Second Hand Shops?

Okay, let's say I make a sofa. I know people like to redecorate their houses sometimes. So I make a transferrable sofa and tell everyone that they are free to resell it in any fashion they please if they ever get tired of it, including through a secondhand store. I hope that by having such an open, customer-friendly stance, it will increase my business.

Is there anything wrong with that?

Wow, in a thread where Ingrid Ingersoll has admitted she is an asshole like 10 times, it's hard to let that go by, but I'll restrain myself. Ingrid, like I said, if your houses had tinted windows in them for privacy, I wouldn't have to unlink them to put in tinted windows for customers, now, would I? And then my house wouldn't break, would it? And I know you don't really *care* but I do, maybe I'm closer to the end-user of the product. And I offered to pay you for replacements of broken houses, and you returned my money, so thanks, I appreciate it, I will go on buying more of the originals.

And here's an opportunity to raise the dreaded issue of KILL COPY. Apparently creators have the ability to go and punish someone to whom they gave a back-up copy of something like a house, and if they think it is not being used appropriately, kill that copy of it and swipe it in essence. They do this if they see a house has been copied 6 times to rent, for example. Now, I don't do this, but I see it done, and I have to say, I"m on the side of the landlords. If a creator doesn't want their object copied, then they click off "no copy," end of story, they don't go in-world hunting down people and killing their copies. And frankly, in the fetid environment of the feted content kings, I'd have to say we need to promote consumer rights more. Killing a copy is evil, and those who do it cannot expect any sales from me if I hear about it.

Now let's turn to Chip, who as usual, provided a stunning exemplar of the kind of behaviour I could characterize as the Bavarian burgher but -- let us refrain from personal attacks!

Here it is, in all its glory. I don't have to make this stuff up! Somebody can't be FREE and buy up Chip's goods in bulk! That would give him cash, to be sure, but it would mean *economic activity he can't control* when they might place his skin in a less-than-spectacular setting -- or so he thinks. Close control of distribution -- that's the ticket! Yes, like Ingrid, he is terribly, terribly concerned that his product might "look bad". But...why can't people make it look BETTER?

For example, it's a good thing Ingrid's houses are on mod (if I don't forget to lock them) because then I can put in the tinted windows she does not deign to include. Now if her handbags which are fabulous BTW would be improved by my judicious application of TSO-like cheetah material to match my TSO-like men's briefs, well...who is to say what is improvement and what is to be ridiculed??? Please. Let us be free, Ingrid. Let us BE. If you can't bear the thought of your creations being mucked up, well, ok, put them on no mod, see if I care. But then, I might not buy them because it's a free game and lots of people DO enable me to dye my pumps to match my dress, dammit!!!!!



Note the veiled and whimpering threat -- don't pay my prices, don't do it my way, I take my marbles and go home.

But I tend to agree about valuation of work. But many people put these hours in for free, then have the economy clock start ticking when they examine income and expenses and how they can cash out on GOM. And frankly, the economy is just too controlled -- in part by people wishing to clutch their content baronhood tightly to their chest and by their feters -- to enable people to really value your time through giving you real dollars. This will come in time. But for that to happen, you have to let go....

And again i have to repeat it since it doesnt seem to be clear.
If someone is tired about something they bought and want to make an one shot yard sale to get rid of unused inventory, fine.
Things change and become much less acceptable in my eyes when people AS A REGULAR BUSINESS buy stocks of used items for low prices in order to stock a second hand shop, undercutting original creators on their own products and on a regular basis to attain a regular source of income at the expense of the sales of the original creators themselves. That is VERY different.

Yes, I'd be happy to find you that someone: me. And anyone else entering the market as a less-than-stellar content creator who hopes for some customers and pass-ons and visiblity.

Shiryu, it's very hard to have this discussion because you have a firmly-vested belief in the ideology of scarcity, and it appears that you believe you are being robbed and harmed in some way if someone resells your goods.

There are other concepts you have to bring into play and pull back the zoom lense a bit from your preoccupation of what seems to you an immediate sale loss.

First, there is the issue of the customer base, building a set of happy customers who keep coming back, who buy more, who go to your other outlets, etc. If they are free, and can modify, or more importantly, can re-sell, they will shop more. America has a huge culture of hand-me-downs, tag sales, church bazaars, garage sales, etc. And there is just no fighting this tide. It may seem unseemly and inelegant to Old Europe, but it's the norm. And it's fine. It creates prosperity. PEOPLE WILL BUY MORE AND SPEND MORE THAN THEN CAN AFFORD IF THEY KNOW THEY HAVE THE SAFETY VALUE OF RESALE. I know that you simply cannot disagree with this reasoning -- a customer feeling more confident because he is free to resell and object, on ebay or a yard sale, is a customer who spends more on you than perhaps he intended or was even wise.

The reason is due to mobility and flexibility. People do not stay in one place, they go half way across the country and have to sell everything sometimes to make the move to a new job. So it is built into culture. And SL is like that too, with people constantly having to pick up their skirts and move out of lag into fresh fast FPS or get away from ugly builds. So when people have the freedom to resell, they can cut some of their losses sometimes from excessive shopping and your product acquires increased mobility and visibility in new hands. You must think of it this way: the person who buys from your original customer for less is in fact a customer who is happy and associates that happiness with your product, and if you put a notecard and landmark in the product, they will come and visit your store more likely than not and buy more.

You see it as loss because you don't believe that freedom of economic decisions, in the aggregate, floats the boat of the whole economy higher. Those who believe in freedom of tag sales believe economic freedom for people to find the right price at the right time at the right place is paramount for the health of the whole economy. Tag sales fill in the gaps for people -- sometimes they don't shop for whatever reason, but during socializing at a yard, they might buy. I find anything you put for sale in SL can sell. And it's for the good of merchants as a whole class if there is increased sales and economic activity, not taking place in an atmosphere of restraint and coercion.

No i have a firmly-vested belief in the ideology of rewarding creativity and i believe i am being robbed or harmed if someone buys and resells used items i make on a regular basis as a form of personal and regular business and income, undercutting me and thus stealing my customers with MY OWN products.

Wow, well at least we're getting somewhere. You've defined a priority for yourself, your self-interest, as it were. Since this is your firmly-vested belief, you should take steps to foster your business accordingly. One solution would be to implement vending systems that allow gift-certificates to be bought (so that people might still give your products as gifts to friends), and selling your items without transfer rights.

Surely this is a more productive solution than selling your products with transfer permissions, and complaining when others exploit (take advantage of) these permissions.

What you said is clear, it's just tangential. If you go back and reread it, my post was about content creators who harbor no ill will toward professional resellers, not about you and your products.

If I design and sell enough original products that there are secondhand stores stacked to the rafters with my items at deep discounted prices, good for them, as far as I'm concerned. But apparently, according to you, they are stealing from me even if I explicitly grant them this right.

The houses I make don't have rooftop gardens! Or pink chimneys! If you're looking for a house with pink chimneys, or rooftop gardens, i suggest you go buy one! OR make one yourself since the house is modifiable! Or tint the windows yourself since the house is modifiable!

And I do care! That's why I made the house modifiable. So that custoemers can modify to their hearts content. Do not blame me because your house is "breaking by iteself".

4 free modifiable houses later...I'm still an asshole. And probably inner and feted at this point too I suspect.

If you explicitly grant them this right good for you, or if a second hand shop owner tajkes his time to go ask to every creator of the items he sells for permission to retail them, thats good to me. But my posts were not related to this cases.

Everything I sell is set to mod/no copy/transfer. I made the decision to do this a long time ago after about the 100th im that someone bought something and couldn't give it as a gift. I understand people like to make outfits with multiple copies of things but I had to make a choice. I prefer that a person be able to resell or give away something they bought from me if they don't want it anymore.

As far as getting ims from people where I have no record of their purchase, I guess all I can do is put a lovely disclaimer in my profile lol. I really need an "Oldbie fetid content baron" t-shirt or something and then i can walk about demanding pie!

So it is in fact okay for content creators to offer such licenses to users of their products. Cool.

Since the default transfer permission means that anyone is free to transfer anything under any conditions, have you considered simply including a notecard with your transferrable products that delineates the conditions under which you think people are stealing from you if they resell your products?

I DECLARE THIS THREAD CLOSED!!!


Mostly because Aimee is drunk.


If you wish to shower me with complements you are invited to do so. But no more poopie talk.

The only thing creators want is for the second hand shop proprietor to ASK before he/she resells. No one is saying that this is not a good, valid or moral method of product distribution. But what can and does happen in SL is that products lose their original permissions through bugs (In RL they sometimes "fall of the back of a truck", and the reseller may knowingly or unknowingly be dealing in illict merchandise.

In RL, businesses have to register their names and obtain licenses to do business. Thats just part of the background legwork that it takes to put up a shingle. In SL we are encouraging resellers to do a little bit of due diligence to assure themselves and their customers that the products they sell are "legit" and not the result of a buggy permissions.

Is it in the TOS? No. But it is a simple action that will insure your reputation with the very creators you will rely on for future goods for your business. Successful businesses in rl and sl don't do the minimum, skirt the law, or ignore the standards of the community in which they do business, instead they go the extra mile to assure people of their integrity, commitment and excellence.

Ask. Talk to the creators of the objects you want to sell to your customers. They may be able to offer other items, provide you with additional information about the product, create special edition items just for your store...anything is possible, once you take the time to actually speak with them.

Yeah, what Bel said.

Exactly, if they ask (giving the creator the option of refusing) all is good

Bel, in most cases this is true, but you are incorrect to say that this is all they want.

Shiryu, for example, sells his items with transfer permissions but if I as a secondhand store owner asked him if it's Ok to sell his things, he'd tell me no.

All a secondhand store owner has a responsibility to do is to verify that the current permission settings on the object are not MORE permissive than when originally sold. As long as this is the case, they should not feel obligated to respect the "intent" of the original seller, because that seller had an obligation to reflect their intent through their set permissions.

If I were a secondhand store owner, I'd start to get warning tingles and beware of anyone who:

-Tried to sell me items with any permission settings other than no-mod, no-copy, transfer

-Tried to sell me more than 1-2 of any item.

I'd also make it my business to keep current on the current state of freebies, and try to be aware of common giveaway products; so that I wouldn't be buying them or selling them.

Well, thank you, if you ask something to someone of course you give him the option of refusing. If you ask but you don't accept the possibility your counterpart will refuse then what is the point of asking?

And asking the one that spent time and effort on the items you sell and you want to lucrate on for explicit permission to do it, it's really the minimum requirement for an honest business.

What part of "WHAT BEL SAID" did you not understand? Now KISS ME DAMN IT!

HAHAHA, that was pure classic Prokofy. Take an opportunity to label someone a bourgeoisie asshole, and then agree with them. Even you don't buy your own bullshit.

Feel free to buy as many copies of my stuff as you want and re-sell them. I don't care - I still get the sales.

The bottom line to all of this is very simple... it is the creator's right to determine how the fruits of their labors are distributed. Period. Some might be perfectly fine with working with resellers. Others may not be. Some might be fine with having their work modified and resold as a new product by someone else and others might not be. If you make assumptions about the creator's intent based on an overly simplified permissions system or you feel some sense of entitlement to profit from the work of others without their consent, then *you* are the greedy one. There is plenty of room in SL for a second hand marketplace, and plenty of creators who'd be more than happy to have their work distributed that way, but it's no one's place to make that decision on behalf of the creator other than the creator.



I have a big problem with that line of reasoning... it boils down to something along the lines of "if I don't have the talent to do something myself, then I should be entitled to profit off someone else's back if they like it or not." No. Sorry. Life doesn't work that way. If you want to resell Shiryu's creations you ask him. If he says no, then it's no. End of story. You do not have an entitlement to his creativity. If you want it then you accept it on his terms. If you find his terms unacceptable then move on and find someone else whose terms work for you. It doesn't matter one iota if you find his position reasonable or not. Without his effort and creativity there'd be no product to feel entitled to in the first place.

To be clear, I am not at all opposed to the second hand market, but I am dead set in my support for the right of artists and content producers to set their own terms, and to have those terms respected.

omg, chip and me agreeing on something... it's gonna rain willing girls

I'm a content creator and I'm okay with reselling (as long as it doesn't make 100% of my sales, but then again, if it does, i can just make new/updated items to make money).

Everytime my item's 'on display' (rezzed somewhere in SL), that's a bit of advertisement for me, people might see it's cool and come to me for more.

I could spend thousands of L$'s on advertisements, but it probably would bring way less sales.

Besides, i take SL content creation as a hobby, it's not my primary source of income (in fact, if it can help cover part/all of my land fees, i'm happy already).

The thing is, the terms are already set, by the permissions:
COPY means 'the creators terms allow copying'
TRANSFER means 'the creator's terms allow transfer/resell'
NO-MOD means 'the creator's terms do not allow modification'

It's like a license!

Maybe there should be a 'GIFT' flag (only allowing to sell for free?). Maybe a 'GARAGESALE' flag, only allowing set-to-sale for a few hours? Maybe there should be EULA-s? Or premade license schemas (like CC-ShareAlike)? That's another question, but where we stand, the license system granularity is limited, so there's no other option than to just take that into account.

And yes, i HATE buying thing for gifts only to find out i have to IM the creator (if he/she's online) and hope for a transfer replacement or lose that money.

This is the same line of logic used to defend building 2000 invisible prims at 700 meters on someones land because they have the land set to build.

"Because you didn't say I couldn't" is the most juvinile of all excuses. Is it that hard to ask?