Limited evidence of copybotting- what are my options?

Last night I found a cloned copy of a statue plinth that I had originally made- it was identical to mine (sculptie mesh, prim shapes, names of prims etc) but the creator name was obviously not mine and the creation date was last Sunday (the 13th) whereas mine is last July. Also, the creation time for the second prim in the plinth was 1 second later than the first prim in the plinth. I managed to screengrab all of this info using inspect object & have a pic of the object, info & one of the people involved.

The person who owned the item immediately deleted it when they saw I was getting curious about it, then ran off and, when caught again thanks to the help of a friend & Emerald's marvellous radar TP feature, claimed that they'd deleted the item from their inventory and cleared out their trash... how convenient.

Lon story short, the false creator was contacted and I got a one line response in bad English saying they were leaving SL.

I have relevant chat logs, screen grabs from the incident and I can prove that the people involved were at my store on the Sunday the cloned item was made.

My question: there are, to the best of my knowledge, no copies of the cloned item in the world right now. I have no other evidence other than my screengrab. This is insufficient for a DMCA and I feel a DMCA would be overkill here as the cloned item seems to have been for “personal” use.

What can I do to get these potential thieves banned?

I have submitted a Support Ticket and have so far gotten back a generic copy & paste response for filing a DMCA... my original message was clearly not read through (thanks LL).

What I'd like to happen is for a Linden to check through the accounts of those involved for suspicious activity- how exactly does one go about doing that these days?

Seeing as time is of the essence, I'm worried that the perpetrators may be busy covering their tracks as time goes on.

Ideas/suggestions/help please? (And I don't have enough money for a lawsuit at the mo )

File an abuse report just to get the matter on that avatar's record. Not everyone is smart enough to know how to obfuscate their physical geographic and computer location and LL will probably be able to correlate the whack-a-mole mole in the future.

File the AR and Fax in the DMCA information. Its quick and relatively painless but follow the guidelines on the website for DMCA to a "T".

I've had situations where its been resolved relatively quickly and all items removed within a couple days notice of sending the DMCA. They DO read DMCAs and seem to take them seriously and act rather quickly.

Here is the link to the DMCA information http://secondlife.com/corporate/dmca.php

You want them banned but think a DMCA would be overkill? I don't see that.

File the DMCA. LL will either find and delete the content (giving the other side an opporutnity to responsd), say that they examined the user's inventory and couldn't find the infringing item, or say that you didn't provide enough information for them to find it.

Based on what you've stated so far, I don't think it's reasonable to expect LL to have someone spend several hours of investigation to see if they can find anything suspicious. Maybe if a dozen different vendors all filed similar complaints against the same people, they'd start an investigation, but that's too much to ask for one case.

okies- AR's all round it is then.

Inbred- I have considered the DMCA but as I've said, the only evidence that I have right now are two screenshots- there's nothing left to point Lindens to in world to "proove" that the cloned item exists so I can't follow the instructions to a T

Do you have the name of the owner, the name of the object, and the creation date and time? That might be enough. As long as you don't make a habit of it, I think the worst that can happen is to deny the DMCA based on lack of information, but let them make that decision. You don't need to decide against yourself on their behalf.

I'm not sure but I think LL will only delete an inworld item that's out on display. They won't delete a copied item from a person's inventory. So if the person has already taken the item down then there's probably not much that can be done.


ps - and people should go visit Amael's place. Some of the best sculpties in SL!

Agreed .. he is a fab creator, and I was sad to hear this has happened to him

And a little mad as well

I hope LL do something to protect his amazing creations.

Ok- thanks for the replies all. I've ARed those involved to flag their accounts & have referred the ARs to my support ticket for all the details.

I've decided to hold off the DMCA for the time being given the useful comments here and the extra info that pops up before you submit an AR with regards to IP infringement.

The AR should get them investigated for using illegal tools (i.e. copybot) which is what I want whereas the DMCA seems to be exclusively for cloned content removal/suppression. Seeing as I cannot find any copies at the moment, a DMCA would be pointless and, as Kidd alluded to, I might get labelled in the long term as a person who cries “wolf”.

I consider this incident to be small time, no major harm done (although I would still like to see the people involved severely reprimanded for copybot use). If (when?) something more serious happens and I need the full force of a DMCA to take out large numbers of copies that are up for sale, I'd rather my word be taken as truth on the first go and not diluted by previous minor/failed DMCA requests.

Thanks for the help everyone- you rock!

If you have screenshots of all the information, you have more than enough evidence for a DMCA notice.

Remember, a DMCA notice is just a letter; it isn't a court order or anything. It is in your benefit to go ahead and file it, in case this person is lying about deleting it or leaving SL. That way, you are on record early in the matter, and LL has to act promptly, or suffer losing their safe-harbor status if this person continues.

So, yeah, go ahead and file the DMCA notice, attaching all the evidence you have. It costs you nothing but a little bit of time, but it puts you in a much better position to deal with repeat infringement from the same person down the road.