Time to Shut Down IP Thieves and Stop Stolen Content

My favourite part "Digital pirates are often pretty stupid..."

They sure are! It's been a good couple years of pirating, but expecting it to continue more than a year - maybe two more - just shows how dumb those pirates really are. Flags to half mast, folks. Our digital high seas adventure is about to end.

I have a feeling I've seen this threat before. If we rounded up all the people who ever copied a cassette tape, CD, video tape, DVD etc, we better start building some bloody big jails. How about AI programs stealing other people's art to make new ones 😵!

And by the way, the scary image used by jstokes at Renderosity belongs to Cottonbro at Pexels so should have been credited. As it has not been, it could constitute IP theft itself. Although attribution for Pixels is not required it's... "always appreciated". Left up to one's conscience to do the right thing LOL.... back to square one. Not for jstokes apparently, ironic about that mate 😅.

Rendo is faultering because they’re losing vendors because they treat them like crap. No one is buying Poser or Poser only crap. No one even bothers pirating the stuff because it’s so bad.

yeah, they wasted too much time on trying to make the shitty "La Femme" figures a success, but it was a dead horse from the beginning ... and with the rise of renderhub they got another big competitor with better conditions for artists. so they are under attack everywhere, i think that's the reason why they now try to play the blame game with piracy. because the fault for their descent can't have been their own shitty decisions, it has to be the piracy ... 😉

anyway, next months will be interesting, because if i remember right, Poser 13 should be released in the first quarter of this year sometime ... with a "new female figure based on a new unimesh figure type". so we will see, if the new figure isn't at least at the same level as genesis 3/8, nothing can stop their sinking.

so you could be right, this year will decide if they have a chance to survive.

@littlepleasures wrote:

It’s also worth noting that there are only five replies at the time I write this. That is very low engagement for what would appear to be a “serious” topic.

I see similar, but taken in larger context, even Rendo's biggest/busiest forum (the Poser "Official" forum) rarely gets more than 2 replies each day, and maybe a new, original post perhaps 4 times a week. Most of the people left in there are hangers-on, a couple of old-timers, and Poser-til-I-die zealots. The place as a whole is a far, far cry from what it used to be.

In 2005 Rendo could issue a diktat and both buyers and vendors would sheepishly do what they're told, because there were very few alternatives that had the traffic and the goods. Not the case anymore. Now, it's a has-been wasteland, screaming about how Poser is superior while paying the bills with DAZ Studio trinkets. The Poser purchase from Smith Micro was a really big bet for them, but it looks like a losing one. Nobody wants the 1998 Kai's PowerGoo interface anymore, and the La Femme figure isn't bleeding edge, far from it. Hellfire, it's barely catching up to Vicky 4 in terms of features and result.

Doesn't help that the Poser hobbyist crowd keeps cranking out renders that would have looked fresh in 2006, but seem so outdated now.

It's been a profitable run for Tim, but I think his Bondware/Poser experience is finally dying of old age. I won't say it will quite die in 2023, but I bet they file Chapter 11 sometime in early-to-mid 2024.

I started using Poser back in the late 90's, when Renderosity was Poseforum Online. They had a marvelous group of users and a great selection of freestuff. I used mostly freebies back then. Now it'd mostly 2D resources. The forums are a wasteland. I had a volunteer job there for years until I clashed with a micromanaging admin. I haven't decided if I'm upgrading to 13 or not. I started a project years ago and bought everything for Poser. Problem is, Daz is far more cutting edge and if I switch platforms it'll be glaringly obvious.

I can't help but remember what a thriving community it was. Then the TOS got stricter, the admins more controlling, and people left.

I started pirating about 2000, and the group of pirates was mostly VENDORS, some of whom still put out great content at Daz. They fled for higher ground. One remains at Renderosity, still loyal to Poser.

There's a great big world out there, @diviniren . The DAZ/Poser universe is, to put it bluntly, a great big CG version of a barbie doll (and yes, that bitch has everything and it is all expensive!)

But yes, I agree, the ease of tossing together something that could be accused of artistic endeavor is indeed its biggest attraction.

As far as takedowns, They've happened since Napster, but much like the movie Firefly: "You can't stop the signal."

Back when I started rendering over 12 years ago I tried both Poser and DAZ studio and DAZ was a paid product at the time. Poser was too expensive so I grabbed the latest off the back of the truck copy. I went with DAZ because the interface was better and it was much more intuitive to use. When I saw Rendo purchase Poser my response was a big ho hum. I do buy a LOT of content every year from sites and there are very few producers on Rendo I even like, the major one would be Dzheng. Probably one of the few clothing artists I even purchase from anymore as I have tons of clothes. New skins or models? Very little. Hair? Depends. For me it's now props and sets and very few Rendo artists produce sets or props I like or are worth the quality of buying. My purchasing is probably going to be slowing down now as my library of purchased product is near the 5TB mark. Will probably drop around 500GB once I weed out most of my antique "runtime" library which is almost all poser stuff DAZ can load. There's a few sets and items in there I plan to keep but most is just too old to bother converting to load natively from the DAZ format.