Hi Good People,
Recently I discovered by chance that a volume of some of the best Ford Tri-Motor Project products had been poached from either the big sites (that we authorised to distribute some components of the Ford Stuff) or from the Ford Site itself and was being illegally distributed by an unauthorised web site.
I will not give this "suck and publish" site the advantage of FREE advertisement and traffic by naming the site - suffice to say that they have been made aware of the consequence of their illegal publications and have promptly removed all of the unauthorised Ford Project related product from their site.
Edward and I carefully monitor the "download" numbers from our site and the authorised sites and from that make decisions on what is popular and warrants new and further development along that particular path. Those that appear to be not so popular go onto the backburner.
This pirate site facilitated several thousand downloads of stuff that we did not know about - one product had over three times the downloads from the pirate site than we had in total for that product and in the other cases more than twice as many downloads as we had records for.
Several of the Scenery Packs (totalling over 1000 downloads) were missing critical components - AI Traffic, building models and textures which are provided by other packs available from the Ford Site. This disadvantaged the downloader and would have implied that our product is faulty.
This also seriously skewed our perspective on what was popular and therefore some important projects were stalled because of our incorrect understanding fostered by this piracy.
In a nutshell - because of the illegal distribution without consent or authorisation the Ford Project has had some very serious impacts for simmers and our current and future developments.
Another consequence for the simming community is that they are possibly missing out on their expectations of what The Ford Project Team is currently developing and what we will develop in the future.
The Ford Tri-Motor Project site is a vast and overall very complex project with many interactive components and everything is provided totally FREE.
The projects exists for your flight sim enjoyment - to ensure quality and development paths to suit your preferences we need to be selective about the distribution agents we use to ensure the products we make available are complete and recorded as legitimate downloads.
The only authorised sites for distribution of our products are the Ford Tri-Motor Project Site, http://www.GJSmith.net, and the following sites that have specially selected releases: http://www.Flightsim.com, http://www.AVSIM.com, http://www.Simviation.com and http://www.sim-outhouse.com
If you have downloaded anything related to the Ford Tri-Motor Project from any "unauthorised" site then please feel free to visit the Ford site (http://www.ford-tri-motor.net) and obtain the genuine and complete products for your needs.
Any Ford Project product that you may come across that you think may be from an unauthorised site please send us a quick e-mail and we will resolve the problem.
Your support in this matter will help us to maintain and continue to provide the best product we can for your enjoyment.
Sorry for the "wordy" thread but Piracy has many and varied impacts on our work as it does on other developers work and needed some clarifications.
Regards
Edward and Garry
Your Ford Project Team.
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