This site just does'nt look right.

I came across this site (and others) a few months ago and reported it here in this forum with my view that the images in the gallery should be watermarked too. However, it was not a very popular view. The creator of filters have a choice:

1. submit filters and permit all uses of the resultant texture even if the end user does not have FF. The gallery is advertised in numerous places as a free source of textures so one has to accept gallery images will be used as texture resources, sometimes even for commercial purposes.

2. Don't submit your filters to the gallery.

Unfortunately, at the moment I am leaning towards the second option and I am offering the textures I create with my filters elsewhere. In this way, I have some say over the use of these textures. It is a personal choice.

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infiniview wrote: If not this is a good case for watermarks is it not? I mean technically if they owned a copy of filter forge they could distribute them. But to direct them to this site to grab the textures? I think I specifically read that is prohibited.

Yep I think it is in a way...The way that site looks to me is that they are pointing to FF as the app that created those textures...At least they do link back to the filters FF page.....HOWEVER....I think the watermarks would come in useful is on the webpage images themselves...I have seen other sites (that I won't post) that lead the reader to believe that the images on the filters webpage itself is the free texture..So people would be downloading the filters preveiw without even downloading FF.....

Yes Amethyst your correct, I am not suggesting to disable anything on the trial version.
At least that person has gone to the effort of downloading the trial.

I am talking about the people who want nothing more than to scrape the site of textures with zero investment.

And if you think about it there are what 6000 filters now, with four or five screen presentable
presets on each one. Which gives the scraper over 30,000 free textures that they can just right click and save. I would not be surprised if the FF site here has not become the single
largest (defacto) "free" texture resource site for those willing to just grab what they want.

Which in my opinion does damage to the legitimate users of the program by diminishing the value of its output.

I can see the point of the line "imitation is the sincerest form of flattery." And that some people will say, "hey where did you get that?" and thereby find their way to this site.

But FF is no longer new, and making that many textures available to people to just grab has got to cause at least some people to reason: "Why should I buy this program when I can just grab all these mass textures right here at the site?".
It makes it look like your willing to throw both the filter designers and the program owners under the bus for the purpose of that last bit of public exposure.

And your right CFandM I was only talking about the texture examples here on the site.
My point has nothing to do with designer incentive or anything like that.

Dilla, your points are interesting too. Great idea on the micropayments thing. Perhaps they could use Lindens the SL currency.

The web site I mentioned while it appears has joined the affiliate program is also undermining program sales in exchange for being able to get his website to come up in search under "Free Textures".