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

Where did you study law? Where did you study copyright law? 'Cause this is poppycock in regards to digital art forms (photoshopped changed transformations) not music or books. For an example, even a title of a song cannot be copyrighted.

Also, if someone publishes their photo on the internet, they took the chance of the whole public viewing it. Photos, very hard to copyright especially if placed on the internet and then altered by the taker and/or then altered again. It depends upon the amount of alteration as to what can be copyrighted. For instance, a hand colored photo cannot be exactly duplicated and resold as due to hand coloring mediums, it is an "altered artwork original". Some things one cannot make digital reproductions of. Other types of digital photo supposed copyrights, forget about it, lawyers wouldn't even be interested.

Thanks for the explanation, Rock.

Before this thread, I hadn't really appreciated just how decentralized the asset storage is on the other grids. So it's really kind of difficult for me to imagine what the business model can be, if it depends on assets having any value. It seems there's really no long-term hope of selling more than one copy of anything, because subsequent copies will be freely available soon enough. I guess I can imagine some market for "creation as performance art" or something like that. But I sure don't envision many folks routinely paying US$1000 for development of a script they could never sell on, for example. That doesn't mean nobody will make such scripts for free, but it certainly won't be all the same people who've been scripting on the SecondLife grid.

Copyright is exclusive federal jurisdiction in the US.

Tort law I was speaking about in California.

See above.

However, if you change a supposedly copyrighted item 25% or more, the copyright is void on digitally reproduced artworks. No attorney would be bothered.

If you've changed the texture, you can either give original credit or not. But it's highly unlikely that it's nothing other than an image gotten off of Google images that's been photoshoped. So, just photoshop it again into your own by changing by 25% or more.

A logo such as Nike or Disney is another story.

Her legal background or lack thereof is irrelevant because she's right.



There is no exception in US copyright law for digital media.



Whether a photo is published on the internet or on paper is irrelevant as far as copyright law is concerned. Photos are no harder to copyright than anything else that is covered by copyright. Any creative work (of the types that are eligible for copyright protection) is covered under copyright from the moment it is "fixed in a tangible medium of expression".

There is no need to do anything to copyright a work. It happens automatically. While the laws have been different in the past, since the Copyright Act of 1976, there has been no requirement of registration (which is also consistent with the Berne Convention).



You are confusing two different things in Copyright Law: Derivative Works and Fair Use.

First--Derivative Works: The copyright holder has the sole right to create or authorize derivative works of the original work. According to the US Copyright act (17 U.S.C. § 101):



Or--as Wikipedia simplifies it, "an expressive creation that includes major, copyright-protected elements of an original, previously created first work."

A texture based on a photo is such a derivative work.

Fair Use is a defense to copyright infringement. To quote Wikipedia again, "Fair use is a doctrine in United States copyright law that allows limited use of copyrighted material without requiring permission from the rights holders, such as use for scholarship or review."

One of the factors in determining whether unauthorized use of copyrighted material is "fair use" or not, is Tranformativeness. However, there is no legal 25% test--or anything close. Whether a Deriviative Work is considered transformative enough to count as fair use is up the courts to decide.

I am aware of what you were talking about above. My point is that while a EULA may be litigated in the state specified by the EULA (or elsewhere if a court can be found to agree), copyright cases are a matter of original federal jurisdiction.

See above.



That is incorrect, as I explained in my previous post. I am almost certain you will not be able to find such a 25% test in US law or case law.



Yes--that's because it is a matter of trademark law; not copyright law.

A trademark is copyrightable.

No attorney is going to take any case of a texture stolen SL incident seriously, my friend.

Handmade textures, yeah sure. You mean handmade textures gotten off of Ebay or Googles images. I'm sure if Google or Ebay didn't exist, SL wouldn't either.

I actually got a nc today inworld about new items with handmade textures. I looked at them and rolled my eyes. My thoughts: Right, handmade textures off of Ebay, oh brother!

And, no, in cases of what is called "altered art" if you change something 25% or more it overrides the supposed copyright. The U.S. case is a song and I think the case is at least 10 years old. It was determined "no copyright infringement because it was changed and/or altered from the original more than 25% and therefore represented it's own altered original creation. And this was a song. Doubtful any attorney is going to care about altered photoshop images to even give you a consult because with photoshop you have a million and one options to change an image into something unique or differing from the original enough to now be your own unique creation.

Hey hey little OS grids, you want to atract content creators? give us something to work with:

-good scripting engine, new exciting functions.
-shaders programming
-advanced texturing
-viable economic system so we can still have something to eat tomorrow.

Seriously it isn't by simply cloning LL's grid that you will make us want to move, give us new creation toys.
And certainly not by trying to push the transfer of assets to other grids by force.

I've said that as well, a few places. You win by making a *superior product* not by simply saying "we're not LL* and hoping people will excuse the fact that you have all the same old problems and less of the new stuff than even SL.

Well you can download Madonna's latest album from the Piratebay or Limewire for free, or pay for it on iTunes. The fact that pirate copies exist, and are easily available, has not stopped iTunes from being a success.

Similarly in SL, I saw the ripped-off copies of Sexgen, but I declined and thought it best to buy the original (to encourage further development), and I also resisted the temptation to download copybot and use that on attractive builds.

Of course, there are always those who prefer to get free, pirate, under-the-counter copies of things, but I suspect that the number of honest people make up a sizeable market. When you multiply that by the size of the Metaverse it could be a huge market.

Watermarking, and other electronic means of identification could also help, as could the offline purchasing of activation keys, that only work with a certain PC hash.

There are ways, and I am sure they will come.

Rock

And that is the nut of the problem, right there. Decentralized asset servers that ANY region owner can hack to grant themselves full access to anything. And any individual with the will to do so, an Internet connection, and a decent computer can set up one of those regions, just like you have.

The issue is far less about textures here than it is about other SL content and its value. Texture sellers have always been screwed when it comes to IP protection, since the SL asset permissions system never has worked in a way that allows us to set valid permissions that both protect our rights and allow the texture to be used in a reasonable manner. The main reason that Textures have tended to come up first in this debate is that they *ARE* so easy to copy and to move from grid to grid. All the grids support uploading textures. Few of them do a good job yet on uploading animations or scripts in a functional form. And none properly support moving already-completed clothes, houses, cars, and other content made by anyone other than the original maker.

We are in a situation much like the Music industry was in back when all music was still sold on vinyl LP phonograph records, and the first home tape recorders became widely available. Back then, no one but a record company could afford the equipment to create or duplicate an LP record. But reel to reel tape, and later cassette tapes, made it practical for individuals to copy whole albums and give copies to friends. The quality often wasn't as good, but for personal use a lot of people didn't care. The music industry had to press a bunch of expensive and widely publicized lawsuits against individuals and radio stations for using and distributing illegally copied music. And eventually things did settle down.

Today, you can copy a music or video source with virtually no loss of quality, making your own DVDs and CDs and loading things onto computers and MP3 Players. And the Music industry still survives. But look at the situation now. You can legally buy a song on iTunes and download it for your MP3 player for less than one dollar US. Pocket change, in today's economy. Back when we were still using phonograph records, a 45 RPM single record, with one song on it, could cost a teenager a weeks allowance, or more. Enough money to take yourself and a friend out for burgers, fries, and drinks, at least once, if not twice. So the value of selling one song has dropped a lot. So we get inundated with ads and other marketing, to hype sales so the record company can actually make a profit from that song. Attempts to copy-protect media, with encoded signals and chips in video recorders that prohibited duplication of commercial videotapes, all failed.

With SL content, the prices are already incredibly low. A dress designer in SL, making high-quality clothes, might spend over a week making a single outfit, yet charges only a dollar or a dollar and a half for copies of that outfit. Unless they sell LOTS of copies of that dress, they earn far less for their time and effort than a minimum wage job would pay in real life. And stolen copies are in most cases perfect duplicates, with no loss of function. Making it even easier to steal copies of SL content will inevitably drive the resale value of most goods even further into the gutter.

What can we do? I don't know. When copybot made it easier for any thief to duplicate furniture or prefab houses, I ended up deciding to close my businesses in those areas. I now work almost exclusively in custom sim building, making one-off builds for Universities and other big clients, and charging much higher prices for my time than i would have for prefab stuff, because I'll only sell a particular build once. I still sell textures, but they are more an offshoot of my building now. I make texture bundles that I, as a content creator, would like to have available. And I sell them to other content creators, so they can improve their builds. Making new texture bundles also gives me something to do when I am between whole-sim building contracts. But my "business model" is one I can do only because I have amassed a LOT of experience as a texture artist and a builder. The average resident just getting started could not just step into a new business at my level, any more than a fresh high school grad could step into the job of a Corporate Vice President who had to have 20 years industry experience to be considered for his position.

The development direction of SL so far is clearly that the experiences of paying consumers are more important that new businesses.

In that, you and I are in complete agreement. Not saying LL is at all correct in assuming that direction, but it does seem the path they have chosen.

Ok, I have a question for the texture artists.

How do you prove that the textures that you create are yours, handmade from scratch?

I was just at the store of one of the big texture guys and noticed that there were a bunch of textures that looked like they were taken from photos. For example, there were photos of what looked like ancient gold jewelry. How do you prove that you own these items and that you took the photo yourself, thus it belongs to you. Or, if you bought the photos from an online image site, then how do you prove that you have the rights to do with them what you want. Do you send proof to the big texture guy that is displaying your textures for sale for you?

P.S. I also saw Budweiser and Coca Cola signs. Did the texture artist get permission from those companies to use their logos?

Usually, it's by providing the layered .PSD files. They're very hard to recover.

Personally the only textures I've ever made have been with Filter Forge, Genetica, or Apophysis and you _definitely_ can't recover their input sets from pictures on the web

Well, in my own case, I have the 20+ layer Photoshop master files, 3D application master files, as well as the raw jpeg or similar images that may have been used to build the image. If I took the digital photos or 35MM photos myself, I have the higher-resolution images on file. You can't work backwards from a low-rez image ripped off the net to create more detail and more layers than were in the original image.

And I don't make textures that have copyrighted logos like Budwiser labels in them. If I need a soft drink can or a beer bottle or a bag of chips, I make up a ficticious brand name and packaging that may be similar to some well-known label, but is definitely NOT that label. Or if I do something like the front of a vending machine full of chips and candy, the individual product labels are sufficently blurred or altered to not be a specific company's labels.

There is, incidentally, a major difference between an image specificly of a beer bottle label, and a photo of a restaurant that happens to have that beer bottle somewhere in the scene. If your focus is on the label or logo, and the picture wouldn't be useful in that context without that part of the image, then copyright and appropriate use permissions for that logo are certainly enforcable. For example, making a texture for a tennis shoe and intentionally including a Nike Swoosh would require permission from Nike, and almost certainly no one in SL could get that permission. Yet I can take a photograph of a crowd of people, and the fact that one of the people is drinking a Coke, and someone else is wearing Nike shoes, and in the background there is a Ford car does not invalidate my copyright for my photo, nor does it require permission from every product maker whose merchandise happens to be in the image. Those elements are an incidental part of the much more complex actual scene being photographed, and my photo is still copyrighted.

Although people do seem to be paranoid about this.

Recently I watched an independent film which ended with a scene in a bookshop. At the end of the credits, every single publisher of a book that was on screen during that scene was listed with a note saying they had given permission for their cover art to be used.

As far as the signs go, they were Budweiser and Coca Cola neon signs. So, again I ask the question. Who is she to tell me that I cannot use those signs since she herself may not have permission to use them in the first place. Show me proof that Budweiser and Coca Cola said you can use them and I'll back off. I only flew around for a couple of minutes and came across these and the other jewelry pictures. Who knows what else I would find.

And again, I won't use them if I'm not allowed, I respect the work of others, but it would have to come from the company itself or from the copyright laws and not some texture store who shouldn't have it either.

Theatrical movie releases are kind of an odd case there, as the large size of the images presented and the nature of the media itself makes small details like book cover art more visibly identifyable. And because movies make a LOT of money, an industry has arisen for "product placement", where one _conspicuously_ presents a character drinking a specific brand of soda, and setting down the can so its label is very recognizable. Some companies actually PAY the movie makers to have the lead character wearing their brand of watch, or their line of clothes, or driving their car. That's Hollywood. If there's an extra buck to be made, someone will figure out how to do it.

What you certainly did not see in that same movie was a listing of every clothing, jewelry and makeup manufacturer whose products were seen, a losting of every food manufacturer whose products were consumed, a listing of the architects and builders of the buildings, and stuff like that. I would guess they included all those books that you noticed because in the bookstore scenes, the camera panned across their covers fairly slowly, or lingered in a way that made those specific book covers visibly recognizable.

I wouldn't sell textures like those, myself. If you see such textures, and have a complaint, then you should talk directly to the artist who is selling them. In my opinion, for that specific case, you would be right, and the textures should be removed. Even if they made the "neon sign" entirely by hand in Photoshop, they likely don't have a license to use the brand names in SL. But that only invalidates the legality of those specific textures, and in no way invalidates ALL textures by that artist. And it certainly does not give you, or anyone else, the right to freely use what you just identified as an "illegal texture". It just means that one texture should probably be removed from sale.

An interesting historical case. Linden Lab themseles used to have a freebie "Coke Machine" that was available. It was a scripted 1-prim vending machine that looked like a classic Coca Cola vending machine, and which operated to give you a scripted can of coke that you could drink. LL eventually pullied it from SL, and told people that they couldn't use those machines in-world. They still exist, but are not supposed to be used with that labeling.

So where is the quality control for this texture store? Why is she letting these things slip through. Don't tell me that she is too big and that things slip through the cracks. I'm not buying that. This place is making money from texture artists who are using copyrighted/registered images/logos without permission unless I see proof otherwise. And like I said, I only flew around for a couple of minutes and came across these things right away.


This whole post started because the store in question had the nerve to say don't use the textures for anything but SL, when they themselves didn't have the right to use some of them in the first place.

That's interesting, since Coca-Cola gave the green light to people to use their copyright in Second Life ( http://www.vintfalken.com/coca-cola-releases-trademark-to-second-life-merchants/ )

Ok, I apologize to the Coca Cola people. That is one down and another couple of hundred to go.

I love Genetica !!! but had to upgrade recently hehehe