DMCA is worthless in most SL texture theft issues

{EDIT}Later in this thread, I'll bow to the many collected opinions of those who have apparently done more research into this than I, and agree that one can, most likely, establish a valid copyright claim to a large collection of artistic works, one that might hold water in US Civil Court, without spending as outrageous a sum of money as it first appeared to me as it would take. However, I will leave the rest of this post intact, so the discussion can be read properly. -- Ceera{/EDIT}

Filing a DMCA report is worthless in most SL texture theft issues. It costs far more to prepare yourself to be able to use this 'protection' than the theft itself is ever likely to cost you. It's like paying $10,000 for a bike lock to protect a bicycle worth $75, and knowing the 'lock' still won't prevent it from being stolen!

When someone steals a texture that an artist has worked long and hard on, and profits illegally by selling the work that the artist produces, the automatic Linden Labs response is "File a DMCA Claim!". Has anyone other than the LL legal staff ever actually READ the requiremenhts for a DMCA claim, and what it takes to make it worth the postage for mailing it? I doubt it.

I'll bet most of them have not. I'll bet most of them haven't even TRIED to do a reality check on the financial viability of using that method for protecting one's artistic efforts. It is financially prohibitive.

You can only file a DMCA claim for work that you actually hold a US Copyright on, prior to the theft. It costs $45 USD, at a minimum, to file for a US Copyright on a single original artistic work. It can cost more than that, if you have any issues complicating your claim at all. But let's keep it simple, and call in $45 USD. That's $45 USD PER TEXTURE. Or roughly L$15,000. Just to cover your rights in case that particular texture ever gets stolen.

Starting to see the light at the end of the tunnel? It'a a train, and if you are a texture artist or clothing designer, it's heading your direction. Heck, it's already run you over and killed you.

Cost to protect a single shirt design? L$15,000. Price that shirt sells for? Maybe L$20 to L$50, depending on quality. You'd have to sell 300 shirts to recover the cost of filing for a US Copyright on that one shirt. And that only protects that one texture...

Cost to protect a single suit coat and dress design? Let's be conservative and say just three textures, so L$45,000. Price that outfit sells for? Maybe L$300. You'd have to sell 150 of those outfits to recover the cost of filing for a US Copyright on that one outfit.

Cost to protect a set of ten building textures? L$150,000. Price that texture bundle sells for? Call it L$300. You'd have to sell 500 texture bundles to recover the cost of filing for a US Copyright on that one texture set.

So, let's say I am a clothing designer, and I make dresses. I offer 50 different dresses in my store, with an average of 4 textures per outfit. Average sale price for one of these dresses is L$400. Copyright filing for 200 textures costs me $9,000 USD, or about THREE MILLION LINDENS. To protect my line of dresses against a texture theft that might happen. For a big merchant that has LOTS of items for sale, it's even worse.

I can't speak for everyone, but most merchants that I know don't have anything close to a high enough sales volume to cover that kind of overhead.

So Joe Scumbag rips off three of my best dress designs, and starts selling rip-off-copies at his yard sale for L$100 each. The petty thief makes about 30 cents in US Dollars for each one that he sells, and for each one, potentially I lose a sale worth $1.20 in US dollars.

For protection against that piddling amount, I need to pay $9,000 USD? Excuse me? Who ws it that said this is a rational way to protect the rights of texture artists and clothing designers?

To be fair, it gets a little better with high-ticket items, like well-made photorealistic skins that might sell for as much as L$1,000 per texture involved. A good skin has a minimum of three textures, and may have three or more in addition to that for different head makeup options. But the economy of scale is the same.

Linden Labs needs to wake up and realize that what they offer as the only valid protection against texture theft costs the artist far more than the losses from theft in the first place.

Actually that's not completely true. You can register a copyright on a collected work or composition. Rights can be restricted on the work 'in whole or in part'. The subpieces still maintain copyright, just not neccessarily registered.

You don't need a -registered- copyright, but it does help.

The actual filing itself doesn't cost anything.

As to its efficacy (the DMCA as a whole); indeed, it's much more effective if you have a team of lawyers to 'make it real', versus being an individual trying to use it.

Throughout most of SL, a company like LL would likely see the liability risk as minimal. (We are all 'smaller fish' than they are.)

That's pretty much true with anything. Those with the biggest lawyers win.

Michi, I respect you tremendously for all you have done in avatar creation, but you are misinformed.

"The DMCA provides a process for a copyright owner to give notification to an online service provider concerning alleged copyright infringement. " If you are not the copyright owner, a DMCA Claim isn't worth the cost of the stamp.

Check this page, Mischi. http://www.copyright.gov/register/visual.html "Registration of a basic claim in an original work of authorship" costs $45 USD, to file for a US Copyright on a single visual art item. That page details the requirements to file, and a fee is mandatory.

Details of the current fee schedule are at this website: http://www.copyright.gov/docs/fees.html The fee schedule mentions "Registration of a group of published photographs", cost $45; "Preregistration of certain unpublished works", cost $100. A .tga file or the .psd file used to create it are not 'photographs', but might fall under "certain unpublished works". Nowhere in the fee schedule does it mention copyright for data files representing computer-generated art.

I will grant that you could probably register a collection of textures for a single dress design or a single avatar design as an "Unpublished work", but I wouldn't venture to guess what it will take exactly to cover your tail without consulting a lawyer. At best, you might be able to register a collection of textures for all your fox avatars for a single fee. But as soon as you make something new, you have to file a new copyright.

I wanted a texture to put on this fancy TP ball i am making, thinking the Library textures of water would work good...checked it was full perms..was going to d/l to photoshop to just overlay the word TELEPORTER on it and d/l it back in...guess what i couldnt! The Lindens can protect their own textures !!! If you already know this please disregard, but i am just flabbergasted. If theres a way for them to protect full perm textures, why cant everyone have this option???? hmmmmmm??? hmmmm?? hmmm??

That's interesting!!! If they can do it what's the deal for protecting everyone else's work.

Hold on, no, Michi is right - you don't have to have registered something to have copyright on it; you are automatically the copyright owner. In fact it says that explicitly on the copyright.gov site:

http://www.copyright.gov/register/

and

http://www.copyright.gov/help/faq/faq-general.html

Now, you have to register if you want to sue someone, as it says, but you don't have to register everything to have protection.

Edit: or, for that matter, see this thread

Ordinal, while US law may in fact protect copyright from the moment an artistic work is created, without a registered copyright you would have a very hard time indeed proving that you are the legal copyright holder, and not the thief, if someone steals your work. Linden Labs has made it clear that they will ignore proofs such as the fact that you posess the original multi-layered PSD file that created the texture. Without a registered copyright, I still wouldn't give you the cost of a stamp for your chances of protecting your intelectual property rights in SL.

Without a registered copyright, you can't bring a legal case against the theif. And registering it after it's been stolen is too late.

No it isn't.


http://www.copyright.gov/circs/circ1.html#cr

Wait up to five years, bundle all your textures for the last five years into a collection, "Five Years of Artistic Expression by Me", and copyright the work for $45.

heres the thing though, you can't even sue the person in most cases for damages, in a court of law the linden is a fictional money, so its worth 0, only amount you can get is a small compensation which isn't even worth the effort. You can't even factor in court costs, in copyright cases it has to be registered 2 months before you can get court costs in return.

Ceera, just to echo what Ordinal and Michi have already said, registering a copyright is simply a legal formality. It expedites certain things, but it's hardly necessary. It's certainly not a requirement, as your original post would suggest.

As you've now correctly conceded, current US copyright law protects an original work from the moment it's created. It used to be the case that copyright was not assumed, and in that time period, registration was necessary, but that changed a long time ago. Nowadays, all works are protected as the creator's property until and unless the he or she says otherwise. No registration is needed; copyright is always assumed.

As for ease of proof, you are correct that registration makes things a bit simpler, but again, it's not necessary. For as long as copyright has existed, there have always been what are known as "poor man's copyright" methods. For physical works, the most popular of these methods has been simply to mail a copy to yourself, and never open it (unless you need to in court). The postmark is all the proof a court will need in order to rule in your favor.

For digital works, it's a little harder since there's no official government time stamp that can be applied. However, there are tons of things you can do to protect yourself without spending much money, if any. Here are just a few:

1. Always save all your source material. If you've got a layered PSD, showing exactly how you constructed the image, and all the other guy has is a composited TGA, it's pretty obvious who made the picture.
   
   
   
   
2. If you want a government time stamp, put your work on a disk, and mail it to yourself.
   
   
   
   
3. Export your work to PDF, and give it a digital time stamp. This isn't as reliable as a postmark, but it is a piece of evidence in your favor. If you have it, and the other guy doesn't, that's points for you.
   
   
   
   
4. Keep a work diary. Day planners, journals, diaries, and similar records are admissible as evidence in court, as long as you can demonstrate a pattern of regular use. When you make a new pece of artwork, make a note of it what it is, how you did it, and why. This may not exactly be the easist thing to motivate yourself to do if you're not already the diary-inclined type, but it's still a legitimate method of "ppor man's copyright". If you can pull out your journal, and use it to say exactly when you created whatever piece of artwork is in question and what inspired you do it, and the other guy can't, the case will have just swung very much in your favor.

Those are just a few examples of cheap or free strategies to protect your copyright. There are dozens more. Remember, copyright is a matter of civil law, and civil cases are not about proof; they're about preponderance of evidence. To win a copyright suit, all you need to do is be more convincing than the other guy. You don't need to prove his infringement beyond reasonable doubt like you would if it were a criminal case. If you take yourself seriously as an artist, it's not that difficult to stand up in court and say, "I made that image on June 15, 2005. Here's what inspired me to make it, here's how I did it, here's my layered showing what I did."

Now, is any one of these things alone a perfect solution? No, of course not. However, it's pretty unlikely that any texture theif would have the skill or the motivation to counterfeit the layered work, to fabricate stories of inspiration, to fully describe the creative process, or to pull the last year's worth of journal entries out if thin air in any believable manner. If the thief were really that capable, he or she wouldn't have needed to steal your work in the first place.

However, if you're very concerned about copyright proof in addition to being a serious artist, then it's also not hard to say, "Your Honor, here's a sealed envelope postmarked from the week of June 15, 2005. In it, you'll find a CD containing a the image in question. This proves I made it exactly when I told you I did. Also, here's my journal entry from June 15, describing everything I made that day, including that image."

You'll win with even half that stuff; trust me. Do it all, and you can rest comfortably, knowing that you're secure. Copyright law is designed to protect you. Quit being so afraid of it.

Not true, John. Contrary to popular belief, copyright infringement is not about profit. An IP theif doesn't have to have made money in order to be sued for it, or to owe damages if found guilty. To receive damages, the plaintiff only needs to argue convincingly that the theft effectively destroyed or lessened the commercial value of the work. That's how the RIAA is able to sue people for distributing music for free.

As for establishing commercial value for SL images, that's not hard to do at all. First, items are sold for US$ every day on SL Exchange. Second, it's perfectly easy to show Lindex to the court, and to explain how the SL business model works to turn inworld creations into real money.

Until someone actually sues another SL'er over a derivative texture and wins, I'd say that's wishful thinking. If someone does a direct rip and makes no changes then yes, it would probably be a no brainer. If they make changes it all becomes a lot more complicated. Either way I think people need to seriously consider how much it would cost them to retain a lawyer and take someone to court versus the real world profit potential of any given texture in SL. Then stock up on some antacid. At the end of the day you'll probably get more from the antacid then going to a lot of trouble to document everything you do and register every texture with the copyright office.

Unless you're prepared to spend a lot more defending a texture than you're likely to ever make selling it, take a step back, remember that you create because you enjoy it, and that focusing too much energy on the fact that there's likely never going to be an effective way to protect yourself is a serious buzzkill. But, even though that's the case, a dedicated and talented SL creator who consistently turns out good work and makes a name for themself will profit far more overall than they'll lose if some fly-by-night jackass steals one of their textures and sells it as their own.

As for the thief, if all they have to offer is stolen goods, and they do it a lot, they're likely to develop a very bad reputation that will prevent them from ever being serious competition.

Just some food for thought.

I had a class in college on Copyright Laws. Most of it was very confusing. BUT- it's not $45 per work, but per collected works. We even had to have some of our artworks copyrighted just for the class (yea, what a fking waste of $45 for a college student!). Anyways, we were able to send in MORE THAN one work. As long as it was the original piece, they would all be copyrighted for that $45.

I myself even keep my Avatar skins in their Original Photoshop Layered format & work from copies.

I wonder how this would apply to projects using resources like Dover clipart? It specifies for most of their books that you may use no more than 10 per project, but what if you had more than that amount in individual art pieces copyrighted as a portfolio?

Anyways, I've been advised that for a starving artist that wants extra security but can't afford to pay the piper, you can always burn your work to a dvd and mail it to yourself.

yes! I was told by a lawyer that this works too!

It costs around $20 to register an item with a UK copyright service or you can pay approx $400 to register 20 items for 5 years.

Is something that is copyright in the UK even valid to LL?

I wouldn't pay it because I don't belive LL will do anything different if I do or don't pay.

OK Chosen, I'll bow to the many collected opinions of those who have apparently done more research into this than I, and agree that one can, most likely, establish a valid copyright claim to a large collection of artistic works, one that might hold water in US Civil Court, without spending as outrageous a sum of money as it first appeared to me as it would take. (I'll edit my first post to note that this concession is made later in the thread).

However, given that Phillip Linden has explicitly stated that he does not believe posession of a layered original PSD file proves artistic ownership, I would still have to conclude that even if I were to take all the valid and viable precautions offered in this thread to heart, and could prove conclusively in civil court that the work was mine, that Linden Labs seems willing to do extremely little to defend such claims or to punish the thieves. If I want definitive action against a thief, I still have to take them to civil court. And that would cost far more in real money than the actual losses from individual theft, which can more often than not readily be measured in pennies.

The point of my posting all this remains that unless Linden Labs is willing to offer a more solid defense against theft of artistic efforts, it is still not financially reasonable to defend oneself against such theft in SL. At best, the stolen material may be removed from in-world, and if the thief is a blatant repeat offender Linden Labs may eventually terminate their account. The policies that Linden Labs has posted do not encourage me to believe that they will do more than give the thief a slap on the wrist.

Say I use the method of mailing a DVD to myself, containing the collected original .psd files and source photographs and journals that you suggest keeping. Say I mail myself three of them, in seperate envelopes, so I can open one to show my proof, and retain other copies for a court case.

So I go to Linden Labs and file a DMCA against some thief that steals the textures for one of my dress collections. Then what? The opinion of Linden Labs, as stated by Phillip Linden, is that my evidence is invalid, and could easily be faked. The DMCA primarily covers the Linden's collective tails, and gives them a method to allow me to hire a lawyer and sue the unidentified individual in civil court.

Based on the Linden policies, as published here, If I file a valid DMCA claim, "When a valid DMCA notification is received, the service provider responds under this process by taking down the offending content." So... they remove the texture that was used to make the stolen dresses from the thief's inventory? And maybe they remove the boxes that are on sale in his yard sale which contain ripoffs of my dresses? What about the copies that he sold to other people? Are they going to track down every sale, delete those dresses, and make the thief refund the purchase price to his customers? Even if they do all that, Linden Labs does not promise to do any more to the thief than taking away what he stole.

The only further action that Linden Labs clearly states they might take is as follows:

Right... So a repeat offender may eventually lose that account.

Which is probably a throwaway alt anyway...

*sigh*

What I would LIKE to see is a clear policy that establishes that having your content removed under DMCA will, on a second offense, result in a suspension of the thief's account AND all alts, and on a third offense result in permenant termination of ALL the thief's accounts. DMCA's falsely applied to you and successfully defended against would not count in those three strikes.

I think you are too forgiving. Instaban for life and all alts on the first offence. They know it is wrong when they do it.

The mailing yourself stuff thing is a myth, it doesn't really help - the copyright.gov site addresses that too (and if they say it's got no status, they're probably right). But you don't need it anyway, if you keep records and can show the trail leading up to something.

What LL do or don't consider proof of ownership is pretty irrelevant to be honest. They've made it clear that they don't adjudicate - any enforcement if the other person counter-files is entirely up to the copyright holder. In practice of course this means that taking action against anyone who's not immediately intimidated by your initial takedown notice is, for most people, impractical - particularly for non-US residents. (It also, as far as I can see, means that I have no personal legal defence against somebody filing malicious DMCA notices against me, since I am hardly going to hire a US lawyer and maybe even fly over to defend myself in court. I'd be very pleased to hear that I'm wrong there if anyone knows better.)

I'd probably countersue in the UK for defimation of character, which is a much more serious offence than any copyright violation.

All this legal mumbo jumbo is just great, if you could actually get the person in court. I doubt seriously LL would give up any info on any customer so that you could serve civil writ. So the best thing to do, is to pressure LL for better protection inside the game. Its possible, we all know that...so keep after em, is all i can say..

In order to download a library texture you have to first drag it from your library to your inventory then download the copy in inventory.

The reason for doing it as three strikes is to protect individuals falsely accused by people maliciously filing false DMCA's.

There's a lot of discussion about 'proof' here, beyond the usual inaccuracies of belief about copyright law. However, seeing as most of it has been corrected, I'll chuck this in, since it's important:

You do not need to prove to LL that you own something in order to file a DMCA Takedown. In fact, the less you say and the more to the point you are about where it is, what it is and that you claim that you are the owner -- LL has been notified and will take it down in order to avoid liability. This is done in good faith that the claim is legitimate.

The most common problem, according to Ginsu Linden, LL's legal ninja -- is that a lot of the takedown notices are filled out incorrectly. This is a key detail, since it's a legal document and it has to be done proper.

The whole question of ownership comes up during the appeals process for the takedown and any impending court case over it. It's not LL's job to become judge and jury over these matters because it's actually covered by US law and we have our own courts to handle this. So far as additional protection, no one has offered anything even remotely approaching practical or unable to cripple how SL performs -- and none of it was crack-proof, anyway.

If someone is seriously injuring your income, then take them to court. There are ways of suing an anonymous party and obtaining records if need be.

EDIT: Ginsu's response to concerns over the DMCA

They don't say it's got no status. They simply point out that it's not part of any copyright law ...because it's not. It never has been, and it was never implied here that it ever was.

Further, they go on to say it's not a substitute for registration ...again, because it's not. Registering a copyright, and mailing something to yourself are obviously two seperate things. As far as the fuction of the copyright office is concerned, whatever the post office does has nothing to do with them or what they do. And they're absolutely right about that.

However, in addition to not being the post office, the copyright office is also not the court. What a court will or will not allow as evidence is up to the judge. Just because there's no law specifically stating "postmark equals copyright registration" in no way means a judge won't take into account the value of a postmark as a time stamp when weighing two conflicting stories about who made what when.


As I said earlier, keeping records is always good practice. However, the records alone aren't necessarily a definitive guarantee of victory. Again, it's all about weighing the evidence. If you've got more convincing evidence than the other guy, you'll likely win. The postmark is just one piece of evidence, as is the record. Every little bit helps. No one thing alone makes for a certain win.



Unfortunately, you're correct. LL does not as a rule take sides in these matters, as far a I know, nor should they. They are simply a service provider, and in accordance with the DMCA, their function is to remove material from their servers upon receiving notice that said material is in violation. It's not for them to determine if the violation is real or not; that's up to the courts.

As for the practicality of taking action against infrigers, that's of course dependant on what action you plan to take. If all you care about is seeing that the offending material is removed from SL, the DMCA notice to LL is generally all you need. Should you choose to seek damages from the other party though, you've got a lot more work to do.



Great info, Belaya. I hadn't seen that thread you linked, containing Ginsu's answers to Elle's excelent questions. Thanks for the link.