Legality Questions

Couple of legal quesiotns:

1. Rebroadcasting of commercial radio - If I have a property, and I setup my own broadcast on one of my servers and rebroadcast a radio station or more specifically a satellite radio station, am I violating any laws?

2. Intellectual Property: Art - If I take a picture of a poster I own in RL, and import into SL and sell, am I violating any laws?

I have a feeling the answer on both of these is yes, but curious.

Rim

Yes to both.

As I understand it, you're not re-broadcasting, you're pointing your visitor's secondlife client directly at the audio stream. It's as if they went there themselves. I'm somewhat confident this is 'okay'. (I was more confident until I saw Zaphod's post! )

as to #2: Unless you have been granted copyrights by the copyright holder for the image on that poster, yep, that is less than legal.

It's essentially the same as sending someone a link to a stream so they can listen to it on their system. It doesn't go through SL. It's as legal as it was without SL!



Are you selling it? If yes then it would violate copyright laws...although with all the Star Wars stuff for sale in SL it's amazing the Death Star isn't pointed at LL or the creators of that stuff right now!!

Otherwise I don't think you'd be in trouble for just having it up on your SL wall like you do on your RL wall.

The OP reads as if he is feeding audio from a commercial radio broadcast to his own server, streaming it out from there, to be picked up by other parties via the media link on his parcel.. that's not legal.

Neither is selling photographic reproductions in Second Life of copyrighted works of real world art.

I read the OP too quickly. Why would anyone want to pipe a live audio stream through their own server? So they could insert their own commercials? Yargh, that does sound rather shady.

If you're selling the photo I believe you're not violating laws, if you were to scan the original straight in then yes you would be.

Thanks for all the replies.

The audio stream is from my satellite radio not a rebroadcast of internet radio, the content I want on my land is not available in any public streams so I want to create myself by streaming this broadcast. I wouldn't be modifying the content at all.

Rim

thats why you pay a subscription fee for satilite radio

I don't think George Lucas is all that worried about a few graphics in a virtual world. Overall him and the folks at Lucasfilm seem pretty cool about fan made stuff.

You cannot legally rebroadcast material from a commercial radio station, be it satellite, Internet stream or regular old analog FM. The originating broadcaster pays licensing fees to BMI, ASCAP and SESAC, among other performance rights organizations, for the privilege of broadcasting music from the cataloges they manage. It wouldn't matter if you modified the content or not, it's still illegal. Just the same as it is illegal for a company to pipe their local radio station into their telephone system's music on hold feed. No way around this, what you are wanting to do is not legal.

I think, if all you are doing is putting the original broadcaster's audio url in the SL interface, there's no problem. If you are recording it for later broadcast, or splicing it in any way, expect legal problems once they hear about it.

The original broadcast doesn't have a URL (or at least not a public one), he's getting it from satellite, feeding into his own server, and then using the URL of his own server. Clearly a copyright violation, and probably a violation of his contract with the satellite radio company.

I am so surprised the larger corps aren't in SL right now slapping people with cease and desist orders. I see this all the time and shake my head. Granted, I have quite the moral flexibility on some issues, but not intellectual property.

There's little wrong with copying the art for your personal use -- still a no, no, technically, but you're not making a profit from it. I've taken rug designs and art, brought them into SL, for my own use only. I see that as being acceptable.

But it is only a matter of time before JK Rowling, Disney and the big boys arrive with their men in suits.

I'm certain it's against the TOS of XM Satellite Radio, as I am a subscriber, probably the same for Sirius.

Max