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well this is no surprise , I can think of a half-dozen artists that visit this site and some of them have made it clear they are here.
yup some of them are 5yrs+ old and they are all over in the wind but still get take down notice.
As @bavor has stated, he seems to be hit the hardest at the moment - literally the moment he posts, someone reports it to MEGA and it's pulled down - within less than 30 minutes. Someone has it out for ZoneGFX but mainly I still think the person or persons behind it isn't someone on the INSIDE of ZoneGFX itself (yes it could be a member, but it most definitely isn't one of the moderators or admins) as doing this sort of thing can be traced by us. And the person can be found out very quickly by their movements in the blog editors.
I've been talking to Chris B. (@bavor) and others who have been hit and I am looking for alternatives to avoid MEGA or services which just listen to DMCAs without asking or questioning them. What bothers me the most is that those reporting are 1) self-copyright infringers selling stolen goods on sites like RenderHub and TurboSquid and FoRender, and 2) they are on this site downloading products from other stores where they do not shop, which is hypocritical as all hell.
I'm hoping that before the items get taken down that some of our share sites which grab our stuff on the same day, make multiple copies and multiple share site downloads propagating the reach of the shares, making it more difficult to pull them all down.
My recommendation is that MEGA is not listed as the main site, and that multiple sites are used to propagate the shares, as many as possible.
When I find that a MEGA link is dead, I erase it from the Blogpost, and remove the text "Mega.nz" I think this is why we are being so hard hit - every blog post has "Mega.nz" listed on its pages as the host. This is searchable even if the MEGA link isn't visible, it only takes a user using a fake name 50 points to get the link and report it.
We must be more diligent and see if we can stop this behavior.
Also, we must stop listing STORE LINKS to RENDERHUB items. The RenderHub link contains the VENDOR NAME within it. This isn't the case with any other site except RenderHub, Guhzcoitus, FoRender.
I'll have a discussion in the New Year with my colleagues here and see if we can figure out alternative methods to combat this.
Everyone have a safe New Year 2023!
AnjaBear
Could it be possible that it’s not a member here sending the takedowns, but someone sending takedowns from known clone sites that doesn’t hide the links? Since some of the said sites tends to copy the links from here.
Rank:
Oh crap... well, if folks are taking a hiatus from posting in the blog, please try to check out the "Requests" section often....
I know some of you are pretty heavy hitters when it comes to filling request AND posting to the blog, so thanks.
That being said, i'd bet there are "PAs" in the ranks that doing the damage.
ALONG THE SAME LINES
Google is pretty crap too, as when I was posting assets there, there was a high rate of download failure... even though the links perfectly fine
Here is an example
This this dead post
https://zonegfx.com/repost-vunterslaush-jockstraps/Leads to this working link
https://drive.google.com/u/0/uc?id=1E_IlDWuPJke3Zf1_FzpGwtRZgfJWOK9u&export=downloadThis this dead post
https://zonegfx.com/new-link-facility-4-ground-level-for-dazstudio-4-11/Leads to this working link
https://www.mediafire.com/file/0ck518u0dy9b1lw/Facility+4+Ground+Level+For+DazStudio+4.11.rar/fileThis this dead post
https://zonegfx.com/repost-tdt-liya-for-g3f-and-g8f/Leads to this working link
https://drive.google.com/u/0/uc?id=1p5Cy9HTw_j4R4hGSTdLS8kEdNQg8FMWV&export=downloadThis "dead" post
https://zonegfx.com/repost-i13-conquest-and-defeat-for-the-genesis-3-females/Leads to this working link
https://drive.google.com/file/d/1xbppA7lKjCmApki5n4lAMGu35pcPABUG/viewThis "dead" post
https://zonegfx.com/repost-gero-for-bullwarg-hd/Leads to this working link
https://drive.google.com/u/0/uc?id=1TanzZE11wbfjFtb0yejcMUbE544RCUKM&export=downloadThis "dead" post
https://zonegfx.com/repost-high-resolution-nipples-for-genesis-8-female/Leads to this working link
https://drive.google.com/u/0/uc?id=1A4Lzs25VEZjkKcDzm24NLSHO07vhqmr-&export=downloadAll the working links are taken from the "dead" post download button
Well I'm not exactly a heavy hitter, but I'm not stopping. If someone tries to stop us we just change and adapt, they see the futility and this fantastic site continues. I'm re-uploading every single download, (sorry if it clogs the board) and I'll be uploading new stuff. December and November are already back up.
@scoobydude51 The takedown requests seem to be happening way too fast for it to be a clone site causing the issues. Some of the takedown requests are filed with Mega within 10 to 20 minutes of the new posts going up here. All of my most recent takedown requests were filed and completed so fast that some of the mega links were dead within 15 minutes of the post going live here. I don't think any of the Mega links in my most recent uploads stayed working for more than an hour.
Whoever is filing the takedown requests probably checks on a regular basis, gets the info about the links and probably sends all the links in one email to Mega. It might be a company hired by some of the artists or content for sale sites doing this considering how it happens any time of the day or night.
Rank:Its interesting...
The Zone is like the Great White shark, and there are several "remora" sites, you know, like those small fish that attach to Sharks and feed off of the scraps....
The smaller "remora" sites seem to go under the radar a bit more, so if something is taken down here, it is often still up, on the other site.
It could be that MEGA is now checking the files if they’re pirated content or not, since MEGA is under the scrutiny of copyright holders and the government now.
I don't reckon that will help Ethiopia. The take-downs are initiated from the Mega links on this site so no matter what the files are called they'll still be reported through the links.
@scoobydude51 I don't think its automated because Mega sends the account holder the email address of the person filing the takedown request. All of my recent takedowns on Mega have been the same person or company.
I suspect the reporter is a piracy-impacted vendor clued in to the presence of their items on the blog by the fact that the product source link is incorporated into every blog post. Even if the poster uses a third-party site like postimg or imgur for the product image, the post itself displays the link to the source item on the vendor's site, and that link is often clickable.
All it takes is for someone to click on one of those source links, really. Once that happens, the vendor's web server logs the referrer URL, which is of course the blog post itself on ZoneGFX. If the vendor is even a little bit tech-savvy, they can have a script monitoring their web server logs and see exactly where people are linking to their products from. From there, they have what they need to report the infringement to the file hoster and have it taken down. (They might need 50 points to unmask the download link to confirm the hoster, but they could simply create an account here and get 100 points/day for logging in. Or, as Anja said, they might just assume that Mega hosts everything, since it's mentioned throughout the site.)
The larger marketplaces like DAZ and Renderosity don't seem to bother with this, probably because of the higher traffic volumes they receive, and the overhead of having to issue hundreds of takedown notices every day on their large product catalogs. Smaller sites--often the ones run by the PAs themselves--are the ones more likely to take this sort of aggressive action, as they can feel the piracy impact more personally and directly than a third-party marketplace.
The folks at Synfulmindz are particularly aggressive about this, and I note that there was a batch of (older) content of theirs posted to the blog this week, so chances are their auto-banning scripts were being triggered every time a visitor here clicked on the link to their site, and that got their attention. I suspect that's where all this new attention came from.
What I might propose is that we ensure that the product source links are displayed, but not clickable (unless they lead to other pages on zonegfx.com), so that we don't get users banned from vendor sites due to a referrer URL, and we don't go out of our way to remind vendors that their products are being offered here.
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