How to watermark your addons
While we try to prevent any copied liveries from showing up at all, it can still happen that your liveries are being copied and reuploaded, whether it be on this websites or other websites. While we try our best to identify these stolen addons once they are reported, it can still be somewhat cumbersome to proof whether these addons were actually stolen. Watermarking your addons could help us a lot in this case.
While we are already watermarking pictures uploaded by creators to make it harder for other websites to simply reupload your addons, watermarking your own addons can also help with identifying stolen work. Ideally, we would share places where we recommend putting your watermarks, however, this would not help anyone since people could just go to this article, see our recommendations and try to remove watermarks from there. Instead, we'll give some general tips on how to and where to watermark your work.
Where
In general, it is a good idea to put your watermark in a place it cannot be spotted easily (otherwise someone will just remove it), but also in one of your "main" files (i.e. the fuselage texture). While you could also "watermark" other files (like .txt files), this can be removed even more easily than putting it in a texture file, which is why we recommend you put your watermark in a texture file.
Within the texture file, we recommend a place where it's not very visible in-game (to not ruin the experience in-game) and also not very visible when opening up the file (i.e. make it very small). We also recommend not using flashy colors (i.e. don't put your name in red on a white background), since this will just catch more attention, the sublter, the better!
An example of a subtle watermark that is hard to spot when zoomed out
How
If you are watermarking a livery, you probably already know how to edit texture files, just pick a spot somewhere in a texture file and put something (like your name) in a good place (see above for general recommendations). If you are watermarking scenery, you might not know how to put a watermark in your textures. Your scenery addon package will generally have its textures stored in a folder named texture
, usually found somewhere here:
[package-name]\scenery\global\scenery\TEXTURE
Within this folder, you'll find .dds and .json files, you'll want to have a program that can open and edit .dds files (like paint.net or Photoshop) and then put your watermark in one of your texture files in a location recommend above. While we don't come across a lot of stolen scenery, watermarking your addons can still help in case your scenery does get stolen.
With these recommendations in mind, we recommend watermarking your work to help us identify stolen addons faster and help you take down any stolen work you come across. We've come across quite some stolen liveries already and watermarks have already helped us greatly since the original creator was able to proof the work was theirs.