Dawn of thieves’

You're not as much of a minority as you might think. I also have acquired quite a bit of loathing for no-modify objects. To me, setting something no-modify is tantamount to you, the creator, telling me, your customer, "This is how *I* want you to use *your* purchase. What *you* want is irrelevant. If you don't like that, then tough shit!" All this really does is actually encourage copying, because now I'm going to try to copy the damned item just so I can get fair use out of it!

I'm a builder. I build houses. I model my houses off of real-world contemporary and traditional architectural designs, and I take a lot of care and pride in my work. Do I worry about someone coming along and copying my builds? Well, a little, yes; but overall, I'm not going to punch the panic button over this whole copying issue. If someone wants to copy one of my builds, prim by prim, and go through the effort of lining each and every prim up to avoid gaps and overlaps, AND go through the effort of lining up textures so that they flow seamlessly and eliminate the texture-jiggle when two prim sides overlap... Well, more power to them. I don't price my houses out of the atmosphere, so the time and effort it would take for a thief to replicate my houses just wouldn't be worth it to him. Thieves copy and steal because they're too damned lazy and uncreative to build something themselves.

Complex functional items like cars tend to overlap heavily into copyright issues, though.

For instance, modern cars run on software. You can use a different engine controller, but you just can't rip the software and sell it as your own. Also, cars have unique graphics (copyright protected) all over them.

Circuitboards are another ~ they are graphics, and also functional. And acknowledged as art in the industry. It's one thing to design your own very, very similar circuit board (by design they have to be similar) but it's quite another to rip the design of a circuitboard, trace by trace down to .005 inch from a competitor and sell it as your own.

Anyone doing multi gigahertz design can appreciate the difference ~ there are copyrighted designs that exceed the recommended art published by the silicon manufacturers, and copyright of the circuitboard art is the only thing protecting the design ~ such designs aren't protected effectively by patent or trademark.

After a while, it gets harder and harder to extract the functional item from the blizzard of trademarks, patents, and yes, copyright issues too.

Not of the minority.

I will not buy many items that are no mod.

Especially houses. Yes I make a few houses mainly for friends and such. And I have made a few that my friends are like uggh dont like that wallpaper I have the same thinking too about other builds. What I like in a build might not be what you like in a build. Also some things can be prim heavy if I can save a few prims I am all for that. So I leave them mod. Do I worry heck a bit I guess but I am not going to sit there and worry constantly that takes teh fun out of building for me.

Sheesh. Hasn't the concept of copyright been abused enough lately, without adding fashion design into the fray? Seriously - copyright law was not designed to protect a work of art in perpetuity. It was only designed to afford original artists reasonable protection from copying for a limited duration of time. The keywords here are "limited duration". Yet we have big corporations like Disney twisting the copyright law well beyond its original intent - and it is creativity in general that ends up paying the price.

Copyrighting fashion design is just a bad idea all around. There are only so many ways a dress can be designed and still be called a dress. Anyone who has been around the block more than once knows that fashion tends to run in cycles. Throw copyright in there, and creativity gets killed while the biggest fashion moguls acquire and hold all the rights to anything that could be possibly called a dress.

Getting back to the original poster's problem, I have to wonder just what the hell happened. The guy who copied her stuff is clearly skilled enough that he should be able to make his own designs work. What would make the guy copycat hers instead?

The lack of imagination and fantasy. The greed. The sweet smell of the easy success.
(and I am a 'he')

Oh, sorry about that, it's hard to tell with humans sometimes.

They both could have been inspired by the same RL buildings.

Not saying that this is what happened here, but the first thing that popped to mind was that both could be trying to recreate a particular RL scene somewhere. This doesn't look like that because the copied items don't seem likely to be from any one RL locale, but one could imagine such a thing happening. I've worked with a number of builders who work from photographs and drawings of RL sites. Not my thing, but nothing wrong with it either.

[EDIT: Or what Chris said in 11 words. ]

I thought copyrights had a limited shelf life in most countries..e.g 50 to 70 years after death of creator/ artist. A 19th cc house (or art) would be well outside that.

If that's the case why have people invested millions of real dollars in virtual land???
Your 300 L animations are but a drop in the ocean when compared to ongoing Tier or rental costs!

Some countries think it's something like 120 years already... it kind of depends where you are, it's not uniform.

I've seen copyright claims on "Punch" cartoons as recently as last year, believe it or not, though I really doubt they hold up in the United States. Maybe in Britain?

* * * * *

With regard to copying and motives... I think there are three.

1) A sense of profit and wanting to "get in on it too"
2) A desire to do harm to the original creator in some way
3) Honest inspiration and love of the material, but taken a bit too far.

Could there be others?

BTW Des you almost got it dead on about fashion earlier. If you had Compared stuff in Marshall Fields to target you would have hit it. A dear friend of mine used to work for Marshals and flat told me target is owned by marshal fields. You will see the same clothes in both just with different labels. They are actually in most cases made in the same plant with the same processes.

I think you're too kind, Desmond. Let's not forget that a fresh thread like this has existed here at any given point in time for the last four years. They quite often turn into How-To (copy) threads. This is where potential thieves are given the opportunity to turn from noob to nasty.

Just for fun, I looked up "Cardinal Sins", and five of the seven seemed to fit quite nicely with this discussion of motives:

"Greed", "Sloth", "Wrath", "Envy", "Pride"

You've covered greed and wrath, but sloth and envy also seem likely candidates. I'll throw in denial too - Denial in the sense that some people do a lot of convincing themselves that what they are doing (by copying someone else's hard work) is not harming anyone. What's the motive there? Perhaps pride. If one can't take pride in one's work, then one can at least take pride in standing on what looks like a sturdy moral high ground.

On the flip-side, what these motives/actions breed isn't very nice either:

Cynicism, hatred, fear, paranoia

If anyone hasn't guessed, I'm a cynic who takes pride in hard work

New illustrations can be found here:
http://www.koinup.com/OriolusOliva/works/

It looks like this person has gone to tremendous effort to copy your work, prim by prim. Is it just your stuff that he/she has copied? If so, I would suspect ...



Have you had any sort of run-in with this person in the past? Are they an ex-friend of yours, or perhaps an alt of an ex-friend?

I hope you manage to find some sort of resolution to this. I think going the no-mod route would be cutting off your nose to spite your face though. Most people just don't want to buy no-mod.

Well I don't know but half the examples I see are not copies, at most similar looking items. They might be derived indeed from the same original, or the builder was inspired by your work. Good thing for you is that you did a way better job

To compare first page:
- The boat is a copy indeed, as far as I can see. Admitted too, if the comment is true.
- The dockhouse: the concept is alike but there are too many differences in both pictures to call it a copy.
- Glasshouse: copy
- record player: similar, not copy. The sculpt does not seem too hard to create.
- guns: same picture indeed
- u-boats: similar, not copies.
- lamp post: similar, both derived from real life designs.
- bridge: hardly even alike

The Laszlo dude is inspired by you for sure, and many things look like prim copies. On the first page I see too many items that are not copies, I would concentrate on the Laszlo dude.

That actually goes on in SL too. Some designers operate as many as 4 brands on 4 accounts to cover all the price point psychology segments.

I suspect the followings:
"3) Honest inspiration and love of the material, but taken a bit too far."
A bit later:
"1) A sense of profit and wanting to "get in on it too"
And:
"Greed", "Sloth", "Wrath", "Envy"
After caught:
"2) A desire to do harm to the original creator in some way"

Dawn of Thieves. So like one day out on the grid a big black 1*3*9 domino appeared and the grid denizens freaked out and one touched it. Later on that denizen became a programmer and now here we are and everyone has copybone. Soon we will send out a spaceship with a poorly scripted computer resulting in the modern denizen seeing the new bigger domino and saying "It's full of tards!".

The design was mine. It is not a copy of a real existing building. The copy is less or more modified but the structure is the same.



That was a copybotted thing - already removed by the Linden Labs



Same as the dockhouse. Forced to remove by the XStreet team.



Slightly modified versions of the first, exact copies - Look the lamp on the second page as well, which includes the copybotted(?) sculpt part

Yes, I would agree. I have only just looked at the newest images.

that was very witty...

"D. Laszlo: I bought the designs you did with my money up there ... Do you understand?
D. Laszlo: And then the imitators ... You know what it means to imitate?
Oriolus Oliva: No. You just purchased copies of my works, not the licence and not the design
D. Laszlo: Imitating perefectamente is lawful
Oriolus Oliva: No, it isn't sorry
D. Laszlo: you are wrong, I have not copied anything, I imitated
Oriolus Oliva: Including my own textures...
D. Laszlo: I like your style and so imitated him, but I have not copied anything from a non-lawful

Oriolus Oliva: Copying a design is not imitation. It is pure thievery
D. Laszlo: The textures are modified in Photoshop .. I am very good with that
D. Laszlo: Sorry if it bothers you, but these things, these homes are fakes, no copies

D. Laszlo: Linden can not, or should, take any action against .. All the tools I've used my monitor, my photoshop, etc, are legal ...
D. Laszlo: is the tool to take photos of the actual program. It is not a separate software"

So, purchase something from a creator.
Make an exact copy of it.
Take screenshots of the walls (Textures R Us and other legal sources) and upload them again as your own textures
Put them together and start selling as your own creations.
Yes, it is all legal...

Are you saying you filed a DMCA and LL did not comply as required by law? If so get a lawyer and have the lawyer deal with it.