Ok to resell my anims in poseballs?

I have a set of anims that I sell full perms. The sign in the store and a note indicate that they are for designer's new products. I do not provided poseballs, just the animations. I may do this now as it's quite easy.

A customer pointed me to a store selling pose-balls with my anims and provided screen-shots of the edit dialogs to show me as creator. This store looks fairly good, the owner seems to be an animator themselves but if they are selling mine. Why?
My guess is they are not an animator, can't doand won't.

This isn't the first time. Previously the sets appeared in a Soft-drink looking vendor by .......... etc. I sorta just let it go cause I don't wanna cause a fuss. That's when sales of these slowed and never recovered. I digress....

I haven't contacted them yet, thought I would see what the team thinks first.

So, the question is; Do you think it is ok for them to re-sell my animations in their pose-balls?

Unfortunately, when you sell anything full perm, you are doing so on the honor system, and some people are not honorable. No, it's not "ok" for them to resell your work as their own, it is highly unethical.

The question is, can/should you do anything about it, since you sold the animations full perm?

Someone with experience filing a DMCA claim will have to answer that...

are they selling the poseballs full perm?

if so then yes, that is wrong

if they are not selling them full perm (or copy/transfer, mod is irrelevant) then that would be no different than them putting them in a piece of furniture and selling the piece of furniture.

it is the permissions they apply, not the "box" they are in...

(just my opinion)

I agree with Rha. If you are selling them full perm for people to use in their own products (furniture, whatever) then they are using them as intended. UNLESS they are also selling them full perm in which case it might be by accident, send them a note and ask them not to.

There are texture artist and sculpty artist who sold full permission items
and filed DCMA orders. LL eventually took them down but didn't delete the textures of
those who bought or sold items against the creators tos.
Those who sold them felt justified because they were full permission and paid for them,
felt they had right to do whatever regardless of what the creator said.

Have set a clear license agreement for the approved use?

If not, do so immediately. That won't stop someone from reselling but it at least allows you to go after them.

If you purchase a full perms animation at Bits & Bobs or any other animator you'll likely find a notecard with license terms that specifically allows the purchaser to use the animation in their products but the permissions need to be changed to either copy OR transfer, but not both. You should also specify that the animations cannot be resold alone as animations.

If you haven't specified any license terms then you may be out of luck with the person currently selling, but it would be good to make sure they are selling the pose balls with either copy or transfer disabled.

Thanks for the input folks.

I do sell them full permissions for designers. Each item is also available with just copy perms.
I have a sign in store and notecard included, stating usage rights. I didn't include anything about reselling in poseballs though. This is the main point I guess.

I'm fully aware that giving full permissions opens the door and doing so equates to open slather in some cases.

The funny thing is, that the seller in question, has gone to a lot of trouble making nice images for each pose on a nice stand in a nice looking setup. They call themselves "Professional Animator" (not know in these forums I don't think) and even make them. It seems. Might have to check that some more. More news at Eleven.

It wouldn't be much extra work to actually make them.

It could be that they can do this based on the fact that they value added and I didn't say you couldn't. But really....
Maybe a poseball can be considered furniture.

And just another question.
The files were all renamed. Mine have a -kk at the end.
What's wrong with turning off the modify flag on animations?
Won't that simply stop renaming the file and nothing else? You can't really modify one. Can you?

except that often the inability to rename a animation can be very annoying. outside of locking the filename, i dont believe there is any benefit to making an ani nomod. you cant download them to alter them or whatnot.
imo making anis nomod serves only to annoy people and returns you no benefit.

Ok. did another reckie.
And btw, this isn't a worry for me.

About twenty-odd stands in the store, two poseballs each. A third are mine and the rest are between two other creators. All are no copy, no mod. So again, I'm not concerned.

The transferable packs are all by the store owner. no other creators seem to be in there. So all seems ok there too.

The original question remains.
Here's part of the notecard inside the pack: My pack with the animations.

"PRODUCTS FOR RETAIL SALE."

a pose ball is a product IMO...
and if they are selling them no copy/mod they seem to be abiding exactly to your note card rules.

my answer is YES.

a pose ball is a product! maybe an easy to do product. but none the less its not just the animation.

and they paid to use them in there products, per your note card license., maybe they are just setting up and found some great animations by you and others to help fill there shop so it wasn't empty?

in any case they are doing right, and I would take it as a complement. but that's just me. I might ask them why out of curiosity since they seem to do there own anyway...

When I was very new, I used to sell scripted beach towels that contained an anim that I bought full perm in a poseball. Similar to yours, the animator's EULA said not to resell the animations (or, in that case, the poseballs) alone, but only inside one's own creations. But, it was a beach towel, so it sold for a fraction of the animator's own restricted-perm poseballs. That was the market, and I was following the EULA, but I was undercutting the animator's pricing.

I felt queasy about that for a while, until I sampled various furniture stores and found that more often than not, bare, limited-perm animations are more expensive than products containing them. In fact, I sometimes saw this in the animators' own stores.

Anyway, my point is that whatever the EULA says, it's really not the *packaging* of the resold animations that should matter, but rather the *price*. But nobody does that.

(Incidentally, there's another fairly well-known animator whose EULA imposes almost the opposite packaging restriction on full-perm sales: The reseller is required to keep the animations inside the animator's poseballs, and must link the actual prims to the retail product. This is absolutely the wrong way to go, for a whole bunch of reasons.)

There is actually a benefit to no mod depending on how you run your business. When I eventually set up a animation business to do full perms stuff for creators each one will get a custom named set with the licensee in the animation name. If those animations ever show up on the freebie market I'll know who to go after and I'll be able to do a specific DMCA on the animation name.

I totally agree. One of the first things I do when I buy a full perms animation is rip the animations out of the poseballs they came in. The listen channel can vary widely between creators and if you want everything listening on the same channel they all have to have the same script.

also add in that if you have to use their poseballs and such, it puts them as the creator which can then cause even more confusion

(especially if you link the poseball last)

this is one of my pet peeves with sculpty creators that sell the stuff full perm prims for folks to use and make stuff to sell... without includding the sculpt map (and sculpt maps can be made to look transparent so that they can not be "lifted" by snapshots/screenshots)

Just annoying as a creator that if I chose to use something like that, I will not be the creato

granted if all someone is doing, is recoloring something and selling it as theirs, then they are not the creator LOL

(I am thinking more along the lines of shoes and boots, gemstone, building parts etc)

I buy sculpt maps, because I suck at making them myself... to me it is no different than someone who purchases textures, just another tool

however when I buy the maps, I want to be able to build whatever I am making, from first rez prim to last, I do not want to take something ready made and put my name on it...

*slinks back to SL*

sorry meds make me a rambling fool....
URK

One advantatage to no-mod on anims is it allows you to briefly state the licence terms in the description, and nobody can change it. This makes it very easy to point out a license violation.

For my non-freebie anims, in the limited cases where I provide them full-perm to others, I tag each anim name with the customer's initials and put the terms in the description, no mod. If they leak out, I'll know who leaked them.

also no mod animations really don't effect how they can be used (I mean like, who mods an animation? other than to change the name?)

so that solution is perfect for animations... too bad there was not a description field that could be filled in and not changed by anyone other than the creator... (on all items, be it prim, animation, script, etc)

sort of like a license section or something.. extra little desc bar...

Based on your agreement as posted above, the reseller is within rights, when interpreted literally or even fairly liberally. You may think that a poseball isn't much of a "product", but to someone who just wants to buy stuff to sit on and use the anims and wouldn't know where to begin to make a poseball set from the anims, this is a big value add.

IMHO, a minimum sales price on resell is far more important than the nature of the product containing your anims. To protect your own sales, you'd want to make sure the product using your anims doesn't cost less than you'd sell the anim copies for. But, that's up to you, of course.

I agree with those above who don't like anims that are required to stay in the provided poseballs. I wouldn't buy them. I use my own scripts, and I often don't want poseballs at all. Also, I don't necessarily want my products to serve as an advertisement for the animations they contain. (A sophisticated user can easily find out regardless, which is fine. I often look inside an object to see what's in it, and I'm glad I can, and I'm happy that others can look inside my products for the same purpose.)

That would be great, especially if we could point to a Creative Commons license agreement (e.g., http://creativecommons.org/licenses/by-nc-sa/2.5).

I was the person who pointed out my discovery to Kornscope - as I am designing furniture myself and purchased his full-perm animation set as well as licensing animations from two other animators.

As for limiting the ability to rename animations by setting them "no-mod", I would agree with some of the others that this would be a minor annoyance. As some of the products I am designing are menu-driven, it's nice to be able to keep the filenames organized.

I do think that anyone creating animations needs to have at least one small shop inworld with these animations loaded into poseballs for sale. Then, include somewhere in the full-perm agreement that buyers may not use your animations to create products which are in direct competition to your own. Since you would be selling poseballs yourself, as a stop-gap measure if nothing else, you would be in a much more actionable position to prevent this from happening.

In addition, do you have any sales records that would indicate that this poseball vendor purchased these animations directly from you? All it takes is one person not setting permissions properly in a piece of furniture.

PS: Then again, the definition of furniture is broad. A massage poseball set, linked to a sculpty pillow or mat, is that "furniture"? And that's all any piece of menu-driven furniture really is - a few prims connected to a poseball-rezzing mechanism. A lot of it is in the eye of the beholder.

Then again, it was by examining the animations inside a piece of my own furniture (Abiss) that I came to seek out Mr. Komachi myself.

As someone who sells animations & poses full permissions for other residents, I'm going to chime in here with my own opinion.

I vote NO, all they did was take your animation, stick it in a poseball and are now selling it, do you know how hard it is to make a poseball? it isnt, it takes about 30 seconds (more with lag lol)

they are still technically selling just the animation/pose, if you have proof that you created the animations, IE bvh files, saves poser files (or whatever program your using) then file a DMCA order, it may take awhile but hopefully they get the message. If you don't want to go down the DMCA route, Try a friendly notecard/IM reminding them of said agreement, Did this person buy from you directly?

This is the reason I switched all my new animations to group only for full permission versions, This way I can go have a look around their store before I send a group invite, It's working for me, If someone is selling one of my old stock I send an friendly IM and 9 out of 10 times they remove it, I even went so far as to help one of the re-sellers with poser so they could make their own.

Not that I'm saying you should do that.

It is a minor annoyance to you but for those who create full perms animations for your use it is probably the only way to keep their items from being ripped off and turning up in BIB boxes all over SL.

No, technically, they are not just selling the animations. They're selling a poseball product, containing the animations. If they're couples animations, that includes adjustment. Lots of people in SL don't know how to put an animation in a poseball.

I understand your position that reselling animations as poseballs isn't much of a value add. But the OP didn't provide poseballs and didn't rule that out in his license, so it's technically legitimate. If he had sold the animation in poseballs, or if the licence terms had been clearer, then the poseball seller wouldn't have a leg to stand on.

This is not grounds for a DCMA claim. The poseball seller didn't take any measures to thwart copyright protection mechanisms. At worst, it's violation of a sales agreement, which LL will not get involved with (and as I said above, the sales agreement, read literally, permits this).

I'm all for protecting content creators' content. I've filed and supported JIRA entries to solve this problem (e.g., next-next-owner permissions). This is an unfortunate case where the seller didn't protect himself sufficiently, and the most he can do is politely request the reseller to withdraw his products, or work out some kind of agreement.

It's unfortunate that the permissions system doesn't support the value-added reseller sales model. RL economies are based on it and have legal systems to protect it. I know lots of creative people who don't bother with various kinds of content, because of permissions problems. I look forward to someday having a virtual world that inherently supports value-added resales. If they also get the rest of the world details right, there'll be an explosion of high quality content that'll make SL's look meager in contrast.

No, I completely understand, and that's why I call it a minor annoyance. I'm not going to *not* use an animation simply because I can't rename it. I've invested nearly L$60K in licensed animations so far, and I licensed them because they're good. If every single one of those animations was no-mod to protect the filename and description information, I would completely respect that.

You cannot, however, change the creator of an animation. The creators name will always be there.

And if one wanted to be technical, by making an animation "no-mod" to protect the filename and description information, it's really no longer "full-perm". It's "Copy/Xfer".

What if I put this into my notecard?
Would it cover most things?