<span style: "mode: serious; long">Panchocheesecake wrote:Is there a better way to share the walpaper because, honestly, it seems like it could easily be uploaded to photobucket and just take it from there for free. I wouldn't do that, but pretty sure that eventually someone will.
Foreword: I don't take sides on the whole question of intellectual property, I'm just explaining.
Once and for all: there is *no* way you're going to be able to control what people do with digital media, unless you control the whole chain, that is the media, the site which serves it, the network which conveys it, the computer (or phone, or...) that receives it, and I certainly forget some. You can put every effort in trying to ensure your grip on it; it simply will not work. Think DVDs and DeCSS, HDTV and the recent leak of the master key (and even before the leak), Blu-ray and AACS, generally any audio on the web and most of the video as well. Heck, even before the intarweb was there, back in the mid-eighties, you could find schematics for escaping this godawful Macrovision protection device that was plaguing many SCART-equipped VCRs, and even before that, when France introduced its first scrambled TV channel, descramblers became available quite quickly. And now it's worse of course, since as soon as someone knows how to break a protection, everybody knows it.
So either you decide that no one should be free to access the info they want with the equipment they chose to use, or you reckon that you cannot fully control your digital media. But you can try something.
Big companies don't build a relationship with their customers beyond "you pay and I let you watch", therefore customers or even prospects don't feel any remorse when the consider the company is screwing them on the "let you watch" side -- already some online music services have closed down causing their ex customers to lose the ability to listen to the music they'd paid for; but the screwing is apparent in more subtle things such as forcing you to go through ten minutes of ads before getting to the main menu of that disc, for instance. To people the deal is simple: they pay once and for all; they expect to get the media once and for all.
That's probably different with more indie productions. You get to build a relationship with authors -- possibly even sometime feeding back to them to the point that this affects the media they produce -- so when you get to deal with them, it's not only about money. It's also about being nice(r) to each other (than when dealing with, or being, WorldCo, Inc.) and that is probably a more efficient way of controlling extra media such as the wallpapers here, because the control is voluntary on the part of the reader: you trust him not to -- as opposed to WorldCo, Inc. which wants/orders you not to.
But still, one jerk is enough to ruin the whole thing and upload this to some sharing site. As an author, you can't avoid it. What you can do at best is make it so that if people get to see the wallpaper, they might want to see more of your production, so you put indications in the wallpaper such as the site address; and somehow you count on the friendship of your readership to at least let you know when the wallpaper is up for grabs somewhere, so that you can either have it taken down, or properly attributed; and you regulary prepare something new to give your loyal readers because if you can't give them true exclusivity, you can at least make sure they's always the first to get things.
And heck! Leaks are publicity, after all.
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