BEWARE: More textures/designs were stolen and resold. What’s next?

I’ve heard and read that the same thing has happened to some residents in the past but probably the current incident is of an unprecedented scale.

Briefly, I discovered that a resident had illegally ripped off and was reselling almost half of my products (actually all the best selling ones). After my initial shock, I noticed that he was also selling stolen skin and clothing textures of many well known SL designers. I personally recognized familiar items of at least 2 designers and with the help of some friends, this number went up to 4-5. Perhaps the number is even higher, since that person had built a 10 storey shop and he had filled so far only the first two floors.

What makes the current incident unprecedented in my view, is that it affects quite many designers and that the person who stole the textures didn’t bother to do any modifications. He just ripped them off, made some photos and started reselling them. Regarding my own items, he was even reselling them at a higher price that the one I sell!

In case that you are wondering how can I be so sure that those are my unmodified textures/designs, I am aware that I’m not allowed to post here names or landmarks but I think I can post links with screenshots of his store, for those who are interested to see the extent of the theft (attention: since I sell male body hair, the photos depict some avatar nudity):

http://picasaweb.google.com/vdbv.designs/AR_copies


with links to photos of my products for comparison:

http://picasaweb.google.com/vdbv.designs/Vdbv_originals

I took most of the necessary steps to limit the damage, i.e., I contacted the owner of the shop, I notified the other designers that I thought they were affected, I filled out an Abuse Report (I know however that LL doesn’t provide much help on a situation like this), I notified the owner of the SIM where he has his shop (a well known private continent), and I left for last the posts to the various SL forums.

Anyway, after this person was confronted by me and the rest of the people on his shop he decided, after much talk, to remove my textures. What surprised me even more were his ignorance and his arrogance. He agreed to remove my textures but insisted to keep selling all the textures of the rest of the designers. It took much further talk, to take those down too.

Now I suppose that the case is closed (?). I am perfectly aware that those kinds of incidents have been occurred in the past, that there is no way to prevent them and that are becoming more frequent due to the increase of the SL population and the current predominant climate of "I'll join SL to become a millionaire in two weeks".

However, I decided to post here because first, I want to alert other designers and residents who might spot their own products on the above screenshots and second, to ask for a feedback from the residents who had a similar incident in the past, if there are any additional actions I could take except of those I mentioned above. For example, I was thinking of filing a DMCA claim but I was told that a DMCA won’t do much if you are not residing in US and if this person took the items down already.

I am sorry for the rather long post and the possible spelling and/or grammatical errors but English is not my first language. Thank you for reading, and I would appreciate any comments and recommendations.

Name him.

Vakis, thanks for the heads up on this... I've tried doing body hair, and I know what a pain it is to get it looking right -- I never did, so that's why I bought yours.

I would like to know who it was, too, but maybe there are other ways to address this. Hopefully the Lindens will do a DMCA take-down on this guy. Maybe another thing would be to submit his name to SLBanLink, if you or the landowner is a member of that service. If the guy finds that suddenly he cant go places in SL, he might realize that what he's done isn't acceptable.

I wish we had a better solution to this, though. Technically, if a texture is downloaded to your computer, it can be copied, so there's not much that can be done on that end.

Voodoo DESIGNS has a webpage which has a fraud section. Maybe report this guy's name there. We really need some way of addressing this in SL and it would be hard for LL to do it. We need something that comes from the SL citizens themselves. Making a comment on Voodoo's site might be a good beginning and at least people can make up their own minds.

[http://www.voodoo-designs.com/Forum/]

@Whispering: I'm afraid I cannot name him here. It's against the guidelines of this Forum.

@Simon: An owner of a mall where I have one of my stores, told me that he submitted his name on Banlink. As for a DMCA claim initiated by the Lindens, I doubt they ever did that because a DMCA claim is always filled by the "content creator" and not by the "provider".

Yes the body hair is probably a pain to get it looking right but it’s the same with any other design/building/script I guess. What it matters more for me is that they are people capable of ripping off, copying and selling while they have the nerve to say “I didn’t know it was wrong”.

Re my products, I have to say that I was surprised to see them stolen and resold together with other more well known items, mainly because I deliberately kept my store “low key” because of RL commitments. I still consider it being in “beta phase” that is why I didn’t do any heavy advertising apart of one inexpensive classified (I haven’t even bothered to change the default SL skin for my displays). However, it seems that greedy people can steal everything and from everyone.

edit: Thanks Dnali, I'll have a look.

How did he illegally ripped off ur textures without ur permission? Generally he cant modify and copy ur stuffs.. if he can do the same textures and stuffs with referencing ur stuffs, is that illegally in SL?

Simon, this has been done, as ManHunt Mall utilizes BanLink, at the request of said concerned merchants he has been added, but it requires other people to trust my BanLink listings for it to propagate further. I normally only use BanLink in extreme cases of griefing, but since this was brought to me by concerned merchants who are tenants of the mall, I added this person.

It can be done... I don't think you are going to find anyone really ready to discuss that here.

has someone come out with a new form of copybot (again)? or is this because of permission bug problems?

Kinda curious now as this is the second thing I have seen on here in the last week.

No and more than likely not bugged perms.

is it a bug or the owner's fault?

It was not the owners fault, it was not a bug. It was malicious content theft.

well there is only one other way i can think of then and it will make really horrible textures resolution wise and i get amazed to think that anyone would go to such lenghts for stuff like this cause it seems more work then trying to make it yourself?

ah well

@Ken: Welcome to the Wild Wild West of Second Life. All my items are set as no-mod/copy/no-transfer for a reason, i.e., the items are not meant to be resold. The only way that someone can resell no-transfer items, is when he/she has illegally ripped off the textures out of SL. If you searched further, you will find more references to this illegal practice on some threads on the archived SL forums.

As for that person, taking inspiration and "references" from my textures, I guess I’m lucky because it is very easy to spot if a body hair texture is just copy of the original or a brand new texture which simply used mine as a reference. Body hair, is not like a white t-shirt with a red heart in the middle, which can be easily be done from the scratch to match the original. It’s a texture made of hundreds of individual hair, with certain direction, shading, coloring etc. I suggest you visit the links with the screenshots I posted above, to compare the stolen textures with mine by yourself. It would take a very patient genius to position thousands of individual body hair exactly like in my original textures.

No it’s not the copybot, there’s not a permission SL bug or a permission mistake from my side. It’s just a simple plain malicious rip off (see my answer to Ken above).

Is there anyway of knowing if you're reselling ripped off items? I mean there are wholesalers in SL, if you go to a wholesaler in SL and buy items that are actually not supposed to be wholesale ..how would you know?

Yes Rhyph is the "mall owner" I was referring to my previous post. Generally, I didn’t name any names of the people involved or affected by the incident on my first post because I didn’t ask for their consent. However, the designers that I thought they were also ripped off were notified and most of them confirmed that they recognized their textures.

That is a problem, yes. You are then subjected to the whims, laws, ToS, DMCA, mob of pissed of designers, ruining of thy name or whatever one would be compounded with if it were found out, that yes indeed someone may have been dealing in stolen goods. It's a risk one would take for not getting off their rear and creating things for one-self.

Who are the most successful people in SL? The content creators. I have yet to see one successful "content reseller" emerge in the market place.

Do the ripped off textures list the original creator legitimately?
Or is this ripper's name listed in the creator field?
And is he ripping anything but non-alpha'd textures?

Vakis, come to SecondCitizen.

His own name is on the field. That's why I had to pixelize his name on the hovering box of "his" displays before posting a link to the screenshots here.

Actually my textures have all alpha channels and I guess the clothing textures too. I'm not sure about the rest.

Thanks for ur reply.. is it possible to have a solution for preventing stolen-textures?

Not really. You can watermark them, but it tends to be removable.

To all that has asked questions about how the textures can be stolen. Let's just say I won't discuss the techicalities of how to do that; but, it definitely can be done.

Content creation is such an iffy thing to do in SL..much like in the real world. Most anything dealing with software or digized content can be so easily copied.

Yeah.. but if the owner set an item with no-modfiy/copy/resell permission, u cant see any textures with the item, how do u rip off the original textures? in addition, if u can see the texture of object, the texture u see in the texture tab is a smaller pixel-size pic, is it possible to rip off the original texture?