[CommonBlob]

To be honest im not sure where to post this, so ive gone to the nice hidden area where proven developers lurk :)

I put my app out for beta testing on WPCentral a week or 2 ago and got a few people interested (not much feedback though!) However 1 guy was interested and gave some initial feedback, he then told me he could translate it and he had uploaded the xap onto his Chinese piracy forum!

WOW. Thanks!

So be wary of people who wanting to beta test your apps, because they might just steal them and give them to everyone.

Moderator/Admin, feel free to decide what to do about the person, if you want more details please PM me as I don't want to name and shame if people are ok with this.

[CommonBlob]

He has now apologised and removed the download. I genuinely think that he thought it would be fine. Hmm, guess there is a big cultural difference in China!

[Stiv]

Thanks for the heads up! I would definitely be wary of ever providing the XAP file to anyone I didn't know since there's nothing stopping them uploading it to the marketplace.

Thankfully in this case it sounds like he was just trying to be a little too helpful :)

[CommonBlob]

Thanks for the heads up! I would definitely be wary of ever providing the XAP file to anyone I didn't know since there's nothing stopping them uploading it to the marketplace.

Thankfully in this case it sounds like he was just trying to be a little too helpful :)

That's the thing, I didn't provide the XAP, I used Microsoft's beta on apphub. He just ripped it off.

[Stiv]

Oh wow... Ok that's not cool at all!

[selfcreation]

yeah , not much we can do for that, some country have different laws that allow or... does not disallow these things. so its hard to control.

if he post links to his Warez/piracy website here on WPcentral , then we can BAN/give infractions.

what I would suggest is to try to add the BETA games/apps to a SINGLE e-mail or set a LIMIT of downloads that can be done ,

now obviously some people can still hack it but at lease this way you can TRY to protect your self's


this does suck doh :(

[yanglee]

I'm Chinese, just come across this thread.

About Chinese law. I guess that is illegal on paper but legal in practice. I guess as long as he didn't sell it, he should be safe. That's way there are tons of piracy websites in China.

I guess the gov. doesn't care as long as the victims are Westerners. Pirating/stealing Western programs/technologies causes positive effects to China's GDP (negative effects to Western countries' GDP of course).

About Chinese culture. I remember about 5~10 years ago, if someone paid for a program (no matter the price), he/she could be called '*****' by other Chinese. The situation has changed a little in the past several years. Now, it seems only the ones who paid expensive programs could be called '*****'.

But still most Chinese (I guess >95%) won't pay for software. But that also means <5% of Chinese might be willing to pay, its still a big market.


Update:

Well it seems the gov. does care. One of the largest (if not the largest) Chinese piracy website VeryCD (has been operating for 9 years since 2003) has just removed all their piracy downloads (movies, music, anime, software...), because the gov. asked them to do so.

You can still see movies, music... on their homepage, but the download links are removed. Instead, they are now cooperating with publishers to provide paid service of genuine movies, music...

It seems they are not fined for piracy (not surprised).


Update (2012-09-27):

Well, VeryCD has just restored their piracy download links of music, anime and software...