Dawn of thieves’

The last thing on my mind when I go to the workshop every day is whether or not someone is going to copy something. Same in RL.

I go in with the mind set "what do my customers tell me they want this week."

I allow items to be modified....because that's what the customers want. Some times I use sculpties and textures and poses from other creators because that's their specialty, and it's not mine. If I were making furniture in RL....it would not be cost or time effective to have a sawmill and a fabric mill in addition to the furniture factory. You purchase the lumber....you purchase the fabric. Same here....and it keeps the price at the level that customers are happy with.

There is something new to be made every day.....I can make something new with the few hours I have.....or I can spend those hours worrying and complaining about LL or Xstreet or a number of other things.

If I cater to the customers' needs and give good service and say thank you.....and use the allotted time for marketing and building loyalty.....then I don't have to worry about anything else.

Copiers, Xstreet scammers, and Bot Runners will come and go.....they don't offer even half of what I offer.

The economy in SL is not dead, by the way. It's fine.

This is no different than RL, is it? The higher-end the product, the more likely it's being ripped off. Knock-offs of everything from Rolex watches to Prada bags are commonplace. I personally don't have anything to do with those, but obviously a lot of people do. Even with software, look at the piracy. A number of people I know who would tell you they are honorable have pirated software. Heck, technically every time your burn your buddy a copy of that cool music CD you just bought, it's theft.

We pay realistic prices for those things. I don't pay 500 dollars to go to a movie.

People who create content in SL should be doing it for fun, it's a game for pete's sake.

I have my income for the past 3 years in SL, It's just about 1.5 million Lindens. That's around 5500 usd.. I have 44 animations I have created.. each animation takes about 5 hours do do all the work for straight through.. To date that equals $25 an hour for my work. And the thing is.. I don't have to do any more work on those animations.. Now they just sell, so any time I sell and animation that $25 goes up another fraction of a cent.

My point is not that we shouldn't sell things.. My point is that selling things for high art prices in SL, doesn't make sense. Selling stuff for realistic prices, will profit just as much in the long term as volume will make up the profit margin, and things selling for a dime are a lot less tempting to rip than things selling for $10.

Patasha

I.P. rights are worth protecting...

http://www.koinup.com/OriolusOliva/works/

So you are claiming exclusive rights to arch supported bridges and windmills? Tell us, did you design that light out of whole cloth? Or did you search your memory for the image you had seen before?

From your site:



Wouldn't you say both are copies of a lamp like this?



(first hit on "lamp pole" in google images, by the way)

I have to agree with Chris...yes, they are very similar to your own work; no, they are not identical. Similar is not IP theft.

Look at the bright side, imitation is the sincerest form of flattery.

It's easy to copy even without modify rights. Please don't encourage more sellers to sell no-mod objects.

The worst case is those high-prim attachments with a resize script in every prim. It doesn't keep thieves from ripping it, but it does lag servers for everyone and keep honest customers from making personalized adjustments.

I just won't buy 'em any more. If you want to sell to me, make it mod. Yeah, I know, I'm a minority.

I have to say... that's kinda scary. Quite similar works... going on, and on, and on, and on... for any one item, sure, arguments can be made but this isn't one item at a time.

It's sorta like the old joke where a guy is acquitted from killing a rare condor, because he was starving in the woods and it was extenuating circumstances. But when asked what it tasted like, he says: oh, somewhere between spotted owl and carrier pigeon...



It's not cool. You were clearly targeted, and while any one thing might be coincidence, the body of evidence here is overwhelming.

It's one thing to imitate a general style, but this goes waaaay far. Your creativity, as an overall body of work, has been hijacked. No question in my mind.

The weird thing is that these copies were obviously done by rebuilding them from scratch, without any attempt to get prim-perfect. Most of them, like the lamp, look like separate creations. Someone spent a huge amount of effort on this, much much more than it would take to just clone the objects, OR to make something different in the same general style.

It's like people making knock-off Gucci bags with a "Coochie" logo.

The problem is, that's legal.

And if someone is willing to go to this length to copy things while staying under the radar, how are any kind of technical protections going to help?

Not a minority of one, that's for sure: No interest in anybody's no-mod prim crap.

More importantly, anybody relying on no-mod to serve any purpose in protecting content is just delusional.

Even the posted "copies" are clearly just similar--not something a copier would get from cloning a mod-perm'd object (nor from CopyBot or its many descendants). I have no particular suggestion about how to combat that sort of copying, but obviously mod permission has nothing to do with it.

I am getting more and more that way. Somethings have always been off limits if it is no mod. I have passed over many outfits because I could not see if the skirt was mod or not. For skirts and belts even the best resize scripts will not do.

On hair I can handle a resize script. If I have to do more than a simple scale change then I do not buy the hair. I do not like having to rebuild 200 prim hair and I am not going to do it.

I have a couple of pair of boots from PixelFashion. They have a very nice resize script in them, but what I thought was cool was that after you wore them for a certain amount of time without making any changes, the scripts removed themselves. Now that's a feature they all should have.

And no mod houses? I can not use one. No mod furniture? No way. I am not a 10 foot tall behemoth. I scale down all my furniture accordingly. This is on top of wanting to add or replace the animations for many things. No mod poses boggle my mind. Why? The only thing that can be changed is the name and when I put it in my AO I do not want it to take up half the characters allowed in that string. Diesel makes some great poses for photos but the names are so long I can not use them with my photo booth's posing system. Oh well. There are plenty of good animators and pose stores to choose from.

/me sighs

So that's where I stand on no mod. I understand the creators are trying to protect themselves and have had to take some non-traditional choices. It just sucks for everyone involved.

I blame LL

Sorry, rant off now.

Given the number of similar items, I think you could make a reasonable claim of infringement.

This is not a violation of DMCA, because the content was obviously recreated. As such, it's not a criminal action, by law. It's a civil matter, and it's up to you to protect your own copyrights (e.g., by filing a lawsuit).

LL should not be responsible for making decisions in cases like this, any more than the police or FBI would, if it were in RL.

I feel for you, but I don't blame LL.

How legal it is has been a matter for courts and lawyers for ages.

Imitation of an overall popular style is typically legal. But at some point, you really are starting to infringe. Otherwise someone could build a "Chavrolet" and just put a smiley bumpersticker on it to define it as "different." Hey, not the same car!

Well, that's obvious enough.

By making it waaay harder for the casual people who would copy things if it were just a mouseclick or two. The same reason we lock our doors, chain up bicycles and things with locks that can theoretically be picked, cut off, &c. It's a clear, basic deterrent anyway.

You may think you are in the minority, but more and more buyers are coming around to realizing that the no-mod crap is a pain in too many ways.

I always wondered about why poses and animations were ever no-mod. And it does tick me off cuz usually their names mean nothing to me, though it has not always stopped me from buying some of them

There is just very little that I will pay any kind of money for anymore when it is no-mod.

That is legal to do, isn't it? At least mostly.

A car design isn't protected by copyright. Special patented features couldn't be copied. The name is protected by trademark.

I'm not so sure that it's illegal to build a copy of a Chevrolet and sell it. It doesn't happen all the time because (a) it takes tremendous start-up costs to start a car manufacturing plant, and (b) people are generally wary of spending a lot of money and risking their safety on a knock-off brand.

Edit: The one thing that would be illegal would be to create something designed to confuse customers into making them think they were buying a Chevrolet when in fact they weren't. So copying a design exactly and putting a very similar name on it like "Chavrolet" could be violating Chevrolet's trademark in Chevrolet. The legal problem there, though, comes not from mooching from the design, but mooching from the brand name.

Hey please, everyone forgot the words "morality", "ethics" and "fairness"?
The law is not almighty... We need some other things to be humans.

One of the more typical lawful examples are when, say, an upscale place like Neiman Marcus comes out with a bunch of stuff, and then not long after you see that similar style at Target. The kinda clothes that look basically the same until you walk up and see that no, it's got some differences... the kind of differences that would be utterly overlooked by someone not into clothes, like myself.

(For those who don't know what Neiman Marcus is, a.k.a. "Needless Markups" in local Orange County vernacular here, they have a website I think)

This isn't exactly a free pass to go copying people, though. At some point, you are going to trip over design and trademark issues depending on the fidelity of the copy to the original, or what a jury might decide, &c &c.

And actually... a car design is protected by copyright on many levels. Someone designed the fender shape this way and not that, and so forth.

A car won't be entirely covered by copyright but there will be plenty of demonstrably unique areas that don't simply fall under "this is how any car has to be made" that can be claimed as design.

This is a good reminder.

A while back, there was a book called "The Death of Common Sense". Its basic theme was that we had become obsessed with codifying everything down to the last detail. One of the prime examples given was OSHA, and how inspectors made companies spend huge amounts of money complying with their endless picky regulations...while completely ignoring real and serious workplace safety issues because they "weren't in the book".

There's morals. The unwritten rules that the majority of society subscribes to and generally follows. ("Thou shalt not steal"

Then there's the law. (Steal somebody's IP and you will be punished, if you get caught)

Then there are technical safeguards. (The SL permissions system)

Too many people seem to think that if they CAN do it (exploit a permissions loophole, for example), then it's OK to do it. And others think that if they CAN get away with stealing ("those guys won't sue me, it's only over ten bucks of virtual merchandise" that it's perfectly OK to do it.

Stealing is wrong, period. It can be shown that theft harms not only the immediate victim, but has far-reaching negative consequences for society, both economic and moral. A nation without morals cannot long endure.

Trademarks and patents, Des. Copyright applies to creations such as books, artwork, videos and motion pictures...media, not hard goods. But I quibble.

We can commiserate, but when it comes down to actually doing something about it... you're pretty much limited to what the law says. And the law says that you can make a knock-off of a '59 Corvette and mount it on modern chassis and Chevrolet can't do anything about it.

Functional objects aren't protected by copyright, though.

When it comes to fashion, for example, clothes aren't protected as intellectual property at the moment of creation like a non-functional piece of art or writing. Fashion patents (from what I read, I have no first-hand knowledge) are expensive and difficult to obtain. For copyright protection to a useful article, it must have "pictorial, graphic or sculptural features that are either physically separable or 'while physically inseparable by ordinary means from the utilitarian item, are nevertheless clearly recognizable as a pictorial, graphic or sculptural work which can be visualized on paper, for example, or as a free-standing sculpture, as another example, independent of the shape of the useful article . . . .'"

In real life, clothes and cars are useful articles, they don't get copyright protection.

It is possible for fashion designs to be protected by fashion patents, but a fashion patent doesn't come automatically, for free like copyright. A fashion patent apparently costs a few thousand in fees and can take a long time to obtain (which doesn't count paying the lawyers).

But bringing this back to Second Life, to me, the furniture and houses ring to me of useful items, and not artistic works. There is undeniably talent and skill required to manipulate prims, but ultimately, there are only so many ways to do it. The same thing applies to texturing too. In some cases, like making simple tiling textures that can be applied to many uses, there are only so many ways to create one. These things are far more guided by utility and artistic design.

I built a house for myself for my little 512 sq m of land. I made every aspect of the house myself, prims and texturing. About a year later, I saw a picture of a house that looked almost identical to mine on XStreetSL. Part of me said that someone copied my work and put it up for sale. Another part of me said that what I did was so basic, that anyone making their own house for the first time, using very simple building and texturing techiques, might come up with something that looks like my house.

(And in any event, my house is fine for me because I made it. But to sell it for someone else- it's not worth the L$ 100 it was selling for, not worth L$ 1 even.)

I think it's wrong for others to just do the widespread copying. For a lot of it- particularly when it comes to prims and functional textures- it does not seem to fit into illegal activity as the law stands.

This, by the way, is a Congressional committee report from a few years ago that considered the possibility of new legislation that would give copyright protection to fashion designs:

http://www.copyright.gov/docs/regstat072706.html

It's a good article for distinguishing between expressive works (getting copyright protection generally) and functional works (getting no copyright protection generally).