Is it ethical

Is it ethical for a person to buy textures from a texture store and then put them in free boxes? I sell textures with full permissions so people can use them to build items they want to sell. I have seen some in free boxes and don't think this is fair.

Depends...if you bought them or made the textures yourself or if you got them from one of those free texture websites. If the latter is the case, then those people might just have gotten them too and are giving them away for free.

they are my textures that i uploaded myself, you can look at properties of texture and see who created it

I think it would be hard to make a compelling argument that someone reselling textures that you made is ethical conduct. However, texture vendors are particularly prey to this sort of resale, for in order for your texture to be useful by a customer (who is likely using it to make new objects for sale) the texture has to be copyable.

I suggest you talk with Drift Monde who runs Textures Unlimited. Her store has large banners explaining why the textures are copyable, but that reselling the textures by themselves is Not Good. Despite this note, I have little doubt that some of her textures are unethically resold, but (to my knowledge) her business thrives despite some amount of non-permitted resale. Of note is that I don't think she or other textiure merchants have any recourse through Linden Lab in the event of non-permitted resale.

But Drift would know better and is quite nice, too.

Did you really create them yourself with a graphic program?

I have a few thousand textures, many of them were not created by me in Photoshop but downloaded from various websites. After uploading them to SL it shows me as the creator too, yet I didn't "create" them, I got them for free from websites. Only the process of uploading them to SL makes me the creator under "properties".

I see quite a few of the very same textures in freebie packs or in stores, because those people did exactly the same what I (and maybe you) did, they downloaded them somewhere and now do with them whatever they want.

Personally, my feelings on freebies are that the original creator should consent to them being given away. Its not a matter of TOS, its a matter of Karma.

At the end of the day, however - if you choose to sell items with fully open permissions, there's little you can do to prevent the next owner from doing as they please with them.

Possibly a short-term solution may be to restrict your textures to no-copy, and reduce the price such that its still reasonable for someone to purchase individual copies from you for their projects.

Better yet would be for you to sell two versions of your textures: No Transfer for personal projects, and No Copy for resale projects. That would nip the freebie proliferation issue right in the bud.

To be honest, I have to say that textures would either have to be fantastically cheap or really, mind-bogglingly good for me to buy them without full perms. I have bought a few texture packs in my time, but rarely do I use more than a few, and further restrictions would make me feel I was just wasting my money. These days, I make my own textures anyway.

I do think it's a bit unethical to do that but I can't see a way to stop it. It would be a lot worse if people were selling them of course.

I sell my textures mod copy no resale in vendors, but if a creator really wants a resell copy to use in creating items for sale, I'll sell them that personally. I guess I sell fewer textures that way, but I think people are less likely to try to resell them once they've made personal contact.

Dunno, it's a theory anyhow.

I don't know much about textures permissions... so I ask

If you sell it with "No transfer" permission, won't that make the trick?

I find it awfully horrifying to find someone who is offering TiledTextures.com images illegally for sale in their store to start a thread about whether offering someone else's textures is ethical! There is something horribly wrong with that -- especially considering the person is refusing to remove ANY of the textures -- hundreds of them -- from the store.

The problem with that is, if someone makes something with it (like say a prefab house) they are unable to sell the object because the texture on it is no transfer. They wouldn't even be able to give it as a gift if they wanted to.

I don't buy anything but full perms textures nowadays. I had too many problems in my early days in SL, trying to track down the one prim with a no copy or no transfer texture in it that was making an object transfer impossible. It is hellishly annoying to find that you have slaved over something which then can't be given away or sold.

That having been said, if you didn't upload a texture, then you shouldn't be selling it. If you uploaded it but don't have rights to sell it, you shouldn't be doing that either.

Lots of people, including myself, go through a learning process when they come into SL, learning what is and is not ethical and allowable. This is one of those things.
Cali

Good points, Cali. : )

For anyone who is interested in this problem there's an ongoing discussion about technical and non-technical ways of protecting texture creators' IP rights in the Law Society group forum .

Permissions are the name of the game...

If you don't want your textures being resold or given away for free... make them no-transfer. Or... make them no-copy and transferrable.

Other than that... good luck.