Warning: Copycat !

A lot of companies do that not just Linden Labs unfortunately it seems that many companies do that as a result of learning it from Linden labs.. which is not such a good thing. IN the rest of the world it would spell disaster but we live in a fantasy pixel land here where things are never taken seriously until enough people get hurt and the paper starts to fly

Its sad and one day the game/platform/whatsamagigie we call this thing named Second LIfe will mature (although the population has to help it along a wee bit here) and things will change. Until then its like fighting an uphill battle trying to do the right thing and not getting burned for it. People who create and try to make neat things and who are honest will always loose in this setting. One day I hope that changes but for now its the way it is. Criminals rule if it gets ignored long enough they will destory the game.

Personally I made a decision to run things in such a way as if it gets to bad due to lack of any regulation on Linden Labs part etc that I can just walk away from it all and not worry about it.

I have considered just living on no land and working out of a small rental thingy and I may just do that. No strings can be good in this scenario.

Anyhow I dont really care what country anyone is from criminals are criminals hehe I hope LL takes some action soon but their track record is not one that makes my hope a realistic one so its just a pipe dream

What do you mean? Inworld companies?

i think that word is pretty self explanatory business that started in SL seem to have adopted in some cases (not all) Linden labs we will wait till it explodes in our face attitude or the hide the head in the sand attitude its part of the problem hehe. I'm assuming they learned it from linden labs cause well that is how they model themselves

seen it a few times now to know that something is wierd I'm not naming names but some of them have been on these very boards at times

I find that so many people have someone steal their design here. Let's group together! Go to the Design Voice web page & then register so you can express which store steal your design or which store you see they copy other designers design. This web is creat by Sachi Vixen:-

http://com2.runboard.com/bdesignvoice

STAND TOGETHER & fight with those stupid copycat that with no creative idea & no common sense! join us now! & tell all you know to join us

Let's just get this straight;

They're not a bot?
They're not using copybot?
They're basically just looking at your stuff for inspiration?

I can understand no one wants to help the competition, but at the end of the day designers are inevitably going to be influenced/inspired by each other. Your own creations are, I'm sure, atleast unconsciously inspired by either RL or other SL creations.

This person seems to be doing nothing that any sensible and morally sound designer wouldn't do.

You might not know you do it, but you do. There is no such thing as an original creation - as I said above, everything is influenced by everything else. What you think looks "cool" is informed by your culture, whether you like it or not.

I had some Venezeulan dude come up and IM me to say he was an escort and did I want to buy his time.

I decline. Volley of abuse, called me stupid and said 'you English are all the same' (I'd said I was English in open chat).

The same as other English people? Yanno, I find that broadly offensive!

Just as well, since you're a foreigner from most people's point of view.

I beg to differ. Getting inspirations may be fine, but what he did sounds blatantly like manually copying to me. Even without assistence by a bot one can see from the outlines of the prims how an object is made up, and asking for complete scripting solutions - and not just hints - may round it off.

As a side note, I think another benefit of sculpted prims is that they make it more difficult for such peeps mooching of honest content creator's work.

Isn't that someone who can use 2 keyboards at the same time? (obviously female, guys stereo ears, mono brain)

Yes I remember when I started, I was really enthusiastic about learning to build, I went to shops and malls and looked at different items to see how they were built. That is pretty much a given for any new builder and I myself dont mind since I know that my brand sells and is original, if someone wants to copy me so be it, but it's not under my brand. Just cant really stop the copycats, maybe make it harder for them to do so. Just like newly released software in RL, it is usually copied, hacked and distributed before it even hits the shops. But that the original poster is saying that this group was actually doing scans of every original item in his shops, yes it can take days to do especially if they are screening every angle of every item to get all the angles of every prim. This has happened to me and yes I enjoyed the moment I broke their character. (maybe a bit harsh, but satisfying to the least and they soooooo deserved it) alas - Non-regulation promotes corruption. Lindens want the community to police itself and by that means, better security/scripts need to be improved or submitted for inclusion into the source code (which by the way is open). Don't expect the lindens to do anything as per danny boy's statement in the stanford interview saying that the intentions of the lindens were to let the community run SL with the exception of TOS violations that they were so backlogged and so overwhelmed with today. So as a community, pulling together and making this happen by means of scripting, writing code that maybe hides/encrypts it's contents and tags items with a brand, hiding prim flags etc. There are many ways to go about this but without cohesion will never happen. Getting cohesion to work or even an organized group to do this is even harder since there is so many groups out there that fall on opposing sides.

You must be joking!!!!!!!!!!!

ran in to a person like this early today!
Also they are hanging out in large dance clubs as well.........becareful very careful!

how does he even know its the same person - sicne they speak multiple languages hehe

Yeah just ask Vanillia Ice

Where do you think he hangs out in SL?

I have a small shop in a mall by my house.
I've repeatedly noticed people spending long periods of time looking at all the items I have for sale.
Sometimes the switch from one item to the next and back to the original.
Sometimes they come back on another day.
I have a name I call these people..

I call them customers.

That is thoroughly creepy. You were pretty patient but that went above and beyond what a normal customer does. People tend to forget that they don't have a right to be anywhere, except maybe on Linden owned land.

The nerve of some people thinking they have a right to even log into second life!!

Ban them all!!!!

It's funny...the other day I was politely asked by a mosque owner if I would give him full perms copies of 3 different hijabs (a Muslim woman's head covering) and 2 salwar kameez (a long tunic over loose pants), so that he could give them out to women wanting to enter his mosque. I told him that those are some of my best sellers, and if I gave them out copy/transfer to him, they'd just end up as freebies. He totally didn't get it; said that it would be free advertising, etc. "Best seller" means "best seller"... why should I give it away? Argh.

I have to own up to having copied items of furniture in my early days on SL. but NOT, repeat NOT for resale. I didn't know much about building in those days and didn't have a lot of money, and wanted to learn and to make my own things. I saw some wonderful items of furniture and photographed them in the store, and took them back to a sandbox and tried to reproduce them.... My versions looked like total crap.

I never used the things i built, and now i make my own things, but i do it with my own imagination and my own textures... and my own skills learned the hard way.

I did go round with a 'builder's eye' looking at the shapes of prims and the way they were put together, but i know thats not what the OP was complaining of. Everyone does that.

I don't know how a noob would manage to re-create anything really difficult without at least *some* effort .. I guess the parameters from the object tab might be a help.. but it sounds a lot harder to me, than doing it from scratch. Perhaps thats just my perception from the other side of the learning curve.

imogen

If the person was really behaving as methodically as you describe he WAS up to something, possibly taking notes on how to dupe your items the hard way. Only he knows what was really up though- but you're within your rights to ban whomever from your land for any reason. Just keep an eye on SLExchange I guess and see whether any strikingly similar products start cropping up. (Not like there's anything you could do about it when they do, though.)

*eyeroll* Okay, can I come onto your land and start copying everything you've made too?

The particular behavior described by the OP is very, very suspicious, but I can't really figure out what was going on.

My edit beam can stay on an object for a very long time, meanwhile I'm browsing the profile of the creator, the owner, their partners, their picks, their partners' picks, etc. (And especially if the item contains animations, I'll surely be checking out who did them, where they have a store, do I have any others by that animator, how do those others look when I play them locally, etc., etc.) And that editor could be open for hours if anybody in that universe has, heaven forfend, a web page in their profile.

But not days. I think even if I had OCD I'd get bored eventually.

And yet, if they're copying, what are they doing that takes so long? If they don't have mod rights, they shouldn't be seeing much in the Editor anyway--at least with the standard viewer; and if they're using a hacked version, why would it take any time at all to get all the info needed to make an exact copy? (I won't detail how, but... even well before the open source viewer, the methods were known--and it should be almost instantaneous.)

I'd certainly not recommend getting overly suspicious of customers. But this specific multi-day scanning behavior seems inexplicable, even if they intended to copy everything in the store. The mystery is, whatever *were* they doing?

Funny...

I logged into world this weekend, and there was an avie there building a house. (I build/sell prefabs) I asked him to please build elsewhere.

20 mins later he was back. Now. Im a bit trusting. I told him if he couldnt find a sandbox he could tp up to my platform with me and build there if he like. He said no and tpd away. Another few mins, he's back. I took off the ability to build on my land and he was gone shortly after.

I logged in yesterday and on the land right beside mine that is currently for sale was a near perfect duplicate (minus textures) of my latest build. My build was my design, my idea, directly from my drawings. I checked the owner of the prims and they were his. I banned him from my land, and asked my neighbor to also.