Loni Arado - Passing on problems to endusers

In RL, organisations like LMVD and MBA (Master Builders Association) while they may be subjected to regulations, aren't run by the government (read LL in this case). They are run by the merchants/builders themselves. SL is evolving and as it evolves more, then more RL customs and practices are going to enter the SL world.

This thread is part of this evolution. An evolutionary aspect will be the formation of trade/building/manufacturing associations, by resident builders in SL. And a key component of those associations will be a trademarked logo. Members of the association will be able to use that logo in their stores and on their products, and they will police the use of their trademark aggressively. Kudos to Stroker Serpentine for breaking this open.

In time, membership of any well-respected organisation will not be easy to obtain, as is the case now in RL; LMVD and MBA being two such examples. And also in time, customers will recognise the value of any particular trademark logo, the organisation which it represents and make their buying decisions accordingly. E.g. Given a choice between a guy I meet in a pub and a member of my local Master Builders Association, its not really a competition when it comes to deciding who I get to build my new house in RL. That MBA logo kinda tells me a whole lot.

And its not confined just to big budget items. Who do I get to cut my hair, given two choices? A hairdresser in Rodney Wayne, or someone holding up a pair of clipping shears and shouting "get your hair done here - cheap!"

what if it was a no copy bed that was rezzed at the time of the sweep?

It occurs to me that big difference between what LL did and normal DMCA takedowns is that people (avatars) consider items they buy from a creator as their property. A dress, a bed, whatever. They buy it and they now consider it theirs. A takedown would normally prevent FUTURE purchases or illegal obtaining of the content from the OSP. It doesn't operate retroactively or invasively into people's individual PC's.

But, the unique relationship between an avatar, his/her inventory and LL makes the whole subject far stickier than someone simply hosting a bunch of MP3's.

One could argue that because LL is profiting from the transactions involved with the purchase of the illegally used content, that they have a greater responsibility than DMCA offers. Even if their TOS say otherwise.

I am just rambling.

Just a quick point, they did not invade peoples individual PC's, peoples inventories are stored on LLs computers, not ours, thus that content is LLs responsibility

Yeah I should have made that clearer. I was trying for an analogy and missed.

I'm not sure if we're missing a point, it's not about the final user loosing their (regularry purchased) things (textures.. scripts... poses.. whatever), but more about third party resellers that may have purchased stolen things full perms, so yes they paied for it and conducted a legit and honest transaction with the thieves, *but* those things remains full perms in end, so banning the abuser and removing his stuff (stuff that he OWN *not* where he figures as the creator) won't solve the problem because a bunch of other ppl already acquired that stuff open perms, when it shouldn't have been (never) open perm. There's no other solution that remove anything in the chain so, and this is what they are doing.
Is it the proper/optimal way? Indeed it is NOT, because Second Life is missing features that would be needed to act in a different way (ie: having the flag "resell" separated by the "transfer" one), but today we do not have any other better solution, and leave it on *until they add more features* wouldn't be an option.
Scenario:

- I sell my creations < REGULAR;
- UserA copybot my creations and start to sell them openperm < IRREGULAR.
- UserB buy that openperm creations and reuse them (or part of them) into his creations < REGULAR.

- I fill an abuse report against the UserA;
- They ban UserA and they delete his inventory, but these openperm creations are still circulating inworld because of userB (and all other "UserB"'s).

So they must remove all of them, including who bought em regularry, because the transaction were regular, BUT the item were not, they should NEVER existed in that form and in the hands of those ppl.

Right, but that's why there's such a huge down-side when these problems get this big: now there are thousands of residents who can no longer sustain the illusion that what they "buy" in-world becomes their "property" in any meaningful sense. So they *will* buy less stuff, all the happy-talk notwithstanding. And if it happens again on this scale, they will buy nothing.

People rode out the occasional glitches in the asset server because it was seen to be something that could be fixed and that LL was working to make better. People will be rather less patient if told that this was done intentionally and that henceforth it's just part of "owning" stuff in SL.

The problem is that this is precisely what LL *aren't* doing.

A) EC was distributing some items which she did not have a license to do so- these in turn were being bought, and redistributed/resold by people in good faith. These items had the original creator name on them.

B) EC was also distributing other items for which she *did* have a license to do so - these also were being bought, redistributed, resold etc. by people in good faith. These items had EC as the creator (quite legitimately).

Had LL deleted all the items under (A), then, yes, there would have been some upset from those caught up in this who were acting in good faith, but the action would have been understandable. Most of the upset could have been mitigated by good communications (unlike the current state of play where the contradictory and confused advice coming from support Lindens indicates that there doesn't seem to be good communications on this issue within LL, and complete silence outside apart from a promise from Kate to look into it).

However, LL has in fact deleted all the items under (B) - whilst this may have caught a few objects where EC was the creator and the item contained some illegal content, in general it caught a lot of items where no copyright infringement was taking place, whilst leaving alone many of the items where copyright infringement was taking place. The result has had more impact on people who weren't distributing the pirated material (either knowingly or not), than on those distributing the pirated material (either knowingly or not).

There seems to be a flawed logic: EC was distributing content created by others illegally, therefore delete all content created by EC

The real problem, is that it is difficult to see how LL can take the correct action (which is clearly to delete the pirated material), since determining if something is pirated cannot in general be done by examining the object alone but by examining its provenance:

Let us take a bed containing an animation - there is no way of knowing from inspecting that bed where the animation is a pirated one or one legitimately obtained from the original creator. Even if that bed had EC as the creator, you can't tell if for isn't I'd discovered that the bed contained pirated animations but because I like the bed so much I had IM'ed the animation creator and paid and agreed a license fee to continue using them.

The only way of telling if something is pirated is to determine its complete provenance by examining transactions logs - a difficult and intensive operation even assuming that LL still has transactions logs going far enough back.

So there's the problem - no action on LL brings condemnation from content creators, however, with the limited metadata on objects currently in SL, the right action to take isn't possible. Which leaves compromises and kludges which upset everyone.

Matthew

What exasperates this, is that some of the stuff deleted was not pirated. The precedence that appears to be being set here is that LL can delete content from your inventory on the basis that the creator committed an offense, irrespective of whether that content is related to the offense or not.

Matthew

If this is just an isolated incident then things will be fine, it didn't impact enough people to make much of a dent.

Most of the people affected won't even know what happened. The consumers will contact the seller over a broken bed who'll likely just make an "well, that's SL for you" excuse and people will buy it since SL isn't top notch as it is. Even most of the sellers who are reselling the unlicensed animations won't likely become aware that they're selling "stolen" merchandise, if they even care at all.

The net effect of this will likely be a lot of people inconvenienced and no significant awareness that this even had anything to do with content theft. Unless LL still makes a blog post which I'm not so sure about. They can post here on the forums or in a JIRA where it's nice and hidden and will have minimal exposure.

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As far as the animations are concerned, LL didn't really do anything about the DMCA, they're all still there so even that isn't much of a "victory", it just made it rather obvious how utterly lacking their toolset is when it comes to removing infringement in anything but the most trivial case.

It also showed that Lindens aren't terribly involved either: telling someone to just rerez an infringing item or telling someone they should just not sell the animations as full permission and they'll be fine when they're not even properly licensed really isn't advice they should be handing out.

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On the other hand, Benjamin Duranske/Virtually Blind gave his opinion as an IP lawyer that LL isn't currently doing what it's supposed to be doing when confronted with a DMCA. If someone ever challenges their liability over the way they execute DMCA an "but it's the best we can do" excuse likely isn't going to be much of a defense for them.

When they actually do start removing *all* infringing instances as a matter of policy then you will get the immense impact because it isn't a question of "if a major/popular/big content creator is found to be infringing" anymore, there's enough examples of major stores that weren't all legitimate after all, but a matter of when.

If it has to happen, it's probably best that it starts happening now though.

Do we have proves that the offender were also redistribute legit and licensed contents and these contents has been removed. I mean concrete proves to demostrate that this really happened and not "maybe", "it seems"?

The original MLP script was licensed by its author Miffy Fluffy under an open source license permitting redistribution, sale, and modification.

Since the source code is available online (in the wiki and the lsl script forum), it is very common for people to create a new emply script and cut and paste the script in from the web. As long as the author and license still appear as comments in the script itself it doesn't matter that the creator which SL reports is really the person who uploads it in this way rather than the actual script author.

EC uploaded the MLP 1.2 script in this way, and distributed it. Others used this script and perhaps even redistributed. This is all permitted by the script's license.

Cale Lear, even took this script and made a number of modifications and bug fixes (again permitted by the license) to produce a MLP 2.0 script which was distributed and redistributed - again permitted by the license, since Miffy's original license and authorship was still included in the script's comments. However, this MLP 2.0 script still had EC as the creator.

Many people have reported that both MLP 1.2 and MLP 2.0 scripts which had EC as the creator were deleted as part of the purge.

Matthew

/me pokes Katt.

No news yet??

Based on performance to this point, you expected the Communications Linden to communicate?

Honestly, this particular post probably needs vetting by legal, and I'll bet dollars to donuts that Ginsu wasn't around to do it.

As I said to my partner Sat afternoon

"Sometime next week LL willmake a statement on all of this that will: cover thier butts, Make them smell like a rose, Placate the masses, and say exactly nothing of substance."


My bet is the issue has been turned over to legal as well. They have to be extremely careful to not imply any liability on the part of LL and interestingly enough not breach privacy issues. Remember they never tell us what disciplinary actions are taken in a particular case. Making any kind of statement at all might well break thier own policies and create a precedent they just don't want set.

Just having them say "we nuked A, B and C and will follow up soon with details on why this happened" would be an excellent start.

Right now, they haven't said anything and there are probably lots of people who have no idea why their stuff went away.

Hey everyone,

Sorry that took so long, I know it's rough when it seems like information should be available and isn't!

We're just now putting up the blog post, explaining in as much detail as we can give.

I realize we're not going to be able to answer all questions, and I'm sorry abut that, though we'll be there to talk in blog comments and or here, later this afternoon. (Laura and I are both in meetings until about 2pm SLT, but we'll be there talking later in the day.)

I hope you'll all understand that we can't always give details in legal matters, but we do care, very much, about keeping Second Life a great place for us all, and we are paying close attention to your questions and needs in this matter.

Thank you!
-- Katt Linden

TY, Katt!