Marketplace item illegal sharing tracker

Excellent idea my friend

Any active and positive measure is worth considering in the fight against those who cowardly make money off of hard working creative people. The results will come, sooner or later. Great initiative.

EDIT : On a side note, after reading what ssiddharth wrote in the post below, it seems a lot like the war on drugs. Who knows, maybe some of us indeed have to swim with the big fish, to catch the big fish.

Just some quick notes since I’m tangentially involved in something related to this. All of my text below is based on how I think the marketplace code works so take it with a grain of salt.

Currently, every asset from the Envato marketplaces resides on S3. The download link merely points to a method which retrieves the file for you after verifying you have the requisite credentials. Thus, only a single version of an author’s file exists in the main repo.

In order to implement a system like the one suggested, you’d essentially have to rebuild the system so as to either build unique archives for each purchase after pulling the required files. You’d probably have to keep it live for an hour or so, not more than that, else the sheer number/size of files would be too much. This also put a lot of strain on the back end, specially during the busy times since archives have to be compiled dynamically instead of just pointing to a S3 file.

Good idea, it’s just that the implementation won’t quite work. Remember that the file sharers are quite a smart bunch and will probably “null” the archives before putting it up for download which is one of my main concerns as of now.

Making the life of pirates hard is quite a noble endeavour but you’ll definitely need to make a judgement call whether it’ll actually end up deterring casual piracy. The idea itself is suave and I agree most normal users won’t notice anything and will end up incriminating themselves but the fact remains that the big scale warez people are the ones who end up distributing the marketplace files on a grander scale and thus end up hurting the Envato ecosystem more. For these people, removing this simple note is less than child’s play.

Wall of text but oh, well, I’m tired so I’ll probably come back and clean this up later.

Sitebase said
I was brainstorming about a way how we could protect our marketplace items better against illegal sharing on other websites.

I came up with a nifty way that if Envato would implement this, that we could know what users shared wich files.

The way you could do this is when a user downloads a files that their user id or email is added to the comment field of the zipped script. This can be done very easily like this:

$zip = new ZipArchive();
$res = $zip->open('script.zip');
if($res === true) {
    $zip->setArchiveComment('user_1345435');
    $zip->close();
} 

// Download zip code here

When the file now is shared on other websites, the evato staff can download a copy, read out the comment field and find out wich user shared that file.

Of course, if a user deletes this comment tag from the zip it will not work but I’m sure 99% of the users here doesn’t know a zip file has a comment field, let alone know how to edit it.

im sure people will repack the zip

You have some good points there ssiddharth.

Another point sitebase.

Extract -> Repack.

Then what? That could take less then 5 seconds.

It just wont work!

Let’s face it, Web is getting smarter, we are getting smarter and even they (let’s call them hackers) are getting smarter.

Even if in future somebody develops a web app/software to completely stop hackers from nulling apps/softwares, there will be a nulled version of that software as well.

I don’t want to discourage anybody but no matter what you do, it’s not possible. (* unless you host it on your own+/secured server)

I won’t consider this to be the excellent idea but i do love when people try different things to fight this.

@Thecodingdude
I don’t say it’s bullet proof but all small bits can help. Besides if they don’t know there’s a tracer in that zip they will not repack it.

^ at above.

It won’t work. Look at Rapidshare, and Thepiratebay. (sorry if mentioning that isn’t allowed).

If those sites are still up, there’s no hope. There’s nothing the law can do.

Besides, when one shuts down, another opens?

It’s impossible to stop Piracy. Fact.

If it’s technically possible (if Bitfade says not, most probably will be not) i don’t think it’s a bad idea.
We’re considering that dark hackers are the ones behind the black market, but it’s not completely true. Many of the people that share on warez forums are just young guys trying to make some few bucks with it. If fact, as an example, i reported one user that was using the same exact name here than in a forum where he was sharing numerous files!! Unbelievable but true. He was banned. There are some stupids outside, count with it.

Anecdote: Few weeks ago i found one of my files hacked. I contacted directly the guy that made the post. I wrote him a sincere email telling him that i’m a small guy trying to live with his own work, bla, bla… and that’s difficult without piracy, even more with it. You know what? He replied he understood my situation and he deleted the file and post. Suddenly i saw a human side behind piracy.

Anyway, again (and again): would nice a private area where to discuss these kind of things.