Home › Forums › Archives › Instant Messaging › AIM Support › Show your support for BigBlueBall Smiler!
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April 15, 2003 at 2:19 pm #63439newrisedesignsMember
Copyright on what?
“Smilies” aren’t exclusive intellectual property. If that was the case, Yahoo! should sue AOL Time Warner (if AOL hasn’t bought Yahoo! already) for infringing on their rights.
Is the “running man” on any of those pages? I hope not. That’s about as far as their legal extent goes. Even that’s murky.
Rumors say that AOL isn’t making the money they want off of the AIM-end of instant messaging. They would be fools to damage their fanbase – the only group of people able to pull them out of the hole.
And you remind the attorney of that.
April 15, 2003 at 2:47 pm #63437AlloweeParticipantJeff, how did you get the code for those smilies?
you didn’t rip it from there program. that would be some kind of cracking and against the law….
so all i can think of is that you used a legal way of getting those codes.
AOL: omg, they have *aim* or *aol* on there site. lets look if we can shut down that site
April 15, 2003 at 4:01 pm #63434TracerMemberGetting the SML code is easy, really don’t think it is a crack. All you need is a buddy from AOL 8.0 to send you an IM with one of the new Smileys and have a AIM add-on that allows you to log messages. Then open the log file in notepad and you will see the SML font code used by AIM/AOL to know which Smiley face to display. The graphic images themselves are stored in a directory named Bart Cache and then look for a directory named 1024, you will see files with a number code. Just add the extension .ZIP to it and open it with a zip program you will see all the 19×19 pixel gif images that are used to display in your IM.
What is sad is the web site I had, offered the Smiley Sets, which you could use right within AIM. You just had to have an AOL screen name or subscribe to AOL’s new AIM Expression service to use them. In either case AOL was getting money from the users that were using Smiley Sets.
On the statement the AIM is free service, it really isn’t it is AD-Ware, sure one can hack aim or add an add-on to remove the ads but in reality the product is still supported by advertisers. I really don’t think AOL would continue to offer it if they weren’t making some money on it and actually are probably making a profit from AIM.
April 15, 2003 at 4:07 pm #63418detn8rParticipantaol isnt making enough money on their services, so they think the only way to make their money back is to sue them… and thats whats happening.
April 15, 2003 at 6:42 pm #63425thecanuckMemberyahoo is better anyways.
April 15, 2003 at 8:22 pm #63442CharlesMemberIn my opinion, AOL has their heads so far shoved up their asses that they wouldn’t know a smiler if it f*ck*n sat on their heads. They are too busy laying off people and trying to boost their income that they will do anything for money. They should be sued for false advertisement. A motto that says ‘It’s so easy to use, no wonder it’s #1!’ tells you something right off. Their dial-up service is $23.90 a month. It isn’t even that cool or easy. They could also be sued for many more things.
April 15, 2003 at 10:23 pm #63432fuzzface00MemberThe war continues…
(Note: if someone thinks I have my facts wrong, please feel free to correct me)
— Back when MSN was in its initial releases, AOL recoded their AIM servers to prevent the MSN client from connecting to AIM.
— Trillian had the same problem as it grabbed market share away from the AIM client.
— At one time AOL was supporting the open source community through the release of TiK and prior to that the first JAVA AIM clients. That support, and the people behind it, has disappeared. Prior to the end of support, TiK developers come up with the stock ticker, news ticker, weather and several other “future” AIM features.
— gAIM was ordered to stop using the Running Man icon on its software, even though it was the only compiled UNIX client at the time.
— AOL is strongly encouraged by the FCC to open up the AIM service to other clients as part of anti-trust (etc) negotiations. After some baby steps, that effort disappears.
— AIM Expressions begins as a cute add-on. Now beginning to shape up as a method to try and make money on something that (let us face it) doesn’t have a ton of value.
— Development of non-windows “official AIM clients” continues to lag behind the Windows application.
— AOL is now looking for ways to provide Video by bypassing “the letter” of FCC anti-trust issues.In my humble opinion, this is yet another example of AOL proclaiming “Our Way, We Get The Money, Or Get Out Of Our Sandbox.” It is pretty sad since they seem to be attacking their biggest fans and supporters (e.g. increasing their market share). Ultimately a no-win situation for everyone.
The smart play for AOL would be to provide the ability for sites (such as this) to license certain AOL trademarks (et al) for non-commercial use. This is what game companies do for fan sites. They should recognize sites like this for the added value they are getting for free, not as a threat to their empire.
Cheers,
Fuzz
(AIM user, AOL user, AIM Expressions user, Original author of CNN newsfeed code for TiK, and Old Goat)April 15, 2003 at 10:55 pm #63427Spider_manMemberfuzzface00, those are some very interesting points,even though I can’t completely confirm their validity, they are interesting nonetheless. AOL more than likely has been violating several anti-trust/anti-monopoly laws, and should suffer the same fate as Microsoft; a thorough investigation and possibly a break up of the company, or a more fair distribution of their power and money.
April 16, 2003 at 12:08 am #63448AvalancheParticipantaim
v. aimed, aim·ing, aims
v. tr.
To direct (a weapon) toward an intended target.
To direct toward or intend for a particular goal or group😮 AIM is on dictonary.com 😮
Oh yeah AOL this (R) doesn’t mean this ®
And anyone who has AOL shut thier site down, made youke any thing off thier site, or just bitched to you Email me the site or the thing they bitched about to [email protected]
AOL will regret it.
And I say we find anything in thier software that is even the littlest not thiers. AND THEN SUE THEM!
Go BIGBLUEBALL!
April 16, 2003 at 12:43 am #63431fuzzface00MemberI included the disclaimer because I wanted to avoid the inevitable “I read it on the Internet, it must be true!” problem. To my knowledge everything I said is accurate, but better be safe than sorry.
Maybe I should clarify one thing. At the time TiK was being worked on, we were proud that some of our ideas were making into mainstream AIM client development. It was later when TiK got shot down when I got grumbly about it 🙂
On a related note from earlier in the thread, I’ve cruised a few websites today that are related to AIM and have “aim” in their domain name. And with the exception of aimsmileys.com (mentioned earlier) I haven’t found anyone else who has mentioned an attorney’s letter. Maybe I am looking in the wrong place ? Opinions ? It seems strange that I can find plenty of places where the “Running Man” is being ‘misused’ and domain names with “AIM” in them. And yet, many of those folks don’t look like they are being bothered by AOL. Is this just about the smilies ?
April 16, 2003 at 2:48 am #63433TracerMemberRight now it looks like they are after the sites that made accessing the new Smileys easy to the end user. But, who is to say they won’t go after other web sites that have aim in the domain name or pictures (screen shots) from AOL products. What upsets me more than anything is sites like this and mine are designed to help improve the Instant Messaging experience and make using AIM enjoyable.
April 16, 2003 at 3:55 am #63415Jeff HesterKeymasterHas anyone heard of any other AIM-related sites contacted besides BigBlueBall.com and AimSmileys.com?
April 16, 2003 at 8:13 pm #63430fuzzface00MemberFWIW, I tried to get slashdot.org to carry an article about “AOL Lawyers versus AIM Fan Sites”, but in typical slashdot.org fashion it was rejected.
OTOH, it probably would have kicked the bandwidth usage here through the room.
I’ve done some poking around, but I have yet to see any other sites that have gotten hit with a C&D.
April 17, 2003 at 12:34 am #63440shodgesMemberDamn AOL, Damn you to hell!! If you want to make money stop sending the m-ing f-ing g-damn cd’s in those bastard tins to my house!!! Stop trying to screw people out of $9.95 a year to use your damn smiley’s, it’s just HTML code and as stated any of us can get it at any point in time, you’re lucky there is only one site, if this site gets shut down I’ll go through the list of free ISP’s and post a site on every damn one of them –0catch.com, myjspace.com, coolfreepages.com, geocities.com, and any other domain giving away free webspace, and there will be 5,000 copycat sites as well, all because you are trying to put this one site out of business, it ain’t going to work, look what happened when Napster was shut down, now you have KaZaA, Morpheus, Audiogalaxy, Gnutella and 50 others…… Go ahead and try…..
April 17, 2003 at 5:23 am #63449archergurl89ParticipantOMG, I love using the bg blue ball AIM smilies. they are soo great. I think I would hate the AOL people if they dont let us use it anymore…:mad:–upset
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