Removal of MLP Scripts - facts and solution

OK, posting this in a new thread as the other one is so long and full of other things.

I spoke at length to Scout Linden about this last night and believe I have the facts.

Firstly - this affects all scripts that were attributed to Eva Capalini. This means the Open Source MLP (multi-love-pose) scripts that she has sold in a bundle with numerous poses.

Secondly - MLP is NOT SexGen. SexGen is a trademarked name and the two are SEPERATE things.

Well over a year ago I noticed that Eva was including poses in her bundles that were not supposed to be there. They were full-perm poses from highly respected builders who sold them for use in builds, not to be passed on full-perm. She had DMCAs issued against her and stopped selling a lot of the beds etc she previously had been.

The MLP script is open source, and should never have been sold, of course. However, many of us fiirst got it as part of a freebie bed or BIAB.

Using the MLP script was not a problem. Again, open source, free to use.

I am not sure what caused the Lindens to act now, but they decided to delete all of Eva's creations from in-world. This means that many of the MLP scripts inside our builds were deleted.

THE SOLUTION FOR CREATORS

Your inventory copies are still there, just fine. If they have Eva's name on them you should change this. To do this, just copy the contents of the scripts and paste it into new scripts, created by yourself. You can then drop them back in the product. You will also needs to replace the notecards that accompany the MLP script. You should have safe copies of your products in your inventoriy - just copy/paste the cards contents into your own cards. So don't panic - you are not going to have to set up all the positions again


THE SOLUTION FOR OWNERS

If your pose furniture has stopped working, don't worry - it is solvable. Firstly, contact the creator, they may well already have a replacement ready. Please remember that this is not their fault and they are just as miffed about it as you are.

if your product is copyable & modifiable, you can fix it yourself - follow the instructions above for creators. If you are in anyway unsure of how to do this, best to wait for the creator to get back to you, or ask a friend with building skills.

I have been told that just rerezzing the item will also fix the situation, but I would advise taking action as it may well be best not to have anything left with this person's name on it, just in case.

Scout did apologise to me, I don't think the Linden's really meant this to happen as it has.

Finally. MLP is not Sexgen, I repeat, these are two different things. Calling a product Sexgen is NOT ALLOWED unless it really is, and this is a trademarked name.

I do hope that passing on this information is of some use.

Well, you know, who could _possibly_ have predicted that removing without warning all items created by an avatar regardless of what they are might at all have any negative effects?

Thank you for taking the time, incidentally.

That is incorrect. One of the freedoms open source gives the user is the ability to sell.




Do not forget the prim ball, and the script inside it.




One more thing. if you added some poses to your bed, or adjusted the positions of the poses, You will have to do that over. it's sucks but it can not be helped.


good post

I was gonna say that too.

thanks ...that made it a whole lot easier than wading through 100 other posts

First of all, as said before by others, a mayor benefit of OpenSource software is that it's allowed to resell, but depending on the license type,

GPL Licence:
you need to either include the original sourcecode with the product, or have a way for people to get the source freely. (incl. modifications). Reselling is allowed.

BSD License:
This applies for MLP, since it's BSD licensed. BSD license is less restrictive as GPL, where you are not in need to provide the sourcecode along with the product, making it available to your customers. That's why Apple uses FreeBSD as it's base for OSX.
They are not in need to provide the sourcecode for the platform.
Whereas if they would have used Linux, they MUST provide the code to anyone who wants too (kernel and any GPL licensed software in the OS).

As you see, it's completely not against the law, to resell the BSD licensed software, or GPL for that matter. Infact it is endorsed to DO resell, it.

In other words, this mentioned person, who has resold the MLP package, is not against TOS or any other law. So, shame on LindenLab for acknowledging a false accusation, and along with that removal of the scripts, grid wise.
They should have read about the licenses, and the restrictions/rules around them.

This is a typical American law situation, where people are money hungry and not (even judges) following the real law around licenses.
In Europe this would not have happend. Since here, we are serious about such licenses, and not so money oriented. (no offence but the statistics shows it all the time)

Well in theory 'just copying them into your name' seems simple enough. But what if you have a two year old business with some 50 objects relying on those scripts by now. Not so simple really. This still doesn't explain why all her scripts were deleted grid wide. So it wasn't a sexgen lawsuit. Which is actually more curious, because I could support that. I never intended to 'steal' scripts, i bought them like everyone else. And I never released them full perms, not even sure they are full copy either.

So just simply contact the builder, that being me, isn't so simple. Honestly I was debating on closing that entire line of products to make room for my new business, I guess that decision was just made for me.

Yes, you are correct, it is allowed to resell open source code. Of course, whether it is morally right to do so is another matter, heh.

I don't think the issue was with her reselling this code. She WAS selling poses against the creators terms, I know that. The Lindens did not clarify exactly what prompted such a drastic action.

You shouldn't have to redo the pose postitions as the info is still in the card, and the card should still be in your inventory or inside an unrezzed version. You can copy/paste them.

And yes, indeed it does suck. I am baffled as to why the Linden's acted quite like this. I have a few prefabs that include beds, chairs and benches which are driven by this code. It is very annoying that customers are now (understandably) upset that their items are not working.

A little warning would have been nice.

It does depend what the DMCA complaint was - if the script was identified in the DMCA take down request, then unfortunately it is incumbent upon LL to remove that material until a counter claim is made - the DMCA doesn't give the ISP any discretion to decide what is or isn't a copyright infringment.

Likewise the take-down is supposed to take precendence over notification.

Matthew

A lot of creators seem to say "Sure I gave you a full perms item, but it's morally wrong to resell it!"

Include a license that fits what you want or stop complaining.... Seriously It's getting old, and if you didn't license it properly that is your fault. How are people going to know not to resell it if you don't include the proper license?

This is not directed at the MLP situation, just a general rant

We should all refer to LL®™'s official statement on this.

Oh! Wait! There is no official statement on this.

Just one more example of LL®™'s total lack of good customer service and their poor communications. And to think they actually hired and are paying someone to be a communications Linden.

The GPL at least and I think BSD are Free Software licenses, not Open Source licenses - the two are not the same.

Here is an article explaining the differences:

http://www.gnu.org/philosophy/open-source-misses-the-point.html

However Free Software or Open Source you still have to ability to resell if you wish.

The root cause of this problem is that SL's permissions system is not capable of properly supporting a value-added reseller model. Value-added resellers must currently have full permissions of contents they resell. If the let those copies loose into the world, the original creator is screwed, with little recourse other than to file a DMCA claim.

What SL needs is a permissions mechanism supporting value-added resellers. I admit it's not a simple problem. The simplest model would be "next-next owner's" permissions, but I think a single "reseller limitations" checkmark would be best, where, if checked, the item can't be distributed by the next owner as copy/xfer, but can as copy/no-xfer or xfer/no-copy. Mod perms would be unaffected, or would need a separate checkbox.

Clearly, LL mishandled this one, though it's not a trivial problem to solve, and no doubt they were unaware that many folks had taken the free distribution bed and used it (with all anims replaced) in perfectly legitimate products.

I inavertently contributed to the fiasco. Some time ago I found a "full perm sex bed", which I had a lot of fun learning to configure. Eventually I figured out that the animations were not intentionally free, so I didn't make any products using them. However, I did enhance the scripts and distributed them as MLPV2. Unfortunately, the notecards and scripts had E. Capalini's name as creator, and so perfectly legitimate makers have had their products disabled. We will get this sorted out soon though, fortunately.

PS: Thanks for the OP!

Are you sure your content is owned by E. Capalini? If not, you're in no danger. LL is not simply removing all MLP scripts. Furthmore, they don't appear to be deleting E. Capalini's content any more.

There is no way that the scripts could have been claimed in the DMCA. Furthermore, creatorship does not specify content. A DMCA claim is against content. If I take a notecard created by Joe Blow and completely replace it with my own text, it cannot possibly be a DMCA violation. Therefore, what LL did was an overcorrection.

However, they do have a hard problem to solve here, and mistakes happen. No doubt they were unaware that perfectly legitimate content would match their filter, and I read that a linden has apologized for what happened. LL is in the position that they are legally required to strike the pirated content.

Note that in this case, the pirated content is due to violating a license agreement.

You seem to know more about it than the rest of do, Lear. Would you like to tell us what you know - why were the items made by E. Capalini removed?

The DMCA claim might have been that EC had created a bed whose contents were all pirated, or that all EC's content was in copyright violation. The script may have even been explicitly mentioned in the DMCA.

There is every way in which the script could have been incorrectly claimed in the DMCA - here's a recent web example where an overly broad DMCA resulted in a lot of material being unnecessarly pulled - http://www.boingboing.net/2007/08/30/science-fiction-writ-1.html - the people who filed this DMCA admitted that what they filed was in error (and due to a genuine mistake) and included works that shouldn't have been there. However, that didn't prevent the material being (temporarily) removed under DMCA.

It is possible (albeit speculation) that LL were responding to a similar DMCA which was overly broad or had a list of content which erroneously included content which was not pirated. Under DCMA it isn't LL's responsibility to vet the list - just to respond to counter claims.

Matthew

Phil, I don't have all the facts for sure, but here's my assessment of what happened, along with a suggestion that would avoid this kind of problem in the future:

/327/20/265318/1.html#post2035065

Copyright law means, you cant sell other creators work without the creators permission.
So assume if there is no license/tos with the item; you could not sell it and should contact the creator incase you want to re-use/resell it.

Check the Linden TOS you signed when entering SL.

You further understand and agree that: (i) you are solely responsible for understanding all copyright, patent, trademark, trade secret and other intellectual property or other laws that may apply to your Content hereunder; etc.etc.



Anyway, it seems Linden reverted some of the frozen assets/stolen goodies this morning.

Eva Capalini, and this case is about 1 person with dozens of alts and dozens of DMCA on his accounts. Ripping of people and creators since early 2007. Copybotting/Glintercept etc etc. Untill Linden finally decided to do something about it.

Note that this particular case has nothing to do with copybot or glintercept. It's a simple case of violating a sales agreement on copy/xfer content (and distributing it as copy/xfer).

I noticed the rise of the free/cheap sex beds sometime last year. I was sure they were from stolen items because the time and effort to make sex beds would make anyone charge a whole lot more. In fact, some time ago on this forum it was mentioned that there was a bed stolen or sold full perms accidentally.

All of my beds seem to be working as I used the original MLP bought from Miffy's free vendor and I made all my anims. But knowing what I know about MLP I think the solution depends on what exactly the Lindens removed from the beds. Are the original stolen animations not removed? Are all the supporting notecards and scripts for the MLP removed as well? If they used just the MLP script (and all it's supporting notecards) then you could just replace that with your own copy. At worst you will have to reconfigure all the positions again (which is a major pain).

I don't think the Linden's fix here doesn't fully address the stolen animation content. Where those removed as well? If not, then someone could recreate the whole cheap sex-bed and we'll see this problem rise again.

So it was the animations that were the cause. Thank you, Lear.

The odd thing is that I haven't seen in the threads where anyone said that the animations were removed. It seems that only scripts and notecards were removed. I guess that's because they only went after items that were created by E.C., which is a very Mickey Mouse way of dealing with it, because it simply doesn't deal with it. The DMCA was because of the animations, and they left them all intact. What sort of thinking is that?

Um... typical Linden thinking?

Of course - silly me - I was forgetting that it was LL