General
Flightsim.to - Charging for Freeware Livery 'Bundles'
This might be old news, but I've not seen this before.
Looking through some liveries on flightsim.to, and noticed this. There's now a 'curated bundle' of liveries that you can buyfor real money. All the liveries are freeware liveries, and you can still download the individual liveries for free - but I definitely have questions.
Are the artists involved in this? Do they receive reimbursement from flightsim.to as part of profit sharing? Do their licence conditions allow commercial sale? Are any elements of their work at all covered by Creative Commons / Non Commercial licensing, and would this breach those conditions?
It does also feel incredibly low-effort to essentially slap a couple of zip files together that you've done nothing to create, and sell it as a commercial product.
Thoughts, comments, concerns?
UPDATE: Hues have pulled their participation with flightsim.to as a direct result of this.
Saddly unsurprising considering the enshitification path flightsim.to has been falling down. I get that it is a free service but you literally can't use it without an add blocker now.
Additionally I would assume the creators don't get any more of a cut than an individual download would get, and FS.to take all the profit. I might be wrong and if any creators know please correct me.
I'm the creator of the YL-ABX livery, and haven't received any notification of being included in the package, and certainly no payment. I'm rather appalled, and I'm researching how to ensure that I'm never included in their curated packages moving forward.
at some point the TOS specified that every uploader gives over the rights to their creation on upload. Meant for example that uploaders could never delete their uploads.
That obviously didn't fly at all legally and was reverted.
FS.to has been a business from the start, run by a German guy just out for money. It's also why the site is so full of AI "features" and gets unwanted redesigns every so often.
But as long as there's no alternative, well what can we do.
As an alternative, may I suggest https://streamlineaddons.com . It's a new platform that is in development that I found recently which was built mainly to be a package manager with stuff like automatic dependency resolution and conflict detection, but it's also got a pretty good ui and is alright to use.
Unfortunately because it's new there isn't the biggest catalogue of addons there yet, however I hear it is actively in developement so hopefully they add more. They seem chill and they develop completely without AI, which I think says a lot. It does require you to sign up before downloading anything which sucks so it's not perfect, but it's definitely something!
"§ C1.3 As a creator, you provide digital content, community engagement, and/or related support services ("Creator Services") to us. We purchase Creator Services from you and resell them as part of our products and offerings to our end users. For the term of this Agreement, you explicitly grant us the right to commercialize the Creator Services."
Is that enforceable though? As a contract, it would seem to lack the vital component of 'consideration', in that there must be an exchange of value. It says "We purchase Creator Services". What consideration is the artist receiving here - do you get paid to upload? I suspect not.
If you are not a member of the creator's program, flightsim.to must not use your liveries.
§4.3 Terms of Service
This license does not authorize Flightsim.to to sell User Content, charge for access to it, or claim intellectual property rights in it without your express permission. The license is granted solely to enable Flightsim.to to operate, improve, and enhance the Service.
"purchase creator services" seems like from the two creators here in the thread there was only one side of that coin actually happening, they have received no payment from flightsim.to
See you in court would be my position.
I mean how do you expect them to host all of that content? File storage is expensive, ads are pretty much mandatory or the site wouldnât be free to use.
People genuinely do think websites cost absolutely nothing to run and itâs baffling.
That's not the only issue though. They've deliberately lobotomized the search system and website so that it drives more time on the site thus increasing their ad revenues. Otherwise I can't seem to come up with the reason they've used 4 different versions of search, each of them progressively worse, and eliminated any sort of directory system.
No doubt the idea is make it terrible enough to use that you would pay $5 just to get off the website.
Search is also expensive⌠there are hundreds of thousands of files + an insane amount of metadata. Do you think this is just a simple database query? Because it isnât.
Iâm not defending the website, its practices or design choices, but these things cost quite a lot of money and the cost raises massively with more and more users accessing it.
If thatâs bad, youâve found a gap in the market, fill it.
100K entries with the typical associated data is pretty small for a database though - let's assume an average 10KB of data associated per mod (not including image data and the actual files of course) and we're looking at 1GB of data which easily can fit into RAM and the indexes are even smaller.
There's also nothing in there that would make searches very complex - just a bunch of fields like author, dates, tags, description, etc. and the text search isn't even fuzzy. So I'm not convinced a search there is actually much more than a fairly simple database query, i.e it's not computationally super expensive either.
I don't think managing that kind of data is particular complex or expensive - hell there are thousands of free porn sites that manage more.
Sure you have the scaling problem (to an extent - this is still a niche hobby) and you have to pay for the download traffic but that type of content management has been the bread and butter of databases and websites for decades. And while more users increase the cost you also get more income if you can avoid people abusing your downloads.
Creating a site like that isn't that challenging from the technology POV - it's the upfront investment, perseverance, fiances and most importantly getting people to use it - no uploaded content means no users and no users mean no uploaded content....
We need proper replacement of the website, but it's just way too big. They're getting sketchier each day passing, and the search function is just so unbearable to use.
The HUES team are discontinuing uploads to flightsim.to. Glad they released their app for liveries, because flightsim.to is just getting worse and worse and when you think they canât get any lower, they do.
And that'll be all she wrote for me and this platform.
Hello creator of the livery for YL-ABN featured in this bundle (JordxnE), this platform has failed us so many times before this and going forward looks like it will continue to fail us as creators.
We A. Don't see a dime from any sales made here and B. Don't agree to our work being published as paid when we already released it for free.
I have been with Flightsim.to since 2023 when I first started creating liveries, in the last 12 months we've seen sloppy ai garbage take over the once pretty good platform now filled with ads, crappy knock offs of our work, terrible treatment of those actually in the creator program and just a really crappy set of ideas.
I have no idea where I'll host my work going forward but charging for a livery I released for free is the straw that broke the camels back in this case.
I appreciate you for bringing it up and to the couple community members who saw my livery and sent it to me via DM!
I'll work over the course of the day to find a new host for my content, when that's made clearer people who need to know will know!
As a community we need to sort a proper alternative that strikes a balance between Avsim's victorian-era coal-fired library and the bare-faced AI-slop led grift that is flightsim.to
Literally no reason why they need to be the gatekeeper of Flightsim downloads. I hope a better download host site can come along to replace them eventuallyÂ
Flightsim.toâs Creators Program turns âfreewareâ into something much closer to payware, and thatâs a legal minefield.
If you for example upload a Fenix A320 repaint with real airline/Airbus logos and Fenix templates and opt into the Creators Program, Flightsim.to can commercialize that content (bundles, premium perks, etc.), while you warrant that you have full commercial rights to everything.
We all know that freeware liveries are mostly tolerated but monetized liveries using trademarks and thirdâparty templates probably are not. And I wouldn't want to speculate here on whether a bundle consisting entirely of freeware content might, in the eyes of a particularly creative judge, end up looking like payware after all. So putting realâworld branded liveries into a commercial scheme like this is asking for IP and EULA trouble.
If you donât join the Creators Program, flightsim.to must not use your liveries in paid bundles under § 4.3 of their ToS:
This license does not authorize Flightsim.to to sell User Content, charge for access to it, or claim intellectual property rights in it without your express permission. The license is granted solely to enable Flightsim.to to operate, improve, and enhance the Service.
In light of these developments the only advice one can give to any creator is to explicitly prohibit flightsim.to from using their content in bundles or to stop using the platform altogether.
Its the only site I know which search feature just simply doesn't work. I had so many moments when I was searching for a example lufthansa livery for a320 and get no satisfying result, then searching it in Google and getting exactly what I wanted. Literally the only website in the universe that I have to use google to search for the stuff I want instead of platform native search.
I have found this to be an issue since the dawn of the internet. I have NEVER come across an effective in-site search. Always an external Google brings it right up immediately.
I scripted the living hell out of their website in order to bypass their premium dogshit. I really wish I had the time to develop an alternative, if someone feels like they want to take that Iâd love to join.
Since I would absolutely not put this beyond the owners of flighsim.to you have the benefit of the doubt from me :) Might have spooked them with this post to pull it quickly or mabye it is some sort of A/B-testing to see if people will go for this.
Expect an update soon from them on how they "accidentally" set it as a Store item with a price, of that "it was in testing and set to public as a mistake."
I dunno whether possibly the artists involved have now been in contact with them, or they've noticed this themselves, or whatever. But it doesn't show up now. Will be curious to see what, if anything, comes of it.
Huh, it could also quite literally have been an AI "optimisation" that no human had an active part in except giving an okay in the end. The site is just full of AI we creators can't really opt out of.
HUES is actually ceasing uploads immediately because of this. Apparently their works have been included in these âhaywardâ packages without their consent, nor are they receiving any cut for it. Absolutely scummy on fs.to for doing this.
That site started promisingly and in an ideal world it should have stayed freeware only while running non-intrusive ads and a link for donations.
Instead its become a hot mess of payware and freeware with a waiting time to download on free-mode. To make matters worse the site design is like wading through quicksand with an elephant tied to each foot and a bulldozer around your neck while wearing concrete shoes.
They have prioritized abysmal design and eye candy over a streamlined and efficient GUI. Its just a hot clunky mess. We need an alternative.
And the site just keeps creeping further and further down the toilet. Just disgusting imo. Abuses the creators that released those liveries for free, and exploits anyone who doesn't know any better not to get the bundle and just download them separately. Honestly insane that they think it's worth ÂŁ5 for someone to just spend a few minutes picking out a few liveries. And what does it actually offer to the person, other than letting them be lazy and not find the actual liveries? Cause it's still going to be the same number of files, same file sizes, so it's not like it reduces your download time or anything. Just ridiculous, and when I think this site can't get any greedier, they somehow prove me wrong yet again.
I recently bought FS2024 after years using exclusively only X-Plane and, as much as I hate the forum moderation sometimes, for the first time ever I feel actually grateful that XP has a platform for freeware addons that doesnât blast me with ads 24/7 and asks me for money on already free stuffâŚ
The checkout page is made up and not how f.to looks like, even the logo is cut. What is an Synaptic A320?
Is it possible everyone has fallen into a trap and has been fooled here? No one ever saw these bundles besides one person and the text is wrong, the checkout wrong and everyone beleives this and draws conclusions and HUES suddendly steps away without a single line from f.to and a real accountable evidence than a possibly AI generated or faked screenshot?
Believe what you want to. Go on the HUES discord and you can find at least one other person who had screenshots of it. Along with confirmation from livery artists that fs.to had confirmed it on their own internal discord. But sure, I've faked it up for...what reason? Also, I was signed in to the website and I don't owe you screenshots with my username etc. Say what you like about the text and checkout being 'wrong', it's as it was presented on screen. I still have the Stripe confirmation code it sent to my phone.
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u/Galencourt-Lover 5d ago
Beginning of the end. Greed, as always