Can a content creator restrict...

The Business Software Alliance website is full of all the details you could ever want to know about that kind of thing.

I just found this on the wiki:

http://wiki.secondlife.com/wiki/Permissions_Explained

This seems to spell out what your rights are wrt perms.
I think it may well be the case that as a creator you are agreeing to bide by the rules set out by LL and if you set copy then that means you are giving permission to copy.

The article talks about fair use and right of first sale and so rights and fair use are being considered. This suggests to me that LL expect the setting of perms to be the actual right you get.
Copy is not explicitly mentioned under either of those sections but in the section it is mentioned it does state:

"If copy is enabled, you can make as many copies as you want of the original item. Copies maintain creator information, and can never be more permissive than the item being copied."

Thanks Argent

I have to say though, if SL starts going down the route of vendors selling items as licensed software instead of selling them as if they are the digital equivalents of tangible items, then one of two things is going to happen:

1) The licenses will be ignored and rendered useless due to the sheer number of violators and the cost in bringing them all in line.

or

2) People will become very concerned about what buying an item is signing them up for and want to read the license for everything they buy up front and before they pay any money or they will abandon in-world shopping if it is too difficult for them to understand.
SL shopping the way it is today is not conducive to reading licenses before buying and it could damage the in-world economy.

Some people may be willing to think about the license for a texture before buying, but they are not the majority of the shopping public, they are creators which form a minority class. The majority of people are either going to want to just go shopping and be able impulse buy without fear of the myriad of different licensing causing them problems. If they cannot do this then they will not go shopping. The perms system only really works because it is simple and everyone can understand it.

The "right of first sale" discussion kind of implied that LL was treating copy-no-transfer as "software" and transfer-no-copy as "hardware".

I agree completely. I have made all of my prefabs copy/mod/no-transfer for the very reasons you've explained.

I would expect and hope that if someone buys one of my houses for the purpose of populating an estate with it, that the person would buy that number of houses from me, but it's not something I could realistically enforce, nor would I try to. In actuality, I'd be rather ecstatic that someone chose one of my builds for populating an estate, and I'd hope that the exposure my build gains as a result helps offset the "loss" from not getting the multiple sale.

Except the excerpt I pointed out does that LL allows you to make copies of copy-enabled items, it did not place any conditions on that.

There was nothing there that explicitly backs up your claim about first sale Argent. I didn't read that into it and you would expect LL would have made the comparison if it were pertinent.

I shop at Turbosquid and Renderosity and i always read the License given with the products i consider purchasing.

But this is a new one on me and when i went to the XstreetSL page to give it a rating, i read the "License" at the bottom of the page.

I thought about maybe offering the builder 1/2 the price to rez another, but then i was like, WTF - COPY means COPY, it does not mean 1 single copy or 1000 copies, it just means you can COPY it.

I do not think an End User License Agreement can work for the "tangible" virtual goods we sell in SL when LL gives us the permissions to set for the next owner of the item which in themselves dictate what the end user can do with the item - an added on item to LL's permission system labeled as a "License" can not alter the permissions LL allows to be set for items exchanged in world.

What is to stop a fashion designer from writing a EULA that says you cannot wear "Sweetest Goodbye" apparel with "Shiny Things" shoes? is such a thing possible?

I just do not see how one can control any aspect of the permission system beyond the control LL gives us without being draconian about it (like using scripts with an external server to track copies rezzed and to derezz copies that have exceeded the allotted license amount - which i actually considered for a commercial rental system for our furniture )

I agree with you 100% Briana.

Keep in mind, though, one thing: Creators cannot set an object as both no-copy and no-transfer. If we could, then I would certainly sell my prefabs as such. The reason: If the new owner informed me that he/she messed up his/her only copy, I would have reasonable assurance that the person isn't just trying to get additional copies from me to sell or otherwise redistribute.

We don't have that option, though, so we must choose a permission set that allows our buyers the greatest amount of latitude possible without compromising our own ability to make a sale.

Yes you can - you make the prims no mod and no copy and then place a small yet functionality useless no-transfer script into your linkset some place. Voila, no perms at all.
Something I would never buy incidentally. Why would someone want to risk their sales this way? This only proves to me that a lot of vendors are not very business-savvy.

Good point, though I would never want to sell any of my houses as no-mod.

But after giving the matter a few extra seconds of thought, I've decided that it is far better to risk losing the sale of multiple units for an estate than it is to be seen as draconian with the permissions.

I would never buy a no-copy/no-mod house, and would not expect my future customers to either.

I think you have made the right decision. Unless you have something truly unique, people will go elsewhere and get a prefab they can copy with such restrictions rather than pay for multiple copies of your prefab with such restrictions.
So it becomes a matter of do you want their business at all if they are willing only to buy a single unit or do you want another to get that business.
I would not find that a hard decision to make personally.

That's correct, *Linden Labs* is not placing any further restrictions on it. But Linden Labs doesn't own the content, the creator does.

I'm talking about the original discussion about Right of First Sale that Linden Labs used to have on their website, back before they broke RoFS by preventing you from removing the content of no-mod objects.

When it comes to textures, most of us observe the wishes of the creator, even though they come full perms. There are other items sold full perms such as animations, that most of us again respect the wishes of the creator,why is this so different?

However the creator gives an unrestricted right for LL to use the content which is possibly being passed on with the perms system. My reference for the first part is the ToS.

Well I cannot address this as I have not seen that discussion.

All this is moot though, if you have to consult a lawyer before buying and using anything in-world in the future (logical conclusion scenario) to be sure of what you are allowed to do with it, then how long do you think shopping in SL is going to last?
Content creators may be shooting themselves into the foot here.

Part of the issue though is when the Renter IM's the creator saying such or such is broke, they messed up texture such or such, expecting the creator to fix it.

The creator only sold one unit to person X, yet they end up with horde Y wanting support for the items.

Would anyone want to sell 1 item, but have to furnish support to 200 people who are renting the item from the 1 person who purchased it?

Remember, person X is getting paid from the horde renting from them, you are not.

It is a tough call either way, but it is more fair if the landlord actually purchased a unit for each one of their rentals.

Not everyone does is the answer.
Also it tends to be other content creators who use these items to make things with who do - mainly because they do not want the thing they depend on to go away.
People who buy prefabs however are not using them to make a derivative product, they are not creators themselves, they are the general buying public who often don't care or want to care about this kind of licensing crap. Why should they have to? If in-world shopping isn't easy then they won't shop. Most won't even use a scripted vendor for goodness sakes and get confused about Pay vs. Buy.

If there's no licence, then it's fair game to copy it. That would be a motivating factor for the purchase. That's why you buy a copy version. If the licence states the copy is for backup purposes only then that's different and people should respect those wishes, but this should be made clear before purchase.

Please remember the context here, we have sidelined a little. The OP stated that the extra restrictions were not obviously displayed before sale and so agreeing or disagreeing with the terms was not possible.

Also why would a renter call up the prefab creator? I would think that never happens, they would call their rental agent first in almost all cases.

They should care about this kind of "Licensing crap" because the content creator has provided a license. We shouldn't just ignore this, it's bad form to ignore the wishes of the content creator, no matter how difficult enforcement would be, it's plain courtesy to abide by their wishes.

I sell all my prefabs as copyable, and I don't much care if they rez a thousand copies. Then again, it's no-transfer, so it'll their thousand copies and theirs alone.

Then again, I'm a fan of voting with one's wallet. The creator can add any stupid condition they want to their product, as long as the buyer is told before they buy it. If they know the stupid conditions, and still want to pay for it, then they've agreed to stupid condition. If they don't like stupid condition, they should take their money to a creator more deserving of their money.


- Newfie

Texture and anim creators MUST sell their creations as full-perms, otherwise it defeats the creations' entire purpose. These creators place an awful lot of trust on their customers, and I respect that, mainly because their terms are completely reasonable: "Use my textures as you see fit and use them to help sell your builds. Just please don't redistribute my textures or allow them to be copied off of your builds" seems more than reasonable to me.

ETA: This evokes a different question in my mind. I currently mark them as no-mod/no-trans before I use them in my builds. Is this the correct way to do it?

Oh please *rolleyes* you are not going to convince me that having this kind of licensing in-world is a good and right thing, nor is bringing lawyers in world either or needing to consult them over every little decision.
If SL and virtual worlds slide more toward this crap, yes crap, then people will just move to doing something that does not require a PHD in lawyer speak to understand what rights if any they have purchased.

Why the heck do you think this kind of thing for tangible goods in RL does not happen? You don't need to agree to a EULA for a hammer or for a microwave oven.
Why are there so many problems with people who are new to computers with violations of software licenses?
It is precisely because it is total crap unable to be understood by most mere mortals to a reasonable degree.

This is fairly simple. I cannot support anyone who does not directly own the build in question, simply because the owner would have to grant me permission to edit his or her objects in order to make any necessary repairs.

This issue really shouldn't come up anyways, as renters are typically not able to modify the building in any way for the same reason.

Yep, totally right for a mod/copy/no trans item as far as I know.