Context Menu License

[Trausti Hraunfjord]

Version 2.0686 has customizable context menu built in. You can add 13 entries, link those to existing functions in the tour (to open panos etc), or link the entries to webpages or simply place your copyright and contact info. In the context menu there are hard-coded "About Flash Panorama Player" and "About Flashificator" These entries can NOT be removed.

In one of the next updates, it will be made so that if the context menu is removed, the whole project will not be functional. People who want to get rid of the "About Flashificator", can purchase a special version of the context menu without it, with their own copyright/contact info hard-coded. If someone tries to remove that information, the project will not work. This will make copyright theft quite a bit harder.

Price for the non-removable context menu license will be €150.
Benefits of this are numerous. You sell a tour to a client, the client decides it's a good idea to sell DVD's with the tour to his clients, he can copy the project and burn DVD's and sell those... completely ignoring your copyright, especially if he first removes all trace of your copyright information in the pano. Be that through context menu and/or info-screeen or other on-screen copyright hotspot placement.
With the context menu being non-removable and not possible to change the hardcoded copyright info that comes with the special license, the client can not claim he "didn't know".
Some of you good folks work in areas that contain competitors, and you might not want them to know what software you are using to create your tours. In that case it would be a good choice to buy a context menu license where the "About Flashificator" info is not present. There is however still the "About Flash Panorama Player" remaining... I will try to work out a deal with Denis, so that the link to FPP can also be removed, obviously it will be up to him to decide if that should be allowed or not, and at what price it will come.

Please feel free to air your thoughts on this upcoming feature. Pro's and Con's are welcome in the debate.

Trausti

[terrycm]

I am in, worth every penny if you ask me. Would be great to add some other protection to FFC should you want to consider my input. For example protection against offline use (client decides to make a cd-rom), or a way to hide xml. Looking forward to it being available for purchase.

[rawtoast]

So what is €150 in American currency?

[Trausti Hraunfjord]

That is around $200 right now.

A lot of money if it was ONLY the context menu plugin you'd be getting, but it's not. There's going to be a "Security" package, and that package will contain the context menu plugin where "About Flashificator" is removed and your own info can be hard-coded. There will also be encryption of the xml and hopefully later on encryption of the images used in the tour (if a fast and functional method of encryption/decryption is successfully made), and there will be a possibility to lock the project to one domain only, so no one can steal it from there and publish it elsewhere. All that (?) and maybe more, for the €150, so that's not too bad.

The programmer has done the basics on the encryption of the xml, and it works pefectly, and leaves no trace at all for anyone to be able to "guess" or work their way back to the decryption key. Quite brilliantly done.

The one domain lock will be protected behind the encryption, so it will be darn near perfect as it looks from my viewpoint... of course I am by no means an expert on decryption or what such experts know about these things... but as a normal user and even for those who are a little bit into encryption/decryption, the security will be too strong to be worth trying to steal the projects.

Coming very soon.

[Paddy2a]

Talking about DVDs, with the security pack mean that we can lock the tour to run only on a DVD also ?
If so, I'm thinking about the case that I get the DVD's professionally duplicated, will that work ?
regards,
Paddy

[terrycm]

I could be wrong but I believe the protection would work to protect offline use. Just to make sure we are clear you can not run any tour project on a DVD, are you talking about CD-Roms? If you are talking about a CD-ROM you can already export the project with the projector feature with makes online use of the project useless. In other words if you have to deliver a projector to a client for a CD-ROM project it would be difficult for them to turn around and make it play online, not impossible but difficult.

Hope that helps,
-Terry

[Paddy2a]

Hi Terry,
Yes, the idea was to protect equally from copying CD/DVDs. Like if you burn CD's for your client, the idea was to prevent anyone from making more copies.
I think Trausti has this in mind.
http://flashpanoramas.com/forum/showpost.php?p=17195&postcount=8
Regards,
Paddy