Brick Back Torrid Midnight!

My reply to that but is right above... sorry, was too fast ^^;;

"to use your Content for all purposes within the Service."

Using a 3rd party hack to rip textures sent to your video card does not fall under use within the service.

Jimminey cricket.

All these words over an image worth, what? Three? Maybe Four dollars?

Was the permission system broken? As I understand it, yes. But so what.

If this would end up in court, the judge would be asking, "How much was the loss?"

$3 or $4.

Get over it already.

That is rather the sort of thing you don't expect to have to spell out in the TOS, isn't it.

It is inherent in the permissions system.

I imagine the creators of SL didn't think they had to write specific rules for things which were already clearly supposed to work in only one way.

Besides, there are things in the TOS about not using things that intercept things.

coco

Talk to McDonald's! How much are their burgers? See how they defend their rights lol

"I do not have a problem with the circumvention of permissions for personal modification of items purchased."

On this, we are diametrically opposed.

coco

In this particular instance, yes, but this issue is much bigger than this one incident. If someone ripped those textures and released them to the public with their permissions stripped the loss could easily be thousands of dollars.

What, if someone modified a burger and added mayo to it?

Perspective, people.

But that wasn't done here. I'm talking about this specific case. There's been a lot of caterwauling and supposed death threats and people leaving in a huff. Over pocket change. Ridiculous.

Have you tried the red herring? I hear it's delicious.

Yet again, the release and distibution is a completely separate issue.

Indeed a good argument. This is where the LL TOS can't be quoted because its outside of our agreement with Linden lab.

I don't understand enough about GL technology.

Oh no, now you have lost the ability to quote now too?

You know it's more than that! What if they can keep that burger forever and not buy another just add different things to it!!? Rofl. Think about it

Now that you mention it, I am getting hungry.

However, SL cannot govern any terms for things that happen outside the Service. That's more than LL has legal say over.

Jesus God, Cristiano, you must really be in a foul mood.

coco

There's another section of the TOS that I think is also applicable:

I was teasing, lighten up. And why invoke Jesus?

I don't remember signing a contract the last time I bought a shirt in SL.

Look, I work with digital media. I DO have contracts. When copyright isn't transferred to the person paying for the work, and it is say, a template, I know and expect that it may be changed after it is purchased. In fact, I would find it rather absurd to even try to demand that someone cannot modify their own website, after they purchased my template. What I do demand is that it they do not claim it is their own original work, or mine (after it has been altered). And that it cannot be resold, either way. The idea that SL designers have some rarefied protection above and beyond what is common use in the real world is really pushing it, to me. The money paid for your work is real money, not play money, and I expect to have the same general personal rights over my own purchases as anywhere else.

QFT.

Some people tick the no mod box, so people don't break the content in question. I do that for the furniture I make. It's not that I don't want customers modifying it, it's that I don't want them breaking it, then coming to me crying because its transfer and no copy, and they broke their only one

But this skins debate has given me much to think about... its a possibility that making skins mod isn't such a bad idea. I don't want to hurt the customers who legally bought my stuff, I just want to rip out the guts of people who resell it . But I would rather we had more layers to deal with this issue, but alas I don't see it coming anytime soon.

Over the years in virtual worlds, the thing I've learned is people want to make their avatars unique in some way, so that it reflects their vision of themselves. I don't equate this desire with theft, not at all. The skin in question was ripped, it was not "ripped off". Nobody stole a texture and resold it here. From my perspective, the software limitations pushes people into these sorts of situations because they don't have enough options to customise their look.

I respect this wish for uniqueness from those who buy the content in question. The biggest problem I see currently is that you can't mod the face easily, I'm having to create my own female skin from scratch in order to just make a neko variation to my liking, that could have been easily solved with layers, but there is no mask layer for the head. Already built a male skin and this sort of debate makes me think about how I would prefer to set my perms and handle customers, as I suppose its likely I will run across this situation sooner or later. And I sure as heck don't want a drama like I see here!

ah well food for thought, my best wishes for recovery go to Torrid. I don't know any of the people involved here personally, just watching from the sidelines and trying to make sense of it all. I feel for the skinmakers having been there before with content ripped off, but my background is from the 3d communities, where textures are sold openly and its perfectly acceptable to mod for your own use in renders. (and I do just that) But rendering is a very different thing than the game environment in here, it doesn't allow a copy of the full texture to be intercepted.

The average cost of these textures in the Poser/Daz communities are anywhere from 10-30 dollars, pending on quality and the creator of the textures. Actually, the low end up to 20 dollars a texture, is not unlike the upper end of cost of skins in SL. I was thinking that skins cost a lot less here (and some do, the favourite skin I own from Toast Bard cost me only 800 linden and its easily one of the best skins I've seen in SL for women), but not all of them in here are inexpensive.

oh well, I have to think about this a while now

This is a general reminder to all the thread participants to remain civil. Certian posts have been forwarded to the Lindens. I'm personaly not happy that this drama has been dragged in here from the blogosphere but about 90% of the posts so far (give or take) have still kept in the realm of the Guidelines, heated as they are. However, things seem to be slipping a bit. This will be the only warning.

And didn't Belaya point you to LL itself trumpting the use of exactly that kind of third party software in the other thread?

You know, this whole argument that mod doesn't mean mod isn't good for the content creators of SL.

In addition, the person who originally did this has acknowledged it was wrong (I believe), and apologized for doing it, some months ago.

It's quite possible to defend that person without having to argue that the mod checkbox is or should be meaningless.

We need the mod checkbox, and we need it to work right. We need to discourage the use of any third-party programs that render any aspect of the permissions system useless.

coco