Should this be reported?

Supposing someone purchased a trivia game in world for a couple thousand $L. Once purchased, unpacked, rezzed, inspected... during spell checking the cards and fact checking a few questions through searching online, one would find the site on the internet where all of the questions were apparently lifted from.. in their order, no less. The questions on this site were billed as "Free trivia".

Figured I'd ask here and see what others had to say.

Reported to whom? Linden Lab? Only if you're the owner of the website in question and want to pursue it as a DMCA violation.

To the maker of the game you bought? That's not going to do a bit of good, they already know about it.

To the owners of the website they lifted the questions and answers from? That might have merit. Especially if they have anything on their site about authorized uses for their content.

Other than that, while I think it rather stinks that somebody is doing this, if the owners of the website aren't willing to take action on it, then it's unfortunately not actionable.

In the long run you might find yourself facing a lot less heartburn if you enjoy the trivia the game provides.

Surely though, the whole idea of trivia is that it is about facts.... So the answers to the questions WILL be on the internet, you would hope! The creator could have been more inventive and re-worded the questions etc, but the fact would remain that they could have "Lifted" the questions and answers from any number of places because they are merely stating facts that are public knowledge?

How can you steal something that is already free?

And how can you charge L$2000 for something that's already free, but that's another thing entirely I guess.

It's only the questions that were ripped... it appears the guy wrote the scripts and built the game themselves.

I'd AR them for being lazy!

…you know, or you just think? even if the scripts appear to be by him he could have just copied a free script, I believe there is one in the scripting tips forum, but I would need to check that.

Edit: found it

/54/2f/151254/1.html

There was no suggestion otherwise until now..... I was giving them the benefit of the doubt (dangerous in these forums I know!)



... that's a double AR for being lazy then!

Because "free trivia" isn't a sufficient description of what you're allowed to do with it.

For example, the typical Creative Commons license grants users some set of rights at no charge. You're allowed to do anything within those rights, but that doesn't mean you're allowed to do anything you want. For example, a non-commercial CC-type license would allow this type of usage if the object were given away, but wouldn't allow it to be sold like this.

It may help to remember that "stealing" isn't really the right term to use; "copyright infringement" is.

That's akin to asking how a bar can charge $2 for 5 cents worth of soda water.

If you have the right to sell something at all, then typically you have the right to set the price. Whether or not the price is fair or ethical depends more on the competition than on the cost of goods. The reason we get down on people who sell freebies isn't that they have no legal right to do so, but that they're exploiting newbies who don't know that they can get the same stuff for free.

On the other hand, if someone puts together a set of gesture sounds from material that is freely available on the web and can be resold, it's perfectly reasonable for them to sell it in SL - until competition shows up. That's because they've still gone to a fair bit of trouble to find the sounds, download them from a web site, maybe change the formats, upload them into SL, and package them. The fact that the pieces are free doesn't mean there's no added value.

Yes and no. There's such a thing as "compilation copyright". I'm not really familiar with the issues around infringement of a compilation copyright, but if the entire set of questions came from a single web site, it's possible that there could be infringement - even though each individual question might be about a well know fact, and might not be subject to copyright on its own.

Which gets right back to what I said. Any action to be taken on this must, by necessity, be taken by the owners of the website in question. That's how the DMCA works.

Playing Devil's advocate again.. could it be that the website belongs to the same person who built the trivia game?

And this is all assuming that the person who owns the website "wrote" the questions and answers...