April 18, 2006
Flash developers! People are stealing your games!
There seems to be a new business plan gaining popularity on the internet: Building game "portals" with servers filled with stolen game SWFs from all over the web, and then filling each page with Google Ads. Half the time they just iframe the game, stealing it right from your own server.
You might as well just steal each Flash developer's credit card and buy a new big-screen TV with it. It's just as wrong.
What can you do?
Be aware of the problem. Search for your game in Google.
Did you build Bowman? search for it
Hapland? search for it
Search Millionsofgames.com
You can go to aggregator sites like millionsofgames.com, which actually makes money from Google ads by collecting links to online games. Thieves want more traffic, so they often register their games in this site, and it has become a complete database of web game thieves. This is the site that has the nerve to make money off of the people who in turn make money off of stealing your games.
Alarming, isn't it?
Protect your SWFs. Make sure that they only run on your own webserver or only the sites you give permission to run the game. Or you can use something like Mochibot to track who's hosting your SWFs. (thanks to Jay Bibby for the Mochibot tip)
Call a lawyer, then report copyright violations to Google AdSense. You can get each offending site's ad revenue shut down.
Be informed. Read the full text of the DMCA.
If you are the author of the game (or the company who hired the author of the game), greedy people are making money from your work, and you can get their Google ads canceled. If it's not profitable they'll stop stealing.
If the game was built exclusively for a revenue-generating site, that site's owner may also be able to sue for lost viewership, if you can show how many impressions were lost as a result of thieves stealing game players from you. The bigger and more popular the original host site, the more damages the thieves could be responsible for.
Do your part to help shut down these crooks. Fight back!
An alternate plan of attack would be to let the thieves make YOU money. Use Mochibot or your own loaded SWF to track your game plays across all of the thieves' servers, but run adspace within your game. That way, the thieves are doing you the favor of virally spreading (stealing) your game, and increasing your ad hits for you.
Jay Bibby has a great post and some more discussion over at his site.
What else do you think could be done to deal with this problem?
Posted by andy at April 18, 2006 02:05 PM