You've been heard. Response re: 4.9 and Encryption
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Its all black so don't know why its not showing for you.
I will say that while Daz is extremely unlikely to go to any kind of subscription basis beyond something like the Platinum Club, there have been Poser content subscription sites, so the business model is not impossible. DRM can make the possibility easier to implement, but doesn't in and of itself mean that it is any more likely given there are other factors besides simple content security that would make it a very difficult change. Besides, the Poser subscription site I remember operated without DRM on the content so DAZ could have set that up any time they wanted and they have not.
Most of the subscriptuion sites had one, or a very limited number of, artists - and as I recall PoserStyle foundered in part due to disagreements between that limited number of artists.
Sorry to interrupt your encryption discussion but... is there any timeframe for when I can find the new stuff that now only is in the Smart Content in my Content Library again? Or did I miss that this already works and I just have to do some simple thing in Order to get to this?
Edit: forgot to say "Thanks for reimplementing that!"
Kinda figured, I was more making the point that they have existed, so the concept isn't without precedent. And that DAZ wouldn't have needed DRM if they wanted such a setup. That they haven't done so in all these years should show there's little chance they'd try now. The difficulties far exceed anything even a magical perfect DRM could address.
..and J. Bruce Ismay said, "Even god himself could not sink this ship".
..meanwhile...
God: Hmmm, wonder what will happen if I move this iceberg over...here...
I assume you are talking about Poser World, but as they are constantly talking about how little money they make, I doubt it is a model DAZ will be eyeing with envy. Poser World has something like 3000 models, but you can subscribe for a short period, a month or two costs like 10 or 20 dollars, and grab the lot. A generous deal for the client, IMHO, but a rather poor business model.
...ended up doing so myself when the Growing Up morphs came out for G3F as well as having learned how to tweak skin tone and quality in Iray. Guess I will have to use my grocery label reading savvy from now on when in the Daz store.
...+1
...especially the Holiday Punch Sale one which has been over for almost a month now.
...to add, to this. The analogy of checking receipts at a store does not work. For example, I go to Frys, purchase a 500GB SSD. On leaving they they check my receipt to make sure it is a legitimate purchase. They don't tell me "oh, you can only install that in a Mac, or Dell, or whatever brand".
On the other hand, DRM is telling me the latter is true as the encrypted content is exclusive to Daz Studio and will not work in Carrara or Poser Pro
Big difference.
Yeah, was reading up on that. The crack group claiming Denuvo is becoming uncrackable is a group that isn't highly regarded in 'the scene'.(is it me or are some of these people stuck in high school? Not that I suppose I can talk since I'm going by 'TesseractSpace' here and still considering whether changing my nick on Rendo to something less embarassing is worth it to me.)
And Denuvo is meaningless without DRM as it just protects the DRM from being tampered with. It performs no DRM authentication function in and of itself.
Added: In addition Denovu seems to operate by doing an constant encryption/decryption on certain processes. It doesn't seem to require much of the system resources to run, but I suspect that a small hit on cpu in a game could be more noticeable in a different kind of software.
I'm not particulary fond of the encryption scheme DAZ is embracing. I'm hoping they will be "man enough" to admit they're wrong when both sales figures and encrypted products showing up on warez sites proves DRM isn't working for their content. I hope they will go back to all content being unencrypted.
But as a content creator, albeit not in the 3D industry, it frustrates me to see so many people think they "own" something they have merely licensed the use of. Licensing is in essence "renting," but with royalty free content, it's a one time rental fee with unlimited usage within the licensing agreement.
The fact is, we don't "own" any of the 3D content available on DAZ or any other 3D content site, encrypted or not. We license it's use. Certain restrictions apply, such as not distributing the content in it's original form. We have ownership of our renders, still images or animation, but not the products we use to create those renders. Regardless of where we get our 3D content, ownership remains with the creator, (or in some cases, with the company who has purchased ownership—Daz Originals is a perfect example,) whether the content is made available for purchase or for free through legitimate channels.
Sorry if I'm splitting hairs here. It just feels like the ownership issue needed to be clarified for the relatively few users new to using licensed content.
Just want to clear up: we were only discussing a hypothetical subscription/rental service as a way to make encrypted content more worthwhile to us, not the reverse walled garden thing people have been talking about. however j cade's point about the high turnover rate probably makes that a pointless concept anyway.
If the turnover rate is so high that raises some interesting questions about focus (it also suggests the vocal minority may be a majority on a long enough timeline since there are so many long term members included there.)
Not trying to speculate, but it puts everything in a completely different light I hadn't thought about before.
The You've never seen Eva 7 like this! one bugged me the most.
Go to smart content. Select the product tab at the top of the list and then select All. Select the available tab at the bottom. Then at the top of the pane (the one with all the thumbnail images by the way) you can select to sort in a variety of ways. One is "Sort by order date:recent first". That will put your newest purchases at the top of the list.
You're right about the actual ownership term (for the sake of new users) since you "own" in that sense basically nothing you buy digitally unless you specifically buy the right kind of rights to say you have the right to it.
As a term in common usage though, we just mean that if the "owner" seller whatever goes berserk and decides that it never sold anything, or they crash into an iceberg, they can't actually take the file away and stop us using it on the computer (whether they can change your licence to use it at a later date is another story and I'm not an expert.) The moment you have to come and ask the seller's permission to use the file again at any point in the future, that "owning-not-owning-but-lets-say-owning-its-simpler" goes away.
It's like the piracy-theft thing. Software piracy doesn't actually deprive of the original copy, but everyone recognises the terms theft and stealing to go with it. The only problem with that is when people start trying to use physical analogies for software piracy, when steal and steal are actually two different - similar - words.
English is fun!
...exporting to other applications, which would include Carrara, means doing so as an unrigged .obj that loses all functionality.
yes, I did understand that, I was referring that to use/download encrypt, 4.9 is needed.
any version below 4.9, encrypt products will not work, unless exported from 4.9
encrypted can only be downloaded from DS Connect (currently only available with 4.9) from what I understand
There are several export format available in DS, not only obj.
I can believe some left for both reseasons.
I have no faith in the poison pill. Not because I doubt Daz, but because in the eventually it will be needed, is when whoever takes over the Daz assets will consider releasing the pill tantamount to giving away the assets. I agree not likely to be needed.
But the fix: ergo not buying encrypted, solves the problem of how long before 'my content' becomes unavailabe.
Personally, they should sell tweleve month access to encrypted content, then we know in advance, and can plan accordingly or decide the rental is not worth it; to me DRM makes a purchased item a rented one.
@TheSultryLady:
Wouldn't that only disable encryption? You'd still have to buy the content from whomever took over.
You feel that implementing DRM was doing something, and not implementing DRM was doing nothing? This is not the first post that you've made saying similar. But please correct me if I am mistaken.
"We need to look at what we can do to curb pirating." Say there was a comment along these lines - or at least something to suggest piratting might be a problem for Daz products.
Those then invested with the project to look at the problem and come up with a solution, could have have determined three or four avenues of action.
1. DRM is considered to be a useful method of protecting our product; it is believed it will have no effect on our customers, or the loss in sales from existing customers will be balanced by the increase from those who no longer get it for free.
2. DRM is considered to be a poor method of dealing with our product - it will have some effect on how quickly our products are pirated but ultimetely of little significance; customers will hate it; further research has revealed that we will posibly lose business from our existing customers due to DRM. Our conclusion is that it would be not a viable method.
3. Before we reach a final decission about DRM, it is considered viable to examine alternatives.
You should note that all three would have been doing something; even the one where DRM was discounted, as it would have determined that it was not viable. Daz considered some sort of point 1 or 3 to be the best action.
Personally, I can't help but feel someone in Daz reacted emotionally to the theft of their products; in business, emotions cost money.
As I said in beta discussion, one option would be to encrypt for a time frame. Like, say, 6 months. After which point, the product is available as un-encrypted.
Since, as PAs keep saying, most sales are within the first few weeks, this SHOULD be an optimal solution -- if DRM actually prevented any sales, then it would protect the product within the critical initial sale period. Then, anyone who absolutely refuses to deal with DRM can pick it up down the road, once it is available not encrypted.
This ALSO solves the poison pill issue, particularly if the de-encryption is somehow automatic.
EDIT:
I initially agreed with Percat.
However, as DAZ_Steve has apologised, I am happy to ammend this; it is always nice when someone admits to a mistake.
We all make them.
TY DAZ_Steve for apologising,
Not sure if you saw it, but DAZ_Steve actually did come into the thread and apologize for phrasing it that way.
It would need an encrypted portion that if removed would make the product unusable.
Pirates would hack it and remove said item if it existed, and presuming that they knew about it.
Depending on how it was verified, it may also then need a hack for Daz Studio.
Doable? In effect tieing the product to Daz/computer - which is indeed what the DRM is doing to the content, not the software, as far as we know.
Correct, and my views have not changed.
No, doing nothing is not doing something. Whatever alternative DAZ might have come up with instead of DRM would be doing something.
Thank you. So to everybody else: Can we please stop talking about subscriptions? THIS is why I don't "do" Adobe software. This is why I don't "rent" orchestral samples from Soundsonline.com. Microsoft wants to do it with your OS and office software.
They're all trying this tactic and I hate it; and I avoid it like I avoid the plague. I don't care if it's "only" $10 per month for Adobe, or $35 per month for "all 12,000 instruments". Whooo, I can get 8,000 MORE instruments to add to the 4500 I already don't use, awesome! It's all too much for one person to wrap their mind around, and I swear the next economic downturn will show all these companies just how fast people will stop their subscription when they lose their jobs or decide to retire and can't afford that monthy cost anymore.
I've said it before, I don't even like the PC+ membership. I tolerate it; and barely so. Even talking about anything that has an ongoing cost is like making me eat brussels sprouts.
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As for the encryption issue, I'm still reading posts and rethinking my original stance. For those of you in the US, you might remember an Irishesque pub chain called "Bennigans". Great burgers, steaks, and seafood, and killer deserts. I once took a lady friend to the one near my house and we had a blast. Outstanding salad, steak, salmon, and deserts that night. The kitchen staff outdid themselves, for sure. This was a Saturday. They closed within a week. They left hundreds of employees out of work and thousands of customers stranded with worthless gift certificates.
I'm sure they didn't want to do that, but they did. Restaurant employees didn't even know about it until they came to work on that awful day. All this talk of poison pills is what made this one come up in my mind. I'm sure management wanted to tell, but could not.
So regardless of what DAZ says they believe they're ready for, it may not be possible. So I have decided that for now, I may try Connect, but not for purchases and not for installing anything that will break that thing in DIM. In other words, I don't have enough confidence to put actual money into Connect content, so I plan to avoid laying out any money at all for Connected content or using it to install stuff.
I refuse to become emotionally "up in arms" about this. My memory, however; is very clear with Bennigans and others. This is just not worth the risk of getting hassles, especially when I already struggle more than my share with the UI.
I've seen a couple of threads about people who have had issues with Connect; screwed up databases and so forth. If I find that it's not stable, I'll disable it and stop using any free stuff I got. If I ever start getting the feeling that DAZ is leading us down that rabbit hole of "all Connect all the time", then I may be forced to reconsider my PC+ membership. I hope that never happens, but right now I also don't think anybody at DAZ is in a position to outright deny it. As the saying goes, "things change."
I will continue to read this thread with interest.
Not implementing DRM would have been doing something; it would have been the result of an investigation; many companies chose to not use DRM or to remove it; not implementing DRM for them is doing something.