DMCA: slide viewer blank

How odd, I just got a notice from Linden Labs,



The prim by that name was created by me and has inside of it a script named "Slide Show 10 sec" created in 2005 by K... C..... that has to be one of the oldest and most common free full permission scripts that is floating around in SL. Did numerous other people get that DMCA notice?

Its hard for me to believe that someone was willing to go to the trouble of doing a DMCA for it. I obtained it years ago from a freebie box called Free Common Scripts. It is a simple slide show viewer, that displays slides of any images that you put inside of it. Rotating them every X seconds.

Note: I do not sell this script but I did have it in a box of free useful stuff at my store.

I wonder, is this a new way to grief Linden Labs and Second Life, issue a DMCA on common freely curculated items?

This is akin to writing a DMCA for the "floating text" or give note scripts that are in common use.

Any chance the DMCA might be directed at one of the images that are being displayed?

Dumb Theory #1: You have another copy of that object in your inventory that includes a texture that's been DMCA'd.

Dumb Theory #2: Somebody else had a copy of that object that contained a texture that's been DMCA'd, and idiocy ensued.

DT#1 is easily disproved; DT#2 not so much.

I am wondering if this is one of the cases where this semi-automated DMCA stuff can go wrong. Is it possible that a user of this object put some textures in it that someone objected to, and maybe the container object was incorrectly flagged?

Interesting ideas. I wonder if someone is using my prim as a box to sell stolen copies of stuff. Wouldn't they DMCA the Owner of the box?

Sort of, but in the new system they crawl everyone's inventories for copies that have been redistributed. That's the guess here, that maybe there is a flaw of some kind in those searches.

If you were whacked by the new process, your slide object may have been replaced by a plywood sphere. If that didn't happen then you may have been whacked by the old manual process. A little more on that sphere business is here: http://wiki.secondlife.com/wiki/Linden_Lab_Official:Frequently_Asked_Questions_on_the_IP_Complaint_Process

That won't give you all the answers, but maybe it will help you to piece together the puzzle :/

I wonder.. if I DMCA one of my own designs using one of my own alts, what would happen?

If you are ever stricken with amnesia, you could use a counterclaim to find out who you are.

That is helpful information. I'm considering filing a counter notification, since I created the prim by that name, and it makes no mention of any contents. Odds are that the person filing the original claim has no rights to that old freebie script. But it irks me that I will have to release my identity to LL and whoever filed the claim, without being able to find out who filed this DMCA and why.

Perhaps I filed this claim against myself, and forgot?

I wonder why LL didn't list the location of the prim in the notice instead of saying

??

Is there (or was, if if was nuked) an old copy of the item in your inventory? THose count for DMCA too, not just rezzed items. (Stuff in inventory is actually going to be a little easier for LL to hunt down, since it's all in a handful of databases and not spread across thousands of sim instances.)

One possibility that occurs to me is that at some point, someone could have sent you a copy of your object with textures in it, either a "hey look what i made with your stuff!" deal or "wah why doesn't this work?" kind of situation. If that's the case, it might be the loaded version someone sent you, and not your original frame, that someone reported.

They have not actually removed anything yet, the notice they sent went on to say.

I checked my inventory for all items of that name and all scripts with the script name. I found several texture packages that I purchased which used that script to display the textures. But all prims in my inventory that contained that script had no other contents.

Maybe it's not the script that is being DMCA'ed. Maybe it's the slide viewer itself. Maybe someone made a very similar slide viewer and saw yours somewhere in world and thought you copied theirs.

The slide viewer is nothing more then a single flattened prim.

If that is the case then they are indeed idiots, there are numerous people selling slide viewers in SL. This morning I discovered in my inventory, one of the common scripts used for these in selling texures, "cycle textures", is a freebie written by Cory Ondrejka, i.e. Cory Linden.