Poll: Do You Have a Problem With Distributors?

I have no problems with distributors, only with thieves.

Hehe, I don't sell copy/transfer products. It is too dangerous and you are practically giving your control to somebody else. The better approach is to have nocopy/transfer items. Create boxes with 5, 10, 50 items in them and sell these to your distributors. Once they have sold everything, they come back to you and buy another box. By that, you can still keep the control over the sale of these items in your hands.

Except the Junkyard sells stuff in bulk for L$1 per box, everything inside that box was given permission to spread for that cost of L$1 per box load. Its not like the Junkyard has taken anything to be relabeled and resold for L$1000 a copy without explicit permission. Also going to the junkyard and buying these boxloads doesn't constitute "comissioning."

Also I myself am a distributer in a manor of speaking, people give me JEVN catalogs/vendors of theirs to sell things for them for a comission. They have full control over their products and their prices where as I take the risk setting up shops or selling items to people face to face.

Mad

I understand your 'control' over items that are generally useable.

However, some of us comission very specific items, in my case they are normally branded items. As such I am releasing my copy right company logo to the designer.

The items they produce to my spec, with that logo, they are not able to sell, as they would be in breach of RL copyright laws. So they have no advantage in keeping the complete design, other than to force me to return to buy more of the same.

On the basis that I come back to the designer for more commission items, they elect to take that route to market. They are of course perfectly at liberty to retain the design and sell it themselves, without the corporate logo. I don't feel they are ripping me of by doing that, but the need for 'control' is diluted by the fact that some commission buyers are not after one or two items a month, but 10 -15 at over L$5.000 a time. I don't need or want 20 a month of each individual item to sell. So the opportunity to profit with these types of commissions is in letting me have those rights.

Clothing I know the retail rate for, I pay in excess of 10x that rate for a commission, now with 1,000 plus items in the pipeline, which won't be corporate branded, I wouldn't as a buyer work with a designer who didn't permit me full perms. But they equally have rights to resell those items on to other distributors, resellers and retail customers.

Of course if I see a design that is exactly what I am after, I wouldn't expect to receive resell and copy rights, I would of course try to negotiate for it, but those, 'it's perfect moments' are few and far between. Therefore whilst the designer is designing and creating, I have had to have the eureka moment myself to identify what I need creating.

I am not criticizing the desire for 'control' nor digging my heels in about the need to have full rights, merely pointing out, that each commission and design job needs to be looked at in its more precise context.

The 'creative designer' is more usually disregarded and forgotten in RL and it is great that SL puts a far higher value on this creativity than RL, but the pendulum shouldn't swing completely to the designer, at the expense of the customer, else large commissions wont be forthcoming and many of the dream creations wouldn't happen as buyers will feel they are loosing out by paying a premium for custom work, when they have no control over their purchase, so they may as well stick with the prefab, standard clothing etc. and just copy the same item over again in their inventory or do their own design work, often not as well.

I think the framework for a distribution-oriented economy is still yet to be put in place. I imagine a world where a distributor's vendor object can ask a creator's vendor object "can I have a copy of X object for L$Y?" After paying, the distributer's vendor then receives a no-copy object from the creator's vendor, and can distribute it to customers how it pleases.

Right now, llGiveMoney only works from object to avatar - objects cannot give money to other objects, so automated distribution is impossible. llGiveInventoryList also chokes on no-copy items.

Im all for the redistribution of non-free no-copy items, that's what's implied in a customer's fair use rights. Redistributing copyable items is ok too, but only given the consent of the creator. Charging for someone else's freebies, however, is disgusting.
==Chris

No Opinion: Don't really care

edited....