Texture theft becoming increasingly popular

I agree with you on your points. What do you expect Linden Labs to do? They are just a company and not a goverment. Without any legal basic they are helpless to slow down "copyright" infringement. They are not the all powerful and have to operate within the laws of the host country the United States of America.

I think one salient fact that has thus far not been discussed is the fact that the U.S. does not have a justice system. We have a LEGAL system, which is not the same thing at all - and very frequently, you only get as much justice as you can personally afford to pay for. In no case is this more true than copyright infringement.

Mounting an effective case against a copyright infringer can cost literally tens of thousands of dollars, and most attorneys won't even take a pro bono case (do it for free and take a cut of the final judgement) unless there are substantial realistic punitive damages involved.

In short, prosecution of copyright infringement is almost never done by individuals for this reason. It is nearly ALWAYS done by corporations that have the financial clout to launch an expensive and possibly fruitless legal campaign. Further, because of the expense, it is almost NEVER done out of moral outrage, but instead is done to protect the fiscal viability of the company holding the copyrights.

There is the supposition by many that moral outrage is enough to put the law on your side, and to make a legal action winnable. Moral outrage alone does not guarantee either of these things. Only the combination of the letter of the law, and prodigious amounts of money to pay for attorneys, can do such a thing - and one must always ask oneself how much of one's yearly salary one is willing to sacrifice for the sake of moral outrage.

I see your message but do not understand your point? If tyere is no legal way to stop copying of peoples Intellectual property what do you propose to take its place?

I think 99% of all people want to do the right thing and do not copy people’s work. You understand there is only so many ways to do something and parallel development happens more often than not. The problem to determine what is copying, what is parallel development and what is just normal ways to do things.

Perhaps what is needed is for a committee to be set up under the management of Linden Labs with the task of making the above determinations. All of the residents that produce, sell and buy would have to agree to accept their judgments. They could set up a series of benchmarks as to what is allowable and what is not. What is considered copied and what is not. Is this idea perfect? Well no but it is order over disorder. Some residents want to use watermarks and scripts to stop copying but there are always ways for a determined person to get around them thus the absence of them does not prove original content.

As residents and people in general we have to get along with each other. If we cannot get along with each other technology will not save us.

Linden Lab has quite a bit to lose if their top content creators go elsewhere with thier business. What I choose to spend my time on is most definately influenced by what my potential earnings are. I am not here to play a "game". My business in RL is as an artist as well.

And if people show LL where they got the texture form on a website, the same one you did? Guess what..they didn't steal it from you- if anything you both get it taken away.

This presumes the content creators in question (the ones who would choose to leave) generate enough income _for LL_ to outweight expenses involved in handling 'copyright infringement' cases and the staff needed to handle these.... by enough amount to make them want to consider this extra work. Which is not exactly a given.

Not to mention there is no real correlation between 'quality' of content creator and how much they are bothered with their work being lifted without permission. So can't really say this policy would 'cost' LL exclusively the "top" content creators and all or even majority of them.

Has anyone thought of creating an in-SL texture registry? For a nominal fee, a designer can register their textures. Each new registration would be checked for uniqueness.

The registry can help members resolve disputes, and give designers credibility (by displaying a logo, perhaps?). I would love some surety that I'm purchasing an item from the person who actually developed it.

It should be possible for well less than $30/texture. What do you think?

Ann

You speak as if LL doesn’t the authority to manage their system. Linden Labs does have the right to enforce copyright, just maybe not the means. Heck, they could delete a texture for no reason at all and an individual user would be hard pressed to do anything about it. They can legally do just about anything they wish with their system. There are lots of actions that might cause their customer base to run for the hills, but you just have to look at other MMO environments to see that the hosting company has absolute power over their system.

They have both the legal authority and access to the system required to do enforcement. What they don’t have, it seems, it the economic incentive or means to do enforcement. So clearly what I would like to see them do is come up with a system that would make it economically possible for them to live up to their published view on the matter.

"Intellectual Property (IP) Ownership
Second Life Subscribers maintain IP rights for the digital content they create and maintain in Second Life, including avatar characters, clothing, building, scripts, textures, objects and designs. You own what you create."

destroying someone else's property is not exactly something one could do without consequences. It'd be akin to a parking owner smashing your car wih sledgehammer after you park at their place, despite clear statement on the toll booth that your car remains your own after you park it there.

It might work different in other MMO games but that's because SL isn't much like 'other MMO games', really.

However, they aren't really destroying anything. You still have the texture on your system; it's just no longer part of their system. We all think of these virtual items as being something we own, and we maybe able to claim ownership of the idea when we create something (as stated in the text you quoted), but LL is the one the “owns” the virtual representation of the item (the bits and bytes) that exist on their server. When it comes to bits and bytes on their system, I think you will find it hard for anyone else to claim ownership.

As long as it only applied to truly original textures, and not ones taken form the wed, Ann, then yes. If someone could prove that it came from the web (and not from the sl uses rl art site), the texture would be 'unregistered' with no reimbursement.

I do not think that Linden Labs is prepared to take the law into its own hands. What if they make a mistake and delete what is not copied work? They leave themselves open to legal action. Things are not so cut and dry as you think. We are on the edge of the evolution of tech and things have not been worked out to their conclusion in the courts. Yes it will come down to the courts sometime in the future.

I think common intrests and agrement should be used over conflict. There has to be a way to make most of the users in Second Life happy.

If LL went off and started selling for profit a texture someone uploaded, that person would have something they could take to court. Removing a file from their own severs? I don't think you would find that an easy case. Most of all since you didn't pay LL anything to do the uploading. Oh, yes, you lost 10 L$, but the TOS also states that means you paid them nothing.

I think it's not quite the grey area you think it is. LL's terms of service is written in a way that, of course, favors almost any action they take. It states the L$ has no intrinsic value, so you didn’t pay them anything for storing it. It also states you own anything you create, that does not mean they are required to keep it on their system.



In a way I think you have hit the nail on the head. This is an issue that affects very few of the users directly, and so they don't really have to do anything about it.

This is convenient presumption, isn't it? I mean, who is in position to say that i _still_ have offline copy of texture, script, or any other item which was uploaded to LL server, after it was uploaded? Especially if we extend this to content that cannot really have offline copy stored on my computer without me going out of my way to write down every single bit of sizes, positions, slider settings etc.

It's of course mostly a moot point since the TOS specifically grants LL right to delete anything off their server, so it _is_ in fact a case of 'taking your car to parking with "leave things here at your own risk" sign on the tool booth' ... nevertheless i don't think the "you still have your copy" argument can really be applied. Quite often deleting the server data is going to result in actual destruction of someone's intelectual property.

I think you will find that LL would easily be able to say they aren't responsible for record keeping for you and they are not a responsible for any action you took with your property. Also, yes, I think they would say that ownership of the idea of an item makes you responsible for recording size, position, etc. I also think they would find quite a bit of backing for making that point. Ownership entails quite a few responsibilities when it comes to protecting your possession.

I don't think LL would be in position of telling anyone this sort of thing. Because this is exactly what they offer -- a service of storing my intellectual property and making it accessible to others. Part of it is exactly the service of "record keeping for me" if you will. And the action i take is entrusting them with the safekeeping of my property.

If someone offers a service of storing things for you, this involves taking responsibility for the state of these things while in their posession. That there might be another copy of this item in existence is irrelevant, because it is not that copy they've offered to store for me.

At least in theory of course, since the TOS makes sure to remove LL's obligations that normally come with this type of service. But it's still not a case of "well we can do anything we want with your items because you should've had a copy" but rather "well we can do anything we want with your item because you signed paper that gives us this right". And i believe this part of TOS is in there exactly because otherwise erasing content (accidental or otherwise) could put them in this very sort of legal trouble where no "you should have a copy" excuse could save them.


So does service of storage of someone else's belongings. In regular world, at least.

Actually, no money has any intrinsic value, even the US dollar is fiat money, but that's beside the point. Money, to put it a bit too simply, is just a transmission medium of value. It has the value YOU put into it. And that could be an interesting thing to see in a court, one day... I find the Linden to be a brilliant experiment, one I watch closely.

I can see why LL has people pay Linden to upload. The upload fees keeps people from uploading stuff like crazy, overloading their servers. The idea for prims was absolutely novel too - that forces people to model inworld instead of uploading highresolution 3d models (generally copyrighted to someone else, too) that can bring sims and clients down in a heartbeat.



Au contraire, it affects them INdirectly, and very much so. I left a world two years ago which I wonder why Mr. Jarod Godel doesn't go to - as its his dream paradise of no DRM (textures downloaded straight to disk, unencrypted for every human equivalent to a hermit crab to play with and butcher, and eventually claim as their own work) and this fabled "P2P technology" (private grids). The only "private grids" I can see useful is people being able to own and admin a grid themselves, with the software from LL but having it run on your own hardware, in much the same way you would set up a webserver on the net. I also see this as being expensive, dedicated servers with good bandwidth in the quality you need to run something like SL - are not cheap. I can see that being very useful to some, though.

Of course, nobody should wonder why the user content verily sucks in the place I was before, compared to the brilliant displays of creativity in Second Life, or why the client grinds to a halt when texture maps are encountered at 3000x3000 and stolen geometry topping out over thousands of polygons, sent P2P mind you, over the usual DSL connections. And also enquire why the company tossed their totally private system that was actually better in many ways than the one that exists now - ah right, too many people copying the CDs, making it impossible for the company to survive on that business model.

Eh, been there, seen that. Move along. Second Life is way better.

Now, if the good content creators can't hope to make even their investment of time, that person is not going to share it anymore, and take their toys and go elsewhere. Like I did. Here in SL I do not stand out at all. There are many creators here who are just as talented, many far more so, than I am. It's brilliant and it makes me so happy to see so much fabulous creativity everywhere in this world. I wouldn't want to see that go away, and yes, it affects the users immensely if we had a brain drain of talented people going to other projects which suit them better. I believe in the 3d net and SL is the best I've seen yet. It's got its problems (all of them do) but I think we have to stick it out and see it resolved here.

What I wonder is:

How much stealing is really going on? The permissions system prevents the casual user from stealing textures, very effectively. In my experience, that was where the worst of the violations were, in the other world I was in. People who couldn't find their backside with a flashlight and a compass, just wanting to tack something onto themselves that's pretty (like a hermit crab) ... but not without butchering the work first to make it somehow "theirs, and then go "look at MEEEE and what I MADE". Whatever.

Yes, a user can dig it from the cache but how easy is that really? And do they really spend the time on that, vs. just go the path of least resistence and pay a resident a few pennies (or bucks, depending on how high the price is) for a texture.

Digital media of all types is easy to make perfect copies of; this is part of what has gotten the MPAA and the RIAA terrified.

The only way you can prevent textures from being stolen is to never display them. This is akin to the anti-copying stuff that record companies are starting to put on CDs. If you can listen to it, you can copy it - this can be low-tech (plug the output of the player into a recorder) or high-tech (run a driver that grabs the digital information off the audio chip before it gets turned to sound).

Similarly, in SL, if someone can see your stuff they can copy it. Welcome to the digital age, there is no preventing such copying given sufficient motivation from the copier. Incidentally, this is nothing new, player piano rolls were a a hot item to copy about 150 years ago (and as they were digital, nearly perfect reproductions could be made) somehow, we've managed to survive that era of copying and people haven't stopped making music or other digital art.

Key words are "sufficient motivation". I think SL has in place probably all they can do, the permissions system. I like the permissions system. It's not perfect but it puts a barrier in place, that says - this is mine. Yes you can steal it, but you can't claim you didn't know you were stealing, as in the world I was in before - where people could claim "I didn't know" even when they really did. And despite this little snag, I think it's still working.

I think that if SL has some sort of tagging system, which for all I know may be in place already, may be enough to address the textures problem. I for one have no interest in going into the texture business again. I may sell some here and there but it's better that textures are in tandem with additional value items, like prim models, avatar shapes, animations, special scripting, etc. Then it becomes much more difficult to copy as one piece, at the same time giving the customer more value for money. Some thoughts there.

All it takes is one person to upload a stolen texture once with full permissions. Then they can distribute lots of copies in a welcome area absolutely free and anonymously to naive people who won't know "Jack" what they have. From there, the copies spread faster than the Ebola virus.

ah that's a problem, similar to the one I ran into. People not realising they shouldn't tamper with other people's stuff. Still though, people can figure out that a skin handed to them for nothing at a welcome area could possibly be stolen. Education programmes there could be helpful.

I am unsure how it could be fixed with software though. I personally have never taken a free skin texture from anyone, except the actual designer, and never had one offered to me by anyone else. (my first skin was a freebie Hosequeen gave me, for which I am very grateful)

Sadly, the only real result I see happening is talented people not providing skins at a low price and accessible to a majority anymore. It will be as you said before, custom work and expensive. These things can be sold two ways, and that's the other way. The "people" as a majority don't really win from texture theft.

I still would love to see statistics on how widely these stolen skins spread. I don't think its nearly so wide as what I had to deal with before, with textures being downloaded unencrypted to the client. Also I am in the Poser community, textures are sold there all the time, free to see and modify. Daz is still in business, Renderosity still has a bustling marketplace. So I don't think we'll go away, prices will merely have to go up, like they do in the real world when dealing with product theft.

Education may be of some help for those with high morals. Most Noobs think the textures are created by the person distrubuting them, or from a LL set of freebies. They don't know the names of most skin artists 6 or 7 days into SL (maybe Chip, but not me). Eventually I'm sure they figure it out once they visit my store. Then they have to ask themselves "Hmm, maybe I should IM the real creator and let them know I got their textures/skins from another source". Only once was I contacted by a knowledgable competitor who noticed my textures being sold in world under another name. All other times I have had to do my own detective work, or enlist the help of friends who spend time in the welcome area and at the numerous clubs and popular locations.



You are right. People don't get any long term benefits from stealing the textures. They also don't think very far ahead in a world of instant gratification. Skins take MANY hours of hands on work to impart realism in the textural detail, highlight, shadow areas, and in the blending of seems. It takes me at least 6 months of steady sales to turn a profit on 30-40 hours of design work, 4-5 hours of advertising work, and maybe 100 hours of customer support. That does not include cost for the land, classifieds, and payment to my employees. I assume all the risk up front. I don't get a 50% commission halfway through the work, or even 30-60 days net. In SL it trickles in over 180 or more days.



I would say the Poser community falls into a very different category than SL's. Most Poser artists with an ounce of self worth aren't going to rip one another off and try to resell in such a community. They would be excommunicated the minute they were spotted because the community is mostly artists. Even if someone did want to rip textures off of DAZ or Renderosity to distribute, they would need to work a bit harder to do that if they were distributing to a few hundred people anonymously. It would take sharing 10-20mb files through roaming anonymous FTP sites on highjacked corporate networks to stay cloaked and avoid being tracked by the Feds.

Second Life is essentially one big textural FTP site (if you know how to exploit it). Many of the residents ARE NOT artists. The same anonymous platform that people sell the textures in is the same anonymous platform that people use the textures in. The same cannot be said of DAZ or Renderosity. The web is the platform from which the textures are sold. Poser and other applications are the platforms from which the textures are utilized.