You've been heard. Response re: 4.9 and Encryption

lx_2807502

RobotHeadArt said:

lx said:

People have brought up the Steam comparison several times (usually negatively) but it's not as simple as a 'has a thing' flag:

+ Steam brings all of your games together into one easy place to manage them
+ It also makes it very easy to find and buy more, good for both customers and developers, who would otherwise be strung out all over the place
-There's DRM

You can see how people might say "but they're trying to make Studio the same! Put all your content in one system that is also great at finding more!" The thing is, games aren't 3D Assets. A game is a finished end product that isn't something you work with to do something else.You will never really need to open a game in another content management system. Steam may have DRM, but the games actual files are in place on your computer unencrypted (beyond what the game would normally be) so if a certain asset of the game needs fixing, it's possible. You also don't mix games together to form something, so it doesn't matter if some of your games are in this one system and some not.
 

Steam was also the first online game distributor to achieve success and was thus able to set the rules at the start.  DAZ can't do that today since the 3D content market is an existing one and there are alternatives for customers and artists.  Today, even the mighty Steam is facing competition from other retailers who are using the lack of DRM as a key differentiator. http://www.theverge.com/2015/5/5/8524597/gog-galaxy-open-beta-launch

Right, I'm not saying Steam is almighty and brilliant: I'm saying that there are advantages to Steam despite the DRM (which as you say is now having to fight growing competition.)

What are the advantages to adopting encrypted 3D assets for Studio? What does it offer that 4.8 and content for 4.8 doesn't already offer?

roberthutchinson

So, I guess I am a little nieve, here. I do not mind having DRM, but where is the piracy? I purchase content and use it. I do not share my content with anyone. So, is the piracy being done by some people who are purchasing content, here at DAZ, and then copying it to give to someone else, or selling it to someone else? If this is so, do we really have a community, here, of many violators? How is this being found out? Or how has it been found out? Anyhow, I am for anything which will stop the rising cost of content. I usually purchase at 2 to 3 hundred at a time...I sure do not want to have to push out more to get the same amount of content.  Shame on any of you who might be part of the piracy! DRM is good for me and I love 4.9 and the connect. It does not stop me from doing my renders.

tl155180

Actually nevermind. I don't want to be involved in this discussion anymore. Post rescinded.

DAZ_Jon

The Sultry Lady said:

So, I guess I am a little nieve, here. I do not mind having DRM, but where is the piracy? I purchase content and use it. I do not share my content with anyone. So, is the piracy being done by some people who are purchasing content, here at DAZ, and then copying it to give to someone else, or selling it to someone else? If this is so, do we really have a community, here, of many violators? How is this being found out? Or how has it been found out? Anyhow, I am for anything which will stop the rising cost of content. I usually purchase at 2 to 3 hundred at a time...I sure do not want to have to push out more to get the same amount of content.  Shame on any of you who might be part of the piracy! DRM is good for me and I love 4.9 and the connect. It does not stop me from doing my renders.

Piracy of 3D assets is abundent and happens in two ways. There are the normal torrents where someone who bought the item just puts it up on a torrent to share. They usually come from the same poster so it is the same legit customer of Daz that uploads everything, and either does it from their one account on Daz or fairly regularly creating fraudulent accounts to purchase content with stolen cards and then create a new account when that one eventually gets shutdown.

Basically it happens like this: "Pirate" creates new account or uses old dormant account that has been compromised and uses stolen credit cards to purchase content fraudulently and immediately download DIM packages. They then put those up on their own website which they sell subscription services to for access to all content, so something like access to everything on Daz and other marketplaceses for $15 a month. They are hosted and located in countries like Vietnam or the Czech Republic where getting them shutdown would, literally, cost millions in lawyer fees to try to bring them to court and get a ruling in our favor to shut them down, which if we did, would just be a matter of days to get setup in a different country.

Also something missing from the conversation is in most of these cases, there is a direct cost to piracy in the fraudulent charges that are incurred to conduct it. That is in the case of a lot of chargebacks which directly takes money out of both Daz's, and then naturally flows down to PAs, pockets, in those sales essentially being reversed, and then an additional cost on top of that which is fees imposed by merchant providers and banks for chargebacks which are ever increasing. On top of that there is the risk of, if too many chargebacks happen, them doing things like holding 20-30% of your revenue for a year to make sure you can cover chargebacks or, as per the merchant account agreements, if it gets too extreme, turning off your merchant account because it is seen as a source for fraudulent activity, which adds risk and a lot of extra cost in the terms of downtime or not being able to process transactions, for customers.

Those are risks any company that takes credit cards take on, and mitigation of fraudulent credit card activity from stolen cards, where you aren't shipping physical goods where you can do things like Address Verification Systems and other checks, means that aside from the things like IP geo location to billing address match ups, you either have to make it harder for fraudulent charges to be worth it by either throttling charges from "unkown" customers to be at a minimum until they've built up good enough standing to be "trusted", or make it harder to accomplish their goal of the fraud.

lx_2807502

DAZ_Jon said:

Basically it happens like this: "Pirate" creates new account or uses old dormant account that has been compromised and uses stolen credit cards to purchase content fraudulently and immediately download DIM packages. They then put those up on their own website which they sell subscription services to for access to all content, so something like access to everything on Daz and other marketplaceses for $15 a month. They are hosted and located in countries like Vietnam or the Czech Republic where getting them shutdown would, literally, cost millions in lawyer fees to try to bring them to court and get a ruling in our favor to shut them down, which if we did, would just be a matter of days to get setup in a different country.

Also something missing from the conversation is in most of these cases, there is a direct cost to piracy in the fraudulent charges that are incurred to conduct it. That is in the case of a lot of chargebacks which directly takes money out of both Daz's, and then naturally flows down to PAs, pockets, in those sales essentially being reversed, and then an additional cost on top of that which is fees imposed by merchant providers and banks for chargebacks which are ever increasing. On top of that there is the risk of, if too many chargebacks happen, them doing things like holding 20-30% of your revenue for a year to make sure you can cover chargebacks or, as per the merchant account agreements, if it gets too extreme, turning off your merchant account because it is seen as a source for fraudulent activity, which adds risk and a lot of extra cost in the terms of downtime or not being able to process transactions, for customers.

These are absolutely serious problems that need to be stopped. I'm not sure how encrypted content is going to stop fraudulent purchases though? Surely there are companies other than Daz who have to deal with this sort of thing all the time and have developed better purchasing countermeasures (I don't know the details of ecommerce.)

I'm reading this as "some people share stuff and that's bad (agreed) and also there is fraud costing us a ton of money that we can't prosecute people for! (agreed) therefore we must lock down all paying customers to slow down casual sharing, knwoing it won't stop dedicated criminals!" Am I wrong?

 

DAZ_Jon

lx said:

DAZ_Jon said:

Basically it happens like this: "Pirate" creates new account or uses old dormant account that has been compromised and uses stolen credit cards to purchase content fraudulently and immediately download DIM packages. They then put those up on their own website which they sell subscription services to for access to all content, so something like access to everything on Daz and other marketplaceses for $15 a month. They are hosted and located in countries like Vietnam or the Czech Republic where getting them shutdown would, literally, cost millions in lawyer fees to try to bring them to court and get a ruling in our favor to shut them down, which if we did, would just be a matter of days to get setup in a different country.

Also something missing from the conversation is in most of these cases, there is a direct cost to piracy in the fraudulent charges that are incurred to conduct it. That is in the case of a lot of chargebacks which directly takes money out of both Daz's, and then naturally flows down to PAs, pockets, in those sales essentially being reversed, and then an additional cost on top of that which is fees imposed by merchant providers and banks for chargebacks which are ever increasing. On top of that there is the risk of, if too many chargebacks happen, them doing things like holding 20-30% of your revenue for a year to make sure you can cover chargebacks or, as per the merchant account agreements, if it gets too extreme, turning off your merchant account because it is seen as a source for fraudulent activity, which adds risk and a lot of extra cost in the terms of downtime or not being able to process transactions, for customers.

These are absolutely serious problems that need to be stopped. I'm not sure how encrypted content is going to stop fraudulent purchases though? Surely there are companies other than Daz who have to deal with this sort of thing all the time and have developed better purchasing countermeasures (I don't know the details of ecommerce.)

I'm reading this as "some people share stuff and that's bad (agreed) and also there is fraud costing us a ton of money that we can't prosecute people for! (agreed) therefore we must lock down all paying customers to slow down casual sharing, knwoing it won't stop dedicated criminals!" Am I wrong?

 

There are multiple facets to why we decided to go down the path of encryption for content. There is piracy and the costs that come with it, both in "lost revenue" which is arguable to say how much that actually is because "pirates don't buy" in a lot of cases. But also if you can't steal it or distribute it with your illegal business model nearly as easily, or it slows you down enough to only be able to process a product a day in the export / reimport and rebuild of a product, then that is a big gain in mitigation. 

There is also a little theory going on which is if you look at the demographic of people who would watch movies with those that would pirate movies and have the technical skill to break a DRM scheme, there is pretty much a 100% overlap of those that have the skill and willingness to do it with those that watch movies. If we had a venn diagram of those with the skill and willingness / desire to compared with those that are really into 3D assets, the overlap is most likely going to be significantly smaller since our industry is so niche. That means we are hoping we will see a much longer turn around on the DRM mechanism itself getting broken (it has been there since October, and still hasn't, along with none of the encrypted only content which wasn't accidently released via DIM for the first little while hitting the pirate sites where as you can see our most recently released products up hours after they get released), and the distribution of that crack, if it happens, be much harder to find / distribute. Odds are, if it does get cracked, it would be by one of those people that are operating those pay for services putting up a bounty on it, if they decide it is worth it versus just being content with stealing Rendo's or RDNA or other sites content.

The executive team would have my ass for posting any financial information publicly, so I can't / won't give what the numbers actually look like. But I can say it is not an insignificant amount of money that is actively lost from fraudulent charges associated to piracy. The cost and time that it took to add the encryption was no where near the amount we lose due to the fraudulent activity we can associate to piracy.

father1776

last word on encrypted material, we the customer can eliminate it by not buying it.

No mater what DAZ says, if it does not sell...at all, they will stop doing it.

 

Ok, Next subject...bugs or oversights

several products listed in my...products window are missing an icon photo of the product.

It has that generic ! symbol.

It would be nice next patch if we could right click that, open the drop down menu...then pick..>choose icon<

then it will open up that product and allow use to borrow one of the icons (product pictures) from the next level down to display as the 

1st lvl product icon...getting rid of the !

hope that makes sense

 

lx_2807502

DAZ_Jon said:

lx said:

DAZ_Jon said:

Basically it happens like this: "Pirate" creates new account or uses old dormant account that has been compromised and uses stolen credit cards to purchase content fraudulently and immediately download DIM packages. They then put those up on their own website which they sell subscription services to for access to all content, so something like access to everything on Daz and other marketplaceses for $15 a month. They are hosted and located in countries like Vietnam or the Czech Republic where getting them shutdown would, literally, cost millions in lawyer fees to try to bring them to court and get a ruling in our favor to shut them down, which if we did, would just be a matter of days to get setup in a different country.

Also something missing from the conversation is in most of these cases, there is a direct cost to piracy in the fraudulent charges that are incurred to conduct it. That is in the case of a lot of chargebacks which directly takes money out of both Daz's, and then naturally flows down to PAs, pockets, in those sales essentially being reversed, and then an additional cost on top of that which is fees imposed by merchant providers and banks for chargebacks which are ever increasing. On top of that there is the risk of, if too many chargebacks happen, them doing things like holding 20-30% of your revenue for a year to make sure you can cover chargebacks or, as per the merchant account agreements, if it gets too extreme, turning off your merchant account because it is seen as a source for fraudulent activity, which adds risk and a lot of extra cost in the terms of downtime or not being able to process transactions, for customers.

These are absolutely serious problems that need to be stopped. I'm not sure how encrypted content is going to stop fraudulent purchases though? Surely there are companies other than Daz who have to deal with this sort of thing all the time and have developed better purchasing countermeasures (I don't know the details of ecommerce.)

I'm reading this as "some people share stuff and that's bad (agreed) and also there is fraud costing us a ton of money that we can't prosecute people for! (agreed) therefore we must lock down all paying customers to slow down casual sharing, knwoing it won't stop dedicated criminals!" Am I wrong?

 

There are multiple facets to why we decided to go down the path of encryption for content. There is piracy and the costs that come with it, both in "lost revenue" which is arguable to say how much that actually is because "pirates don't buy" in a lot of cases. But also if you can't steal it or distribute it with your illegal business model nearly as easily, or it slows you down enough to only be able to process a product a day in the export / reimport and rebuild of a product, then that is a big gain in mitigation. 

There is also a little theory going on which is if you look at the demographic of people who would watch movies with those that would pirate movies and have the technical skill to break a DRM scheme, there is pretty much a 100% overlap of those that have the skill and willingness to do it with those that watch movies. If we had a venn diagram of those with the skill and willingness / desire to compared with those that are really into 3D assets, the overlap is most likely going to be significantly smaller since our industry is so niche. That means we are hoping we will see a much longer turn around on the DRM mechanism itself getting broken (it has been there since October, and still hasn't, along with none of the encrypted only content which wasn't accidently released via DIM for the first little while hitting the pirate sites where as you can see our most recently released products up hours after they get released), and the distribution of that crack, if it happens, be much harder to find / distribute. Odds are, if it does get cracked, it would be by one of those people that are operating those pay for services putting up a bounty on it, if they decide it is worth it versus just being content with stealing Rendo's or RDNA or other sites content.

The executive team would look down on me for posting any financial information public, so I can't / won't give what the numbers actually look like. But I can say it is not an insignificant amount of money that is actively lost from fraudulent charges associated to piracy that the cost and time that it took to add the encryption was no where near the amount we lose due to the fraudulent activity we can associate to piracy.

Okay so basically the main point is that it's a gamble that the pay services aren't going to think it's worth it to hire someone to crack it, and if they do, that they won't give the crack out to the more casual pirates. I get that, and I really do hope it works.

The problem then is finding a reason for me to want to adopt encryption and the Connect platform that it requires. The content may be safer for Daz and the PAs (which is good for them) but it's inherently worth less to me as a customer. Why would I want to buy it over just being content buying Rendo's or RDNA or other site's content? (not that it matters, but to date almost all of my purchases have been here.)

TesseractSpace

DAZ_Jon said:

The Sultry Lady said:

So, I guess I am a little nieve, here. I do not mind having DRM, but where is the piracy? I purchase content and use it. I do not share my content with anyone. So, is the piracy being done by some people who are purchasing content, here at DAZ, and then copying it to give to someone else, or selling it to someone else? If this is so, do we really have a community, here, of many violators? How is this being found out? Or how has it been found out? Anyhow, I am for anything which will stop the rising cost of content. I usually purchase at 2 to 3 hundred at a time...I sure do not want to have to push out more to get the same amount of content.  Shame on any of you who might be part of the piracy! DRM is good for me and I love 4.9 and the connect. It does not stop me from doing my renders.

Piracy of 3D assets is abundent and happens in two ways. There are the normal torrents where someone who bought the item just puts it up on a torrent to share. They usually come from the same poster so it is the same legit customer of Daz that uploads everything, and either does it from their one account on Daz or fairly regularly creating fraudulent accounts to purchase content with stolen cards and then create a new account when that one eventually gets shutdown.

Basically it happens like this: "Pirate" creates new account or uses old dormant account that has been compromised and uses stolen credit cards to purchase content fraudulently and immediately download DIM packages. They then put those up on their own website which they sell subscription services to for access to all content, so something like access to everything on Daz and other marketplaceses for $15 a month. They are hosted and located in countries like Vietnam or the Czech Republic where getting them shutdown would, literally, cost millions in lawyer fees to try to bring them to court and get a ruling in our favor to shut them down, which if we did, would just be a matter of days to get setup in a different country.

Also something missing from the conversation is in most of these cases, there is a direct cost to piracy in the fraudulent charges that are incurred to conduct it. That is in the case of a lot of chargebacks which directly takes money out of both Daz's, and then naturally flows down to PAs, pockets, in those sales essentially being reversed, and then an additional cost on top of that which is fees imposed by merchant providers and banks for chargebacks which are ever increasing. On top of that there is the risk of, if too many chargebacks happen, them doing things like holding 20-30% of your revenue for a year to make sure you can cover chargebacks or, as per the merchant account agreements, if it gets too extreme, turning off your merchant account because it is seen as a source for fraudulent activity, which adds risk and a lot of extra cost in the terms of downtime or not being able to process transactions, for customers.

Those are risks any company that takes credit cards take on, and mitigation of fraudulent credit card activity from stolen cards, where you aren't shipping physical goods where you can do things like Address Verification Systems and other checks, means that aside from the things like IP geo location to billing address match ups, you either have to make it harder for fraudulent charges to be worth it by either throttling charges from "unkown" customers to be at a minimum until they've built up good enough standing to be "trusted", or make it harder to accomplish their goal of the fraud.

DRM might dissuade a pirate from using a fraudulent credit card to purchase items but it does absolutely nothing in and of itself to stop, slow, or prevent it. Even if the items never make it to torrent sites or these 'subscription' sites. (I still question the existence of these or at least that they truly have the content they claim. Given how the people running them are crooks, just seems like they'd rather use a small effort to make a scam subscription site than a larger effort to acquire, store and host content for whatever subscription fee they say they charge.)

But a fraudster can still cause all the damage you state without being able to effectively easily share the content. (At least until they break the encyption at which point it's business as usual.)

All the DRM in the world won't stop someone using a stolen credit card. That requires security at the point of sale. And as troublesome as some of those measures might be at least they serve both sides of the transaction instead of being one sided measures.

 

Added: Just to clarify why I think the subscription sites are bogus: Criminals in addition to being a cowardly and superstitious lot, are lazy. Running an ongoing e-commerce site in the face of opposition from all manner of laws just seems too much like work compared to setting up a quick phony site that hits fools who can't really complain to authorities without admitting their own criminal acts.

barbult

I don't understand how this decryption works. I am allowed to use my purchased content on more than one computer, right? I just have to log into Daz Connect one time on each computer get a key for it. Do those keys only decrypt things that are in my product library? If not, it seems like people who download from the pirate sites could just download encrypted files and decrypt them with their own key.

Richard Haseltine

Yes, they decrypt only the files that you download via Offline Authorisation packges (wuth a key) or download directly: the installed version is then encrytpted aganst your personal key.

TesseractSpace

barbult said:

I don't understand how this decryption works. I am allowed to use my purchased content on more than one computer, right? I just have to log into Daz Connect one time on each computer get a key for it. Do those keys only decrypt things that are in my product library? If not, it seems like people who download from the pirate sites could just download encrypted files and decrypt them with their own key.

For older products, they're downloaded encrypted but decrypted at install.(at least for Connect. DIM still does normal .zip files) The new Encrypted only products remain in encrypted form and are only decrypted inside Studio itself by checking against the key at the time the file is used. There's no decrypted version on the hard drIve for pirates to use. 

daviellisir1junior

I don't know if this is a thread for suggestions but I would like a timed auto save function to temporary file in Daz Studio just in case something were to happen.

namffuak

barbult said:

I don't understand how this decryption works. I am allowed to use my purchased content on more than one computer, right? I just have to log into Daz Connect one time on each computer get a key for it. Do those keys only decrypt things that are in my product library? If not, it seems like people who download from the pirate sites could just download encrypted files and decrypt them with their own key.

Encrypted products are encrypted on-the-fly with your key at time of download - so for pirates to post the encrypted products and have them be usable they'd also have to provide the usreid/password of the downloader. And then DAZ sees the same userid connecting from tens or hundreds of ip addresses  . . .

Richard Haseltine

daviellisir1junior said:

I don't know if this is a thread for suggestions but I would like a timed auto save function to temporary file in Daz Studio just in case something were to happen.

This is specifically for the Encryption discussions - there is a thread in DAZ Studio Discussion on the 4.9 Release. Though auto-save is a feature that has been requested so I think it's on the developers' radar already.

XaatXuun

namffuak said:

barbult said:

I don't understand how this decryption works. I am allowed to use my purchased content on more than one computer, right? I just have to log into Daz Connect one time on each computer get a key for it. Do those keys only decrypt things that are in my product library? If not, it seems like people who download from the pirate sites could just download encrypted files and decrypt them with their own key.

Encrypted products are encrypted on-the-fly with your key at time of download - so for pirates to post the encrypted products and have them be usable they'd also have to provide the usreid/password of the downloader. And then DAZ sees the same userid connecting from tens or hundreds of ip addresses  . . .

wonder if that will add conflict to someone using 2 different computers, at the same time

frogimus

icecrmn said:

j cade said:

barbult said:

RAMWolff said:

DAZ_Steve said:

ignore all this crap. Stupid forum software.

namffuak said:

barbult said:

I don't understand how this decryption works. I am allowed to use my purchased content on more than one computer, right? I just have to log into Daz Connect one time on each computer get a key for it. Do those keys only decrypt things that are in my product library? If not, it seems like people who download from the pirate sites could just download encrypted files and decrypt them with their own key.

Encrypted products are encrypted on-the-fly with your key at time of download - so for pirates to post the encrypted products and have them be usable they'd also have to provide the usreid/password of the downloader. And then DAZ sees the same userid connecting from tens or hundreds of ip addresses  . . .

That makes it seem that stealing people's accounts/logins at Daz could see an increase. There would be ways to muddy the IP usage, but I guess if an account logged into a hundred different PCs, it could raise a flag.

Probably a good time to remind everyone to use a strong password here, and anywhere that your personal/financial information is used.

Khory

XaatXuun said:

namffuak said:

barbult said:

I don't understand how this decryption works. I am allowed to use my purchased content on more than one computer, right? I just have to log into Daz Connect one time on each computer get a key for it. Do those keys only decrypt things that are in my product library? If not, it seems like people who download from the pirate sites could just download encrypted files and decrypt them with their own key.

Encrypted products are encrypted on-the-fly with your key at time of download - so for pirates to post the encrypted products and have them be usable they'd also have to provide the usreid/password of the downloader. And then DAZ sees the same userid connecting from tens or hundreds of ip addresses  . . .

wonder if that will add conflict to someone using 2 different computers, at the same time

No. I have 3 I use.

Charlie Judge

I can understand DAZ's desire to protect their assets and this is not an arguement against DRM; but until DAZ provides a way to decrypt and use the content in versions earlier than DS 4.9 it will be losing sales to people like me who want to keep using an earlier version. Case in point:I use DS4.7 and for various reasons (including limitations of my computer) do no wish to upgrade to a later version. I was planning on getting the Dectetive Bundle until I found that the Trenchcoat component (which would be a major part of why I wanred the bundle) was encrypted only. So, since I can't use it DAZ loses out on selling it to me until they provide a means to decrypt and use the coat in the version I use (DS 4.7)

XaatXuun

Khory said:

XaatXuun said:

namffuak said:

barbult said:

I don't understand how this decryption works. I am allowed to use my purchased content on more than one computer, right? I just have to log into Daz Connect one time on each computer get a key for it. Do those keys only decrypt things that are in my product library? If not, it seems like people who download from the pirate sites could just download encrypted files and decrypt them with their own key.

Encrypted products are encrypted on-the-fly with your key at time of download - so for pirates to post the encrypted products and have them be usable they'd also have to provide the usreid/password of the downloader. And then DAZ sees the same userid connecting from tens or hundreds of ip addresses  . . .

wonder if that will add conflict to someone using 2 different computers, at the same time

No. I have 3 I use.

oh cool . .are the 3 all the same DS version ?

DAZ_Jon

lx said:

DAZ_Jon said:

lx said:

DAZ_Jon said:

Basically it happens like this: "Pirate" creates new account or uses old dormant account that has been compromised and uses stolen credit cards to purchase content fraudulently and immediately download DIM packages. They then put those up on their own website which they sell subscription services to for access to all content, so something like access to everything on Daz and other marketplaceses for $15 a month. They are hosted and located in countries like Vietnam or the Czech Republic where getting them shutdown would, literally, cost millions in lawyer fees to try to bring them to court and get a ruling in our favor to shut them down, which if we did, would just be a matter of days to get setup in a different country.

Also something missing from the conversation is in most of these cases, there is a direct cost to piracy in the fraudulent charges that are incurred to conduct it. That is in the case of a lot of chargebacks which directly takes money out of both Daz's, and then naturally flows down to PAs, pockets, in those sales essentially being reversed, and then an additional cost on top of that which is fees imposed by merchant providers and banks for chargebacks which are ever increasing. On top of that there is the risk of, if too many chargebacks happen, them doing things like holding 20-30% of your revenue for a year to make sure you can cover chargebacks or, as per the merchant account agreements, if it gets too extreme, turning off your merchant account because it is seen as a source for fraudulent activity, which adds risk and a lot of extra cost in the terms of downtime or not being able to process transactions, for customers.

These are absolutely serious problems that need to be stopped. I'm not sure how encrypted content is going to stop fraudulent purchases though? Surely there are companies other than Daz who have to deal with this sort of thing all the time and have developed better purchasing countermeasures (I don't know the details of ecommerce.)

I'm reading this as "some people share stuff and that's bad (agreed) and also there is fraud costing us a ton of money that we can't prosecute people for! (agreed) therefore we must lock down all paying customers to slow down casual sharing, knwoing it won't stop dedicated criminals!" Am I wrong?

 

There are multiple facets to why we decided to go down the path of encryption for content. There is piracy and the costs that come with it, both in "lost revenue" which is arguable to say how much that actually is because "pirates don't buy" in a lot of cases. But also if you can't steal it or distribute it with your illegal business model nearly as easily, or it slows you down enough to only be able to process a product a day in the export / reimport and rebuild of a product, then that is a big gain in mitigation. 

There is also a little theory going on which is if you look at the demographic of people who would watch movies with those that would pirate movies and have the technical skill to break a DRM scheme, there is pretty much a 100% overlap of those that have the skill and willingness to do it with those that watch movies. If we had a venn diagram of those with the skill and willingness / desire to compared with those that are really into 3D assets, the overlap is most likely going to be significantly smaller since our industry is so niche. That means we are hoping we will see a much longer turn around on the DRM mechanism itself getting broken (it has been there since October, and still hasn't, along with none of the encrypted only content which wasn't accidently released via DIM for the first little while hitting the pirate sites where as you can see our most recently released products up hours after they get released), and the distribution of that crack, if it happens, be much harder to find / distribute. Odds are, if it does get cracked, it would be by one of those people that are operating those pay for services putting up a bounty on it, if they decide it is worth it versus just being content with stealing Rendo's or RDNA or other sites content.

The executive team would look down on me for posting any financial information public, so I can't / won't give what the numbers actually look like. But I can say it is not an insignificant amount of money that is actively lost from fraudulent charges associated to piracy that the cost and time that it took to add the encryption was no where near the amount we lose due to the fraudulent activity we can associate to piracy.

Okay so basically the main point is that it's a gamble that the pay services aren't going to think it's worth it to hire someone to crack it, and if they do, that they won't give the crack out to the more casual pirates. I get that, and I really do hope it works.

The problem then is finding a reason for me to want to adopt encryption and the Connect platform that it requires. The content may be safer for Daz and the PAs (which is good for them) but it's inherently worth less to me as a customer. Why would I want to buy it over just being content buying Rendo's or RDNA or other site's content? (not that it matters, but to date almost all of my purchases have been here.)

Someone brought Steam up as a comparrison. Regardless if you like Steam or not, or if you prefer GoG or not, they are the powerhouse in PC gaming. They became so successful by getting the right balance of convenience, ease of use, and no longer having to worry about if you still have the CD / DVD of a game or can find the serial or having to repurchase it if you have to. The DRM they have was "done right" in that it was enough to entice publishers to distribute through them but transparent enough to customers that a lot didn't even know it was there. Convenience, ease of use, combined with low price point made it, for a lot of people who used to pirate games, more convenient to just buy through Steam then the hassle of pirating and getting the latest crack for the latest patch.

We want to strike that balance in our marketplace. We want the convenience and ease of use to make that math for the majority of customers and average users to be worth more than the hassle of pirating it, or at least if something is successfully pirated, a crippled version of the original. We aren't there yet with Daz Connect on the convenience and ease of use, but its the first version and definitely a work in progress to make it better for not just new customers, but existing as well. So right now it might not be worth it to you to buy encrypted stuff. In the future with improving on all fronts of quality of content, great sales, and improved experience and technologies inside Studio, we will at least try to make it harder to resist for those that aren't just 100% opposed to DRM and will never consider using anything that has it (so for those, make sure to get rid of your smart phones, use Linux instead of Windows or OS X, don't use netflix, and definitely don't use other 3D apps except for Blender ).

 

TesseractSpace said:

DAZ_Jon said:

The Sultry Lady said:

So, I guess I am a little nieve, here. I do not mind having DRM, but where is the piracy? I purchase content and use it. I do not share my content with anyone. So, is the piracy being done by some people who are purchasing content, here at DAZ, and then copying it to give to someone else, or selling it to someone else? If this is so, do we really have a community, here, of many violators? How is this being found out? Or how has it been found out? Anyhow, I am for anything which will stop the rising cost of content. I usually purchase at 2 to 3 hundred at a time...I sure do not want to have to push out more to get the same amount of content.  Shame on any of you who might be part of the piracy! DRM is good for me and I love 4.9 and the connect. It does not stop me from doing my renders.

Piracy of 3D assets is abundent and happens in two ways. There are the normal torrents where someone who bought the item just puts it up on a torrent to share. They usually come from the same poster so it is the same legit customer of Daz that uploads everything, and either does it from their one account on Daz or fairly regularly creating fraudulent accounts to purchase content with stolen cards and then create a new account when that one eventually gets shutdown.

Basically it happens like this: "Pirate" creates new account or uses old dormant account that has been compromised and uses stolen credit cards to purchase content fraudulently and immediately download DIM packages. They then put those up on their own website which they sell subscription services to for access to all content, so something like access to everything on Daz and other marketplaceses for $15 a month. They are hosted and located in countries like Vietnam or the Czech Republic where getting them shutdown would, literally, cost millions in lawyer fees to try to bring them to court and get a ruling in our favor to shut them down, which if we did, would just be a matter of days to get setup in a different country.

Also something missing from the conversation is in most of these cases, there is a direct cost to piracy in the fraudulent charges that are incurred to conduct it. That is in the case of a lot of chargebacks which directly takes money out of both Daz's, and then naturally flows down to PAs, pockets, in those sales essentially being reversed, and then an additional cost on top of that which is fees imposed by merchant providers and banks for chargebacks which are ever increasing. On top of that there is the risk of, if too many chargebacks happen, them doing things like holding 20-30% of your revenue for a year to make sure you can cover chargebacks or, as per the merchant account agreements, if it gets too extreme, turning off your merchant account because it is seen as a source for fraudulent activity, which adds risk and a lot of extra cost in the terms of downtime or not being able to process transactions, for customers.

Those are risks any company that takes credit cards take on, and mitigation of fraudulent credit card activity from stolen cards, where you aren't shipping physical goods where you can do things like Address Verification Systems and other checks, means that aside from the things like IP geo location to billing address match ups, you either have to make it harder for fraudulent charges to be worth it by either throttling charges from "unkown" customers to be at a minimum until they've built up good enough standing to be "trusted", or make it harder to accomplish their goal of the fraud.

DRM might dissuade a pirate from using a fraudulent credit card to purchase items but it does absolutely nothing in and of itself to stop, slow, or prevent it. Even if the items never make it to torrent sites or these 'subscription' sites. (I still question the existence of these or at least that they truly have the content they claim. Given how the people running them are crooks, just seems like they'd rather use a small effort to make a scam subscription site than a larger effort to acquire, store and host content for whatever subscription fee they say they charge.)

But a fraudster can still cause all the damage you state without being able to effectively easily share the content. (At least until they break the encyption at which point it's business as usual.)

All the DRM in the world won't stop someone using a stolen credit card. That requires security at the point of sale. And as troublesome as some of those measures might be at least they serve both sides of the transaction instead of being one sided measures.

 

Added: Just to clarify why I think the subscription sites are bogus: Criminals in addition to being a cowardly and superstitious lot, are lazy. Running an ongoing e-commerce site in the face of opposition from all manner of laws just seems too much like work compared to setting up a quick phony site that hits fools who can't really complain to authorities without admitting their own criminal acts.

Sure, people can still just do fraudulent activity. However, stolen credit cards are also a commodity. Why would you waste on that is working on getting caught and turned off on a product you have no use for or can't use when you could use it else where on other things? Yes, it requires, and is why we have a lot of security on the point of sale to identify and automatically shutdown fraudsters. Just like piracy, they get more sophisticated, and it is a losing battle to stop fraud completely. It is about mitigation, slowing them down, making it harder for them, making it so their success rate is lowered so it isn't as costly. The same is true of piracy, our goals aren't to stop it completely, we know we can't do that. But we think we can, in our niche market, slow it down, make it harder for them, and lower their success rate. It isn't a black and white thing, but a multi-faceted effort that goes into shades of grey that has quite a bit of overlap between fraudsters and pirates.

As for the subscription sites being bogus, they aren't. I know of four off the top of my head and we monitor them regularly to see what is going up on them from what stores. These aren't a lazy lot, they try to run a business in other countries where they can legally get away with it and are relatively safe from prosecution. We actually know where they are hosted (and gotten no where with getting them shutdown) and in some cases, the name and city where those people live. In fact, there was a post on one of the other forums about someone who found them and were pissed at Daz for one reason or another, so they decided to sign up and just take stolen content and "stop buying from Daz" even though they never actually spent a penny with us previously (so odds are they were pirating content before but having it all in one place was more convenient). 

roberthutchinson

So, how much of DAZ content can be used outside of Studio without exporting from Studio to fit another 3D application, such as Poser? Maybe DAZ should start selling their Studio application with a steep enough price so that pirates are not likely to want DAZ content. Way back when, I had to purchase Studio. Maybe offering free software is not helping the situation with piracy.

gregbo

DAZ_Jon said:

lx said:

DAZ_Jon said:

lx said:

DAZ_Jon said:

Basically it happens like this: "Pirate" creates new account or uses old dormant account that has been compromised and uses stolen credit cards to purchase content fraudulently and immediately download DIM packages. They then put those up on their own website which they sell subscription services to for access to all content, so something like access to everything on Daz and other marketplaceses for $15 a month. They are hosted and located in countries like Vietnam or the Czech Republic where getting them shutdown would, literally, cost millions in lawyer fees to try to bring them to court and get a ruling in our favor to shut them down, which if we did, would just be a matter of days to get setup in a different country.

Also something missing from the conversation is in most of these cases, there is a direct cost to piracy in the fraudulent charges that are incurred to conduct it. That is in the case of a lot of chargebacks which directly takes money out of both Daz's, and then naturally flows down to PAs, pockets, in those sales essentially being reversed, and then an additional cost on top of that which is fees imposed by merchant providers and banks for chargebacks which are ever increasing. On top of that there is the risk of, if too many chargebacks happen, them doing things like holding 20-30% of your revenue for a year to make sure you can cover chargebacks or, as per the merchant account agreements, if it gets too extreme, turning off your merchant account because it is seen as a source for fraudulent activity, which adds risk and a lot of extra cost in the terms of downtime or not being able to process transactions, for customers.

These are absolutely serious problems that need to be stopped. I'm not sure how encrypted content is going to stop fraudulent purchases though? Surely there are companies other than Daz who have to deal with this sort of thing all the time and have developed better purchasing countermeasures (I don't know the details of ecommerce.)

I'm reading this as "some people share stuff and that's bad (agreed) and also there is fraud costing us a ton of money that we can't prosecute people for! (agreed) therefore we must lock down all paying customers to slow down casual sharing, knwoing it won't stop dedicated criminals!" Am I wrong?

 

There are multiple facets to why we decided to go down the path of encryption for content. There is piracy and the costs that come with it, both in "lost revenue" which is arguable to say how much that actually is because "pirates don't buy" in a lot of cases. But also if you can't steal it or distribute it with your illegal business model nearly as easily, or it slows you down enough to only be able to process a product a day in the export / reimport and rebuild of a product, then that is a big gain in mitigation. 

There is also a little theory going on which is if you look at the demographic of people who would watch movies with those that would pirate movies and have the technical skill to break a DRM scheme, there is pretty much a 100% overlap of those that have the skill and willingness to do it with those that watch movies. If we had a venn diagram of those with the skill and willingness / desire to compared with those that are really into 3D assets, the overlap is most likely going to be significantly smaller since our industry is so niche. That means we are hoping we will see a much longer turn around on the DRM mechanism itself getting broken (it has been there since October, and still hasn't, along with none of the encrypted only content which wasn't accidently released via DIM for the first little while hitting the pirate sites where as you can see our most recently released products up hours after they get released), and the distribution of that crack, if it happens, be much harder to find / distribute. Odds are, if it does get cracked, it would be by one of those people that are operating those pay for services putting up a bounty on it, if they decide it is worth it versus just being content with stealing Rendo's or RDNA or other sites content.

The executive team would look down on me for posting any financial information public, so I can't / won't give what the numbers actually look like. But I can say it is not an insignificant amount of money that is actively lost from fraudulent charges associated to piracy that the cost and time that it took to add the encryption was no where near the amount we lose due to the fraudulent activity we can associate to piracy.

Okay so basically the main point is that it's a gamble that the pay services aren't going to think it's worth it to hire someone to crack it, and if they do, that they won't give the crack out to the more casual pirates. I get that, and I really do hope it works.

The problem then is finding a reason for me to want to adopt encryption and the Connect platform that it requires. The content may be safer for Daz and the PAs (which is good for them) but it's inherently worth less to me as a customer. Why would I want to buy it over just being content buying Rendo's or RDNA or other site's content? (not that it matters, but to date almost all of my purchases have been here.)

Someone brought Steam up as a comparrison. Regardless if you like Steam or not, or if you prefer GoG or not, they are the powerhouse in PC gaming. They became so successful by getting the right balance of convenience, ease of use, and no longer having to worry about if you still have the CD / DVD of a game or can find the serial or having to repurchase it if you have to. The DRM they have was "done right" in that it was enough to entice publishers to distribute through them but transparent enough to customers that a lot didn't even know it was there. Convenience, ease of use, combined with low price point made it, for a lot of people who used to pirate games, more convenient to just buy through Steam then the hassle of pirating and getting the latest crack for the latest patch.

We want to strike that balance in our marketplace. We want the convenience and ease of use to make that math for the majority of customers and average users to be worth more than the hassle of pirating it, or at least if something is successfully pirated, a crippled version of the original. We aren't there yet with Daz Connect on the convenience and ease of use, but its the first version and definitely a work in progress to make it better for not just new customers, but existing as well. So right now it might not be worth it to you to buy encrypted stuff. In the future with improving on all fronts of quality of content, great sales, and improved experience and technologies inside Studio, we will at least try to make it harder to resist for those that aren't just 100% opposed to DRM and will never consider using anything that has it (so for those, make sure to get rid of your smart phones, use Linux instead of Windows or OS X, don't use netflix, and definitely don't use other 3D apps except for Blender ).

 

TesseractSpace said:

DAZ_Jon said:

The Sultry Lady said:

So, I guess I am a little nieve, here. I do not mind having DRM, but where is the piracy? I purchase content and use it. I do not share my content with anyone. So, is the piracy being done by some people who are purchasing content, here at DAZ, and then copying it to give to someone else, or selling it to someone else? If this is so, do we really have a community, here, of many violators? How is this being found out? Or how has it been found out? Anyhow, I am for anything which will stop the rising cost of content. I usually purchase at 2 to 3 hundred at a time...I sure do not want to have to push out more to get the same amount of content.  Shame on any of you who might be part of the piracy! DRM is good for me and I love 4.9 and the connect. It does not stop me from doing my renders.

Piracy of 3D assets is abundent and happens in two ways. There are the normal torrents where someone who bought the item just puts it up on a torrent to share. They usually come from the same poster so it is the same legit customer of Daz that uploads everything, and either does it from their one account on Daz or fairly regularly creating fraudulent accounts to purchase content with stolen cards and then create a new account when that one eventually gets shutdown.

Basically it happens like this: "Pirate" creates new account or uses old dormant account that has been compromised and uses stolen credit cards to purchase content fraudulently and immediately download DIM packages. They then put those up on their own website which they sell subscription services to for access to all content, so something like access to everything on Daz and other marketplaceses for $15 a month. They are hosted and located in countries like Vietnam or the Czech Republic where getting them shutdown would, literally, cost millions in lawyer fees to try to bring them to court and get a ruling in our favor to shut them down, which if we did, would just be a matter of days to get setup in a different country.

Also something missing from the conversation is in most of these cases, there is a direct cost to piracy in the fraudulent charges that are incurred to conduct it. That is in the case of a lot of chargebacks which directly takes money out of both Daz's, and then naturally flows down to PAs, pockets, in those sales essentially being reversed, and then an additional cost on top of that which is fees imposed by merchant providers and banks for chargebacks which are ever increasing. On top of that there is the risk of, if too many chargebacks happen, them doing things like holding 20-30% of your revenue for a year to make sure you can cover chargebacks or, as per the merchant account agreements, if it gets too extreme, turning off your merchant account because it is seen as a source for fraudulent activity, which adds risk and a lot of extra cost in the terms of downtime or not being able to process transactions, for customers.

Those are risks any company that takes credit cards take on, and mitigation of fraudulent credit card activity from stolen cards, where you aren't shipping physical goods where you can do things like Address Verification Systems and other checks, means that aside from the things like IP geo location to billing address match ups, you either have to make it harder for fraudulent charges to be worth it by either throttling charges from "unkown" customers to be at a minimum until they've built up good enough standing to be "trusted", or make it harder to accomplish their goal of the fraud.

DRM might dissuade a pirate from using a fraudulent credit card to purchase items but it does absolutely nothing in and of itself to stop, slow, or prevent it. Even if the items never make it to torrent sites or these 'subscription' sites. (I still question the existence of these or at least that they truly have the content they claim. Given how the people running them are crooks, just seems like they'd rather use a small effort to make a scam subscription site than a larger effort to acquire, store and host content for whatever subscription fee they say they charge.)

But a fraudster can still cause all the damage you state without being able to effectively easily share the content. (At least until they break the encyption at which point it's business as usual.)

All the DRM in the world won't stop someone using a stolen credit card. That requires security at the point of sale. And as troublesome as some of those measures might be at least they serve both sides of the transaction instead of being one sided measures.

 

Added: Just to clarify why I think the subscription sites are bogus: Criminals in addition to being a cowardly and superstitious lot, are lazy. Running an ongoing e-commerce site in the face of opposition from all manner of laws just seems too much like work compared to setting up a quick phony site that hits fools who can't really complain to authorities without admitting their own criminal acts.

Sure, people can still just do fraudulent activity. However, stolen credit cards are also a commodity. Why would you waste on that is working on getting caught and turned off on a product you have no use for or can't use when you could use it else where on other things? Yes, it requires, and is why we have a lot of security on the point of sale to identify and automatically shutdown fraudsters. Just like piracy, they get more sophisticated, and it is a losing battle to stop fraud completely. It is about mitigation, slowing them down, making it harder for them, making it so their success rate is lowered so it isn't as costly. The same is true of piracy, our goals aren't to stop it completely, we know we can't do that. But we think we can, in our niche market, slow it down, make it harder for them, and lower their success rate. It isn't a black and white thing, but a multi-faceted effort that goes into shades of grey that has quite a bit of overlap between fraudsters and pirates.

As for the subscription sites being bogus, they aren't. I know of four off the top of my head and we monitor them regularly to see what is going up on them from what stores. These aren't a lazy lot, they try to run a business in other countries where they can legally get away with it and are relatively safe from prosecution. We actually know where they are hosted (and gotten no where with getting them shutdown) and in some cases, the name and city where those people live. In fact, there was a post on one of the other forums about someone who found them and were pissed at Daz for one reason or another, so they decided to sign up and just take stolen content and "stop buying from Daz" even though they never actually spent a penny with us previously (so odds are they were pirating content before but having it all in one place was more convenient). 

So to sum up... Vote with our wallets? Will do. 

lx_2807502

DAZ_Jon said:

lx said:

DAZ_Jon said:

lx said:

DAZ_Jon said:

Basically it happens like this: "Pirate" creates new account or uses old dormant account that has been compromised and uses stolen credit cards to purchase content fraudulently and immediately download DIM packages. They then put those up on their own website which they sell subscription services to for access to all content, so something like access to everything on Daz and other marketplaceses for $15 a month. They are hosted and located in countries like Vietnam or the Czech Republic where getting them shutdown would, literally, cost millions in lawyer fees to try to bring them to court and get a ruling in our favor to shut them down, which if we did, would just be a matter of days to get setup in a different country.

Also something missing from the conversation is in most of these cases, there is a direct cost to piracy in the fraudulent charges that are incurred to conduct it. That is in the case of a lot of chargebacks which directly takes money out of both Daz's, and then naturally flows down to PAs, pockets, in those sales essentially being reversed, and then an additional cost on top of that which is fees imposed by merchant providers and banks for chargebacks which are ever increasing. On top of that there is the risk of, if too many chargebacks happen, them doing things like holding 20-30% of your revenue for a year to make sure you can cover chargebacks or, as per the merchant account agreements, if it gets too extreme, turning off your merchant account because it is seen as a source for fraudulent activity, which adds risk and a lot of extra cost in the terms of downtime or not being able to process transactions, for customers.

These are absolutely serious problems that need to be stopped. I'm not sure how encrypted content is going to stop fraudulent purchases though? Surely there are companies other than Daz who have to deal with this sort of thing all the time and have developed better purchasing countermeasures (I don't know the details of ecommerce.)

I'm reading this as "some people share stuff and that's bad (agreed) and also there is fraud costing us a ton of money that we can't prosecute people for! (agreed) therefore we must lock down all paying customers to slow down casual sharing, knwoing it won't stop dedicated criminals!" Am I wrong?

 

There are multiple facets to why we decided to go down the path of encryption for content. There is piracy and the costs that come with it, both in "lost revenue" which is arguable to say how much that actually is because "pirates don't buy" in a lot of cases. But also if you can't steal it or distribute it with your illegal business model nearly as easily, or it slows you down enough to only be able to process a product a day in the export / reimport and rebuild of a product, then that is a big gain in mitigation. 

There is also a little theory going on which is if you look at the demographic of people who would watch movies with those that would pirate movies and have the technical skill to break a DRM scheme, there is pretty much a 100% overlap of those that have the skill and willingness to do it with those that watch movies. If we had a venn diagram of those with the skill and willingness / desire to compared with those that are really into 3D assets, the overlap is most likely going to be significantly smaller since our industry is so niche. That means we are hoping we will see a much longer turn around on the DRM mechanism itself getting broken (it has been there since October, and still hasn't, along with none of the encrypted only content which wasn't accidently released via DIM for the first little while hitting the pirate sites where as you can see our most recently released products up hours after they get released), and the distribution of that crack, if it happens, be much harder to find / distribute. Odds are, if it does get cracked, it would be by one of those people that are operating those pay for services putting up a bounty on it, if they decide it is worth it versus just being content with stealing Rendo's or RDNA or other sites content.

The executive team would look down on me for posting any financial information public, so I can't / won't give what the numbers actually look like. But I can say it is not an insignificant amount of money that is actively lost from fraudulent charges associated to piracy that the cost and time that it took to add the encryption was no where near the amount we lose due to the fraudulent activity we can associate to piracy.

Okay so basically the main point is that it's a gamble that the pay services aren't going to think it's worth it to hire someone to crack it, and if they do, that they won't give the crack out to the more casual pirates. I get that, and I really do hope it works.

The problem then is finding a reason for me to want to adopt encryption and the Connect platform that it requires. The content may be safer for Daz and the PAs (which is good for them) but it's inherently worth less to me as a customer. Why would I want to buy it over just being content buying Rendo's or RDNA or other site's content? (not that it matters, but to date almost all of my purchases have been here.)

Someone brought Steam up as a comparrison. Regardless if you like Steam or not, or if you prefer GoG or not, they are the powerhouse in PC gaming. They became so successful by getting the right balance of convenience, ease of use, and no longer having to worry about if you still have the CD / DVD of a game or can find the serial or having to repurchase it if you have to. The DRM they have was "done right" in that it was enough to entice publishers to distribute through them but transparent enough to customers that a lot didn't even know it was there. Convenience, ease of use, combined with low price point made it, for a lot of people who used to pirate games, more convenient to just buy through Steam then the hassle of pirating and getting the latest crack for the latest patch.

We want to strike that balance in our marketplace. We want the convenience and ease of use to make that math for the majority of customers and average users to be worth more than the hassle of pirating it, or at least if something is successfully pirated, a crippled version of the original. We aren't there yet with Daz Connect on the convenience and ease of use, but its the first version and definitely a work in progress to make it better for not just new customers, but existing as well. So right now it might not be worth it to you to buy encrypted stuff. In the future with improving on all fronts of quality of content, great sales, and improved experience and technologies inside Studio, we will at least try to make it harder to resist for those that aren't just 100% opposed to DRM and will never consider using anything that has it (so for those, make sure to get rid of your smart phones, use Linux instead of Windows or OS X, don't use netflix, and definitely don't use other 3D apps except for Blender ).

 

TesseractSpace said:

DAZ_Jon said:

The Sultry Lady said:

So, I guess I am a little nieve, here. I do not mind having DRM, but where is the piracy? I purchase content and use it. I do not share my content with anyone. So, is the piracy being done by some people who are purchasing content, here at DAZ, and then copying it to give to someone else, or selling it to someone else? If this is so, do we really have a community, here, of many violators? How is this being found out? Or how has it been found out? Anyhow, I am for anything which will stop the rising cost of content. I usually purchase at 2 to 3 hundred at a time...I sure do not want to have to push out more to get the same amount of content.  Shame on any of you who might be part of the piracy! DRM is good for me and I love 4.9 and the connect. It does not stop me from doing my renders.

Piracy of 3D assets is abundent and happens in two ways. There are the normal torrents where someone who bought the item just puts it up on a torrent to share. They usually come from the same poster so it is the same legit customer of Daz that uploads everything, and either does it from their one account on Daz or fairly regularly creating fraudulent accounts to purchase content with stolen cards and then create a new account when that one eventually gets shutdown.

Basically it happens like this: "Pirate" creates new account or uses old dormant account that has been compromised and uses stolen credit cards to purchase content fraudulently and immediately download DIM packages. They then put those up on their own website which they sell subscription services to for access to all content, so something like access to everything on Daz and other marketplaceses for $15 a month. They are hosted and located in countries like Vietnam or the Czech Republic where getting them shutdown would, literally, cost millions in lawyer fees to try to bring them to court and get a ruling in our favor to shut them down, which if we did, would just be a matter of days to get setup in a different country.

Also something missing from the conversation is in most of these cases, there is a direct cost to piracy in the fraudulent charges that are incurred to conduct it. That is in the case of a lot of chargebacks which directly takes money out of both Daz's, and then naturally flows down to PAs, pockets, in those sales essentially being reversed, and then an additional cost on top of that which is fees imposed by merchant providers and banks for chargebacks which are ever increasing. On top of that there is the risk of, if too many chargebacks happen, them doing things like holding 20-30% of your revenue for a year to make sure you can cover chargebacks or, as per the merchant account agreements, if it gets too extreme, turning off your merchant account because it is seen as a source for fraudulent activity, which adds risk and a lot of extra cost in the terms of downtime or not being able to process transactions, for customers.

Those are risks any company that takes credit cards take on, and mitigation of fraudulent credit card activity from stolen cards, where you aren't shipping physical goods where you can do things like Address Verification Systems and other checks, means that aside from the things like IP geo location to billing address match ups, you either have to make it harder for fraudulent charges to be worth it by either throttling charges from "unkown" customers to be at a minimum until they've built up good enough standing to be "trusted", or make it harder to accomplish their goal of the fraud.

DRM might dissuade a pirate from using a fraudulent credit card to purchase items but it does absolutely nothing in and of itself to stop, slow, or prevent it. Even if the items never make it to torrent sites or these 'subscription' sites. (I still question the existence of these or at least that they truly have the content they claim. Given how the people running them are crooks, just seems like they'd rather use a small effort to make a scam subscription site than a larger effort to acquire, store and host content for whatever subscription fee they say they charge.)

But a fraudster can still cause all the damage you state without being able to effectively easily share the content. (At least until they break the encyption at which point it's business as usual.)

All the DRM in the world won't stop someone using a stolen credit card. That requires security at the point of sale. And as troublesome as some of those measures might be at least they serve both sides of the transaction instead of being one sided measures.

 

Added: Just to clarify why I think the subscription sites are bogus: Criminals in addition to being a cowardly and superstitious lot, are lazy. Running an ongoing e-commerce site in the face of opposition from all manner of laws just seems too much like work compared to setting up a quick phony site that hits fools who can't really complain to authorities without admitting their own criminal acts.

Sure, people can still just do fraudulent activity. However, stolen credit cards are also a commodity. Why would you waste on that is working on getting caught and turned off on a product you have no use for or can't use when you could use it else where on other things? Yes, it requires, and is why we have a lot of security on the point of sale to identify and automatically shutdown fraudsters. Just like piracy, they get more sophisticated, and it is a losing battle to stop fraud completely. It is about mitigation, slowing them down, making it harder for them, making it so their success rate is lowered so it isn't as costly. The same is true of piracy, our goals aren't to stop it completely, we know we can't do that. But we think we can, in our niche market, slow it down, make it harder for them, and lower their success rate. It isn't a black and white thing, but a multi-faceted effort that goes into shades of grey that has quite a bit of overlap between fraudsters and pirates.

As for the subscription sites being bogus, they aren't. I know of four off the top of my head and we monitor them regularly to see what is going up on them from what stores. These aren't a lazy lot, they try to run a business in other countries where they can legally get away with it and are relatively safe from prosecution. We actually know where they are hosted (and gotten no where with getting them shutdown) and in some cases, the name and city where those people live. In fact, there was a post on one of the other forums about someone who found them and were pissed at Daz for one reason or another, so they decided to sign up and just take stolen content and "stop buying from Daz" even though they never actually spent a penny with us previously (so odds are they were pirating content before but having it all in one place was more convenient). 

I was the one that posted about Steam striking a balance of offering never before seen convenience (although there are now competitors, but there weren't really at the time) with having to put up with DRM being a thing. And that's great. But I also posted that Games aren't 3D Assets and you don't combine various games together at once from different things to form one scene, etc. They were also offering something new with a system that was that way from day 1, whereas in this case nothing new is offered to the customer, only less.

But as you say, right now, encryption and Connect offers nothing to me personally (sure it helps others, but I'm not paying for them so not relevant.) There are a whole lot of maybes down the road, but as we've been told not to speculate, I can't suggest whether those things might be good or bad. So we'll see. But it's going to have to rise significantly in value for me to think it's worth purchasing in the future (considering I already have such a backlog of purchased content and non-encrypted content still available that do very similar things in almost all cases.) 

lx_2807502

The Sultry Lady said:

So, how much of DAZ content can be used outside of Studio without exporting from Studio to fit another 3D application, such as Poser? Maybe DAZ should start selling their Studio application with a steep enough price so that pirates are not likely to want DAZ content. Way back when, I had to purchase Studio. Maybe offering free software is not helping the situation with piracy.

Every edition of Poser has been pirated (relevant because same field) so having a purchase point on Daz won't do anything, no.

Leana

The Sultry Lady said:

Maybe DAZ should start selling their Studio application with a steep enough price so that pirates are not likely to want DAZ content.

Pirates would simply crack the app and distribute it with the content. And DAZ would lose lots of customers who could not afford the app or would simply not be willing to pay that much, and also their number one bait for new customer ("just try it, it's free!")

Havos

I can not see why encrypting the products will make a big dent in the fraudlent purchases, which are clearly more serious, since they actually lose DAZ money, rather than just the losing the potential to make money that comes with piracy. I guess if pirates are too lazy to export out the functionality they may skip the DAZ site and so that would reduce the fraudlent transfers, but that is a bit of an unknown if they will do that. Pirates only need a single copy of any given product, since I am sure they all copy from one another, regardless if they are actually in league or not. I would imagine a number of the fraudlent purchases could be from plain criminal clients who want to get an item they can not find for free, and use a stolen credit card to get it, though I am sure DAZ has a better guess on that than me. By reducing piracy, in theory these types of transactions could actually get worse, since these dubious folk will find it harder to get what they want for free, and so decide to "buy" the item through the store with a dodgy credit card.

Peter Fulford

DAZ_Jon said:

lx said:

DAZ_Jon said:

lx said:

DAZ_Jon said:

 

 ...and definitely don't use other 3D apps except for Blender ).

My Bryce 7 Pro installation seems to be free of DRM. Moved it to a new computer without issue. Didn't even need the serial number.

Available in the DAZ Store.

TesseractSpace

I just wish you'd found a better way than turning a previously open format content into a closed format. You may have decided the results and potential issues are acceptable collateral damage but it is less acceptable from where I'm standing. 

Remember that DRM may look nice from your perspective but then it only serves your interests. It serves no interest of mine or any customer except in a very nebulous possible sense that prices might get better if the piracy is reduced. Something I have no faith in as businesses almost never drop prices once raised unless they go too high or some major economic shift occurs. The point of sale security may be annoying sometimes but at least I see a direct benefit to myself as well as to the business.

I'm guessing these subscription sites are pretty hard to find as I've been looking just to see if I could find any that aren't just the silly ones that offer direct download of whatever term you drop into their search. Then again I'm not into the 'dark web' or whatever places these guys hide. I'll have to take your word that they're as you describe. Sad that they'd be putting so much effort and resources into such things.

I may never buy an encrypted product from Daz but I sure won't support anyone running a site like that and would gladly support an effort to see them taken down.

 

I hope you can see that I have bought from Daz (back to the days of Victoria 2 at least) so my concerns about DRM are not a pirate's sour grapes. I may not be a major buyer, but I'm not going to turn pirate just to spite you. I've talked people into giving up piracy (of 3d content at least, never asked them about any other) both because it's better for content makers to have less pirates and more buyers but also by pointing out that it's better for them because then they can do more with their artwork than just keeping it to themselves. (Not much motivation for the weird 'collector' types that don't actually do anything with the files but for those who actually try to use them it can help. This isn't movies or games where content is just consumed. The whole point is to actually make something with it. Not saying piracy is ok for the other content types but it's harder to get someone to see that sometimes, sadly.)

frogimus

A lot of people have a strong aversion to DRM. A lot of other people do not like you crippling their use of items they will buy the rights to use. Not only are you locking out Poser users (which you have admitted to thinking are a minimal group) but you are locking out users of products you sell.

I'm gonna LMAO the first time a Carrara asset hits the store as Encrypted Connect Only.

You know it'll happen. I just filed a ticket last night for a set of $8 photoshop brushes that included a $19 hair model as a bundle.