Loni Arado - Passing on problems to endusers

Precisely, collaboration is a necessity.
When we create items (from scratch) we are reliant on being able to buy items from external parties - it can be sculpties, scripts, animations or other things we dont master the creation of. These parties are creating and selling these exact item (from scratch as well) with the specific intention of selling them to people like us, to use in creations.

Its common practice and actually a good one. The problem arises when someone in the chain turns out not to be supplying legitimately created items built from scratch - as we have of course bought their bits for the creation in good faith and included them in what we build, but still end up with our entire business blacklisted due to for instance a sculpted shoelace on a boot. A sculpted shoelace created and sold as an item specifically to be used by other creators ...

Goodness, such response. Well, yes, I am aware of texture sales and so on, and it is an unusual product where every aspect has been created from scratch. I have a lot of items that use free textures certainly (and some of those may well not have been really "free" either from what I now know about the origins of a lot of the free packs).

I'm just not entirely sure what is covered here. If someone has used a couple of apparently open sculpt maps or textures or scripts to make their own item, that seems pretty typical really. The greater the unmodified reproduction of something someone else has made, the less sympathy I would have - going up to the level of BsIAB, where really, one may easily be reselling stolen goods.

If a texture was removed from the asset server on this basis, I would think it fair that an alternative, properly-created texture could be substituted for it.

OK I'm ranting, I know.....I just logged into a business I'm really proud of falling on it's proverbial backside LOL

Content theft is the bane of my life in RL where I've issued more DMCA notices than I care to think about. So I'm with anyone who fight SL content theft tooth and nail. The guy in question appears to be in huge trouble and quite right too! A lot of (but not all) of the full perms things and business in a box items are there appear highly dubious to me....I've seen a lot of freebie items offered for sale all over the grid and it sucks.

However, the ones left dealing with mess are us, the end users of products bought in good faith from someone who has been around a while selling his "creations". I don't get why Linden Labs thinks me and my customers should be the ones to lose the most out of this. The whole thing has left me feeling sick to my stomach. And they say it's only a game......!!

I don't see what else they can do. They can't leave stolen stuff to continue being used (although they do until their arms are twisted). They could give an advanced warning, and allow time to do something about it, but that's about all they can do.

And SL is not a game. It can be used as one if you are RPing etc, but when you sell items and your lindens can be converted into RL money that is a business.

Just like the real world, if someone is selling illegal knockoffs they run the risk of being raided and having the stock taken. Even if they had no clue it was knockoffs.

It works the same here. Who would be responsible for making things right with the customers in that real world shop? Not the law, not the company that makes the real deal and good luck getting the scumbag that sold the knock offs to you to do it.

Nobody can tell you what to do, you have to decide based on your own code of ethics and morals what you think is right. LL does not offer a "do it this way" option in these cases. They did what they had to do.. now unfortunately the aftermath is on you.

I sincerely wish you luck in whatever you decide and in your future business dealings.

Rosie:
If my memory is correct, your only problem is a sculptie shoelace on your shoes. Couldn't you make fresh versions of the shoes, using a prim shoelace, and give them to any customer who come to you with the problem? That way you can carry on with the business without feeling bad about previous customers.

I think we need a new inspect feature that lists every single person who contributed something to the end product (prim creators, script creators, texture creators, animation creators, etc).

If there's a name listed you don't recognize as someone you trust not to deal in infringing material you can weigh the risk of wanting it vs having it vanish because the unknown name turned out to be less than upstanding.

I know of a large collection of kids goods dat got deliberately nuked last night -- copied items from a major kid's furniture and goods developer. Sounds like them DMCAs are goin' somewhere.

Ya, I was there to see it all! It was first time to see with my eyes a mall with everything being sold there stolen. For example, there was an item that I bought at SLX for L1500, it was there for L150 !!!!!!!!! And yes, Linden was sent to investigate..........

Would that possibly have had a related thread here?

Interesting if that was acted on so fast.

I was one of the affected there, I asked for help to Lindens but told me to file a DMCA report, send it by snail mail and sit and wait for them to keep on copyboting things.
I honestly dont know who pulled a string to make Lindens move so fast, but I'm sure grateful we didnt have to go through the burocratic paperwork.

I am also affected by the script and sculpties thing, as I bought in good faith in slex a few of them, but I prefer now to deal with exchanging than to sit and watch my hard work being copied and undersold.

I filed a DMCA with LL and they removed the infringing item in about a week which I thought was reasonable speed. SLX has acted on my DMCA's usually in 24 hours.

My customers tell me when they see my sculpt maps being resold full perms in violation of the purchase agreement and that is enourmously helpful to me.

Everyone reading this, please, if you see something dubious and you know who the original creator is, let them know so they can file a DMCA. DMCA's work.

Here is something that I observed with those individuals that I have filed DMCA's on. My stolen items stood out because they were made by a different hand, they had a different creative style. A genuine content creator will have a creative style that can be recognized from item to item.

This is likely to get unmanageable, quickly. It's an interesting problem of technical requirements. For example, should a content creator be able to replace each constituent part of every instance of some content, regardless of who currently owns it? That would let creators undo the damage caused when constituent content from a supplier is blacklisted. But it would mean that almost anything we own in-world could be changed by its creator--and by any of the creators in the chain of suppliers. That could break stuff, and could enable abuse and exploits.

Without something like that, though, meticulous, complete, and permanent customer records would be required of everybody who sells end-user or embedded content and relies on *any* supplied content (even free textures, as Ordinal notes). Those records would be needed in order to know who should be offered or granted replacements when supplier content goes bad.

And of course if the seller isn't around anymore, end-user property is lost when it relies on embedded content that was blacklisted, possibly years after it was supplied.

Horrid thought: Vendor objects containing products that can't be rezzed because they contain blacklisted content: is there anything to prevent those vendors from distributing unrezzable content? (For scripted vendors, it might be impossible not to take customer money, whether or not it could distribute the product, and certainly whether or not distributed product could be rezzed by the buyer.)

And there are lots of scripted vendors still in-world distributing product of sellers who've long since left SL--distributing product that may have been rendered unrezzable by "blacklist bit rot", years before purchase.

so, exactly what all is being deleted?

You expect something more than rumour?

the thing i am wondering is if there was only one law suit then how do they tell what has been stolen and what hasn't out of all the things out there in sl right now already created that have nothing to do with sexgen? AR reports?
i mean how are they telling what is legit and what isn't?

The more I hear about this, the more that I think that there is some sort of almighty screwup taking place - the sort of thing that sounds terribly sensible when proposed late at night, but in the light of day would be greeted by "noooo!" Items and inventory are disappearing without warning and nobody knows what is going on.

One thing to consider in the future:

I just checked the inworld profile of the "creator" mentioned in the OP.

They were born 2/8/2008, Are no payment info on file, are not part of any groups and have filled nothing out on their profile. This is a red flag to me.

When I buy something from SLEX or in world I check the profiles out. You can learn a lot about someone based on the groups they are in, how long in world etc.

Just something to consider for the future. It is not failsafe or all inclusive but it sure can't hurt to check it and go with your gut.

Well, the customers had use of the object for X amount of time. Perhaps the business could make three or four types of the product and offer people their choice from the three so as to cover for the damaged purchase. How long should something costing 25 cents need to last? Forever?

It seems important that stolen goods be removed from the grid.

Actually you're seeing Lonii with two "ii"s. Loni Arados profile seems to have magically disappeared altogther. It was still there this morning.

Depends where you search. Can still get at the Resident profile via Search All, but not Search People. FWIW, the one-i'd (!) Loni has a 1/1/2008 rez date and is Payment Info Used.

And this is probably a Forums violation, but it's too good to pass up: the About field includes this gem: "I hate no-copy item,paranoiac person & business men only in SL for their bank account."

LOL

I bet she does.

And I thought the 2 I's at the end was a typo on the OP's part. Odd that there are two names that close. My bad.. my thoughts are still the same though, check them profiles out.

I've noticed that in the past few months that several people have been making and selling sculpted "bits" on SLX, cuffs and collars for prim jackets and shirts, pieces of boots n' shoes, even gears and other pieces of whatnot. These're intended for the buyers to make and texture their own items for sale.

It struck me as a pretty good idea. But prolly very subject to the same kind of abuse that full perm textures are.

yep and we have been waiting for years for this

LL ftw

I find it funny that the same people who are speaking out against themselves or their friends losing content are the same people who before this happened were the ones screaming at LL to deal with the distribution of stolen content and now they take the exact opposite stance. What LL needs to do is to keep doing this since it's the only way to stop the distribution of stolen content that I can see that will actually stop it in it's tracks once caught but at the same time they need to create better way for people to get more info on textures and other items such as time of upload, date of upload, uploader, history of ownership, etc....