Does this piss you off?....Texture makers who say you can't use their textures....

According to the SL terms of service, unless the creator has specified otherwise you have no license to transfer their content to another grid.

You have access to the creator's content under the SL permissions system because the content creator has granted LL a license to that content for use with Second Life. Unless the creator grants Linden Labs or you a broader license, you're violating that license when you transfer it to another grid.

The problem that I have is did the creator actually create the texture themselves or did they "borrow" it from the web?

If they made it themselves then I don't have a problem.

My problem is when they say I can't use it and they themselves did not get it through the right channels. If they paid to be able to use the images/textures and the person says to them "you bought it so go ahead and do what you want with it, you own it now" then that is fine. Then I am fine with them saying "Don't use it for anything else but SL".

Actually, that doesn't change anything. If they have a royalty-free license for the texture, then their version is a "derived work", and they are re-licensing it. If they don't have such a license then you don't either, so you're still not entitled to use it on another grid.

Ceera when was the last time you went texture shopping?
I double dare you to in world and go open search and hit the texture places that show up that you don't know about. Last time I went was year ago it was thoroughly depressing, went spent hours going place to place. I double dare you to do it on older computer that generates lot of lag. I bet you 100L you will find lots of textures that people are selling
that shouldn't be, I also bet you'll find textures that if you google textures you find in images, and I also bet you that you'll find a whole lot of textures without full permissions.
I also bet you that it will take numerous hours to go to every place with word "texture" in search and by the sixth one you want to go back to your art program and make your own out of sheer boredom or need a nap due to headache.

Well no, I think this is an issue. Are you working on trying to make there be a way for a person to identify themselves across multiple grids? I expect you aren't because you gain money as a result of such a way not existing. This sort of perverse incentive is something that a lot of people dislike.



You can defend your IP rights on _any_ grid, no matter what. A subpoena can't be ignored and if the grid doesn't follow Safe Harbor rules you can sue the grid operator.



Which they can do on SL as it stands.



That's true, but textures are an exception as they aren't protected by DRM on _any_ grid, not even the SL grid.



Those items aren't sold with full permissions in SL, textures are.

saying textures should be free on other grids because you bought them in sl is like saying all content should be free on other grids since you bought them in sl..
boots and shoes and clothes ect..

i hear these other worlds bitch about SL all the time..but we want your content because we need to build our world..

what is to stop someone from taking one of my textures in a grid i am not involved with and them selling it as theirs?

Indeed and I'm pretty damn sure many people are going to want to do exactly that. This is an argument that is most definitely brewing and it's upto content creators to ensure their customers know exactly what they're buying if they're going to object.



You need to look into your options closely and ensure you do everything you can to avoid the said situation.

I think a reasonable answer would be for creators to make items purchased in sl available in other grids at a cut down price... I could not (so far) make my favourite sl items myself and would be happy to pay for them again - at a special offer price (for valued customers) - in places like openlife...

alternatively in view of the fact that sl are playing around with grid interconnectivity maybe sellers could offer there goods at an increased price to be used in other grids - in much the same way that copyable items are sold at a higher price....

...and on the same subject Im suprised wily genius doesnt make available a transfer service... for those objects where the rights belong to the person who wants the transferring doing ...of course

How about "I'm not doing that because other people are already working on it"?

Why so negative and confrontational?

And it doesn't matter whether textures are sold with full permissions or not: there's no box a creator can check that says "allow transfer to other grids", and without that Linden Labs doesn't have the right to grant that permission, so "full permissions" within the SL grid doesn't grant it.

I rarely buy textures at all, since I make them for a living. But when I do, I tend to search no farther than TRU, where I know the 40+ artists that sell there, like I do, have committed themselves to NOT ripping off Internet textures and selling them as their own. TRU has dismissed artists before for passing off Internet textures as their own work, and has refused to allow those individuals to sell their textures at TRU. If I can't find it at TRU, I usually just make it myself.

Sure, I've been to other texture shops, and have been appalled at how much of what is there appears to be just random-generated stuff from apps like genetica, or stuff that looks like it may have been ripped from some game system. If the textures don't look like high-quality, hand finished work, I don't buy at that store.

I have to know a lot about a texture source before I'll trust that they didn't just rip the texture from the net. I know very few people in SL that'd I'd trust for original non-prim content. My faith was dashed when I found online the anims used by some very prominent old animators, and when I paid good money online for what turned out to be mediocre textures created by filter forge.

"Well no, I think this is an issue. Are you working on trying to make there be a way for a person to identify themselves across multiple grids? I expect you aren't because you gain money as a result of such a way not existing. This sort of perverse incentive is something that a lot of people dislike."


Geez, Yumi....we are talking about a few pennies here out of our pocket, right?

Ashe

I have absolutely no way to influence the people who run Legend City, OpenLife, or even Linden Lab in how they proceed with establishing a verifiable ID system between grids. I have a full-time job in the Real world, and a 20+ hour a week business to run in SL. I don't have time to donate my time and effort to developing changes on systems I am not familiar with, written in coding languages that I don't program in. I'll leave that to the developers who are getting PAID for such work, and the hobby developers who actually have applicable skills relevant to solving those issues, and free time and interest in those areas. Considering that Linden Lab has proven themselves incapable of even establishing a system for their own grid to verify the age of each individual Player, I hold out little hope that they will establish a cross-Grid identity system with any sory of validity, at any time soon.

As for my own ability to profit from this lack of validation, I have, thus far, refrained from even placing a single one of my textures for sale on other grids. I can't yet profit personally from ANY of them, not even from the one where TRU is setting up a store, because NONE of them as yet have an economy and currency that allows a content creator to cash out profits.

Only if you know it is happening in the first place. And in the case of Legend City, their TOS is to protect the IP rights *of their residents*, and does not necessarily extend beyond that.

And sorry, but a DMCA claim and subpoena is worthless unless it is a major rip-off case, like one person setting ip a competing store with thousands of ripped-of textures. The cost of pursuing each small case far exceeds the few pennies per texture lost to the average texture thief. You go to Court over a theft of $3.97 USD, and see how far you get. You'll put more change into the parking meter ath teh courthouse than you get for a settlement in a real-world court of law.

Arguments about how poorly SL itself protects texture artist's rights lend no weight at all to why I would want my work exposed to even more questionable environments.

That's fine with me, I won't use it if that is the case. I just don't want them telling me that I can't, especially if they don't have the right themselves.

And I don't believe that they have valid licenses for the thousands of textures that they, whoever they are sell, (if they are indeed not custom made). I'm sure the M&M's company did not give them the right to use their images. I'm just picking that company for arguements sake. If I"m wrong about the company then I apologize, I'm just assuming.

Doctor Freud to the White Courtesy Phone...

First, let me say that in Rl I am a lawyer. However, I do not work in the intellectual property field and I am not up to date in IP law. This is not legal advice.

With the disclaimer out of the way, we are dealing with simple contract law (sales are part of contract law). If you buy something and, at the time you buy it, you are made aware of terms of the sale, those terms are binding. So if you buy, even on SL, a texture with a rule that you can only use it in Tuesdays and Thursdays, then you can only use it on Tuesdays and Thursdays. If you object to those terms, then don't buy it.

If the seller prohibits you from using a texture on another grid, and you are made aware of the prohibition at the time of the sale (or before), then it is binding and you can't use on another grid. If you have a problem with that, just don't buy it.

If the texture is stolen, the prohibition still applies. The fact that the texture is stolen is another issue, which can be dealt with.

People should refuse to buy anything if they do not like the permissions or if there are prohibitions they do not like. I do not buy clothes that do not allow copy because that prevents me from placing copies in multiple folders of my inventory. If enough people refuse to buy something because of prohibitions on use, the seller may remove prohibitions to increase sales.

Mary

If the textures are their own work (or textures that they sell for other creators who have licensed them to do so), the can impose such a requirement--but only on textures they sell with that as part of the license.

If you bought a texture from them before such a license condition was in force, they can't retroactively bind you to their new policy.

I think you are wrong there. No--I'm absolutely certain you are wrong there. If the texture is stolen (i.e., sold/licensed in violation of the creator's copyright), then the seller of the stolen texture has NO RIGHTS to make or enforce a license for that texture. Any such license is meaningless as decisions regarding purchase/license/use of that texture are the purview of its creator; not some random person who violated his or her copyright.

what I want to know is:

if they will make 20 packs instead of 10 packs so people have to pay not only double but double twice... or is that 20 times for the one texture that someone actually wants..

or how about a 905-pack of the same copy paste hue rotated crap in 50 colors over and over again...

It's not quite that simple, no? What about the license granted to LL by content creators under the TOS? What about the implied contract of merchantability? What about the fact that the Linden Labs TOS and licenses bundled with textures are contracts of adhesion?

Yes, I'm not a lawyer, and you are, but I think you're simplifying things just a wee bit much here, no?

However, unless their previous policy allowed the textures to be transferred to other grids, the limitations of the license they granted LL under the TOS apply, and that license is limited to the Second Life service.

Absolutely. And as Lindal said early on in this thread, "If enough people don't like their policy, they'll change it. It's a marketplace issue."

That's part of what this thread is about. There's a real question whether the terms of the EULA contracts are so restrictive that the product no longer has much value, even in the grid where it's sold. I suspect that one reason they're so very restrictive is, as Yumi says, "textures are an exception as they aren't protected by DRM on _any_ grid, not even the SL grid." Of course images are particularly vulnerable to bypassing any kind of DRM, but the SL permissions system (DRM, such as it is) is simply broken for the vast majority of commercial texture sales; see http://jira.secondlife.com/browse/SVC-3448.

It's a very valid point that SL textures are relatively inexpensive because they are licensed only for use within the platform. If instead the license were for use of the image anywhere on the web, say, it would just be a very different product and a very much more expensive one. This applies to work original to SL content creators, and perhaps more obviously, to SL-sublicensed work from image distributors on the web.

we have heard the PR departments oppinion and saw the multiple ads for the store but.. I am surprised that the actual evil-doers havn't responded yet.. hahaha

What evil-doers? Microsoft or Google?