A sad day for Sculpty Paint

I'm a mentor and I do not have a scuplty pack. I don't accept much of what they give through the group via Mental Mentors (unofficial group).

But, I'm also a paid member of the scuptypaint group (L$1000) to be abreast of the announcements and betas. Now I will not get to play around with any updates to the program as Cell has pulled down the site.

I briefly read what happened and the mod/copy/trans flags, being what they are, allowed a person to distribute the items. Now I'm sure this has been discussed, but perhaps someone, a non-mentor, purchased the original package, saw the perms, removed the TOS and credits, repackaged and eventually gave to a mentor. The mentor, thinking it was a free-ware pack, distributed it to the mental mentors group so they can help new residents start their SecondLife.

Hindsight is 20/20 and realisticly Cell should have done what the person that "gives" away the MysticTool Hud away does... make the mentor show up at a particular location and give them a SINGLE copy, with correct flags, for free... if that's his choosing.


-KMS

This may sound idiotic, but is there some type of Creator Union?

If there is maybe you would have a better voice and power as a collective group go on a type of strike for a day as suggested above to make LL notice.

I bet the MM are in the dark about this and would hate for the innocent ppl in the group suffer but whoever did this was very wrong and tainted a good thing. I hope it can be straightened out.

That's understandable, but what happens when the genuine creator of a freebie sculpt texture becomes deluged with IMs from both Mentors and others, requesting confirmation that their freebie is really a freebie? Remember that a stolen item doesn't look any more "suspicious" than any other freebie, so every single freebie would have to be checked.

I also have been told that at least some content thieves have sent threats to creators saying that, if they are DMCA'd, they'll put the content into freebie distribution (eg, via the Linden Bazaar), thus opening Pandora's Box.

Again.. I'm sure that we need some kind of central source against which this kind of thing can be checked.. and I'm happy to help with that if I can.. but should it be opt-in or opt-out?

TY to the mentors for replying. Again, I'm not trying to bash you guys and girls and.. err.. whatever that avatar over there is. I've been thinking of applying for Mentorship for a while because (when I'm not jumping up and down on people, screaming "whiny little bitch!!!" I enjoy helping new folks get started.

It's good to know that this isn't just being blown off as "oops! sorry!" to Cel and nothing more.

edit:

That sounds like a RL crime.

The problem is that what he's really selling is textures for builders to use. They're sculpty maps but still textures. Like regular textures, if you want to sell something for builders and want to allow them to sell _their_ products, you've got to sell them as full-perm..

Jack Linden's office hours on Wednesday last was attended by a handful of residents.
The topic raised was IP theft, both by out-world software and in-world replicators.
The difficulties of controlling this were discussed much as in the posts above.
One idea that looked like a runner would be to upgrade the permission system.

What if there were separate permissions for free-transfer and sale-transfer, with all objects inheriting the most restrictive permissions of the prims, textures, scripts used in the object?
Someone could freely give their work to the community for sharing, but could ensure (as far as possible) that nobody could sell the work or anything incorporating the work.

We'd still get people ripping stuff for their own use, but the profit motivation would be gone.

/me would vote for that.

It's a good idea, but the only problem it really addresses is freebie resale.

It doesn't help the problem of people who make textures (or other things) for use in other people's creations, having to set them full perms to prevent the resulting build having restricted perms too. As far as I know, for example, texture sellers don't prevent people using the textures in (for example) a house that's given away as a freebie, as long as the textures themselves can't be extracted from it. (Although yes, if the freebie house is full perms, people can re-use the prims to re-use the textures, or a scripter can grab the texture UUIDs Nonetheless I don't recall seeing any licenses forbidding the use of the content in freebies. )

It also doesn't help with content theft because stolen content must either a) have the permissions hacked, or b) re-uploaded by the thief. If a) is the case then fixing the hack would fix the problem without adding any new permissions; if b) is the case then since the thief decides the permissions of the new upload, it won't matter what's available.

If they are adding a new permissions, "transfer all copies" would be a far better one

Maybe it would be good for people in groups like that to share landmarks instead of stuff? That makes it harder to share if they don't know where the stuff came from but if the origin is a mystery then maybe that's a good sign that something might be wrong?


Yes this is happening! One really really bold thief is getting famous for that one

There is no one move that can hit everything.
The permission for a texture to be used by builders would have to allow 'transfer in a sale' only if the texture is applied to a prim, and would not allow the texture to be transferred otherwise. Maybe the prim should be unmodifiable (in some respects) if it had such a texture applied?
Trouble is, that could restrict legitimate applications.


Maybe the real answer is to come up with a purely technical solution that would work but so horrendously complicated that LL would rather police the place rather than try to code it?

They are very much aware of the problem. It's the solutions that are in short supply.

They copied the threats to LL?

Such people should be perma-banned.
But there needs to be a way of identifying alts.

Unrestricted sign-up! *sigh*

Yes absolutely!

They were permabanninated a few times!

Is there one? Is somebody who is that bold about stealing stuff going to be afraid to steal some credit card numbers? Safely outside the countries that Second Life has offices?

Oh I hadn't talked to Cel this week but I know he has been quite sad about this and as his friend I have been quite concerned about him.
He has helped me a lot as friend. Thanks for reminding me to check on him.
He is very good to me and is one of handful of people that has any of my the things I make.
Yet listening to his experiences with dcma take down orders and how LL handles stolen products especially textures its made me feel very reluctant to get involved with any selling of my own textures.
What I have seen recently is there is few texture sellers on SLexchange in the last few days because of this.
What is going to happen I think is people basically who make textures will stop selling them or quit.
Basically it just not textures anyone can reproduce certain items and resell them now as their own because of certain programs.
From my conversations with Cel he has told me that LL current policy is to tell the person to stop but doesn't delete the stolen or illegally gained items and they can transfer them to another alt and continue to sell them until they get caught.
I hope he doesn't mind me saying this...but it's bit scary and
difficult to want to make things for the public if you can just be continuously ripped off and nothing can be really done about it.

"They were permabanninated a few times!"

Love it!
We need a *permanent* permaban?

How about : An avatar can not sell anything unless they have "Payment Info On File"?
How many different unique Payment Info sets can one individual produce?
Anonymous one-off credit devices should not be accepted.
Like anything, this could inconvenience some innocents. But how many? And how would that stack up against the greater problem.

As for credit card theft.. that stands a far better chance of attracting a knock on the door than would the copying of IP in some virtual world.

I don't see LL _ever_ doing that.

New permission check box for textures: Build Only
Would only allow it to be added as a texture on a prim or as a sculpty texture, but not allow transfering or saving texture (plus the watermark feature suggestion below).

On a side note, LL should add a watermark when viewing no mod textures so that the person cant just take a screen shot.
This should also apply to the thumbnail in the edit window for textures.

This sucks. Cel's sculpt packs are like lego sets. I own a lot of em. While i've accepted that idea theft in SL makes the copyright theft thats rampant in China look like the most original place in the world.

I will continue to purchase new packs as they are released. I hope a better solution is found, but i dont believe one will. If anything, theft will only get worse. I hope LL takes more attention to Cel, as he is one of the most influential and progressive designers in here.




whimsical thought:

Every object in here has an ID. while there probably isnt enough strength and resources to database those IDs currently should there ever be an issue, perhaps we will be able to use that as a categorization and tracking tool in the future. Dupe an object, keep the root ID, if the creator can prove to LL (most likely with a legal document) that the object he/she created violated the agreement, recall all of them. wherever they are. In RL when someone buys stolen property. Same should be in SL

I like the idea of a Build Only permission for textures. At least then it would be clear that the texture was meant to be used for creative purposes, not resold or given away.

What if LL added a way to attach your own licensing agreement to an original asset?

So when you upload or create something in SL you could attach a text file that outlines your copyright restrictions and licensing info. Sort of like the land covenants, but for content.

This wouldn't stop people from ripping textures or objects with a custom client or external program. That is pretty much impossible, I think. But it would make it easier to communicate what is allowed and what is not. This might make it easier to prosecute a thief as well.

When I first started selling sculpties I thought alot about this problem. Essentially when you sell a texture in SL it is useless to the customer unless it is full perm.

The other option is to release a set of copy-mod prims, and other set of transfer prims which are preloaded with the sculpt map. Allthough people can still rip you off it becomes a little more difficult.

I think there is a larger issue at hand here, and this turn into a bit of a rant..

I find that i spend alot of time and effort preparing things for sale, setting perms, checking scripts, contents sculpt maps.. in order to conform to the SL permissions system. Now that we are seeing there are ways to circumvent the permissions.. i say what's the point?

Why should I spend hours to set it properly for the system when it doesn't work? And then in Cel's case why should he have to spend so much time and frustration dealing with the DMCA through linden labs?

IMO the fact that LL has made a technical permissions and rights system means it is LL's responsibilty and liabilty to support it. If it is a system that is 'broken' or one that is impossible to work (more likely IMO) then LL has to replace it with someting that does work. They should use existing license agreements and build this implicitly into the agreement that new people sign when the register for SL, then there might be some legal recourse outside of asking LL to slap someone's hand because thier own permissions system doesnt work.

In the long run creators will be forced to sell thier wares outside of SL (which probably isnt a bad idea anyway given the recent developments in other virtual world platforms) with thier own licensing agreements and pricing models.


-w

I don't think LL is going to do anything about the permission issue until they have too and it hurts their bottom line.

I just created a feature suggestion in the JIRA for it. https://jira.secondlife.com/browse/VWR-5426

Please stop by and vote and help protect the content creators.

That's really unfortunate. Cel makes the best full perm sculpts...it's easy to tell his sculpts apart from most people's. I really hope he doesn't stop creating over LLs lack of creator protection.

I found a skin thief and posted on it a while back who threatened me that if I didn't shut up he'd make all the skin .tgas he had stolen from tons of creators available to anyone to download. He also claimed in this case, it'd be my fault. On one hand, I knew he was full of it (I did nothing wrong in calling him out), but on the other hand, I was worried that I would cause him to do even worse damage to those creator's businesses by him releasing those work files. Simply put, the thiefs are worse than just those out to make a buck, these thieves ultimately only care about destroying the things we all love.

LL, unfortunately, will never be able to rectify the permissions system at this point because, as others have mentioned, at the end of the day the client has to be able to display the content... and the client is open source now. Unless they're going to undo that, there is very little hope. Scripts are already relatively protected. It _MIGHT_ be possible to protect prim builds.

But there already is legal recourse.. it just depends on the RL legal system. And unfortunately, all it takes to defeat that is "The thief is in (insert difficult to access country)."

well I am not sure if this is a result or what, but you can no longer save textures to your hard drive with the new update. And the uuid option was taken away the update before that.

So to me, it looks like LL is taking this seriously and putting in some stops.