Well I don't think that's true. Find me one person who thinks giving money to organised criminal gangs from Iran is a good idea.

Mind you the amount of tourists I see buying obviously fake goods from the Russian Mafia funded street criminals in Eastern Europe makes me wonder. Although I doubt the Russians are funding Islamic terrorism. (Unlike the Americans who funded the Taliban in the first Afghan war and no doubt various dubious parties in the Syrian and Libyan conflicts.) So yeah. Basically don't ever buy anything from anyone because it will always end up in the hands of terrorists.

 

Politics aren't welcome on these forums. I'll have to lock the thread if it continues to be of a political nature & hand out infractions.

 

This is pretty much the best way to approach it and discourage piracy. Support those you know are legitimate and ignore everyone else. Those who want support or didn't know better will simply go the proper way.

Those who knew it was piracy, they'll never support you and you cannot stop them. Better to ignore them completely.

 

thanks @hippocoder
Hey @yoonitee why you change this simple copy right issue to a serious political one? what is the mafia? terror? where is Afghanistan? who? what?
I just want to say some body is doing wrong work and we should try to stop it.
Also with the Iranian sanctions nobody couldn't pay any money for this guys from outside of their country so we just try to find way to prevent hackers to rob our assets and if its be possible try to stop their dirty website!

 

Many different methods have been tried. Hardware keys, software solutions such as SecuROM, online-based activation, and physical solutions like code wheels and booklets. None of these have been successful.

We can discourage it as developers, but we can never eliminate it. Very wealthy companies and industries have tried and failed. That's simply how it is.

 

The only way to make something hack proof is to not put it on the internet

 

It may make it hack proof, but it won't make it piracy proof. Back in the 1980s you may have not had online stores to purchase games, but you could still pirate them through a BBS.

 

Then hacker will rob your information by hacking your whole PC via internet then you shouldn't connect to internet so we should come back to cave
I think this is a match between developers and hackers and we have to do it harder for them.

 

Yep, games were on tape, and every schoolkid had a tape to tape recorder

 

Of course its a political issue since if the copyright infringement site was located in a democratic country with copyright laws then it would be easier to shut down.

But anyway, I'll say no more as hipocoder will shut down the thread if we talk about anything interesting like that. Obviously as game developers the issue of pirated games funding illegal enterprises is not our concern??? Let just bury our head in the sand.

 

If the shop is in Iran I don't think anyone except the people living in Iran can try to get it removed by contacting authorities there. AFAIK Iran is already under embargo and even Unity has blocked/banned everyone from there I don't think they will get any help in return even if they wanted to get the site closed down. I think the same applies to many other countries that they have no chance to get the site taken down.

 

For the last time, it's against forum rules. You, yourself have broken the rules and do not yet have an infraction for it. I'm very lenient (people don't understand I'm the softie of the moderator team). I can't speak for other mods that might or might not put the smack down. I wouldn't recommend gloating or justifying it.

 

@hippocoder: If he has broken the rules delete his posts instead of threating to close the thread... no reason to do collateral damage...

 

So much talk about Iran... Seriously, visit chinese websites. lol
I guarantee, it's 100x worse.

 

What the???!!!! I have seen the height of piracy since in Bangladesh, there is no effective anti-piracy law either. But selling pirated assetstore products in a unity-like assetstore web page, is an ultimate disgrace. And thats something I have just known with this thread. What kind of low mentality lies behind this?

@yoonitee, about political thing, even though you are right about many information, unity forum is not a right place to talk about it. So kindly do not bring it on here.

 

Sorry guys got bit carried away with the politics!

Anyway, I wouldn't worry about the copyright too much. NetFlix is making loads of money despite the fact people can download illegal films for free. And Minecraft made millions even though it is easy to copy it.

I see a future where films are available for free to watch and then at the end there will be a button to "tip" them. Much like how street performers work. So you would watch Transformers 3 and maybe tip them 50p. Then you would watch Jurasic Park and think that's the best thing ever and tip them £5. Copyright laws will soon be old fashioned.

Another idea is that films and games will be given away for "free" in places like Starbucks and then the developers will get paid a percentage of the coffee price. There might be booths in Starbucks to watch films and play games. Not sure if I like that though.

That's my guess anyway.

 

That will be a future of very limited and poor quality options. Noone will work for free, especially noone worth watching. I see the future as being quite different, where people pay a fair price for the things they want.... maybe I'm just an optimist...

 

I've seen my assets on some websites too, with many more downloads as well. It's a pity. But it's not just the website's fault, THE PEOPLE have to go there and support the site by using it. They could just as easily say no, but they don't. Easy to point a finger at what seems to be the leader of the problem when it's all the support from the users that makes the difference.

 

unfortunately some people when do this work and find digital product for free , they feel satisfaction but they don't know what is they really doing is robing like a thief !!

In past years some times our TV have beautiful advertisement that show a man who is robbing a car and then asked audience : "have you ever steal a car?" and so many examples like that with same question and at the end show a man who that download a crack from internet then TV ask:"Are you know cracking and ignoring copy right is same as that works (hijack airplane , attack bank , steal car , ...) and if you do that you are a thief ?"

I think we have 2 ways to fight with this work :
1- Increase public awareness about use of digital products.
If the number of users decrease then the hackers will not have enough motivation , and this supply and demand will get weaker.
2- Try to get more harder to hackers to hack.
I know that is impossible to fully stop them but we can get it harder and more time consuming for them and it can stop some of them.

 

Most attempts to dissuade hackers only serve to annoy your legitimate customers. The absurd tactics employed by companies such as Electronic Arts, Ubisoft, etc are the exact reasons I absolutely do not buy (or download) any of their products. I would rather go without a product than deal with an unnecessary headache because the author was paranoid.

Big companies can easily get away with these types of paranoia because of a general lack of alternatives and losing customers isn't necessarily a problem when you've got so many. An indie developer cannot really risk this without risking their viability of being indie.

It isn't like you're going to truly gain anything. Those who intended to pirate will simply continue to do so and not buy your product. Those who intended to buy may decide the competition is a better choice or simply build own solution.

 

You'll never stop the piracy, no way no how and the effort you blow exhausting yourself trying to stamp it all out is effort you waste that you could be directing toward your legitimate customers. Trust me, I've been down that route. My asset is pirated pretty heavily. I wasted a lot of time on takedown requests and though they were successful, it just resulted in the pirates getting angry (and I stupidly engaged them), and loading up torrents.

That being said, there are some battles that may be worth fighting... the pirates that are giving the stuff away for free are one thing... the sad sacks who are downloading those assets likely would never have paid for them to begin with. And it has resulted in me having to verify invoice numbers which I never used to do, but now I do, not because I don't trust people, but because I want to make sure I'm giving priority support to those who actually purchased my asset and not those who pirated it.

But... there is that other segment of pirates... those who are selling the assets for cheaper and profiting. They are selling them for next to nothing (pennies) because they're selling lots of different assets and don't have to be responsible for support. I've found lots of these (my asset and others) and they are generally on Chinese sites like Taobao.

 

If a mate called me up and said he'd just brought the latest *insert cool car model here* and asked if I wanted to come over and burn a copy... Let's just say stealing cars that way would become far more prevalent, and society as a whole would look on it as far less damaging.

 

You would think unity would be shutting down these sites since they are probably losing more then us.Since its probably affecting the whole store

 

There were teething problems early on, but my attitude was that I'd buy the things I wanted and demand my money back if they didn't work as advertised (in other words... treating it like any other product). So far I've not had any issues with any of the games I played. And when there were issues during the teething stages I seem to recall the publishers being pretty darn cool about it and giving out free game keys and stuff like that.

Also, I don't understand how UPlay and/or Origin are any worse than Steam, which does many of the same things.

I've certainly been on the painful end of DRM before, but a) not with video games and b) current systems with games aren't that bad. (Also c), if I'm going to spend energy getting upset over something it sure ain't going to be that I can't turn on a video game quite as easily as I'd like.)

 

In a certain way, if you look at it differently, you could claim that because software is easy to duplicate with almost no expense, and barely any use of physical materials (a little bit of wear on the computer hardware), you could say that if you are being honest, then anything past the first copy of the software is practically free to produce, and therefore should not have a pricetag. And that's probably an angle many people take. I know though that its the content and its meaning and the value in it, that is the real value you're supposed to be paying for. e.g. if you stream a stolen movie, you can claim you're not keeping a copy, but you're still getting the benefit of all the effort and expense that went into making the original version. But... I dunno.... there is a small voice that seems to say its sort of okay to treat easily-copyable software with the same rules that we're used to from physical goods... if it didn't take more raw materials to make the copy then it's worthless, so should be free. So maybe the industry is actually wrong, and not the pirates, and we should be more honest about how we're sucking people dry with charging for 'copies' that didn't barely cost anything? ... that said, go buy my assets. ;-)

 

chinese ebay have the whole asset store on sale, but you can blame the asset store to not support Chinese banking system (union pay or alipay) . if you want to fight piracy, publish often update and check how some devs like Opsive do, the asset store have an api to check validity of an invoice, using this you can filter user that dont have invoices, for support forum registration for example, or download example scenes, soure code version, free extensions..

 

Poor excuse. Asset store accepts PayPal which supports the Chinese banking system just fine. And many vendors such as my self provide an alternative (I use FastSpring) for those who can't use the asset store.

 

this is not the subject but there is reason why 99 % of people in china use alipay instead of paypal.

 

This sort of argument ignores the fact that the initial product costs $10,000-$100,000,000 to create, possibly more. The entire cost of the single product is made up in all of the sales afterwards.

I like to use the themepark analogy with talks of privacy. Should people be able to hop the fence at Disney World? Afterall, the extra cost to the company for one more guest is minimal - a little wear and tear on the rides, maybe an extra couple pieces of trash to pick up. And yet, no one defends that as acceptable behavior.

That said, Disney World doesn't have patrolmen stopping you every 10 feet asking for proof of your ticket. Don't make your product unreasonably difficult for users just so you can catch the fence-hoppers.

 

It sucks, but thats just life nothing to do about it.

Guess most people here have streamed or download a movie or tv-show from a not so legal distributor sometime in their life Its always easy to get mad and point fingers when its your own products

 

The best way to stop piracy of your assets is first to change how you perceive piracy; acknowledge that your assets will end up being pirated and get on with your life.

What I wrote above doesn't make sense, does it? That's what piracy ends up doing to you when you try to defeat it.

There's a way to watch your stuff being pirated which, with a bit of belief that it will happen, makes you want to smile and make even better assets.

Try to better your skills by creating assets like you have never done so before. Bigger, better, more refined, better coded, streamlined etc Gauge the piracy sites for your assets and see what kind of storm is brewing when people try to acquire your assets/ip. If you see a thread started on a piracy site that someone has requested your asset and that thread is full of pirateers almost scattering the net like cockroaches trying to find a link to it, then you know your asset is worthy and is good.

Heck, register on that forum; tell them your the developer and give them a link to it on mega-upload or other sum such site.

Allowing pirates to elicit strong emotional behaviors/feelings within your own mind that steer towards the very negative does you absolutely no good. Do not allow them control of you as you are the only one living in your brain. Killing your minds mojo when it comes to being creative, productive, is what piracy in some forms is about. It is never the need for the asset in some scenarios but the need to have and control something that they could not possibly make themselves.

.....

 

Don't forget to mention too that full support is provided to those who buy the asset legitimately.

 

Exactly why I verify. I want my support to go to legitimate purchasers. Several times when I have asked for invoice numbers, the folks who emailed me have disappeared into the woodwork.

 

Well, I once had a basic question about an asset (non-Unity) that I purchased. Extremely simple, yes/no question. Contacted their support and they asked for my invoice number - I actually got annoyed (wasn't willing to search through 2 years worth of email to find it) and didn't bother responding. So be aware that it can annoy legitimate customers as well.
Wasn't enough to drop the product though - I carried on using it.

Most products require email registration to download/purchase anyway, perhaps we should do a quick lookup against our DB before asking for the invoice number (pirates can't fake an email address easily).

 

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