Now what do I do?

This type of incident makes me want LL to add to the viewer the features of Sim Entry Viewer Type display along with Avatar name and SL day age.

Hire a lawyer who knows about copyright laws,
and file a DMCA Takedown Notice for starters.
You want a lawyer so that you don't screw up the notice or leave
anything out that you might not realize should be in there,
and for general consultation about how to proceed from that point.

Then you take legal action against the person or persons who are illegally
distributing your textures (and perhaps your furniture objects).
Assuming that your textures are sufficiently original to receive copyright
protection, I assume you registered them with the US Copyright Office so that
statutory damages are available. Otherwise you will have to prove actual damages.
In any event, you are filing one or more lawsuits in federal court.
You'll be getting the identity of the people who stole your textures
from Linden Lab, or at least their IP address. You will have to file
legal paperwork to get that information. Your lawyer may have to hire
a private investigator to locate the person based on that (eg. more
legal papers filed against the people's ISP and so on.)
Then you have to serve them and see if they respond.

Meanwhile, if you don't think LL is handling these things in
the proper and legal way, or is anyway itself profiting off
the illegal copying and distribution, then you might wish
to join the class action lawsuit that Stroker has filed.
Make your lawyer aware of this and he will guide you on that.

Did I mention that you ought to get a lawyer?

We did get a lawyer 2 years ago, we had some items copied/stolen.

the guy that stole the items, is still in game.....and we won in a federal court case and the guy is still ingame. *sigh*

This time, it was 2 full sims of our work, copied and will be out in yard sales as we speak!

Anything made by Queef Solo, is stolen merchandise. We have rezzed all the items from this box on our private sim.

We rezzed all but our items, that were in this box, if you want a tp, to come see if your things are among these stolen items, please contact me.

Everything has Queef Solo as the creator, so we don't know who really made the items.

I thought the DMCA required the service provider, LL in this case, to turn over a copy of the counter-notice, which would contain that information. Of course, the person filing the counter-notice could have lied or could live in another country.

I totally agree Phil and sorry your work has been ripped off like this RH

Join Stroker's class action suit maybe?

Question, is it only furniture?

The name of that 'creator' is pretty rude, too. Sounds as if someone made an avatar just to do this. The name breaks LL rules in itself.

I find it amazing that discussion of Stroker's lawsuit is being allowed on this forum.

No. It's a big pile of everything... including hair.

Love it... I can't edit my profile signature or posts on here.

Anyway, as an addendum I did cover this at Shopping Cart Disco today, so you can find pictures and other information here: http://www.shoppingcartdisco.com

It sounds harsh but if the standard proceedure was to delete all the pirated items from the database, maybe customers would be more cautious of whether the person they were buying from had been in SL for a reasonable amount of time, it may get to a stage where people just wouldn't buy from an avatar less than 6 months old. But then these theives would just create accounts in advance I guess. So maybe there needs to be something to show a resident how long this person has been in business or how long their shop has been open on that particular plot.

How could we script something that refered to a database so there might be a day counter that displays how many days someones been in business on that particular plot but shows todays password so people could check randomly against the main database object, could a few top scripters come up with some freebie system like this that just required a permanent server prim stored somewhere?

Its being discussed here as well https://blogs.secondlife.com/thread/2452?start=0&tstart=0

But here is more user friendly than than flogs

I added the link on our thread here http://www.slapt.me/phpBB3/viewtopic.php?f=11&t=805 a good article to

This is the point I was about to make also. I think we need a culture where people *know* they will lose their items if they are purchased from a thief. I'd like to see all those wearing stolen skins to wake up one morning in nothing but their original default library skin, and finally get it that next time, they'd better pay for the creator's talents.

And I am sorry this happened to you, RH. It's what we all dread.

I agree. It's like the copybotted "noob" statue. It hit the grid like wildfire, and people put him in all sorts of things without knowing it was "'botted." Heck, even M Linden himself has song the praises of the big noob on his private land -- a noob that is likely one of the 'botted versions. IMO, LL should have killed the 'botted noob and if content died in the process, well, so be it. Receiving stolen property does not make it any less stolen.

Yep once it's been 100% proven to be stolen or the accused fails to respond to the charges withing a time period,, delete all the copies from the database and just put a blogpage somewhere for residents so see the names/creators of deleted items listed by date and maybe even the original creator so they could get some business back in people bying replacements.

Yes...this could be a great resource to promote ethical spending, avoid buying from known thieves, and would really help the original creators recoup some losses from those who *would* have bought from them initially if they'd been more informed.

Maybe LL could go one better and replace the stolen item with a simple prim or notecard with a description like "deleted content notice #786"naming the deleted item/creator and the original creator.

This would also give LL a way to reverse the item swap if it became necessary for some reason assuming you didn't delete the notecard.

simple and elegant

There you go, Tegg, a much more useful suggestion than nerfing free accounts.

I think the economy could also be bettered to a degree by removing poor performing businesses that undercut others, a level where you either gave stuff aways as freebies because you want to or you had to at least make enough money to cover your monthly fee of $10 for a premium membership.

Or perhaps just the requirement to sell items for over L$0 relying on having provided some form of verification to LL. So they have something to try when you serve them with a legal notice to supply a copyright violators details.

Allowing free players to continually anoymously undercut longer term creators only benifits the theives.

It might be worth considering requiring an avatar be 30 days old before they are able to sell items, or even given items away. Simply make everything in their inventor no transfer for the first 30 days.

As an alternative, less appealing but maybe more effective, require a membership, nominal fee - in order to activate the sell feature.

And to RH, I am the new owner of your theatrical drapes. Hang in there!

Pun unintended.

As good an idea as that initially sounds, I think it won't stop hardened theives, most of them would already have dozens of spare alts already prepapared ages ago to protect them selves from such simple measures. It would probably just remove the fun for newbies being able to share stuff between them a bit I suspect.

A monthly or at least nominal fee is a better idea because it means theives are going to have to gamble on whether they can sell US$10 of content on each alt before being caught to be a profitable venture. At the moment it's free to them to just continue creating new disposable alts everyday for free selling the same stolen content and they make no loss if nothing is sold by some of them before they get caught.

It's nearly impossiblle for theives to make a loss. Where as if it costs US$10 each to create 20 accounts to sell stollen stuff in world they are going to be gambling at possibly making a loss.