Now what do I do?

my blog post on this sad sad day is here, for anyone that may have missed it.
http://heygirlfriend.wordpress.com/2009/09/20/content-theft-and-you-in-the-sl-community/

I do hope you (RH and Rebel) as well as Susan the others targeted by this recent act do hold out and stick with us on this. You would indeed be a vital loss to our community. I know I tend to be an idealist, but it is my hope that in the end we will win, LL will find a way, we will find a way, if we just stick together, and that the thieves will grow bored of it all.

<3 Love to all of you
Catty

It's terrible, it happened to me too a month ago. All of my furniture sets were copied and sold on Xstreet full perm. Many people downplay copying in SL, saying 'you have a brand', or 'you'll make something new, don't worry'.

The fact is... it is burglary and it feels like burglary. Someone invades your 'home'. I filed a DMCA and LL took the copied items off Xstreet. But how many were (full perm!!) sold and distributed in the meantime? And the copycat wasn't IP-banned.

Copycats are the number 1 threat to SL. If LL doesn't take this more seriously, honest content creators will go elsewhere, me as well. Just one luck RH... they didn't copy your scripts and animations. In other words: the copied items are sort of useless.

Oh Paulo, I'm so sorry.

Same for RH. It is just awful.

I wonder if there is anyone left that still thinks our content security is good enough, in light of the issues of the last week or so.

What makes me angriest is that LL does not IP ban these thugs. THAT is why I support Stroker's lawsuit. LL may claim it can't prevent theft (though it could do more to deter it) -- but it certainly can take some steps to deter thieves from participating in SL, once they have been identified.

As soon as I read about this, I changed my store access to PIOF only. It's just too much.

Oh and I read a post on a blog by the purported ripper saying it was an act of spite and vengeance.

Economics doesn't work that way.

What do you mean by that? I mean, there's so many different things you could be referring to by "content security". The technical measures? The policies? In what way do you think the events of the last week particularly shed light on them?

Thievery and ruthless copying and breach of copyright will prevent and dissuade legitimate real business corporations from marketing in sl.

Sorry to hear about your problem in this regard.

Economics doesn't work with business licences being given away in cornflake packets either

Sorry this happened to you RH. I know keeping the faith is a bit hard atm... but don't give up.

That's the one upside to content theft, if it keeps the corporations away.

As for content theft generally, it's reached the point where if you get a good freebie you start wondering if it's stolen, unless you got it from a creator you know.

I didn't mean anything fancier than "content security." The security of content here.

This week has sharply highlighted that the price of too~soft content security is clearly being paid, in a variety of ways.

In terms of five years of work being dumped out on the virtual street full~mod, in terms of longtime, valued content creators ready to vocally (or silently) quit, and in terms of lawyers and courtrooms... and the time, effort and money required there.

And in terms of the new climate of concern, as people wonder how all that will sort out. A bit tighter self regulation earlier on, might well have been preferable to whatever semi~informed ruling a court of law makes up in response to all this.

There's probably a hundred different reasonable measures in tech, policy, and new ideas that would improve things greatly, without jumping the shark.

Linden Lab may eventually start doing that, but it's something that takes up man power and can't be handled by a lowly Linden liaison (i.e simple take down). I also suspect Linden Lab doesn't like the idea of deleting content that somebody has paid for, regardless of whether it's a copy or not. They'd much prefer upsetting a single content creator by not doing anything rather than upsetting several buyers of copied goods by deleting their items.

It takes big balls to punish somebody for innocently buying coped items. I don't think I could do it.

I believe the answer to the problem is transparency. We can't stop people copying stuff, but we can make it difficult for them to resell/transfer copied items. The only legitimate way to transfer items should be through a marketplace like XStreet. This way we can all see what eachother is selling. i.e transparency.

I'm really sorry this happened to you, you don't deserve it (no one does, of course) but please don't let it stop you! You make great stuff

Oh, OK. Yeah, asset server glitches over the past week or so (starting after the 12th of this month) have really made me worry about the security of the stuff I bought, and I'm thinking again about using libsl to download my inventory as a backup outside SL.

Well I must admit I was one.I just Tp'd to Woodshed for a nose. Wow!! What a place.The owner must be devastated.I now have changed my stance on this ,it must be stopped.
I did not realise it was so rife. Christ all that time,effort and skill and what ,you get ripped.

I do hope it gets sorted.

It isn't punishment. Why would anyone be allowed to keep stolen goods? (Assuming it's been proven adequately to be stolen goods - and I think someone's idea of a notice board somewhere about which goods are stolen would be very helpful to the whole grid, assuming whoever was in charge was sterling and the 'list' could not be used for griefing.)



Why would it be less difficult to funnel stolen things through there - there is no real way to tell what you are getting until you get it.

I have occasionally seen stuff in XSL that's absolutely ripped merchandise. I just reported one to LL, in fact.

Would you really rather the content creator lost his business he spent years working hard full time on over someone having bought a few items for a few hundred L? Take a trip to the Woodshed and Rebel Hope sims and see the amount of hard work there. Everything on the two Woodshed sims was copied and many of the Rebel Hope stuff.

As for only able to sell items on a market place like XStreet, I make mainly furniture and prefabs and I need the customers to be able to see what they are buying beforehand. I want them to check out the poses I put into my items, that the prims lined up and the textures are good quality and applied properly. XStreet you really don't have any idea how the item looks or how well made.

The only way to stop this copying on this scale is if LL get tough and make it not worth their while. Delete all the content in the servers of those caught copy botting and ban all the alts.

Hey, as a thought experiment... let's assume that LL puts the proposed "ban illegal content" scheme into place. Let's say you're a big seller and you get LL to pull the trigger, and a thousand ripped copies of your content vanish from the grid. Someone comes to you and says they bought a bunch of your stuff, they didn't know it was ripped, but now it comes out as untextured balls when they rez it... and they can't afford to buy it again. They're polite, but upset. What do you do?

1) Ban them from your store, or otherwise treat them as a willing accomplice.
2) Offer them a cut rate on re-buying the stuff they bought from the crook.
3) Offer them free copies of a couple of the products, and let them buy the rest again.
4) Other?

It's a form of punishment for Linden Lab to delete an item that somebody has paid for.



The original creator would spot the item and would be able to verify if it's a legitimate copy.

Perhaps it could be a requirement of listing an item - that a copy of an item must be on display inworld somewhere.

That's a great point. I might be inclined to give them a discount on purchasing stuff from me, if they could prove they got scammed the first time.

And YES, people who buy stolen content are often victims just as the creators. If you suddenly start taking their inventory from them, they should be reimbursed for any L$ they spent.

Just incase no one reads the new thread:



Thank you to Linden Lab. All the contents of the boxes from yesterday and today, have been blacklisted.

Rebel and I want to thank all of you here at the SL Forum for your support!

No, it isn't. What happens in real life if you have stolen goods. Are you allowed to keep them?

Punishment is something like: in real life, jail time or a fine; and in SL, banning.



Any idea how many listings are on XStreet? And how many are sold with only a box as the photo with it?



That would penalise those who cannot afford land but who want to start up a business. Aside from that - shops can sell ripped items also. From what I've heard, (once in a while), some have. (Or given the ripped items as freebies.)

Definition of punishment aside, somebody isn't going to be very happy when Linden Lab come and delete their L$20000 toilet while they're still sat on it!.






Yep, I've just checked the statistics for sales of boxes and it says zero.

Go look!