How strict should people be about reporting trademark infringement?

Here's what I don't understand about the "who cares about corporation X and their trademarks/copyrights? It's not my job, etc. etc."... as a community we're pretty quick to descend like a pack of wolves when a SL content creator has their work pirated or is otherwise ripped off (which I think is great), so I'm curious where the dividing line is between little guy that doesn't deserve to be ripped off and evil corporation that does. Disney was probably an unfortunate example to pose the original question since they've done more than any other entity to push copyright protections to a point that can seem unreasonable and create disdain for copyrights and trademarks in general. I don't have an answer, and I'm not sure how I feel about it, but that's what I find most fascinating about this issue.

Disney has an army of lawyers whose full time job is seeking out infringement so the attitude that it's their responsibility to police the planet is at least understandable, but the same argument when applied to a small time artist, who can't possibly protect themselves without a sympathetic community, really makes me bristle. So where is the line?

It's a good question, and one that doesn't seem to yield to a simple answer. There was a recent dustup on Facebook that is similar to what you're asking Chip. In that situation, some small company made an online version of the game Scrabble, and it became very popular. The copyright holder, Hasbro IIRC, hadn't bothered to create an online version of the game. Anyway, once the online unofficial version became popular, Hasbro filed a DMCA and later issued their own online version.

So, I have to wonder if these big cats just watch the marketplace, and when something seems economically viable by generating enough traffic via the unofficial version, then they move to shut down the unofficial content production and put out their official version, for a profit of course.

So I don't know, it seems like a perfect situation for big content in some ways. They get someone else to pay for building the market demand, then they shut them down and take over that new market.

Some of the bigger comic book companies do aggressively pursue infringement -- my husband is a professional comic book artist and is not permitted to sell sketches of the "heroes" he draws on eBay (or any other public venue) as the copyrights are owned by the respective companies.

That said, I've seen quite a few infringing "art sales" and superhero avs around SL, so my guess is that the big companies have not found it all yet. Maybe it's that "search" problem. I don't report the stuff, because I know most of my artist friends don't care about the small amount of money involved (if they do happen to hold the copyright). And I don't care to be cop for the big companies. They PAY people to do that, I'm I'm not on the payroll.

It is just a matter of time. The fact that Linden asked someone to stop making superhero costumes is a sign. But they should have asked everyone not just one vendor. I suspect it was a complaint from some other vendor not the company.

The trick is not to copy stuff. You can make superhero costumes without using the same designs. I have seen many super woman costumes on the web copies of wonder wonder woman. Some were pulled but others have survived. Copywrite violations are tricky. All one has to do is to change it just enough. You know it is a copy but it is not close enough to be sued for it. Just look in stores and you will see what I mean.

The copywrite names are another problem. Wonder Woman has a copywrite but superwoman does not. I have a wonder woman costume, not doubt a violation, if they called it a superwoman or hero woman it would probably be safe.

One problem with appointing oneself to be a Trademark Cop is that often you don't know anything of the situation on which you are reporting. I know of a number of companies who have written to RL companies whose products and/or trademarks they wished to use in SL, and received permission to do so, usually because the company decides that it's not an area where they're interested in selling things, and in many cases they figure it's good advertising. One company even offered to give us promotional material to give out with a product.

I would think that most companies will recognize SL products as being mostly the equivalent of fan work. Also remember that most of these companies consider their actual competitors to be other RL companies that produce competing products, not someone making things on the internet. Anything that gets the brand in front of people's eyes is a good thing.

It doesn't even need to be that extreme, there's plenty of "little guy" infringement in SL as well that is never widely condemned because the original creator isn't involved with SL (DJs all over SL will play pirated/unlicensed music from small groups as happily as the multi-million hits, content from rendorsity - among others - results in nitpicking over the license, few still care about pirated textures, etc).

Leaving out the shades of gray the dividing line seems to be whether the creator is part of the SL community or not. Minnu was a perfect example of that: everyone (rightly) condemned anyone who copied her skins, but the fact that she copied the skins from someone else to begin with was downplayed and justified by as many as (rightly) condemend it and many more just couldn't care less.

Does this imply you've rigged your DVD player to skip over the warning at the beginning of many DVDs that say copyright infringement is a crime that might be investigated by the FBI?

I'm not familiar with the details of what turns a copyright infringement case into a criminal matter, so it may not apply here, but there is a crime of copyright infringement. I don't know whether there's an analogous crime for trademark infringement or whether counterfeiting is that analogy.

Right on the first, wrong on the second, at least within the U. S. It's useful but not necessary to register a trademark.

See http://www.uspto.gov/go/tac/doc/basic/register.htm .

Notwithstanding my mention of criminal copyright infringement, I don't believe there's any moral obligation to report third party copyright or trademark infringement within SL. I do believe that there's a moral obligation not to buy such products if you believe they're infringing, but it's a mistake to assume that an SL store doesn't have permission of the owner of the rights.

But just because there's no obligation to report such cases doesn't mean it's wrong to do so. If you're running a business in SL, and you believe that someone else is infringing upon a third-party's intellectual property in a way that affects your sales, then it's perfectly reasonable to report that. It's strictly a business decision as to whether your time is best spent doing that or doing something else.

There's a huge difference between reporting a case when it comes to your attention and spending time searching out infringements. I'm not sure why people are focusing on the latter.

Finally, while there may be no obligation to report infringements in general, that doesn't mean there's no social value in doing so. Do you want SL to be a place where people think it's ok to infringe on other people's intellectual property if they can get away with it? Or do you want it to be a place where people respect the IP rights of others as a matter of principle?

What I certainly don't want it to be is a place where the only way to succeed in certain business fields is to violate trademarks. Certainly, some fields and interests in-world are so dominated by trademark interaction ("magic" and Harry Potter comes to mind) that for a business to avoid the trademark is nearly impossible.

So essentially a newcomer has a choice.. violate the trademark, and risk a lawsuit and damages or at least loss of all your content if the right holder does decide to act; or don't violate the trademark, and de facto fail.

That seems to be a horrible tradeoff. On other virtual sites where creating content is easier, in many cases it has effectively strangled the entire market: for example, on Whirled (where an avatar is just a 2D animation), why bother drawing an original character when you can just cut and paste an image of a famous character from a cartoon still and it'll typically get more sales?

It probably implies that I don't really know what I'm talking about.
If I see someone in rl climbing into the window of a house I know what to do: call the police and tell them it looks as if criminal activity might be taking place. If I happen to see something for sale in SL that I suspect was stolen from someone else in SL I would definitely alert the real creator. If I see a Disney charactor on a tee shirt for sale I do suspect that the Disney company hasn't given permission but I don't feel such a duty to report it to anyone. I'm not so sure I can justify this attitude though.