A question about transfer object selling

Dear All,

Ok - to cut a long story short I've got some land where I can't get at the lovely linden water which is very tedious, living on a boat in RL means I NEED water so I made a sculpted water package. I sell it non trans mod/copy at the moment but I'd like to sell it trans so that house builders etc can use it in their creations BUT. I don't want to end up with people just reselling my water.

What can I do about this?
My thoughts so far are:-
Have a developer price that is very high Like L$10,000 to deter those who would think to buy it and just resell it, have a license agreement they agree to rather like textures'r'us (We love you!) where it states you cannot resell the textures on their own they need to be part of something else.

Am I missing something here?

Welcome to the nebulous world of selling building components in SL.

Yup, that's pretty much your main option, and good luck.

Setting a high price works both ways, though. Unscrupulous people who think it's overpriced will band together, buy it, and share it amongst themselves.

The SL permissions system should have a better model for this. Some day VR worlds will, they're needed to grease the wheels of a mature manufacturing economy (which SL's really isn't). For a one-level solution (which I feel isn't sufficient, but better than nothing!) see this JIRA entry:

http://jira.secondlife.com/browse/SVC-2622

My suggestion is rather than using the price to avoid resales (or free distribution for that matter), investigate potential customers carefully.

That is the model that most sub-component creators have to use.

For example, if I want to include pose ball animations from Bits and Bobs in my furniture, I can pay a higher one-time fee to license a full-perms copy for my furniture creation. I then am required by their licensing to change the permissions for the animation in the finished furniture so it will be no-copy for the next owner. (You could just as easily require that it has to be no trans for the next owner...).

There's a risk involved, to be sure. If someone intentionally ignores your requirements, or if they release a product where they mistakenly didn't set the next user permissions as you desired, then you may end up with full-perm copies of your sub-component floating around out there. But generally speaking, most content creators who are willing to pay a higher licensing fee to add your sub-component to their product are just as eager as you are to make sure that what they sell doesn't get abused by their customers.

For most sub-components, I would say that 10x to 20x the price of the restricted perms version would be fair for a full-perms copy. Bear in mind that the content creator needs to be able to sell enough copies of their product to make it worth the investment of adding your component. (Or sell it as part of a high-ticket item, like a full-sim build).

As a builder of whole-sim and multi-sim projects, I encounter this sort of issue fairly often. For example, I may want to design a lake that people can swim in. But the "swimmable water" is no transfer. That means I have to get the client to purchase those parts, and I position them for them. Being able to purchase a more expensive version of the same product that I could place myself, and then transfer to the client as a no-copy or no-transfer product would certainly be worthwhile. If that option was available, I would weigh the cost of that component against the time and effort required to get the client to obtain theno-trans parts. Most times, the higher fee would be worth it. And for something like your sculpted water, it would be a product I would certainly use again and again, in future sim projects, so a higher fee wouldn't be much of an issue for me.

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One other model is "builder's multi-packs" of no-copy duplicates. This model is used a lot by makers of prim trees and plants. I can go to my favorite virtual garden center and buy a box containing 25 no-copy, transferrable trees, to use in landscaping a project. In your case, maybe a client could buy 10-packs or 20-packs or 100-packs of your sculpted water parts, as no-copy but transferrable, to use when making lakes and streams for clients.

This is a really important point to note, because it's not in the interests of the person paying for the full perms copy to see it end up in a BIAB. They want to recoup their investment so they will pay careful attention to any restrictions you attach and if they don't think they're going to protect the value of the item, they won't buy it.

Ceera

I just had to say it is kinda nice....as a question asker, and a willing answer-er (I dunno if that makes sense)

Thank you for being. you answer well.... and with detail. I kinda have a non-romantic..not creepy crush. .... mostly just saying thank you

Jake....feeling lovey today

Thank you Jake. It's nice to be appreciated. And I genuinely like offering helpful advice, so no problem, from my side.