The Content Thief & The Nice Estate Manager

Not technically a question so I will slip a question in at the end of this sentence to alleviate any non question related anxiety, is that ok?

So I was planning to post a thread this morning to alert the world to my current crisis and ask for advice, but my problem has now been resolved at least in the short term. So just wanted to document it here and thank the relevant parties.

I own a prefab business called 'Hydro Homes' and have been selling prefabs for over 2 years. We have a strong sales record and a very good customer base and I would determine that we are a successful business. After being out of world all day yesterday, I logged in about midnight to find 8 IM's from different customers telling me that a certain individual had been in my store most of the day soliciting my customers, telling them he was selling 'Hydro Homes' for half the price and handing out LM’s to his store. Customers sent me LM's etc so off I go, and to my horror I arrive at 'Beckham's Prefabs". This was a blatant advert for Copy Bot if ever I have seen one. He was selling 6 of my builds (although I know he was working out putting up more for sale) and my work was the only designs he was selling. The builds were half the price and some were full perms! So I bought one, it was identical, right down to the alignment of my custom made textures. This wasn’t someone imitating my design. This was blatant theft of my design. To make matters worse, they even stole the building description I have created for marketing purposes, so basically this individual slapped his logo on MY product and was selling it at a reduced price to MY customers.

As you can imagine I was pissed. Now allot of my designs have been ripped off before, but these were people trying to imitate my design and by the time they finished the builds had distinct differences that stopped me taking action against them. I wasn’t too worried in the past as their build quality was terrible. This theft was different though as they were exact replica's right down to the quality of the build and texturing.

I immediately sent an abuse report and submitted support tickets in each category, not really being sure of how to report this guy to LL with the new support system.

Then I calmed down a bit, went back to the store and realized he was living on an estate. Read the convenent and the management clearly state that they will not tolerate anyone doing anything to violate the TOS and specifically, the use of Copybot. So I sent an IM to the estate owner, not really confident that they would do anything, but I wanted to explore all avenues so I figured it couldn’t hurt.

The estate owners name is Femina Matahari. To my surprise when I checked my email this morning she had pretty much resolved my immediate problem already. She had purchased a copy of one of my builds and the rip off version in order to compare designs. They were identical. As an estate owner, she contacted the concierge service and got immediate support. Spike Linden came out and viewed the original build and the rip off and determined that it was an obvious copy. Spike suspended the thief’s Avatar and his alt pending investigation. The estate manager returned all the guys objects and reclaimed the land, putting him out of business (for the time being at least).

So I wanted to thank Femina publicly for contacting the Lindens on my behalf and for helping to resolve this issue so quickly and efficiently. She went above and beyond what I expected from an estate manager I have never met and it’s greatly appreciated!

I also wanted to thank Spike Linden for helping to maintain my IP rights. I was pretty much ready to stop building prefabs last night and was rethinking my entire business strategy, but my faith in the system has been restored somewhat.

Thanks for your time!

Porky.

Yes Porky, it's ok

Nice to hear a positive outcome to a very disturbing scenario.
Well done Femina and Spike

Great story Porky , Good guy fights back ... wins for a change , Bad guy gets his ass kicked .

That is how it should be , The estate owner was key to getting this resolved and she need's to be praised for her actions .. Good job .

The People rejoiced! Linden finally did something to stop a thief, with a big assist from responsible landowner. Nice job by all.

Thanks for the story Porky. I'm glad everything worked out for you. I can only imagine how upset I'd be if this happend to me.

Now we need some way to nail this guy and keep him from creating another alt and doing the same thing all over again. Maybe getting this story out there and circulating will open some peoples eyes.

So, handing over the keys to the jails to estate managers might work afterall? Congratulations to all those involved on the right side of justice.. it's heart warming to see/hear something good happening in SL.

I'll admit I've been skeptical before, but now that you've caught a thief I do believe you could catch a monkey.

LOL!

Good to know that your problem was resolved quickly with the help of the estate owner/manager. However, I guess you were lucky because in a recent similar incident that happened to me, where a resident stole and was reselling almost half of my products, the estate management where he had his store didn’t take *any* action when I contacted them. Instead, I was told that "this is a matter you have to resolve with LL and we can’t do anything about it"!

I was lucky too though, because to my surprise LL took prompt action by suspending the account of the thief so his lease expired and his land was reclaimed automatically even without the refusal of the estate management to intervene. I wrote a detailed post about the incident here for those interested:

/327/02/187168/1.html

I was and I am still very cautious not to name names on this forum but the land where the thief had his store was the self-proclaimed "one of biggest private continents of SL". And the thing that really puzzles me is that if the management of "one of biggest private continents of SL" refuses to handle and resolve a situation like this (while LL resolved it effectively), how we can be safe in the future when LL handle the keys of AR to the private estates?

So pleased something has been done in one of these instances, hopefully as a Linden did help out after the estate owner reported, they will now know about this copying issue and do something about it.

I think a lot of estate owners are very helpful and will assist with this sort of thing, I know both my home and business landlords are very approachable and come when a problem.

As you can imagine, this issue has raised my paranoia somewhat, I plan to employ somebody to sweep every prefab seller and mall in SL to ensure no one else is selling copies of my designs.

This got me to thinking about a possible future business venture for another player (I don’t have the time myself). Set up an organisation whose sole purpose is to monitor the entire commercial world (to the best of their ability) and report any incidents where one of their customers designs has been obviously copied. This will only work with Linden Lab’s backing as they are the key to taking action. This is not as far fetched as it sounds. Robin Linden sits on the Board of the SLBB (Second Life Business Bureau) and their mandate is to help resolve disputes over content, service and land transactions. A similar organisation could aim at locating and reporting instances where content that has been ‘Copy Botted’ and report it back to the customer as well as Linden Lab’s. I would be willing to pay a monthly fee for this service if it worked effectively and I know plenty of others would too. It would take a lot of organisation to set up and to recruit trust worthy employees but I think the world is in desperate need of a service like this, and given LL’s positive support of the SLBB I think it may be possible.

I forgot to add, Porky I was in your store house hunting, before I decided to build myself. I was very impressed with your designs. I may even "ripoff" some of your ideas when I renovate.... . It would be a shame if a thief forced you to give up.

This is actually very good news. I too am all too familiar with the horror and disgust of logging on to ims notifying you that your products have been ripped off.



I guess next time this happens to me I will see about contacting the estate owner. unfortunately some of them just don`t care. As long as theyre getting rental payments they allow anyone on their land.

But im really glad to see that the linden came out and acted this fast....good news.

I’ve always done well selling from images and don’t have my stuff rezzed for viewing. I put allot of effort into presentation and the display images to give customers the confidence to buy without touring the builds themselves. However, for the past few months I have been planning and setting up a huge new store with multiple rezzing areas so people can tour full size models etc.

However, I am not sure now as it's just making it even easier for people to use copy bot to copy on mass. In my original post the culprit had to buy the builds he wanted to copy. Not a major deterrent but could be enough to make the average fraudster head on over to the next store on the list where everything is rezzed and displayed.

So I am torn at the moment. Do I progress with my plan to display full size models, which will inevitably allow my business to grow or do I stick with my current display methods. These are rhetorical questions but feel free to comment if you wish.

While I'm happy that you got your case resolved quickly, LL shouldn't be involved in IP arbitration. If someone copies your work, there are established RL procedures for that, the easiest of which is to simply file a DMCA with LL and if you wish to persue the matter further, take the infringer to court.

It's easy enough to forge the creation date on a set of prims so what are you going to use as guideline if A builds something and B copies it, but makes the creation date appear as if their infringing copy was built first?

I think it was the obvious use of Copy Bot in this instance that inspired the Linden to act.

If it is, then that's a security hole. There should be no way an ordinary user can forge a creation date.

I suppose one could create a bunch of prims on a given date, and retrofit them on some future date. I haven't checked to see how this affects the creation date, but it's likely to require some attention.

It would be nice if we could inspect the creation date of textures used by an object, but I don't think this is currently possible.

I've played with the TempRezzers a bit (I'm guessing that's what you intend to use). While I do defend their use, I always do recomend caution. Some builds (even very nice builds) can cause horendous lag when being rezzed by a TempRezzing script. If you do go this route, be sure to experiment over a few days with each build and watch the sim performance.

Aside from that, if you DO put out rezzed builds for display, I'd incorperate a standard prim within the displayed builds. Bury a prim within another prim, for example, where the prim is named "Property of Porky Gorky" and has a custom texture reading "Stolen!!!" on it *grins* Sort of like a car PIN. That way, if it is copybotted, you have proof it was.

And glad things worked out for you, and very glad the thief got his just deserts.

~Jessy

I don't think it's a bad thing that LL/Spike intervened, it's great and lucky for you .

I just think an organized effort to set up a "resident IP police" is asking for trouble.

As far as your display dilemma goes, I don't feel like it should influence you too much. If you think that it would improve sales then that's what you should focus on. If someone really wants to copy something, they'll do it anyway, whether it's in boxes or rezzed.

The original copybot needs to be able to build on the land btw to recreate the object, so simply turning off building for "All Residents" would stop that, and more drastically you could make a special unlinked copy for display.

Sorry to hear you had such troubles there Porky .... but VERY glad to see you got it resolved .... p.s. wanna send me the SLURL to your place in world ... and I will stick it up on the Brit Business board in my store....

Marty

Thats quite a sly idea, thanks!

Yes I am swinging that way. I am not going to let these people stop my business developing, instead I am going to fight them and be proactive in monitoring the community and take whatever action is necessary to stop them. To be honest, I allways assumed this sort of thing wouldnt happen to me, not to this extent anyway, but now ive been bitten on the arse I will be keeping my back to the wall in future

I hope you do stay with it. I don't want to see any resident business run out of town by petty thives. (Or Corporate Thieves for that matter).

I have went and checked out shops especially textures and also checked for textures on the web and I am amazed how many use do not use for commericial purposes out there or out right sell stuff that is someone elses or even freebies. I am glad someone was able to do something about it. Good job Porky and the lady who helped you. I must confess I pretty have given up having any real business with real protections in SL. I just create and camp for 6L for upload money until I get tired of SL all together. Maybe there hope for unique content, real protections. Biggest issue is even when someone does create something really good which I have seen its hard to get noticed so if someone does steal from you there no real proof that you did it first.

I wonder IF any of the RL Giants decide to sell stuff here would there be some sort of copyright enforcement implemented. Could it be the rest of us aren't worth the trouble?