FREE means FREE

That bold part is exactly equivalent to what people are complaining about. Especially since, in this case, you can make that copy for free, as many copies as you want, and they will all be exactly the same as the original.

Then as I stated if you have a problem with it .. Don't make freebies.. I could understand if say you made a object that you was later going to sell down the road, but you gave a copy to a friend to play with. Forgot to set what settings you needed and he has free rights.. He then backstabs you .. Sells the item before you do and the likes. Then we could have a problem... But all this gripe over items that you get for free? ... Only thing I could see that could not have any rights to it in a free item would be the script.. But here I always went right to the owner for a copy of the script... if it was something I couldn't get myself... And had no trouble getting said script even if I had to pay for it.


Edit
But yes the idea of the resell for X would be good cause I got no tranfer items I don't use and since I can't give them to people I end up deleting them (I'm talking about items I paid 1k+ for) if there was a resell option for say the item cost 1k least the person who made it could set the resell for 400-500L

hmm guess i won't bother finishing writing my post,
skips to the point.
The content distributors that control the majority of content distribution are only interested in profits; their bottom line is already secure. They are only interested in increasing them, any way possible (ie. Sony Music infringed other peoples IP to protect their own IP; consequently Sony Music is now involved in 4 lawsuits and may face criminal charges in England and Italy). It's not in thier best interests to suggest things that are consumer friendly.

Restrictions are inherently bad. SL is only unique because nobody has been driven to build their own (besides OSMP). If restrictions are too great then they will drive people away and motivate them.

Anyway I totaly support this feature suggestion (i'm really tired and rambling).

Your book analogy is exactly correct. If you resell and original, you can only do it once, and that's all good. If you scan the book and start selling copies, the copyright owners are going to come after you.

People created free items and released them with full permissions for the benefit of the community. Unethical people are taking the freebies and selling them, over and over for their own profit. This is wrong on two levels... it infringes on the creator's IP rights and it rips off the person who pays for something that should have been free.

The purpose of the permissions system, when you come right down to it, is to make money for Phillip Linden's company. It does this by encouraging an analog of the real-world economy, by implementing a version of the mostly-successful copyright and patent laws that exist in the real-world economy. And just as in the real-world economy, the purpose of these "intellectual property" laws is not fundamentally to create "intellectual property" or to reward the artists, it's to encourage the "advancement of the arts and sciences" by rewarding creators with a temporary monopoly on the distribution of their creations.

This monopoly only has to be extensive enough to work. It doesn't have to be perfect. It certainly doesn't have to be permanent, or to limit the use of products or how they are resold.

Note... I'm not arguing that this new right shouldn't be created. I'm simply pointing out that you need a better reason for it than the rights of the creators.

I favor the Resell for (Max $L price) or less option. It would let people who want to distribute free stuff do so, but it would also likely create a new class of jobs.

Let's say i'm a content creator who is a whiz at making stuff but can't market for a rat's ass... or simply would rather spend my time creating stuff than managing a business.

I could sell a middleman an item for $L 200 with the Resell for Max Price set to $L 250. They then go out and market it and get $L 50 for everyone that they sell for me.

I have more time to make stuff and have created a job for someone else in SL too.

I understand. I happen to have taken the other side, over a much bigger company making a much bigger profit off work I had a part in. I'm working on a freebie right now that I actually HOPE a lot of people will sell and make a profit from, rather than selling and making a profit from another freebie that they are currently using that they don't seem to have the *legal* rights to use that way.

But I can see how you can be upset over the alternative. I just don't see a way to implement the kind of system that would be required to prevent it without breaking so much other stuff in SL that the cost would far outweigh the gain.

Sukia, my whole point is to suggest we add a way that people can still leave the "transfer?YES" flag checked, without fearing that someone is going to take the freebie and sell it. Many people have said that as a result they will stop making freebies, or stop making their freebies transferable. I think instead they should still be encouraged to give out modifiable, copiable freebies, but have the option to make sure that someone won't go resell it for some ridiculous markup, that's what got us to the point where we are at now - people are increasingly likely to say, "Well, forget it then, I won't make freebies, or I'll cripple the permissions on them to stop people from reselling them." I want people to keep making stuff that everyone can transfer and share with eachother.

Argent, you make some really good points. But what we have now is, it's either "totally public domain" or some variation of "not totally public domain" I.E Not Modifiable, Not Copiable, or Not Transferable. I think adding this one more will encourage people to keep making freebies and not "overreact" by no longer contributing stuff to the public domain or limiting permissions. If contracts were more enforcable here it would be a moot point - but as is the pessimist in me says that if someone took one of your existing scripts and blatantly ignored/cut out the BSD liscence, made little to no modifications, and then began selling your script for $L500, it would be A> Unlikely if not impossible to get any Linden response/reaction/help, B> Something that would consume a lot of time and money for you to "wage war" on by buying a plot of land, putting up a sign, spreading awareness, ect, ect, ect...

I understand that's what they're demanding. The problem is that's not what they'll get, because baking these kinds of laws into the code of SL is just going to get people to think up workarounds. AND they can stifle legitimate creative endeavours.

Let's say I create a script that does something tricky and useful, like delicately balancing force and thrust to let people fly more easily above the cloud layer without being thrown about the sky as X-flight tends to do. Let's say I put a limit on sales of L$10.

If you make a really impressive jetpack with a combat system that's easily worth L$100, and you want to use my script rather than X-Flight. You can't, because when you put my script in your object you can't set the sale price over L$10. And if I leave SL, you can't even get me to change that restriction... even if I wanted to do it before I left.

So, what do you do? You create a vendor that takes the money through another mechanism. You run into me later, outside SL, and I commiserate with you, agree that was the right thing to do take a beer in exchange for "absolution" over your sin.

Meanwhile, back in SL, these vendors are all over and nobody uses sale boxes any more. So Linden labs comes up with a scheme to prevent you from mixing objects with different sale terms in the same Object's contents... and stuff starts breaking that had been legitimate before...

So, this kind of restriction is not going to be effective, and it will ironically lead to creative people being unable to significantly add value to a product sold with a low limiting price.

But you can do this already, without the Resell For Max price, and get a better motivated middleman if it turns out he can get L$75 on each unit. I mean, this is basically how EVERY distribution chain works, and very few companies put a Resell For Max on their products.

See, I don't think it'll actually make a difference. People who are going to go "oh, I can't put it in a sale box, I guess I shouldn't try" are the ones who'd stop when you told them not to. The rest will find a way around it.

This actually leads to another issue with the rights system.

The right of first sale is poorly supported right now, because the only way to allow someone to transfer an object (directly or for sale) while retaining control over its distribution is to set it "NO COPY". Unfortunately, many objects that could otherwise be transferred really need to be COPY, either because they may be lost or damaged in normal use (vehicles, or modifiable objects), or they need to be referenced from multiple places in your inventory (an attached object that you want to use with multiple outfits).

What's common to these is that you only need *one* of them rezzed in-world at a time, even if you have multiple in your inventory. These tend to be the high-cost items that you can't give away or trade. Adding a limit to how much an item could sell for wouldn't change that. Changing "no copy" so it meant "only one copy in-world" would, because then your expensive outfits or avatars could be set "no copy/trans".

It means that even if the thing you made freely available is only part of the new product, the new product can't be sold. It means that your thing can't even be bundled in the same box with a product, as a bonus item. You mey not consider these significant costs, you may even consider these reductions in the public domain's rights a good thing, but they do exist.

so your justification of people reselling things that are intended to be free to everyone is that somebody wouldn't be able to put 2 items in a box and give them away. infact further to that your saying it would be bad because people cant make their product more attractive by including free products by other people! weak arguments at best, are you a reseller?

I know something of mine would be right .. heh

Damnit, Argent, quit making so much sense.

I am strongly opposed to creating extra rules and regulations to "legislate morality" or "enforce ethics". And your right, the biggest obstacle here is that of creating a system that ends up doing more harm than good. Limiting scripting payment would be tough enough, and there would always be a lot of ways people could get around it... Then again, many people out there can just look at something and make an exact or very close copy just on their own... I guess I (probably wrongly) assume that if someone is smart enough to come up with loopholes (Pay an object that sends a signal to a seperate object that gives the item, ect), that this person also might be smart/maybe even ethically enough to come up with their own ideas or make their own version.

I actualy think that without those this platform is doomed to failure.

edit :
it's very nice to dream of a utopia, but it will always be just a dream

No, I'm not justifying anything, and I do consider it a problem if someone is unable to effectively license their content on the terms they want.

I'm simply giving you two examples of how the public domain would be reduced by this proposal. I fully accept that you consider these minor and irrelevant points, but they are real restrictions that don't currently exist in SL, and unlike in the real world there is no possibility of a "fair use" exemption that can be addressed on a case by case basis by a judge because there is no such mechanism.

That's the one side. The other side is ... what would the benefit of this proposal be? Would it actually solve the problem? If it would, then I may be quite willing to accept these restrictions and ones I haven't thought of as a reasonable price for this additional creator right. But if it doesn't, then all you'll have doen is reduce the public domain for no corresponding benefit. that is, this isn't a "free" change, it has to be considered on its merits.

So the next step isn't to come back and ask if I'm a reseller (no, I'm not, I'm a creator who's had his free work picked up and used by Microsoft and Apple in products they sell for hundreds of dollars). It's to figure out whether this is actually worth doing.

I don't understand why some people cannot understand simple courtesy. FREEbies were meant to be just that...FREE. They were meant to help people. If they were made to be sold then they wouldn't have been used as FREEbies in the first place and there would be no discussion of it as there is now. FREEbies were not meant for people to resell and make a damn profit off of. Personally it has never crossed my mind to gather up all my FREEbies I have been given when I started and open up a store and sell them for ridiculous prices. It really concerns me that some people have actually done this because I had no clue until recently. I really try to think highly of my fellow SLers and everyday I hear something new that boggles my mind and makes me wonder what the hell some people are thinking doing the things they do.

My neighbor irl gave me a ridiculously expensive genuine Louis Vuitton purse because her Mom got it for her awhile back and she never liked it. She could have sold it but gave it to me thinking I could use it and would like it. I could have just as easily sold it as well because my co-wroker at the time said "OMG that's worth like $500, you should sell it on Ebay!!" I was totally against this because it was given to me and I wasn't going to profit off of it (even though I was pretty broke at the time) I guess some people here would have tried to sell it off as soon as they got it, but to me it makes me think of getting a cool rl FREEbie and I am not selling it.

In the eyes of ethics, it is wrong to sell something that wasn't meant to be sold or was only meant to be given away...things that were meant to help a new person or a person who doesn't have much. How damn helpful is it to a new person that things that were once FREE now have a dollar amount attached to them? Oh Yes, quite helpful...

yes i do think it's worth doing, people are being taken advantage of by paying for things that are free elsewhere, I see no downside to a free item having a no resale flag. I do however see the downside of an item being freely sellable by anyone, and that is less and less people will make free items. who realy looses out from the current policies and who gains? i'd suggest the thiefs and liars gain and the general consumer looses, a grand state of affairs and very worthy of protecting.

Hold on, you're not listening. I'm not saying "this may not be worth doing because it's wrong to have a no-resale flag". I'm saying "this may not be worth doing because a no-resale flag won't stop resale". If it won't stop resale, then what's the point of doing it?

i am listening, but i see no reason why it cant be made to work. the no transfer flag works very well why couldn't a no resell flag be made to do the same thing? and if people found ways around it then should be banned for exploiting as simple as that.

Let's travel back in time...

CHRONOTUNNELLED!

Request: Addition to "Community Standards"
/13/12/3337/1.html

The "no transfer" flag doesn't "work very well". I would much rather they did some work on fine-tuning the semantics of "copy" and "transfer" before they worry about "minimum price".

Here's things you should be able to do with the rights system that you can't:

1. Create an object that someone can give as a gift, with the recipient having "copy" right.

2. Create a texture that can be effectively used by builders but not pirated.

3. Create a gesture for your own use containing an animation you don't have full rights to.

4. Create an object that's subject to damage or loss in normal use, and so you need to retain a copy in your inventory when you use it, that can be transferred.

5. Sell your inventory when leaving SL, like an "estate sale".

6. Create an object for rent, that has a fixed lifetime in the asset server after transfer.

7. Create an object containing components with mixed rights, such as a necklace with a modifiable chain but a non-modifiable pendant.

8. Create an object with a "transfer fee", so it can be copied and sold - but when it's sold you receive a fee.

Many of these, particularly the last one, would do a better job of solving the original problem without hurting the public domain. For example, if you set a "transfer fee" of L$100 on your freebie nobody could resell it without paying you, and when they did the recipient would know where they got it.

This is the direction you need to take the conversation.

When people are banned for pirating textures or selling GPLed scripts in closed-source objects, we can consider the implication sof this one... there's problems here too.