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While technological methods are doomed to long term failure - social and legal means are not. | While technological methods are doomed to long term failure - social and legal means are not. | ||
| − | The space platform is a closed environment, this means all content needs to be routed through our systems and processes - for the majority of users, this will also include content review, where our teams inspect all content prior to upload. One of the goals of content review is to prevent and prohibit ripped content from being sold or distributed in the space platform. Penalties for knowingly uploading infringing content include permanent removal from the service, through to legal enforcement ('''don't do it.'''). See [[Review Policies]] for more information. | + | The '''space''' platform is a closed environment, this means all content needs to be routed through our systems and processes - for the majority of users, this will also include content review, where our teams inspect all content prior to upload. One of the goals of content review is to prevent and prohibit ripped content from being sold or distributed in the space platform. Penalties for knowingly uploading infringing content include permanent removal from the service, through to legal enforcement ('''don't do it.'''). See [[Review Policies]] for more information. |
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| + | A good comparison example for how '''space''' operates is to compare the App Store and Google Play marketplaces - by placing a more stringent review, greater identification requirements and a delay on cashouts, the Apple store is considerably better at disincentivising infringements. Both platforms employ similar levels of DRM. | ||
==Copying, Single Source, Marketplace== | ==Copying, Single Source, Marketplace== | ||
While the Space platform is a closed platform, it is simply not possible to guarantee any form of copy protection. With that said, we do implement features which make "content ripping" harder. While technical measures cannot be guaranteed - we do attempt to also limit the applicability and usefulness of ripped content through social and legal means, including our content review process.
Uploading content to the Space platform is a destructive process; our compression systems actively strip and reformat content into specialised formats. Further; many of these formats involve lossy compression (e.g. DXT texture compression) of some form of another.
For example: when you upload a FBX file containing an animation, our tools will in the process of packaging strip out the skeletal data, remove the associated meshes, and reformat the animation timeline into a custom format - the original FBX is not delivered to the end users client (although it will be stored on our processing servers in case of future reprocessing in the event of format changes). Usually we will also strip redundant (not used) information from the mesh, such as unused vertex colours or higher UV channels (UV3/4); if it can be determined at build time that this information is redundant.
It should be noted that while this provides a roadblock to extracting content, a dedicated reverse engineer will be able to restore a semblance of the original files; either by decoding the formats we utilise - or extracting from the GPU using existing tools designed for graphics debugging (specifically not mentioning any by name here). As with the music and movie industries - there is no technological 'silver bullet'.
While technological methods are doomed to long term failure - social and legal means are not.
The space platform is a closed environment, this means all content needs to be routed through our systems and processes - for the majority of users, this will also include content review, where our teams inspect all content prior to upload. One of the goals of content review is to prevent and prohibit ripped content from being sold or distributed in the space platform. Penalties for knowingly uploading infringing content include permanent removal from the service, through to legal enforcement (don't do it.). See Review Policies for more information.
A good comparison example for how space operates is to compare the App Store and Google Play marketplaces - by placing a more stringent review, greater identification requirements and a delay on cashouts, the Apple store is considerably better at disincentivising infringements. Both platforms employ similar levels of DRM.
The space backend design means every user copy of a item is shared from a single master copy of the item. If that master item is removed from the service - all copies will vanish with it. If an item is placed onto the service despite review processes, it is an option for the original owner to have every copy of the item removed or replaced in a single instance.
Additionally, all content sales occur within the platform itself where they can be monitored and all details recorded. We also offer a central marketplace managed and operated by us, where we aim to guarantee that all the content is legitimate, and can provide a curated high quality marketplace. By encouraging users to utilise the space marketplace we can maintain user trust that they are buying authentic goods from the authorised sellers - and ensure they understand the original creators are being paid for their work.
While technical means can be used to slow or delay a infringement, we prefer to rely on social and legal methods; our social & legal methods include:
If you have any content which has been uploaded to any Space environment, without permission, please read Intellectual Property on how to report a infringement. We are creators ourselves, and we do take any complaint seriously.