Sound advice DbS!("Holy crap! What if...) Let's take it a step further! Everybody involved should take a month off, grab free netspace (Renderosity Admin. has graciously supplied us with a list of free space providers), post their own stuff on it and charge folks a nominal annual membership fee (maybe $10.00?) to have access to the passworded files. Those who are hosting other people's stuff, if they are truly interested in protecting the rights of their contributors, would not make their contributors' work available any longer. This might not sound like much but look at the column to the right. Is anyone going to want to cough up $10 to each of those sites for the "privilege" of hopefully selling enough stolen stuff to make up his losses? We can all support each other by adding links to each other's sites, but only with permission, of course. This won't stop this particular clown, or anybody else that has already downloaded enough stuff to start his/her own pirate site, but the operatave term here is "already downloaded". See y'all in a month :)

There's a plan! could fly! Comments folks?

I have a question. How is this thief taking payment? Is he taking credit card payments? If so, has anyone thought about talking to the credit card companies about cutting him off?

Your opinion is valid and respected, Allerleirauh. I'm in no position to cough up 10 bucks a site either. Equally, though, my hd is choking on my own rabid downloading of free stuff (including some of your work) in the hopes of being, someday, talented enough to do it justice. Each will make a decision that best suits the circumstances for them. Personally, I admire you, Roshigoth and others who aren't going to let this weasel shove you around. The plan that I outlined, and Winslow so efficiently elaborated upon is for those that do. Cheers! :)

If I had 10$ I'd buy food with it, not models

Is there some way to set downloads to serially number the items, I wonder... Then any illegal copies would have the same number and be tracable... I guess it would have to be some sort of server side script though, and could be hacked... Still, a thought. And both cheaper and more practical than the membership fee thing, IMO.

I wonder if Renderosity's (and other website) servers can be rigged to reject connections from ISP's that tolerate dirtbags in thier ranks? I'm pretty sure each ISP gets a fixed pool of IP addresses that they assign from as needed when users connect. Maybe whenever anybody from one of the bad ISPs came here, instead of the website they'd get a message saying they can't be allowed access because thier ISP knowingly hosts thieves.

it won't do any good to lock out the bad ISP's. they can just connect through another ISP (most people don't have their sites hosted from the same place they get their net connection)

We just need to drive this guy out of business and have him serve as an object lesson to other fools that think they want to do the same thing. I don't really get how he has the gall to charge for doing this. I mean, I have polytrans and at least two modeling programs that I can import nearly anything into and export as almost any format. It might take me all of 30 seconds. And for this he charges money? That makes no sense to me.