Creators Double-Standards

How many times have we sat down and created products or offered services from scratch to finish? Or assisted someone in an idea that enhanced a creation already in existence and was told it is now a custom-job; therefore it must have a custom price. Well, original work vs. custom work or original designs vs. custom designs is my topic. If a customer comes to you for a red light bulb and in the store you offer blue, green, and purple but no red. The customer now has brought you a color (RED) you did not offer. Then the customer says, "Can you make that light bulb turn on and off using the touch command." And you are able to do that with ease. You now tell the customer you are going to re-sell the red light bulb that turns on and off in your vendor machine; but you charge the customer a custom price. Let's define the word CUSTOM: Made SPECIALLY for individual customer or dealing in things so made, or doing work to order. Now that customer is going to pay a custom price for something SPECIALLY made just for he or she; but sees it repeatly sold to other individuals. Now, Does the customer get offered a profit on each new red light bulb sold with on/off command? No, because merchant can argue that they originally made said light bulb and because they colored or textured it red and did the scripting they have sole rights to the red light bulb. If that is truly the case and you agree, the next time you make something and someone re-builds or re-designs by altering it in anyway and re-sells it for profit the same principle applies to them also. Because it is no longer your original creation. But keep in mind, Custom means Custom and the price charged should make it EXCLUSIVE-excluding all others from a part or share!

Red light bulbs are only allowed in M sims so you can charge more for them...

I always guarantee to customers that anything made for them will NOT be resold to anyone else. However, if I fabricate certain components for them (parts of the whole), I always offer them a deal...
If they consent to me re-using these parts (custom exhaust pipes, seats, etc), then the price that I charge them for the complete product will be greatly reduced. After all, there being another bike out there with one or two components that your custom job has, does not alter the fact that your bike is still a unique one of a kind product. If you also want all components initially made for your bike to remain unique to your bike, I need to make a bigger profit on those parts as I can sell them only once. If I get to re-use them, then I can take a much smaller profit margin on each one sold.
My L$2 worth.

This happens in the real world as well. For instance, two public examples are ReiserFS and OGG (music format, like MP3). Both will take on custom jobs for you, then release the work under a free license, GPL for ReiserFS, and don't remember what for Ogg Vorbis. In the ogg case, they made an integer decoder, I think.




Two things must be separated here: custom jobs, and exclusive jobs. Those aren't nearly the same. Custom is what you said, made specifically for somebody, but it doesn't imply exclusivity. Charging a large amount for a custom job is normal. Perhaps what is asked wasn't part of the original design and doesn't fit well in it, perhaps it's something so specific very people want it, etc.

This doesn't mean your job is exclusive though. Ideas are dime a dozen. I might have heard the same request before, or considered it myself, but in the end decided not to implement it (yet). You're effectively paying for something that you specifically need and which might otherwise be unprofitable to make.

If you want it to be exclusive however, I'd charge even more for it, as it'd mean I'll never ever make any more money from it. Any good programmer or scripter is going to have pieces of code they reuse. I certainly do. If you want true exclusivity I'll charge an arm and a leg for it, because it will mean I have to do everything from scratch for you. And it would also imply that any improvements to those common pieces of code shouldn't propagate to anything else. That's a rather nasty situation.




And that's exactly how it works in the real world. People buy things like paper, paint, wood, etc. They modify it, then sell. The manufacturer of the paper or the paint doesn't deserve any more profit just because you made the next Mona Lisa with it.

Of course, if you can buy somebody else's stuff and resell it with modifications, it'd usually be no copy/mod/trans, in which case you have to pay per original code, mod it, and resell. Perfectly fair, and exactly the situation from above.

If I may paraphrase you, you're simply saying custom work shouldn't be resold off the shelf ?

Sure. Do you have evidence of wide spread double standards amongst content creators ?

Ultimately this is a matter of agreement between the creator and the customer. As a content creator, ethics would suggest one doesn't resell custom work without a permission quite apart from the fact that it would damage one's reputation thereby hurting business eventually.

For a customer, it makes sense to stipulate it isn't to be resold before you have the work commisioned, and failing to receive this comittment, finding another content creator who will honour your request.

Custom means custom, it doesn't mean exclusive. If you pay a premium for a custom product it's because you're getting something made to your own specifications. Regardless of whether other people then buy the item, they didn't get to define exactly what it did.

Exclusive means you're going to pay more, because unless there are individual designed components that can be reused in other products for general sale, the time that that creator spent making your item won't ever get them any more money.

In practice some people's custom work is also exclusive but you can't assume that it is going to be at all, nor should you.

When someone comes to me for custom work, what I charge depends a lot on whether or not the result has any resale value, and whether or not the customer wants this to be an 'exclusive' item, made only for them, or allows resale. Understand, most items created in SL can't possibly sell for what the artist's time and effort is worth. The only way to get decent compensation for your effort is through multiple resellings of a finished work.

Some examples of how I set prices on custom and/or exclusive work:

A customer wanted a very specific metal texture, that I didn't yet offer. However, that texture was quite likely to be a decent selling item. I asked if they had any problem with my reselling it if I made it for them. They had no problem with that. They get the texture at the same price that I normally charge for textures that I sell, based on its complexity. I won't get back a decent return for my effort on that one sale, but I will over time as it continues to sell. So I can keep the price low. Yes it's a custom order, but it's no different after its made than any of my other products. Your 'red llght bulb' example. Price is same as standard price.

A customer wanted a texture consisting of his Avatar's cursive signature, on parchment paper, embellished with several artistic features. The texture is worthless to anyone other than that one specific avatar, but they are willing to pay to have it made. The cost for the texture is noticably higher, because the only compensation I will ever get for it is what that one sale pays me for it, and the time spent on this project could just as easily be spent making something that would resell every week, without fail, making a constant revenue stream. Depending on complexity of effort, such a one-shot item might cost 10x, 20x or even 100x the price of a similar resellable item. Often in such a case, I will ask the customer to tell me what they are willing to pay for it. We negotiate from there, and either I accept the request of reject it. A lot of the time, we agree I can't do it for a reasonable price. But some times I will do these whan my other work is slow, as a general favor and to encourage future return business.

A customer wanted a line of custom Sarong Dresses, with a batik pattern that incorporated the name of his club. The work to create the dresses was unique so far in my collection, but if the customer would allow resale of something similar, I could possibly be compensated for a lot of the effort by making texture variations and selling similar dresses in my store. I negotiate with the customer, and reach an agreement. They get an exclusive right to dresses in this line with the batik parrern that has their club name in the design. They also get full resale rights, and can sell or give away no-transfer copies of their dress design as they see fit. (They get a full perms master so they can set up their own vendors and redistribute.) Meanwhile, I come up with 4 more batik patterns, all originals, and hand-fit these to the new design, and make it in 4 colors. We negotiate a final price for his exclusive resale license on his pattern, and agree on an initial resale price per dress so his dresses and mine won't undercut each other when first offered. He pays an initial fairly high price for his custom pattern and his exclusive resale rights to a part of my work. He can profit from that in the long run, or just give away copies to his employees. I sell my version of the dress in my store at the same prices per dress that I sell any of my other dresses of similar quality and complexity. Cost for an exclusive resale license of a custom design, would typically be 10x to 20x the cost of each variation that they want if I were to sell it singly, taking into account that I also get to resell similar ones. If they wanted to be the only one to sell anything similar, I would charge a higher price, as I lose any future resale value from the effort.

If a customer came to me with a request that was innovative, or which improved one of my existing products in a way thay makes them easier to sell or worth more, they would be offered a discount on their purchsee, or maybe even get their item for free. If it was really fantastic and I was to have exclusive resale rights, I might well offer to pay THEM, for those rights, offering along the lines of 10x to 20x what I feel I can resell the item for.

I think the problem is more that simply splitting things into sections as "normal", "custom" and "exclusive" isn't quite right..

In the above case, changing the colour of a lightbulb could be as simple as changing the colour of a single prim, and I think the argument was that arguing that doing that means you have to pay for the whole item at custom price seems a bit excessive. I tend to agree with that - because I make scripted objects, it's harder for people asking me for things to know how difficult something will be to make (because the complexity of a script isn't visually obvious), but I price based on the actual difficulty as I know it, not just on the fact that "it's a custom item".

I can see other problematic arguments as well. For example, one girl I know had a particular jump animation which had a problem - it stopped after a certain amount of time, leaving the jumper still flying through the air in a landing pose. The girl contacted the creator and asked him about this. Now from my point of view, that would be a "bug fix", which would be free to anyone who had the original; but from their point of view, they got together and treated it as a custom exclusive, meaning that not only did she get charged extra for it (and from what I've seen it was basically a case of adjusting the 'end %' slider on the upload screen) but she would up stopping anyone else from getting the fixed version. Now, I guess he has the right to do what we wants with his own animation but to me it just seems really backwards.

Which brings me to the final point - from a pure consumer's point of view, they're interested in the Second Life experience as a whole, and the idea that it's provided by a whole bunch of creators who all have different experiences and attitudes and reactions to things can be a bit awkward to them, so I can understand allegations like this.

I generally turn down exclusive work unless the request includes a reasonable offer. Reasonable offers are real world amounts so generally far more money than people are willing to spend for anything, other than land, in Second Life.

When people come to me with a custom idea, if it seems a viable product, I can manage it, and they have no problem with me selling copies of it, their copy is usually free. Consider it payment for the idea and direction, or input of what people do and don't like, They functionally help me design and test the finished product so it seems logical to "pay" them for the effort.