Today MAKE posted a link to a tutorial that describes the best way to download you favorite Flash and multimedia files from any website using Firefox. This brings up a touchy subject for designers and developers around the web. How do we keep our work from being stolen? Sure anything that can be done is Flash can be mimicked, just look at any SWF on the web and most Flashers can figure out how to do the same thing, if not in a better way. But if anyone can download your work how do you save it from being out right stolen?
More after the jump.
I can think of two ways right off the bat. Ruin you design by adding the copyright so and so on the bottom of every project you make. This may cause problems with you clients or may just change that cool game’s empty background look, but at least no one can remove it later and you will know if its been stolen.A better way might include loading all of your Flash into empty contain files. The main project page consists of a lightweight loader file that is the same size as the project but contains only a small piece of ActionScript:
_root.LoadMovieNum("my/project/relative/location.swf",1); Any better ideas? How do you safeguard your work?
1. You'd also have to protect your other files with .htaccess by allowing requests only from the same server. That way, if someone deconstructs the containe SWF, they still would have a hard time stealing the other stuff...
Posted at 12:26AM on Jul 8th 2005 by Daze