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I don't know where you are getting this. Even in the USA's current
litigious climate, it is most certainly not illegal to make or even own
a tool that is capable of decompiling stuff. Valentin has done nothing
wrong (even if he lived in the USA, which I do not believe is the case)
by making a tool with the expressed purpose of giving Director
developers the ability to make or save swf files from a running
projector. The fact that it can be put to a more nefarious use is not
Valentin's fault. It's like saying that we should be suing Microsoft for
releasing cmd.exe since it allows hackers to run decompiling tools.
Because it is important, I will repeat. This is not a tool designed to
steal swf assets. It is a tool designed to save swf files at runtime.
Perhaps a better analogy is the SharpExportXtra which is also a free
tool (in this case designed by Werner Sharp, the guy who wrote the
imaging lingo routines in Director) that allows one to save bitmap
assets at runtime. Used in a "non-standard" way, it would let you pull
out bitmaps from a DCR. It is a helpful tool that I an many others have
used for good things. It is a mistake to condemn it because someone
could do something bad with it. It is no more illegal than the print
screen button which also lets you save images of copyrighted things.
What is illegal by the DMCA - at least in the USA - is to actually do
the decompiling of a copyrighted work (though I don't think that you
have a leg to stand on about your work in this thread since you made a
challenge out of it and actually told folks to try to decompile it)
I know you are not a newbie, and I have a great deal of respect for your
skill and the amount of time and energy that you have put into making
shockwave 3d games and other related stuff. But to say that Valentin,
who is, in my mind, one of the absolute top of the line Director
developers in the world, is not a serious developer is uninformed at
best, and slanderous at worst. He is not trying to make hacker tools to
decompile protected assets. He just makes a bunch of free xtras that
are amazingly useful. The folks out there who are using these tools and
others for bad things - or the ones who are making actual hacking tools
- those are the ones you should be ranting at.
Anyway, as it has been said before in this thread, the dcr format was
never designed to be a format that protects assets. It is designed to
protect your scripts. You, as a programmer are responsible for writing
code that will protect your assets if that is an important thing for
you. And as it has also been said, there are plenty of things that the
programmer can do that will make decompiling things MUCH more difficult.
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