alert- ebay member "orienblack" is selling thecoverproject covers for $15 a pop!

[AppleQueso]

What's to stop folks from registering just to grab unwatermarked covers?

I don't think these kind of preventive measures are necessary to protect TheCoverProject. In fact, as TheValeman said on the previous page:

Asking people to say where they got the files from COULD ... I stress COULD ... cause more issues for us than doing nothing about it.

Instead of protecting us, things like watermarking and such could instead draw some unwanted attention.

[PDDestro]

Watermarking and asking sellers to advertise for us, yeah, could draw unwanted attention. I'm not advocating that. But, making the community less open doesn't IMO, in fact it does the opposite. I'd be down with requiring people to be active members of the community before being able to DL. They could see thumbnails of the covers but couldn't DL until after X many posts, etc. In fact this may become a necessity as time passes and security of the site warrants due to understood reasons.

Ultimately, I don't want to see the Cover Project go under, nor can I stand seeing the hard work done here be ripped off by anyone, let alone by shameless profiteers.

[comradesnarky]

I kind of think things should be left as is. Is it insulting to have your work (which is really only partially your work) giving someone else a profit? Absolutely. However, if an eBay buyer wants their collection to be covered that bad, they will make their way here. No eBay seller will ever be able to offer the full range of covers here for a price. As it is they have a handful of covers for different games. Collectors aren't stupid; they'll recognize that these games were never released in DVD cases. Some may buy, but, if they like the look of the case, they'll make their way here, find out they got ripped off and take it up with the seller on their own.

As for locking the covers unless you're an active member...that's kind of ridiculous. I've lurked for about 3 years now, and only recently registered, and we can all see the wild amount of activity my account has had.  There's not a whole lot here to put your two cents in on. It would probably bring in a flood of spam posts.

These guys likely aren't making much off of this anyways. DVD cases aren't wildly expensive, and they're charging shipping, but they're using the ink to print, the paper, they have to use gas to get these covers to the post office, it's likely they're losing money on the shipping materials as well. They're probably making a quarter at most. If they want to go through all that effort for a quarter, then oh well.

[Snowcone]

as a watermark would be successful in preventing this type of scam, Snowcone just moved 50GB of data, or atleast the "remaining" 50 GB of data... I think that if you were to use a simple remedy like this, you need to have the original picture and a doctored one with the watermark, meaning twice the hosting space needed =\

The site is a svelt 70GB today.

[MedaForce]

I was thinking more about this today, what we could start doing is just simply put a line in the legal info or somewhere on the box that says "This cover was fan made, if you paid money for it your were ripped off." This way we don't do unwanted advertising for the site and we get the buyers to report the covers themselves.

[Arseen]

Put a line in the legal info or somewhere on the box that says "This cover was fan made, if you paid money for it your were ripped off."

And the seller would not use MS-paint or Photoshop to remove the text.

[AppleQueso]

Requiring folks to "contribute" is still just dumb to me. This place isn't very discussion oriented, so requiring people to participate via posting isn't going to do much aside from encourage fluffy spam posts that don't really contribute anyhow. Requiring people to submit scans or a custom before being allowed to download would be a poor idea too. Not everybody has a scanner, not everybody is skilled in graphics, and not everybody even has a computer powerful enough to handle those image editing tools to begin with.

I don't make my covers just for other folks who make covers, I make them for anybody who would need them. I don't want to turn TCP into some kind of elitist "secret club" just because a few guys decide to profit off of our work.

If you guys want to do anything, right now there's absolutely nothing on the main site that indicates that these covers aren't meant to be sold. Should we really expect all of our visitors to simply know that we don't want them selling these things? Why not simply put a disclaimer in a few visible spots that these are all provided for free and aren't meant to be sold any way?

[tiktektak]

yeah and while we're at it we should just ban members who submit covers that get rejected 

Now THAT would be a good idea!

Your idea isn't going to increase contribution. If anything, it'll turn countless people away from the site and present our community as stuck up and elitist.

Why would we want people on our site that do nothing but leech?

By the way! We are elitist we are freemason!

[Doom]

Some people might not have the capability or desire to help. I just want to help people get replacement covers, even if that means some people get money off my work.

[PDDestro]

Tell me, is there any plan in place for if and when the Cover Project is sent a Cease & Desist to take down X,Y,& Z's companies' covers, or worse? This is why I said:

In fact this may become a necessity as time passes and security of the site warrants due to understood reasons.

Keeping things wide open has its pros as well as cons. Some/all of you may think it highly improbable, but eventually it may well happen, and it would really suck if TCP is shutdown because we didn't want to be 'elitist'. Food for thought is all...

[AppleQueso]

I mentioned it before, cdcovers.cc and hell possibly even vgboxart.com will be shut down long before us.

Not to mention the fact that simply restricting access to our content would do little to curb a possible C&D.

[Doom]

There is no plan in place.

(Secret message) Yes there is.

[BadChad]

I mentioned it before, cdcovers.cc and hell possibly even vgboxart.com will be shut down long before us.

Not to mention the fact that simply restricting access to our content would do little to curb a possible C&D.

Thats very true. The day those 2 sites get shut down is when we should worry about it happening to us.

[juan0tron]

This has come up before, but I'd be willing to eventually put tohether a few torrent files just in case our we do get a C&C. Hopefully I can keep up with RSS feed to constantly update the torrent as well, but I'm not terribly concerned with that we'll be getting shut down any time soon.

(COMPLETELY UNRELATED SIDENOTE) I just got BTstack Keyboard for my jailbroken ipod and it works AMAZINGLY. Now I have a somewhat reliable way to work from home. (Emailing from the Notes/Mail app, we browing etc). Had to tell someone because it took me forever to get running and now all my friends are asleep haha

[AppleQueso]

Actually I believe something along those lines is "the plan"