What would you do?

LOL!

Tempting....

My vote is to have the creator quietly file a DMCA takedown request, and sidestep all the rest of the drama.

The rules are pretty clear that you can't name someone who is, or is believed to be, a violator.

But do the rules also prohibit naming the victim?

In this particular case, would HoneyBear get into trouble by posting here something like:

"if you see [actual Designer name] skins as freebies, get out of there, because [actual Designer name] doesn't have any skins that have been released as freebies, and the person displaying them, whoever he or she is, is violating a creator's rights'...

???

But are they easily identifiable as [actual Designer name]? Or has the brand been removed, and one would need to be familiar with [actual Designer] skins to really recognize them?

That is where it gets difficult.

Jerboa's statement says it all, I believe

One thing I would ask for is that you inform other freebie bloggers, HoneyBear. I know there are a lot of us and that would be quite some ground to cover, but most of us would be horrified if we inadvertently recommended this store on our blogs.

I'm not so au fait with skin designers in Second Life that I could say "this is a rip-off of such-and-such store's skin", but alarm bells would likely start ringing if I saw what looked like high-quality skins being sold for free, especially in one of those stores that sells 'a bit of everything'. However, if they were bundled together in your typical reseller/freebie skin package they might be less easy to spot.

Whilst I missed probably the main section of the debacle last night, I was witness to one of the bannings. One of the army that had descended on the store resorted to name calling, not very clever, not useful at all. I was impressed the owner limited his action to banning and not send the chat record to LL, AR-ing them for harassment.

By the way, has anyone actually looked at these skins? They're not top-notch. The eyebrows are largely blurred, one of the two with freckles fails to load the highest level of detail and there are blemishes and aliasing abound.

Oh and by the way .. they're no longer at the store.

Bear in mind, that ripped skins frequently show problems. And these skins came from one of the designer's earlier lines - and there were frequent complaints about them not being "top-notch".

However, even the crappiest designer in SL still has the right to have their content protected.

Honey

I appreciate your sentiment on whether to announce the store as well. As you know and possibly some of the folks on this forum -- that I was a victim of Copy Bot and discovered this yesterday(and no this is no wild conclusion I drummed up) All of my sculpt maps are alpha'd and have been for the better part of a year. The maps were certainly not accessible nor ever distributed to anyone.

An anonymous avatar IM'd me and informed me of the infraction. Like you, I debated whether to announce the store to my group of 3600 members, for fear of advertising to the bargain hunters.

Well.........within 10 minutes of me sharing the information -- An army descended on this store filing AR after AR. Some of the folks leading the charge were very well known and I truly appreciate the overwhelming outpouring of support. The store was apparently filled with stolen skins, shoes, clothes etc.

Fast forward to this morning -- Some renters have pulled out of the SIM. The shoes were taken down, and the thief was removed from search. (Probably suspended) but nonetheless, a loud message was sent.

Ya know, it plain sucks but, I was biding my time until the day it happened because I knew it would eventually. The actions of the community absolutely blew me away and I still am rather shocked.

There has been a rash of theft lately. I would caution anyone about discussing any type of program that is available on the web that can be used for nefarious purposes as I have seen in some threads here lately. These people do not need help nor do we need to give any 'fence sitters' any ideas on how to steal content.

Protect your designers folks cause I gotta tell ya -- it's something you prepare yourself for but won't know how to react when it does happen. And, its a sickening feeling.

CC

BTW CC, please PM me the name of the store. I ran out of time and energy last night after that little drama. I need to verify they're not on the blog.

Thanks.

I'm with Lindal.

If it was me, and I knew for sure that the skins were stolen, I would name the store and let everyone be damned. Otherwise, it seems that I would be pretending it didn't happen or that it didn't matter.

Oh how I wish my new found building skills (or lack there of) were good enough to entice someone to try and steal my build lol.

Anyway, this is a subject I haven't given much thought to, until I started building myself. I can totally understand how upsetting it would be. I now understand how much work goes into creating something.

I bought along a skin maker who identified these skins in seconds and it was the same creator Honeybear had identified, the skin maker then got herself banned for calling the guy a ripper but he should have taken onboard the objections.

Just because something is free it doesn't mean it's not damaging, the creator finds their product greatly devalued in such circumstances.

Update on this...

The owner of the freebie place contacted me tonight, was very pleasant, apologized...said he was just kind of freaked out by it all last night, and said he also apologized to the creator's partner, whom he had banned, and explained the situation to them. I haven't not spoken with the partner.

Ciaran, I wonder if your friend's been unbanned.

Honeybear, your topic enticed me enough to visit your blog... and now I'm afraid you owe me two healthy retinas.

Aaaaaaaaaah... the pink! The PINK!!!

I think the biggest thing to take away from this is that if you give the situation a little time to cool off and then see what happens before doing anything, you might not need to do anything in fact.

If the offender had not contacted you to make right I would have probably left it at the ARs and a delisting of the review(s) on your blog.

Maybe if LL didn't remove the content after a little while I might have been tempted to list his place as a place to avoid but this is tricky as it can just as easily spread the infringing material.

I think in the end you did the right thing and waited to see what happened and got the best result.

You think *that's* pink? Should have seen the last design! lol