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

Thanks I have photos of the places in question but I have no means of paying for attorney. These items aren't even mine. Though I have seen textures that look exactly like ones I have created that I have sold or given to very few people I just assumed the person used similar effect, it wasn't intentional theft.

Its debugging program that game designers use to read data off the video card.
Its a very complex program you've have to know what you're doing.
Any one with skills in debugging and game creation can use it but personally I don't get why they do it unless they are really lazy. Any college student in Computer Game design program could figure it out though.
I don't even know the name of it or how to use it but friend has told me about it.

I believe in giving anyone the benefit of doubt. If it is obvious that this was teivery than I would go ahead and file.... Any of my textures made with Genetica Pro I do watermark.

http://www.digimarc.com/register

-NO, YOU HAVE NOT.- in fact, full ip and copyrights -ARE STILL YOURS.- just because one can make still vhs or tivo a movie from cable, or create an easy copy of a cd to mp3, cassette or any other medium -DOES NOT GIVE THE RIGHT TO REDISTRIBUTE AND PROFIT FROM COPIES OF THAT PRODUCT WITHOUT A PRIOR AGREEMENT WITH THE ORIGINAL CREATOR, or explicit consent provided via a creator's 'open source'-style statement.

linden permissions only help you -control- the usage of -your ip.- they do not DEFINE your - or anyone else's - rights to YOUR IP.



this is the difference between an sl texture store and a rl paint store... you buy -quantities- of paint in rl, hence, your usage rights are inheirently limited. unfortunately the same context would have to be programmed into the very fabric of sl, but at the risk of complicating the digital world, it is a limitation we have to live without.

(as if 'rl limitations' in this case would actually be desired, but the point is, usage rights of a product are defined by the creator. and unless the creator of a particular product explicitly defines that product's usage 'open source' or 'limited resale value', then usage is LIMITED, no matter the 'sl permissions' set. sl building contractors as is should have a ready, friendly and healthy relationship with sl texture creators.)

(a thought regarding, although i am only in the 'texture business' by way of clothing currently - what if texture sellers sold no-copy, but at 1/10 the cost (i'm thinking 10Ls at most per texture... sell 10x packs for 100... 100 for 1000... etc etc...) ... then contractors can price per piece. after all, in rl you have to pay for a number of ceramic tiles to refixture a bathroom. although size is abstract - generally up to 10m square - this would be a limiting factor i would think i would entertain if i entered that business... quantity should be accounted for.

and yes, installation of each texture being a ten-fold-plus pain for contractors, along with some pain for texture creators and some extra 'billed time' pain for clients... the absorption will be felt in each direction.)



and even not being in the "transferrable textures' business is risky enough!! here's my bottom line: DMCA is the rule of law. read over it carefully, and if it will help you protect -your property- ... USE IT.

p.s. http://secondlife.com/corporate/dmca.php
p.s.s. http://www.slexchange.com/modules.php?name=Content&pa=showpage&pid=42

Last time I've been on Textures R'us I've seen that they now have another warning, along with all the others, that supposedly scans who is using this technique to steal textures. I wonder if they can share the way they detect these people. I didn't ask, I'm shy.

I don't see any real way to protect your textures besides having a brand, name and a reputation. Everybody can steal everything. For example one way of stealing good ideas (that seems so unlikely because the idea is inside your head) is to have competitions where they give out prizes for one or two winners but keep the record of all the ideas from the other participants. See, you can steal just about anything. I know that copying a complex objects made out of lots of prims is also possible with the modify permission, but it's a lot of work.
That UUID thing I've read some stuff about it and I suspect that it's also a lot of work just searching for a specific one in the middle of thousands of them that come from a scan.

I'm trying to relax about this here, because from the moment I had some requests for selling my feather textures with full perms, and refused to sell them that way, I knew that eventually they will be stolen. This is human nature. I don't care, by then I will have made other even better textures. That's the power of the brand and the person behind it, you are always the first to make it happen, and you can prove it making specific commissions.

What does that person win by stealing? money? good for him. life is not about making money anyway, it's about what you feel while making that money.
maybe he will get the credits for it, yes maybe that can happen, so what, now he's stuck with the credits and can get really **ked up if somebody pays him a lot of attention.

karma bites in the arse.

The trick works for clothing and skins that are worn on your own avatar; your system has to receive all the textures you are wearing and put them together. It doesn't work for other people's clothing and skins; all you get for those is the "baked" textures that combine all the clothing layers. I suppose you could grab the skin of a naked person.

Another thing Vakis could have done was to send a message to the vdbv group to tell us what happened. Likely all of us in that group, including those who don't read the forums, are satisfied customers who don't want to see him ripped off. We wouldn't want to buy something mistakenly thinking it's really his, and I think that most of us would take it on ourselves to let others know that the vendor who stole the textures had done so (as well as letting them know where they can get real vdbv textures).

Of course, group IMs are also intermittently borked... well, still a good reminder. I think as long as you don't abuse your group by spamming them with ads (which Vakis doesn't), they're a resource for you if things get tough.

Just make all your textures no copy, no mod, No resell and that will solve everything. No one will steal your textures.

No one will buy them either, but at least you will be assured no one will steal them.

OR

Imbed a large watermark across them featuring your name and the date of creation so if someone Does steal them, you can prove it.

No one will buy those either, but again, they will be safe from Theft.

OR

We could put in place some Draconian measures aimed at all those nefarious persons who steal textures.

But then, When YOU get nailed by it because somebody else sourced the same on line texture/clip art site you did, and registered the image in SL First, you probably wouldn't think that was such a great idea either.

On the plus side, people Will buy your textures until you are banned from SL.

From day one, the nature of textures, and the need for thier permissions to be open in order for them to be in any way at all useful, or salable has always made them vulnerable to misapropiation, Even if you Sell a single texture with no permissions checked, It's a simple matter to steal it using a simple piece of software (i won't say exactly how). And yet, several Companies and individuals Still market them, and still make impressive profits despite the fact there is some thievery going on.

I think this is just one of those cases where one has to factor in acceptable losses, and move on.

Angel.

@ Angelique
Quote "Just make all your textures no copy, no mod, No resell and that will solve everything. No one will steal your textures."

This will not stop direct ripping off video card data.


Quote "Imbed a large watermark across them featuring your name and the date of creation so if someone Does steal them, you can prove it"

This will be as selling a "demo" texture .. who would buy a skin/texture with "made in SL" stamped across it"?.

Shirley, I think you may have missed what Jesse was referring to. There is no way to take the textures off of clothing (directly), sorta as an object if it could be placed out in view if that makes sense or via the picker. I do know that via my conversations with people that we are all exactly aware of how this works and wish to shed no further light on it other than that.

To the rest of the past few posts regarding texture merchants and such. This is borderlining a completely different issue. You are debating the implications of an industry that have a known interhent problem that MUST be accepted with owning and operating a business in the "texture sales" arena. I do not wish to make texture sellers sound less important, but you have to accept the system (SL and the client/viewer) for what it can do. If you are afraid of texture loss/theft while trying to resell, then you quite frankly must not have understood these implications fully and all you have to protect yourselves with is ToS, DMCA and whatever other local jurisdictional law that could possibly be applied to the matter (which may be none).

That's not what the OP is about though and ofcourse as with any online/digital medium things WILL happen. But, this is about the blatent cirumventing of systems to steal/rip-off something somewhat different. Again, not trying to make a "texture artist" sound lessor, but it's inherent that the work that goes into some clothing, skins, etc, can be 10-fold more exhaustive and intensive than a flat 2-d texture. Sorry, just my opinion...

So, when faced with the problems of, full perms texture seller, who really doesn't have tools to protect (and you can't say, "oh I didn't know" vs. super star skin designer which does indeed have certain protections in place that are not supposed to be circumvented this is where that age old problem lies. Infact, it creates a false sense of security IMO.

When a skin or clothing texture is mated to its skin body part or clothing article/garnment layer and permissions are indeed set, the two are feasably and technically not supposed to be serpeable from that point forward. Even if it's full permission, you can not seperate the texture from the item via the viewer. So it stands to reason then the person with the skin, clothing, etc that they have created, certainly should have a larger and much louder drum to beat on, because his/her safeguards were ->circumvented<-. It's not merely a open texture->save as theft.

Correct@ Ryph (Though I did not read his whole post)

I was simply reffering to the method used to grab textures from objects IN WORLD. The method does not work on articles of clothing.







This whole thing just makes me sick. Wherever I go anymore it seems people are selling stolen items (The business in a box kits). I don`t know. Things seem to just be getting worse, I just wish there were a way to better protect the content creators. I know if I keep having my things stolen I will stop creating all together, and there must be others who feel the same way.

I see that the conversation was completely derailed on the last couple of pages.

@poopmaster Oh, Najmah Handayani, FD Spark et al.

The incident did *not* involve textures that you can buy from shops like Textures R’US, which are sold with full permissions in order to be able to add them on a prim.

The incident was about stealing and selling *clothing items* (i.e., skins, body hair, clothes) with their permissions set to no-transfer.

Perhaps the title of the thread is not clear but if you read the body of my first message, you will see that this person didn’t steal and resold "simple" textures but *clothing* textures. And the only way that this can be done is by maliciously ripping off the clothing textures, uploading them again and reselling them.

I would really appreciate it if we could stick on the topic of the thread and not spin out the conversation.

Thank you for the tip Egil. Actually the first thing I’ve tried to do after I notified the rest of the designers, was to alert the members of the vdbv.designs group. Unfortunately, I couldn’t get it to work, every time I tried I was getting errors. I’ll keep trying.

I also asked the person who was selling my stolen items for the list of the people who bought from him, in order to notify them, send them the original items and refund them the price difference (yes, the ripper was selling the stolen items with a higher price than mine).

Jesse, like I said on my first post, there is no way to prevent those kinds of incidents and that they 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".

I guess the only way is to learn living with that and to take prompt actions when those kind of incidents occur.

You know, Linden Lab could put a line of code in that prevents anyone from checking the "for sale" box without having shiny new verified identity status. That might cool some ripoff artists' jets. It'd also suck horribly, but you never know. It's possible.

By "shiny new verified identity status" I guess you mean the resident to be verified with the old method (i.e. though a credit card or paypal transaction) and not the new proposed "Adult verification" procedures.

Well, that person had "Payment Info Used" alright, that didn't stop him.

It'd also really be a big middle finger to every content creator who cannot or will not be verified for whatever reason.

May we have an SLURL so we can see if this theft affects any of the rest of us, please?

I'm afraid I can't name names or post landmarks. It's against the Forum rules.

Then contact me in world
No rules about sharing SLURL's in-world.

Umbra Lunardi

LOL, you're the one wanting to know, why not call upon us?

As i noted, none of these "Fixes" is actually a Fix, and to date No one has been able to come up with a viable one.

Some problems in life Are insoluable, and texture protection is a Good candidate for the list.

Angel.

Of course not, this is just the Knee Jerk reaction of "Blame everything on the Unverifieds".

The permissions placed upon an item, whether it be a texture, or a Hairstyle, or a clothing item will determine whether or not it's a candidate for Theft.
When you check "Next owner can: Transfer/Resell" Whatever your intent, That is precisely what the new owner Can, and May do. Not too bad if they are only yardsaling the single one you sold them. Add "next owner can: Copy" and you are handing out the ability for others to manufacture and sell the results of Your work and creativity. Whether it was yout intent to do so or not, the Fact is that is what will happen because there are a few unscrupulous people out there. if you are going to sell an item, any item take time and THINK about what permissions you grant and why. That is why the check boxes are there. Think, Plan, and decide just how freely you want your items to be used.
Make things copy, Or transfer, but Not Both Unless it's your intent that these items spread far out of your control. For textures, there isn't much you can do, For everything else you Can weigh your options.

Angel.

No texture is safe...


Using the SL Client you can get Second Life to spit out to you via chat all the texture UUID's on every face of ever prim in a linked group or a single prim.

and then you just simply script the UUID.


ofcourse I am being very vauge on this due to the fact that it could easily destroy business such as JZ Corp.. LV... and alot of others that have trademark textures that can easily be pulled as UUID's and then scripted llSetTexture("";

And this is all done through the SL Client, no software needed.

I cant believe LL is still allowing this to be ~ok....

Well as I understand it, people in the US, for example, were/are able to buy a $10-20 prepaid credit card with their cigarettes and six pack, use it to register on SL and get "verified".

Not quite the same as handing over your fingerprints, blood sample and taking the anal probe that they're suggesting for the new verification