Copywrites and Free Content?

So I created a bike called Ming-MX. This bike is fully animated and was given to Lindens to distribute as free content in SL.

Lately I have noticed a plethora of people spring up -selling- this bike for 100L. They took the original name off, slapped on a new texture for the box, and called it their own.

My question is, is there anything I can do about this as the original content creator? As it is my wish that this bike remain free to the community, and my name not be tainted because I am the original creator.

It's a crappy way to do business to make bank off someone elses work and I won't sit idly by while they do. Not to mention I end up doing all their dang customer support, because guess who's name is on the bike? Yep you guessed it.

Welcome to SL... :^( Even free content created by Lindens themselves gets a price tag slapped on it by greedy hands..

Considering they are using the BMX brand name on the label though, I suppose I could always write them and let them know... *snickers*

Is it a cool bike? I got one from Abranmiations that i liked pretty good, but it was way more than 100L, lol.

It's the way freebies work though. People will resell them, =\ It's unfortunate, but part of Second Life.

For that reason I remove the trade/resell permission from my selfmade freebies. Freebie means, people can get it for free, not with full permissions. If they want their friends to have a free walk replacer or cuff set, they can send them to my store. That's why I offer freebies in the first place, to attract more traffic. There's no point in having my freebies offered at Yadni's, or even resold by someone.

Its a sad thing when someone tries to profit from someone elses goodwill, but back to SL, yeah, it happens the whole world over, doesn't mean it's right, and those that do such things rely totally on niavety of the purchaser. Assuming you have a script/animation inside the bike, which I assume contains your signature, if you always ask anyone coming to you for 'assistance' where they got it from and if they paid for it, you could then prove unfair trading and ask LL to look into it. You always maintain intelectual rights to 'electronic' property in SL.

My name remains on the bike as the original creator. As well as the scripts inside are in their original state, and the animations all contain my name.

The bike has been unaltered aside from the original name placed on the object.

I found the original person who placed the 'resell' vendor out. Their shop is full of like-items. Not other bikes, other free stuff for sell.

It disgusts me.. truely it does. I filed a report with LL, hopefully they will do something about it. If they can't I have some other legal alternatives in mind. If I have to I'll take this fight to the RL courts.

People getting ripped off with a product -I- made is -not- something I will stand for. Expecially if it's not me getting to rip them off (j/k)

Can you make the item no modify and put in the name that this is a free item?

This is why we need a checkbox for "can give away but cannot resell" or "max resell price" with a field to enter.

I found a shop that many business owners may want to check. It has a ton of stuff that is normally free, and bunches of full permission items for sale. Probably most free, but designers may want to verify that their stuff is not being sold here without permission. One of the items is a BMX-Bike.

http://slurl.com/secondlife/Jsindo/184/193/90

This feature is impossible to implement. If you put an object into a vendor then the vendor script can sell it for any amount. In a vendor the money event is decoupled from the inventory transfer, from the point of view of the simulator. There is no way for the simulator to tie a money event to the transfer of a "mandatory free" object and block the sale.

If you want to force something to be free then make it no-transfer. If you do this then you (the content creator) must have an entry in your profile picks pointing to where your freebies can be found.

There's a legal answer and a realistic answer.

The legal answer is that you may keep most rights to your creation, and license its use to other people. Your license could be: "You may copy and distrubute this item, as long as you do not accept payment for distribution." Or something along those lines. You need to protect your rights from the beginning though, otherwise you can lose them.

The realistic answer is that you don't have any options of enforcing your intellectual rights on Second Life. You could try real world courts (assuming you have protected your rights to the product and not already lost them), but those are usually too expensive to be worth it for most things on Second Life. You could ask Linden Labs for help. Good luck there.

Linden Labs will enforce DMCA requests.

However - I dont think that will effect the OP's case.

I have seen some freebie couches I heavily modified that I gave away up for sale in various places.

Complete with the slightly offcenter angles (I was new and we decided to keep the "queer" couches as they were for the longue area of a lesbian club)

This is a violation of DCMA.

In the future, you should find a copyright notice that's suitable to you and place it in a notecard in the item. I use Creative Commons licenses (on stuff where I care about it, though I haven't put that in my SL freebies).

Like this one, which is what I usually want:

http://creativecommons.org/licenses/by-nc-sa/2.5

This is a great system, because it handles a number of common options, with text that's very clear to the layperson, translated into dozens of languages, and with legalese backing up each option.

Find out more at http://creativecommons.org/licences.

Can you explain how reselling his free item for money (in the absence of any licence etc) is a breach of DCMA ?

As I understood it the Copyright Act of 1976. Section 109(a) is the ruling law which covers "First sale doctrine".

The DCMA affects this doctrine to the extent that it makes it illegal to circumvent protections on digital media that prevent resale. Since the OP did not prevent resale of his items surely DCMA does not apply ?


Note the above is not to say that I condone the resale of free items for money (I dislike the practice and would be annoyed if someone resold the clothes items I make available for free). I'm just trying to get clear in my own mind what is legal and what is not.

if the item is scripted, you can also make use of;

llSetObjectName("Freebie";

or

llSetObjectDesc("This is a Freebie !!";

and then let it re-cur on rez and state's or something

it will set the name and description of the object

Actually, the script I used is the WetIkon AO Script. I kept all the original documentation, and this is a major reason in why I -do not- resell the item. I'd be kind of a hypocrite to do so.

I stand corrected; however, in SL, you file a "DCMA complaint" for copyright violations. The term is loosely applied by LL. If you read what they say about it, it seems they really mean "Copyrights" when they say "DCMA".



The OP has an implicit copyright on the work. He is within his rights to stop the behavior listed above. Furthermore, as copyright holder, he can enjoin anyone from selling it. This is true even if he's made it freely available. These are US laws and also apply in most countries due to bilateral harmonization of copyright laws internationally.

As mentioned in a post above, the OP has the law on his side, but practically speaking there isn't a whole lot he can do.

BTW, the reseller is not only violating the OP's copyright, he or she is also violating the open source licence on the script (most likely). I believe LL will take action in these cases, on filing a "DCMA" violation report.

BTW, to those who are trying to follow along, "first sale" is something that applied before the kind of copying that happens in SL was possible. It refers to the first sale of, say, a particular copy of a book after its manufacture, and specifically exempts resale of that book where the first owner loses the book when he sells it (which is OK to do). In the case of copiable objects in LL, all sales are essentially "first sales" unless the person selling it deletes all copies after the sale.

Any freebies I make I make no copy, like that one person said, if somebody else wants that freebie, give em a landmark to my place!