Loni Arado - Passing on problems to endusers

Sounds like normal LL operating procedure ta me

I agree there, action equals a moral obligation to satisfy a true sl experience.

I see a couple of huge problems here...

1: How can LL possibly inform everyone with a copy of the 'illegal' prims that it's going to be disabled? There could be tens of thousands of copies. Are they going to write a script of some sort to examine EVERYONES inventories and send an IM for every prim found?

B: How many creators are likely to have a copy of their object that does NOT include that ONE 'illegal' prim? If the object is unrezzable now, they can't remove it.

Does anybody know whether sculplts have also been copybotted? People say that the only parts that can be copybotted are the prims and textures visible to camera......if thats the case, then its a good think that the core of high quality work cannot be stolen.

Tya!! Long time no see.

Sculpts can be ripped with the same method some have used to rip textures from items. Sculpts are textures themselves so it works the same way. Likely that is what happened with the shoes in question.

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That's unacceptable. The entire object is not that one lil piece. Simply not bein' required to inform is no excuse for not doin' so. Someone who bought the 'illegal' prim or map in good faith, should have the chance to remove it rather than having to rebuild the entire item.



Notifying someone that an item is going to be disabled doesn't prevent the disabling.



O joy, more hits on the already overworked asshat servers.

I suppose that might be usefull, but those who un knowin'ly linked a stolen prim to their object should have that opportunity to remove it!

This is the part that worries me - going back to Phil's question



If the offending shoelace was linked in at an early stage of creating the shoe following by a lot of work on the shoe itself, scripts, etc. and now any version of the shoe will not rezz due to the offending shoelace, then the amount of work to create a fresh version of the shoe may be to recreate the shoe from scratch entirely.

If the shoelace was used in a range of shoes, this could be a lot of work - enough work to make the creator just give up on SL.

We also appear to have a case described in another thread - /327/c9/264963/1.html - where LL has removed *all* content whose creator appears in the inventory as being a particular avatar, because some of her content violated copyright. This includes some GPL scripts which were being used legitimately without violating any copyright.

So you could find an item you've spent a lot of work on will fail to rezz (effectively gone) just because one prim or one texture was supplied by someone who has been accused of copyright violation even though that particular prim or texture does not violate any copyright, and is an extremely minor part of your object!

I said accused of copyright violation, rather than has ben violating copyright; one of things that many have worried about the DMCA process is that it tends towards the principle of guilty until proven innocent. On receipt of a DMCA complaint, to avail itself of the safe harbour provisions to avoid liability, LL must initiate a takedown request, even if the accused files a counter claim. So having lost your business due to the fact you used a legitimate texture, legitimately from someone accused of a copyright violation for something entirely unrelated to your product and the texture you used, that person may successfully counter-claim the DMCA complaint and have all their objects reinstated.

The bottom line here is that:

a) LL should only delete assets against which a DMCA has been filed, not delete everything relating to an account against which a DMCA has been filed (unfortunately given how DMCA has been used to take down entire websites due to an alledged copyright violation on one page, I suspect that the DMCA may not have provision for this)

b) when an offending asset is included in a larger linked set, it should not prevent the entire linked set from rezzing - merely the offending assets (textures may appear grey or defaulted, prims missing, sculpt defaulting to spheroids etc.)

Matthew

Ok. I have looked around our store here and I cannot find anything that i made with LONI sculpties. I am sure i made at least 1 or 2 items using a sculpt map from that Kit, not an actual sculpt prim (which I cannot rez now in-world). Does this mean whatever furniture i have made using that sculpt map will not rez?

When do items made with the "blacklisted" sculpts cease to exist in-world? Do they derez or just simply not rez from inventory with the message "That inventory item has been blacklisted."?

In the other thread that Matthew Dowd mentions above (where all of the inworld [rezzed] content associated to a particular avatar name was deleted, regardless of the fact that that some of that content was GPL open source) the content vanished yesterday. Some people just lost that specific content (for example, all the scripts and notecards - all GPL ones, but created by that avatar - inside my rezzed poseballs vanished, whereas the poseballs and poses remained) and some people lost entire builds that contained the same items, or were linked to items containing those scripts etc.

I couldn't speak for the sculptmaps, but I would guess that yesterday Linden Lab made a 'sweep' of the grid and deleted all of the affected content. In the above case, though, the items are still rezzable from inventory. I don't know if that's the case with the sculptmaps.

Maybe I'm missing something but the sequence of events seems to be:

* someone puts up something for sale (whatever it is or however it was obtained)
* people buy it
(some amount of time passes)
* original creator finds out, files DMCA
* LL removes the content
* infringer goes on his/her merry way

Unless the creator initiates legal action the infringer isn't in any way accountable for what they did. If enough time passed for them to cash out they even get to keep and enjoy the ill-gotten money, otherwise they're no worse off than when they started.

With the threat of legal action near non-existant potential content thieves really can't possibly loose anything, there's only potential gain at virtually no risk.

Until infringement actually carries a significant risk (financial or legal) it will keep on happening. Having your (main) account closed *is* a risk, but that's only something that matters to established residents; someone who's in it for the money isn't going to think that's much of a risk, their next alt is only a mouseclick away.

(Edited to add that I'm not disputing that you should stop distribution, but you're just caught into a never-ending vicious circle if that's all you do)

Kitty is correct. It won't stop anything in its tracks. One thing it may do is encourage merchants to expand their SL hobby and learn to create more for themselves - sculpt maps, animations, textures, and scripts as much as possible.

I appear to have been fortunate in this episode. I create all my own objects, of course, but most of the animations, some of the textures, and a few scripts were not created by me. (Some anims, many textures, most scripts, and the very few sculpt maps that I use are my own work.) So far I haven't had any customer complaints about things disappearing, or IMs from people in the store. I did a quick check when these threads appeared and things seem to be normal, but that was fortunate.

Here's another thought. It's impossible for creator-merchants to avoid being caught out like this, unless they create *everything* themselves. Take Miffy Fluffy as a hypothetical example. The MLP system is free to use, and most stores that sell sex beds use it. Miffy is well respected, and as far anyone knows, the stuff is safe as houses. But suppose Miffy does something wrong in the future, whether unintentionally or intentionally. If LL repeats this process, all the MLP items will disappear.

Perhaps this is a good time for creator-merchants to consider expanding their SL hobbies. Most things are not difficult to do.

I strongly disagree.

I've been here since 2003 and watched "everything" come into existence and most are hard to do, especially animations and sculpties. Not only is there a very high learning curve, but there is an issue of time and money. With the time i spend building furniture in SL i barely have time for anything else except socializing with my partner and I definitely do not have the money to buy these various professional packages for content creation like Poser or Maya - and please do not mention something like Blender as that's like the Rubik's Cube of sculpty programs).

Instead of it being time we content creators take on more skills, spend more time, effort and money learning new programs, how about LL continue to doing these DMCA take downs, causing would-be future thieves to think twice about trying to sell stolen work and then stepping up the punishment for the profiting infringer's, like say...BANNING, not suspensions.

As I mentioned above, Miffy doesn't even need to *do* anything wrong, just to be *accused* of doing something wrong! Under DMCA, LL is supposed to take down content on the basis of a complaint being received, not on a complaint being upheld (and LL seems to be under pressure to react more quickly to DMCA complaints then it currently does - although I can understand why those with legitimate complaints would be asking for that).

As such suppose someone genuinely thought that any multi-pose furniture infringed their copyright, and filed DMCA complaints against such furniture including SexGen and MLP. If the complaint was properly written and filed, then LL should take down all such furniture until their creators had filed counter-claims. I suspect that in such a case the counter claims would be successfull and the content re-instated, but that would be a pretty tumultuous month for the furniture industry in SL.

Matthew

Sculptmaps should actually be much simpler to copy illicitly than prim assemblies--they are pretty easily identifiable in the messaging stream. (But in passing, "quality" is very much in the eye--and viewer--of the beholder. Sculpties were amusing for a while, but some of us now go to great lengths to limit our use of them because of texture lag and persistent artifacts of rendering and physics.) I saw much the same comment on the jira, and it's just as silly here. There's nothing hypocritical about taking LL to task for responding so slowly to long-ago identified content theft, so that now it is affecting thousands of innocent customers and merchants. This one is LL's f*-up because they couldn't bestir themselves to be responsive to the many, many complaints they had before, and let the problem become unmanageable. It's true that they really had little choice but to remove stolen content, but as we see, they in fact removed perfectly legitimate content because that was the only tool they had available--even after years of IP enforcement responsibility.

hehe - Blender isn't nice to use, but that's at the start. It does take time to get used to it, but it isn't difficult, and it's free. For animations, Qavimator is much easier to get used to and it's also free. Textures aren't especially difficult, but learning scripting isn't easy (not impossible) for total non-programmers.

Expanding the SL hobby isn't for all creator-merchants, of course, but now might be a good time to consider it.

Yes of course. I'd forgotten that. It really *is* a good time for creator-merchants to consider expanding their abilities.

But - "The jack of all trades is the master of none." Are not specialisation and components hallmarks of a modern efficient and competitive economy? Or maybe a return to the age of the master craftsmen would be preferred?

This would have serious implications on the economy as a whole, I don't see this as a good move at all.

Is there *any* evidence that content thieves actually have an established main account at all that means something to them? I'm honestly curious because if they don't you don't have a single real deterrent.

Imagine yourself as a potential infringer: you don't care if you loose your account, noone is going to sue you, you're not going to loose money, you can be reasonably sure that the original content creator will find out if you copy in-world items but you have days if not weeks to profit from your actions before it all gets taken down and LL can't touch any money that you make from the scheme that's already cashed out.

I can imagine that people who infringe on content that was created outside of SL can think they'll get away with it, but I can't imagine that someone using a copybot to resell items doesn't know they're going to be found out sooner or later. A DMCA is there as an aid to help you protect your content, I don't see how it could possibly be seen as a deterrent.

It would be interesting if Stroker could comment on whether there was a significant decrease in the unauthorized use of his trademark after the legal action became common knowledge. The trademark doesn't relate to content, but he made it clear he's not going to sit idly by. It's the only real way anyone is going to think twice.

I don't see that. The 'jack of all trades' can be very good in all aspects. Of course, it does take time, and it's not for everyone, but it might be good for some people - people who sell anims in furniture, but who thought they'd never be able to make anims, for instance. I like knowing that most of my items are made totally by me - and they sell well too

How? Do you mean because it would do away with such places as Texures-R-Us? The problem is that using anything that isn't your own work is a risk, because it only needs a DMCA to be filed, and we're scuppered. Personally, I'd prefer to go the self-created way and avoid any risks.

Oh Lord. If anything happened to Textures-R-Us we'd wake up to half the grid turned back to plywood...