I wonder if it's even patentable after Bilski. IANAL, but I'm having trouble figuring out what, exactly, you could claim that would survive reexamination these days? Then again, cleverly worded claims are what people pay the patent lawyers for, so who knows?
Anyhow, I'm glad they found a way to deal with the problem. It's good when people are able to work things out on their own.
Am I the only one who came up with the solution "embed the ads in your game" while reading the description of the problem? Of course, my excitement of having guessed this plot twist faded when I read on about how this was patented. Oh well, I'm sure the real genius was in the Romulan-like cloaking technology they invented to hide the ads in the games.
The solution seems obvious now, but the problem had to be framed that way to get it. I can only speak for myself, but this had not occurred to me before reading the article. I suspect that it would be the same for most -- considering that people argue the positive impact of piracy on business in terms of marketing, not revenue.
The embed-ads-that-travel-with-the-game solution is fairly well known among casual-games developers I think. That doesn't make it a bad idea, but I'd be surprised if it's really patentable, unless the "invisibility" they discuss is particularly novel. I'm not exactly sure what they mean by that part, so hard to say.
Here's a CNET article from 2007 touting the benefits of ads embedded in flash games, one of which is "Even if the game is stolen, even if it runs on a site surrounded by other HTML ads, the ad can still play in-game": http://news.cnet.com/8301-17939_109-9797689-2.html
I think they mean the ads only appear if the animation detects that it's been served from a website other than the original.
I don't think this is especially novel; not for ads but I remember writing code back in the 90s for Java applets to check that they were being served only from the original website.
Originality of solution is not in developing a technology (though getting patent for that might mean it is), but identifying a key problem in business and using technology in an innovative way to solve the problem.
It's also a poor solution! Getting people on your site is much more important than getting people to play your game, because some % of your visitors will return to check out what else you've done. If it's on other sites, they'll return to check out what else is on that site - not your games.
Ads pay out little but you can make decent money out of a site with traction. We don't even bother with ads on a lot of games at http://www.rocksolidarcade.com. The traffic is more important.
I am speaking out of experience. I've done advertising on games that have been played 100 million times around the net, and I've tried directing that traffic back to my own site and profiting from selling games directly. The latter is obscenely more profitable, both in my experience and that of everyone I know.
In terms of success? They took VC and grew very well, we bootstrapped our way to 5 employees without taking a dime. Total investment under a thousand dollars and profitable after a few months. In terms of raw game play counts, I'd bet money on us being ahead.
All in all, I'd rather be in their position not mine, but I guarantee you, the strategy outlined is not the reason why. And their greater success does not mean that I should not be allowed to have an opinion on what I've been doing successfully myself for years!
By the way, if one must always learn from more successful companies, it would be hard to argue the case for Zynga to switch their monetization strategy over to ads.
The point he is making is that people were stealing his games...he was loosing traffic to thieves....he seemed unable to stop this so he turned the problem into a positive.
THey can come after you for licensing. Patents are not a proactical way to Prevent someone from using your technology; they give you a path for getting paid for it.
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"if Virgin Music and EMI etc., would have bought Napster (instead of suing it and closing it down) and then converted the site into their official mp3 website, iTunes would have been a me-too and not the gorilla it is today"
This part is interesting. Not so because of the concrete actors mentioned, but overall. It raises the question about the way the whole film/game/music industry battles piracy. Do You think they too could have found a better way, making it all to their benefit (and profit). Or have they done that already?
If you could go back to 1995 and show even the most open-minded EMI exec the state of business today, I'm not sure that his conclusion wouldn't be they they'd lost - completely.
The music industry has all but completely lost the power over distribution and discovery, and these were the areas that allowed them to pick up a kid off the street and make him a superstar and make people listen to him. When you make somebody a star, it's a bit harder for them to negotiate their salaries, than if you find someone already talented, with a following etc.
The head of the graph is roughly the same height, but it drops off much quicker and the tail is much fatter. Yes, they've more-or-less successfully transitioned to the new reality, but it's a much, much less lucrative reality.
The "music industry" got screwed on like 4 fronts at once. Actual piracy hurt, but the move from $20 CDs to $1 singles killed the "2-4 singles and 6-10 fillers" album model (now you're getting $2 for something you could have gotten $20 for, and sales didn't quintuple), falling production costs made Label Loan Sharking less attractive, and a rise of new distribution venues (MySpace and YouTube, where recorded music is a loss-leader for merch and concert sales) weakened their distribution monopoly.
They could probably survive or solve any one of those problems, but there's no way to survive all four.
The film industry has to wrangle with piracy, but there's still a large entry barrier to make something that looks like it has high production values. Similarly, there are fewer new distribution options, because there's no real "films as a loss leader" business model. They are picking up the pace of innovation with stuff like HD and 3D and 2K/4K precisely so that they can move the goal-posts on production/distribution upstarts. You can throw together a simple romantic comedy with few locations and no special effects for a few hundred thousand, but a HighDef 3-D adventure with city-bending CGI and special effects is gonna set you back piles of money.
Question is whether 2K/4K digital cinema will prove critical quality markers or barriers. Avatar was shot in 1080p and cropped from that to 2.35:1 letterbox for release. Now Avatar doesn't look exactly bad does it?
Now there's inexpensive cloud re-encoding, first i've noticed is http://zencoder.com/ apart from upload speeds, resampling even ridiculously high bitrate video will not be something you need a local cluster or multi socket multi core even to accomplish.
I'm not convinced that the industry buying Napster would have done much but incentivised someone to start over with another illegal sharer.
But, to a certain extent, if i was dealing with a naturall declining business, i'd prefer whack-a-mole to decade long lawsuits which (exp post show) so poor effect for the music biz execs. This isn't so far distant from what pharmas do when a big product runs to off - patent. Lots of R&D in reformulations, lots of trying to stem the generics tide, but it's a fading game, you're just being rational about extending revenues as long as possible.
I think your point about the move to "all singles" is maybe the most powerful. That's the one musicians i know get confused about the most, including one who had a proper "one hit wonder" in the eealy MTV years. I see concern about this as far as the question of audience and composition, i.e. what are you writing and for whom. Though my sample is statistically useless of course. We're only just one generation past the concept album, depnding how you count. Meanwhile the long established artists are simply charging was way way too much for live tickets, so you have a problem as to the context in which your music is presented which i think is more confidence destroying for some than revenue declines. (my artist sample are already comfortable financially)
I'm unconvinced wholly as to the value of 2K and above home distribution. I suppose that living in a expensive crowded city, i simply don't have the room size to view any benefits. Oft cited is the 8 line pair per mm limit of human visual acuity, which - i ought to check - may be optimum, or a kind of 20:20 average. (i'd sure buy well above 2K projectors of control room use though, if i could afford, but you can always just get more of what's affordable in that scenario)
As or surviving, as far as i recall, in total volume terms, i though that CDs and DVDs were actually growing a some 10% a year. This was a article in the FT a couple years back. Anyone got recent figures? There was also the leaked MPAA slide deck of the amazing margin improvement DVDs provided which accreted steadily after the VHS phase-out. Those recalled bits of info (recollection to vague to asert them as data) ought to be very attractive aspects. If you want to see a group of musicians dying financially, try UK based classical performers / composers. The collection agency in the UK decreed that they'd not bother any more with <500 seat venues, meaning no collections from the vast majority of such performances. That was same time they stopped a tiny percentage riser that used to be a subsidy to their arena of music to protect it, or at leass cushion it. Think it was a 3% bonus of collected receipts, so in actual bare numbers a small amount. But that was certainly a double-whammy for a complete group of artists, decided upon by a SONY et.al. board of the PRS, and in my mind wholly gratuitous. The big industry arguments were they were loosing so much to piracy and to inefficiencies in collection they had to do this to save themselves, and why should they subsidise folk and classical performers anyhow? This, from an agency with legal monopoly, where the only usual alternative musical broadcaster is the BBC who are legally permitted to broadcast works and negotiate after, and which agency are not only amazingly slow to collect but i think disinclined to collect for small guys. I think had a similar stunt been pulled in the US, you'd have had a lot of prominent artists campaigning...
The film industry's high entry barrier is getting much, much lower. An Avid editing workstation now costs < $10k, they used to be more like $50k. At this years NAB, DaVinci (high-end color correcting software), went from being a $200k Linux system, to a $1k software package to be run on a Mac Pro you already own.
2K DPX is now doable on a (high end) NAS system where previously you needed a high end SAN with Fibre Channel, and Nvidia's Cuda makes a system that can do do "city-bending CGI and special effects" positively affordable.
@all - Quick points to clarify - my partner and I have 'filed' for patent but not received it yet. The concept is not unique in itself - the auto switch from visible to invisible is. As a fully funded VC company, any patent is value creating - the intention is obviously to use the patent tag to then seriously license the solution to folks like Viacom etc.
if (HOST != MYSERVER) { show_ad(); }
This is silly.
I congratulate you for writing an interesting blog post and I can understand that one would like to obtain a monopoly if he's found a working business model, yet I consider such a practice to be highly unethical.
You are right in thinking that you deserve to reap the benefits after you've found a solution to that problem. You truly do. But you're wrong in drawing the conclusion that you've somehow acquired the right to shut out your competition.
I won't argue with your viewpoint of the patent system, but at some level I can understand why the OP did this. India is not a good place to do business especially if you're a software company which is centered around being a hotbed for innovation. The legal system is so slow that nuclear fusion would have been invented by the time your case is resolved.
Down here it is common for people to copy your code by reverse engineering or some other method and use it blatantly in their products, because they know that you can't go after them. What a patent does is that it gives that aura of security. I think that the indian govt. is trying to setup a fast track court to deal with patent disputes in order to be globally competitive. So, people are less likely to mess with you if you have that bit over there.
In his point of view it is a defense tactic necessary for the survival of his company. It is doubtful that his company would survive beyond a point if it doesn't protect itself like this. I know this is wrong in so many ways, but try to explain this to the trolls.
I can understand the desire to get a monopoly too, as I've pointed out. But I also fail to see how the situation is any different in the rest of the world. Don't let minor differences fool you. This is simply a case of a lack of innovation and therefore they have no edge over their competition.
This ridicules the whole concept of software patents. Where they should protect innovation they simply protect the lack thereof.
If it was the other way around, if they had such a great product that the competition had too much work to do, they wouldn't need a patent in the first place. This is how the rest of the world deals with the problem.
Now we know that having the best product is not a guarantee for success. And that's where that unethical edge-taking via patents comes into play.
The problem is that you're assuming that everyone is playing a level headed game with you. I was born and raised in India. Even though I grew up elsewhere inside my head, I've seen stuff that is so far out that I really couldn't believe my eyes.
I've seen my father pile money into a black bag for his boss in order to bribe a certain famous politician. Why? Well, they wanted to win the bid for supplying security gear to a certain infrastructural branch. I snorted in disbelief and I was promptly rushed out of the room.
I've seen people copy and paste code for a living in a company. I've seen family businesses that are hardly above being a gray mafia. I've seen people burn their books every year to evade tax, and I've seen tax officials get richer and richer all the time.
Do you want me to continue?
It is true that such stuff happens every where, but over here it is taken as the birth right of a company to do so. As long as they have money in their pockets no one can touch them. This is where scare tactics come in.
Whether or not his company is innovative is a question that comes into play only when other people are competing in the same way. Trust me he has done something extremely bold down here, but the trolls have more money and less expenses. They don't need to hire people to develop stuff. They just copy whatever he makes and bribe the officials so that they can get away.
If a patent deters them even one bit and allows him to thrive then I think it is logical for him to do so. Right or wrong comes into the equation when certain basic parameters are met.
Personally, I can't live like this and the minute I get an opportunity I will pack my bags and leave. I want to spend my time creating beautiful things not fighting trolls in the name of running a "business". So, in a way I applaud him for standing his ground and fighting to make it down here. At the same time I condemn him, but can I really blame him?
Just to make it clear, I do not judge the guy and I find the way the blog post was written pleasureful. One of the better reads I've come across recently. I can also envision being in a situation where I would make the same decision even if I hated it. It's not his fault that this easily abused tool exists.
Thank you for sharing your indian point of view. :-) At first I failed to see how all those local issues make a difference. That is because the whole problem translates flawlessly to a global context and I focused that context alone.
It's not hard to imagine that the inhibition threshold is much lower in an environment like the one you described.
@disguisedcoder I really hope that I didn't come off as a rude jerk or something. I know that it is difficult to understand how much your environment shapes the decisions you need to take in order to survive.
>>>your indian point of view<<<
That's the problem. I was born here. I've stayed here all my life, but it's like I've grown up elsewhere. Somewhere in my head. Try to understand something I don't represent the average indian view, and neither do I have any feelings of patriotism or stuff like that. I don't get choked up over national flags, parades or holidays. As George Carlin would say they are symbols and I leave symbols to the simple minded.
So, don't take me as a representative of India or anything like that. I just observe and move on. Earlier I used to get fired up, but now I realize; what's the use?
Don't worry. :-)
It's funny that everything discussed here is globally applicable. I'm not patriotism-crazy either. Your view added at least another insight into the motivation of such a move (patenting).
It's a bit more complicated than a simple formula, but certainly more productive than serving "cease and desist" orders when it comes to protecting IP.
We're a start-up, and we aim to innovate and build value. If we do patents, the objective is not to monopolize but more like an old Arab saying, "Trust in God, but tie up your camel".
When was it filed exactly? I first did this in 2007. And I have to say, I considered it obvious at the time (the difference is I show an ad for my site, rather than generic ads). Do you have a link to the filing?
I've only played a little bit with a flash decompiler.
Calls to the standard library and globals (like mouseX), etc. will remain as is. So my guess is that it would be not too hard to alter.
But I'd be surprised if such simple measures wouldn't cut off the majority of leechers. Though as soon as one cracked version shows up on the internet, the whole maneuver is rendered futile.
This is indeed an interesting topic, especially considering the options a) run everywhere and show my ads (mochiads, cpmstar, ...?) or b) run only at my site so I get all the traffic (not sure if this is compatible with those ad-servers).
Well... this reminds me of the drm-struggle. Although the negative impact for the enduser is a lot smaller (dysfunctional swf on a leecher site?), you'd have to ask yourself how much time you'd like to spend with the arms race rather than implementing features, fixing bugs or writing new games. As a "content provider" there is probably no other way to keep sanity other than accepting theft to some degree.
AFAIK decompiling and recompiling a SWF into something that works and looks the same as the original is not particularly do-able (unless you feel like reimplementing most of the code yourself). Certainly, for most of these sites that steal Flash games, it would be far more work than they are willing to put in (their business is all about easy money, after all).
This is technological Aikido, the Japanese martial art that can be roughly translated as "the way of harmonious energy". One of its more well-known practitioners wrote a book called 'Aikido in Everyday Life: Giving In to Get Your Way'. This could probably be a case study for the next edition.
Why not just check the request URL, and if it doesn't match your domain, or a domain of your affiliate, display an invalid domain screen instead of the game?
Toss in a frame breakout script for good measure.
Doesn't seem like a very difficult problem to fix.
It works against the most popular Flash Decompilers. So hackers will not be able to decompile my code. Although I think that experienced hacker can crack the file anyway.
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[ 3.5 ms ] story [ 123 ms ] threadAnyhow, I'm glad they found a way to deal with the problem. It's good when people are able to work things out on their own.
Here's a CNET article from 2007 touting the benefits of ads embedded in flash games, one of which is "Even if the game is stolen, even if it runs on a site surrounded by other HTML ads, the ad can still play in-game": http://news.cnet.com/8301-17939_109-9797689-2.html
I don't think this is especially novel; not for ads but I remember writing code back in the 90s for Java applets to check that they were being served only from the original website.
Ads pay out little but you can make decent money out of a site with traction. We don't even bother with ads on a lot of games at http://www.rocksolidarcade.com. The traffic is more important.
In terms of success? They took VC and grew very well, we bootstrapped our way to 5 employees without taking a dime. Total investment under a thousand dollars and profitable after a few months. In terms of raw game play counts, I'd bet money on us being ahead.
All in all, I'd rather be in their position not mine, but I guarantee you, the strategy outlined is not the reason why. And their greater success does not mean that I should not be allowed to have an opinion on what I've been doing successfully myself for years!
By the way, if one must always learn from more successful companies, it would be hard to argue the case for Zynga to switch their monetization strategy over to ads.
but what does their patent mean? if i deploy this solution for my own games, or make a business deploying it for others, will they come after me?
Welcome to Rodinhood Inspired by Rodin who sculpted the Thinker and Robin Hood who delivered. Hence Rodin+Hood. Enjoy my blogs, contribute by commenting and sending me stuff that I could publish!
This part is interesting. Not so because of the concrete actors mentioned, but overall. It raises the question about the way the whole film/game/music industry battles piracy. Do You think they too could have found a better way, making it all to their benefit (and profit). Or have they done that already?
The music industry has all but completely lost the power over distribution and discovery, and these were the areas that allowed them to pick up a kid off the street and make him a superstar and make people listen to him. When you make somebody a star, it's a bit harder for them to negotiate their salaries, than if you find someone already talented, with a following etc.
The head of the graph is roughly the same height, but it drops off much quicker and the tail is much fatter. Yes, they've more-or-less successfully transitioned to the new reality, but it's a much, much less lucrative reality.
They could probably survive or solve any one of those problems, but there's no way to survive all four.
The film industry has to wrangle with piracy, but there's still a large entry barrier to make something that looks like it has high production values. Similarly, there are fewer new distribution options, because there's no real "films as a loss leader" business model. They are picking up the pace of innovation with stuff like HD and 3D and 2K/4K precisely so that they can move the goal-posts on production/distribution upstarts. You can throw together a simple romantic comedy with few locations and no special effects for a few hundred thousand, but a HighDef 3-D adventure with city-bending CGI and special effects is gonna set you back piles of money.
Now there's inexpensive cloud re-encoding, first i've noticed is http://zencoder.com/ apart from upload speeds, resampling even ridiculously high bitrate video will not be something you need a local cluster or multi socket multi core even to accomplish.
I'm not convinced that the industry buying Napster would have done much but incentivised someone to start over with another illegal sharer.
But, to a certain extent, if i was dealing with a naturall declining business, i'd prefer whack-a-mole to decade long lawsuits which (exp post show) so poor effect for the music biz execs. This isn't so far distant from what pharmas do when a big product runs to off - patent. Lots of R&D in reformulations, lots of trying to stem the generics tide, but it's a fading game, you're just being rational about extending revenues as long as possible.
I think your point about the move to "all singles" is maybe the most powerful. That's the one musicians i know get confused about the most, including one who had a proper "one hit wonder" in the eealy MTV years. I see concern about this as far as the question of audience and composition, i.e. what are you writing and for whom. Though my sample is statistically useless of course. We're only just one generation past the concept album, depnding how you count. Meanwhile the long established artists are simply charging was way way too much for live tickets, so you have a problem as to the context in which your music is presented which i think is more confidence destroying for some than revenue declines. (my artist sample are already comfortable financially)
I'm unconvinced wholly as to the value of 2K and above home distribution. I suppose that living in a expensive crowded city, i simply don't have the room size to view any benefits. Oft cited is the 8 line pair per mm limit of human visual acuity, which - i ought to check - may be optimum, or a kind of 20:20 average. (i'd sure buy well above 2K projectors of control room use though, if i could afford, but you can always just get more of what's affordable in that scenario)
As or surviving, as far as i recall, in total volume terms, i though that CDs and DVDs were actually growing a some 10% a year. This was a article in the FT a couple years back. Anyone got recent figures? There was also the leaked MPAA slide deck of the amazing margin improvement DVDs provided which accreted steadily after the VHS phase-out. Those recalled bits of info (recollection to vague to asert them as data) ought to be very attractive aspects. If you want to see a group of musicians dying financially, try UK based classical performers / composers. The collection agency in the UK decreed that they'd not bother any more with <500 seat venues, meaning no collections from the vast majority of such performances. That was same time they stopped a tiny percentage riser that used to be a subsidy to their arena of music to protect it, or at leass cushion it. Think it was a 3% bonus of collected receipts, so in actual bare numbers a small amount. But that was certainly a double-whammy for a complete group of artists, decided upon by a SONY et.al. board of the PRS, and in my mind wholly gratuitous. The big industry arguments were they were loosing so much to piracy and to inefficiencies in collection they had to do this to save themselves, and why should they subsidise folk and classical performers anyhow? This, from an agency with legal monopoly, where the only usual alternative musical broadcaster is the BBC who are legally permitted to broadcast works and negotiate after, and which agency are not only amazingly slow to collect but i think disinclined to collect for small guys. I think had a similar stunt been pulled in the US, you'd have had a lot of prominent artists campaigning...
2K DPX is now doable on a (high end) NAS system where previously you needed a high end SAN with Fibre Channel, and Nvidia's Cuda makes a system that can do do "city-bending CGI and special effects" positively affordable.
I congratulate you for writing an interesting blog post and I can understand that one would like to obtain a monopoly if he's found a working business model, yet I consider such a practice to be highly unethical.
You are right in thinking that you deserve to reap the benefits after you've found a solution to that problem. You truly do. But you're wrong in drawing the conclusion that you've somehow acquired the right to shut out your competition.
Software patents are a sham(e).
Down here it is common for people to copy your code by reverse engineering or some other method and use it blatantly in their products, because they know that you can't go after them. What a patent does is that it gives that aura of security. I think that the indian govt. is trying to setup a fast track court to deal with patent disputes in order to be globally competitive. So, people are less likely to mess with you if you have that bit over there.
In his point of view it is a defense tactic necessary for the survival of his company. It is doubtful that his company would survive beyond a point if it doesn't protect itself like this. I know this is wrong in so many ways, but try to explain this to the trolls.
This ridicules the whole concept of software patents. Where they should protect innovation they simply protect the lack thereof. If it was the other way around, if they had such a great product that the competition had too much work to do, they wouldn't need a patent in the first place. This is how the rest of the world deals with the problem.
Now we know that having the best product is not a guarantee for success. And that's where that unethical edge-taking via patents comes into play.
The problem is that you're assuming that everyone is playing a level headed game with you. I was born and raised in India. Even though I grew up elsewhere inside my head, I've seen stuff that is so far out that I really couldn't believe my eyes.
I've seen my father pile money into a black bag for his boss in order to bribe a certain famous politician. Why? Well, they wanted to win the bid for supplying security gear to a certain infrastructural branch. I snorted in disbelief and I was promptly rushed out of the room.
I've seen people copy and paste code for a living in a company. I've seen family businesses that are hardly above being a gray mafia. I've seen people burn their books every year to evade tax, and I've seen tax officials get richer and richer all the time.
Do you want me to continue?
It is true that such stuff happens every where, but over here it is taken as the birth right of a company to do so. As long as they have money in their pockets no one can touch them. This is where scare tactics come in.
Whether or not his company is innovative is a question that comes into play only when other people are competing in the same way. Trust me he has done something extremely bold down here, but the trolls have more money and less expenses. They don't need to hire people to develop stuff. They just copy whatever he makes and bribe the officials so that they can get away.
If a patent deters them even one bit and allows him to thrive then I think it is logical for him to do so. Right or wrong comes into the equation when certain basic parameters are met.
Personally, I can't live like this and the minute I get an opportunity I will pack my bags and leave. I want to spend my time creating beautiful things not fighting trolls in the name of running a "business". So, in a way I applaud him for standing his ground and fighting to make it down here. At the same time I condemn him, but can I really blame him?
Thank you for sharing your indian point of view. :-) At first I failed to see how all those local issues make a difference. That is because the whole problem translates flawlessly to a global context and I focused that context alone.
It's not hard to imagine that the inhibition threshold is much lower in an environment like the one you described.
>>>your indian point of view<<<
That's the problem. I was born here. I've stayed here all my life, but it's like I've grown up elsewhere. Somewhere in my head. Try to understand something I don't represent the average indian view, and neither do I have any feelings of patriotism or stuff like that. I don't get choked up over national flags, parades or holidays. As George Carlin would say they are symbols and I leave symbols to the simple minded.
So, don't take me as a representative of India or anything like that. I just observe and move on. Earlier I used to get fired up, but now I realize; what's the use?
Anyway, thank you for replying.
We're a start-up, and we aim to innovate and build value. If we do patents, the objective is not to monopolize but more like an old Arab saying, "Trust in God, but tie up your camel".
:(
all start ups lose?
to the mine shafts!
I've seen it with Desktop tower defense. Can't tell I appreciate it, but it should help fighting theft.
Though, is it really that hard to crack? (wrt to code obfuscation) Any experience from flash developers?
Calls to the standard library and globals (like mouseX), etc. will remain as is. So my guess is that it would be not too hard to alter. But I'd be surprised if such simple measures wouldn't cut off the majority of leechers. Though as soon as one cracked version shows up on the internet, the whole maneuver is rendered futile.
This is indeed an interesting topic, especially considering the options a) run everywhere and show my ads (mochiads, cpmstar, ...?) or b) run only at my site so I get all the traffic (not sure if this is compatible with those ad-servers).
Well... this reminds me of the drm-struggle. Although the negative impact for the enduser is a lot smaller (dysfunctional swf on a leecher site?), you'd have to ask yourself how much time you'd like to spend with the arms race rather than implementing features, fixing bugs or writing new games. As a "content provider" there is probably no other way to keep sanity other than accepting theft to some degree.
Toss in a frame breakout script for good measure.
Doesn't seem like a very difficult problem to fix.
Of course, maybe they could've embedded a "phone home" check or something.
It works against the most popular Flash Decompilers. So hackers will not be able to decompile my code. Although I think that experienced hacker can crack the file anyway.