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[Tidus_Beta]

hope it helps

[Smax]

@CrAzYcr@sh: don't think that a company is like a single person.
Let's stop thinking that they have been "pissed off" by one or two of the last posts (either Christies porting or SN renders, etc.).
It doesn't take few days to them to make the decision and set up a sueing action.

If you take it from another perspective: it took "only" two months from when DOAU begun being skinned to start a legal action.
Which is a pretty decent time for any company with TECMO size.

It may sound like fanta-politics, but the very same decision to encrypt DOAU (months and months ago) may have been taken having this legal action in mind, in case the encryption would have failed its purpose.

There's nothing much to say.
It's not deleting one or two of the latest posts that will settle down this whole affair.
NinjaHacker has to *completely* stop.
This is simply necessary.

-Xmax

[CrAzYcr@sh]

obvoiusly you missed my whole point..

we have been doing what we've been doing for a while now....
I'm just saying look at it like this, we've been skinning DOA and even got into the
audio portion of DOA and not much has happened. IMO it just seemed like once we got
into modifying the actual model's behavior...TECMO blew up

Maybe it's realated to the release of a tool that modify's model behavior which COULD
be considered modifying source codes, maybe it's not.....

That is why I said  "I was thinking...."

think of it like a house of cards...
We keep skinning and modding..the house keeps getting bigger and bigger
Then we throw in somthing completely new and it's a new card...how do we know that
it's not that new card that caused things to crumble..

This is just a thought to try and help Cypher if at all possible... why take such a
defensive look and postition on what I'm trying to say?

[AgentofEvil]

I agree with Xmax, large corporations do not move with that kind of speed, even if it is a legal matter. Most everything that we've done on the site falls into a very gray area, in the eyes of the law, including swapping move files around. Unfortunatly, reverse-engineering cryptography does not. I should note though, it's certainly still a gray area in the eyes of the court, as the DCMA is a loopy, poorly written set of laws. To whit, title code 17 section 1201 sub-section A part 2:

No person shall manufacture, import, offer to the public, provide, or otherwise traffic in any technology, product, service, device, component, or part thereof, that -
  - A - is primarily designed or produced for the purpose of circumventing a technological measure that effectively controls access to a work protected under this title;
 - B - has only limited commercially significant purpose or use other than to circumvent a technological measure that effectively controls access to a work protected under this title; or
 - C - is marketed by that person or another acting in concert with that person with that person's knowledge for use in circumventing a technological measure that effectively controls access to a work protected under this title.

Why encrypt the skins? I think now we know, and if you search though all the copyright law, I think you'll find that just about everything else on the site isn't as cut an dried as that...

[CrAzYcr@sh]

I wasnt disagreing with Smax, I was just saying see my point before flaming me.
You at least were able to show what you meant, and yes, I understand and support
your point compeltely. I was merely trying stating an observation that I had noticed.

[FM77]

QUOTE(AgentofEvil @ Jan 31 2005, 01:11 PM)

  - A - is primarily designed or produced for the purpose of circumventing a technological measure that effectively controls access to a work protected under this title;

The question is, is the xpr encryption an effective control? After all, it does absolutely nothing to stop someone copying the game. As this can't be considered a functional copy protection, what I've read suggests that it wouldn't be protected by this section of the DMCA.

-FM77.

[DracoLacertae]

I agree with FM77, it don't think it falls under the DMCA because it is not copy protection.

I also don't see how the model files and motion data can be considered source code.  They are data files, no different than textures and sounds.

[Smax]

)

@FM77: unfortunately, it seems that the protection addressed by DMCA has not necessarily to be "copy" protection, as the law explicitly mentions "access control", so it may as well be "access" protection.   Damn'd lawyers...
An example: Andrew "bunnie" Huang received a not so friendly call from MS after publishing the decrypted content of Xbox ROM BIOS, for which the encryption was not specifically a "copy" protection. It was really "access" protection to the machine's Instruction Pointer (main reason for this kind of protection is that if you can't "access" -i.e. get in control of- the IP then you're not able to run homebrew software on the box).

About why bunnie was *not* sued in the end is another long story (it has to do with EFF, and MIT too), but at the end of the day, thinking about stories like bunnie's one, I'm wondering the following:
why hammer so hard on cypher35 head? why TECMO didn't try to contact him and persuade him to shut down the site *before*/*instead* going straight down with the lawsuits?

[FM77]

QUOTE(Smax @ Jan 31 2005, 04:46 PM)

@FM77: unfortunately, it seems that the protection addressed by DMCA has not necessarily to be "copy" protection, as the law explicitly mentions "access control", so it may as well be "access" protection.  Damn'd lawyers...

Hmmm, maybe. It's hard to tell exactly *what* parts of it are supposed to mean, which seems to have already worked against the DMCA in the past. I was reading about a case involving ElcomSoft, which was acquitted in part because the DMCA was confusing enough that they weren't sure ElcomSoft could have known they were breaking it.

-FM77.

[adam1972]

Woo hoo 4 sigs so far! Anyway, I would assume that the question should be.. If something is encrypted, does it make it illegal to unencrypted? Quote from  US Info.state"The exclusive rights granted to the copyright owner do not include the right to prevent others from making fair use of the owner s work. Such fair use may include use of the work for purposes of criticism, comment, news reporting, teaching or education, and scholarship or research. The nature of the work, the extent of the work copied, and the impact of copying on the work s commercial value are all considered in determining whether an unauthorized use is a “fair use.”" .. So does Unencrypting mean that suddenly we can't use it to reseach the file format? And is the file format registered and patented like .jpg?  Again quote "Copyright protection does not extend to any idea, procedure, process, system, method of operation, concept, principle, or discovery, regardless of the form in which it is described, explained, or embodied. Rather, copyright protection is limited to an author s particular expression of an idea, process, concept, and the like in a tangible medium."  So they have the exclusive right to officially express their ideas on their IP's.. does that mean we can't unofficially?  No one said that making a "spiderman" skin was a derivative of one of their original characters....

[diablofreak]

on the other hand, if xbox scene or xbox saves are supportive of NH, can't they simply port over the forum here for now? i sure wont want what happened to cypher to these 2 sites, but somehow the info that these 2 sites deal with are much more "gray" than NH ever was/will be. How can they be spared (again, knock on wood) while NH is being shot down?

It just pisses me off that a community that was very supportive of Tecmo and their games would be dealt with this way.

[adam1972]

  And the defamation... I know when I made skins of some of those characters I had no malice whatsoever  " An attack on the good reputation of a person, by slander or libel. (Duhaime's Law Dictionary) ".. in fact I think TECMO places their characters in more "adult" situations than the general public has.  They would have to prove that these "fictional" characters have a good name in the first place.. and I'm sorry but they have already placed their characters in situations where they KNOW that 18 - 30somethings are going to be oodling over their large breasted female fighters.. I haven't noticed one single "A" cup in there anywhere.. Has anyone else?  And the copyright violation? From what usinfo.state.gov has "The exclusive rights granted to the copyright owner do not include the right to prevent others from making fair use of the owner s work. Such fair use may include use of the work for purposes of criticism, comment, news reporting, teaching or education, and scholarship or research. The nature of the work, the extent of the work copied, and the impact of copying on the work s commercial value are all considered in determining whether an unauthorized use is a “fair use.”"... Seems that if they are claiming Copyright violation thay should have their ducks in a row and not be attempting to "prevent" us from modifyng these graphic files (for our own personal use if I may add) with encryptions that they are considering "source code"..

-Adam  

[Heet]

 ?

[FM77]

QUOTE(cypher35 @ Jan 31 2005, 10:40 PM)

according to their summons, they are indeed considering xpr files and the like to be "source code"

[adam1972]

.  And the thing with the 3D Models.. I don't think that would fly either.  No one is reproducing the program that created those files and no one has patented the 3D file format that they came in as far as I know... Gray area indeedly

-Adam