I guess the subject says it all. In the next couple of month I''m going to create a website containings all of my free flash games (made them myself), hopefully all of you can enjoyed it. So how can I protect those games meanings I don''t want anyone to just copy it and put it on their sites

1. Employ people to search the internet for sites that are runing your game.
2. Get a good lawyer to send them letters/take them to court.

Of course as they are free games it probably isn''t worth doing the above so there is not much point in worry about it. Although it wont protect them you could put a clear copyright message and your sites url at the start/end so that people at least know its yours.

Dan Marchant
Obscure Productions
Game Development & Design consultant

Since you made them you have the copyright. This right will not expire until 70 years after you have died. If you find someone who illegally use your content, media, games etc... that you have created you can sue them. Put copyrights in all your games, watermark images etc... Keep copies of the logfile from the website so you know who downloaded things from you. You want the reverse lookup name (if possible) also since ip numbers might change but the name does not. I have seen some sites that do not allow download unless you have a valid name(to prevent fakers).

Hope this helps

quote: Original post by yanuart
So how can I protect those games meanings I don''t want anyone to just copy it and put it on their sites

Simple: Don''t make them public! Sorry, but that is the *only* secure way.

There are of course methods to make it slightly harder for them:
- Have code in the movie that checks its own URI.
- Have code posting its own URI to your server, so you can see if someone is stealing it. Not 100% that these two are possible, though.
- Make the games dependent on some server-side code, which only you have access to.

there is an easyier way, let the flashgames ''report back'' (via php) what the current url etc is (send it at the same time you would send or retrieve the highscore if you want to log it...), if its not yours you can do things like dont start the game, change the gameplay to unplayable etc, or just let them report back from where they are called and send a nice mail to the webadmins...


T2k

There''s little you can do than track reverse lookup names. Protection inside won''t help simply because they can use Disassembler and remove your protection, then recompile it and post it as free version

" Do we need us? "

Ionware Productions - Games and Game Tools Development

How about making your games available to as much of the audience as possible? Submit it to all the major shareware/freeware sites. Depending on your budget, advertise as much as you can.

Theoretically, if everyone knows you wrote these games, then nobody will be fooled by a copyright thief (at least not for long).

You can even let people host the game on their sites, and perhaps ask to exchange links. Afterall, they can only do you a favour by advertising for you.

yeah if they are free then it would be in your best interest to let them propagate the net.. however it might be good to put some big obvious credits, and your url IN the flash app, since its a lot harder to hack the app than it is to steal it, and it will generate publicity for your site/your skills.