Sex Gen Removed!

I guess I wasn't explicit , but I meant more like a PayPal model between other PayPal accounts.

You'd put $25 on your account balance with LL instead of buying $25 worth of L$ so instead of L$ balances and transactions, we'd just have US$ balances and transactions.

If something costs L$400 now you'd pay $1.45 and it's just numbers that change on the balance, LL has the money already so there's no need to charge other than the deposits for a positive balance.

That is so true and I have seen that myself. In fact, I get nervous if the shop is too polished. BUT, again, for larger ticket items it pays to do a little detective work... what other items are being sold there, does it may sense? How long has that larger region been there and what kind of shops are around it? Check out the items on display (edit and note creator of all contents) etc.

I admit I've backed out of buying things when it just hasn't felt right. Best to be safe.

Sadly, when first coming in to SL, you've no idea about any of this. These people cash in on the unaware newbies.

What about a notecard or sign with notecard helping consumers understand stolen content and then provide some tips about doing all that can be done to learn if something is stolen or not?

Ahh, understood now *g* Yes, that makes a lot more sense!

Agreed, and once the newbies have done the "running around and grabbing every freebie" thing, have been inworld for a bit, they then start to make their own content in the hopes of maybe starting up their own little business to earn enough to pay their inworld rent. Then they remember those great animations they got, and start putting them into their furniture creations, because hey, they were full-perm, weren't they?

Alas, not everyone reads the forums and the various blogs dedicated to Second Life, and many (if not most) of them are blissfully unaware of content theft. They don't even give it a thought.

Or, rather, they didn't until yesterday.

Is that like a sandwich maker who buys 5 cent (2 p) tins of tuna, and who pleads to the judge afterward that there was no reasonable way he could have have expected his customers would start dropping like flies?

I would hazard that in most countries now, there's a general assumption that if you're in business, you have a reasonable duty of care to protect those buying from you.

Going by the, "I'm new, just joined, and I want to start a store to earn money!" posts I've seen, I was referring to the newbies who genuinely *are* clueless and don't give a thought to such things, and the relatively-new newbies who have been inworld for a couple of months and want to start making their own stuff.

Setting up a store in Second Life is infinitely easier than setting one up in Real Life. Just find a rental box, pay it 100L$ for the week, rez out your 25 or whatever boxed sales items, and you're technically in business. Unless he wants the long arm of the law descending on him sooner rather than later, the sandwich maker had better be following official guidelines on working in a sanitary environment, and hold at least a basic food hygiene certificate (at least here in the UK he would have to) before he goes into business.

There are a great many people who, because this is a virtual world, wouldn't even think that they could get into trouble for using those great animations they got from a full-perm store. I'm not making excuses for those people; I'm just pointing out that they might be less inclined toward thoroughness and cautiousness in this environment than they would be in a real life environment. For all its reality, Second Life often doesn't seem really... well... REAL.

That wouldn't accomplish much because this stuff isn't being grabbed with scripts. (Scripts do exist that can do something similar, but they would be more work to use and have to deal with the SL permissions flags, so counterfeiters wont have much use for them).

People learn soon enough that copybotting something is "wrong" (assuming they didn't already instinctively know), but "full permission" and "freebies" is drilled into people's head pretty much from day 1 and there's no "some things are copyrighted though so watch out" note of caution there.

I had 20-30 folders dropped onto me when I was new, before I could even walk without bumping into everything and everyone and before I even know got the hang of dressing properly with the different layers. Those contained literally hundreds of things that never should have been given out: Starley's Malibu Passport skin among others, dozens of Craig's animations, hundreds of TRU textures, etc. That was just over two years ago, I can't imagine that things have gotten better since then.

I wasn't into building so no problem there, but it would be equally easy for someone to start building something in their first week and "oh didn't I see some textures in one of those folders that friendly guy/girl dropped on me last week" and you have someone who doesn't know any better who's suddenly infringing because they were never told that full permission doesn't equal free-to-use or "in the public domain".

It's by no means alright, but you can't compare that to someone who copybots or who *knows* that this or that isn't properly licensed and uses it on something they're going to sell anyway because it's easier/cheaper/whatever.

LL really should make the permission system part of orientation, and sadly enough also drill mentors to make sure that what they drop on newbies isn't infringing. Education might not redeem everyone, but it will catch some who just didn't know and didn't intend any harm.

Ultimately, it is Linden Lab's sole discretion to delete or retain any of our content. We are granted the "privilege" to create on their platform. If they choose to remove anything from their databases it is certainly within their right to do so.

Regardless of the fact that we use a fantasy currency to trade in this content. The TOS is explicit along these lines. Consumer/User confidence is directly proportional to equitable enforcement. So far there has been no mass exodus to WoW.

I am by no means advocating punishing unsuspecting consumers, however no matter what LL does, some people are not going to like it.

I think the guards being awake is actually the only thing that matters now, ever mattered before, or ever will in the future.

This idea of requiring sellers to post escrow of any amount is, frankly, a non-starter. I think folks are incorrectly assessing the degree of damage done here to the entire content-creation economy. There will be much reduced choice available to consumers a week and a month from now, as sellers leave the market after this, and as customer-acceptable prices for at-risk purchases plummet. Adding burdens on sellers could well reduce those choices to the Library folder and the wonders of Anshe's L$10 bargain bin--and whatever scheming BIABs devise to sidestep the rules.

Granted, I've never been a very enthusiastic "merchant" nor consumer, so it's not necessarily representative that this turn of events makes me more motivated than ever to just pull everything down and stop my in-world selling and buying altogether. But anyone imagining that I'd pony up any RL cash for the privilege of engaging in such dubious and perilous commerce is quite mistaken. And I bet I'm not alone in that.

I'm also astonished that it's so appealing to punish the victim. Yeah, sure, consumers may have lost a bed or even, rarely, a house, but I've been chatting with creators who are just sick with what has happened to their work, overnight. And so now we should pile on, making extra sure that they leave, miserable and broken and somehow mysteriously held to shame, having done nothing wrong themselves?

Just _have_ to throw in another plug for Sinamatic, we were almost shocked at how pleasant that animator makes it to buy building resources, even in the face of all the trouble SL tosses in the path.

To protect against that contingency, you could make the script no modify and offer the source separately as a notecard.

Stroker (quote):
In a long and detailed converstaion I had with one of the Lead Programmers at SLCC '06 I was told that it is physically impossible to remove all instances of a UUID due to the sheer volume of data the asset server contains. That type of spidering would lag the grid to a crawl. (Hmmmm)

Most likely this scenario is just another borked content anomaly.(unquote)

I am poking a stick when LL took ownership of this action per my conversation with Boyscout Linden. Apparently they DO have the ability to do this and apparently it is not just another borked content anomaly.

There was intent behind this action, but I do not believe it was court sanctioned. Here's why:

-->"MLP - MULTI-LOVE-POSE V1.2 - Copyright (c) 2006, by Miffy Fluffy (BSD License)

The BSD Licence allows anybody to use the source code, in any manner they wish, providing that they provide the copyright notice above on further distributions."<--

Although Eva's name was on the scripts I owned, the actual content of these scripts was Miffy's in its entirety. No where on any version of any script or item I purchased, created or sold does the terminology "Sex Gen" appear.

Linden Lab did a sweep of the grid removing any MLP script with Eva's name on it, but has not removed them from inventory. If this is court sanctioned, then please explain to me how this floats?

Boyscout Linden's response was to simply re-rezz the objects from inventory "and should be ok". --Should be ok?? What is the difference between what was in world yesterday and what I rezz tomarrow of the same items containing Eva's version of Miffy's scripts?

I am invested in and damaged by the actions of this weekend on the part of Linden Lab. I have an entire sim worth of non-sexual furnishings which use the mlp system in leiu of poseballs. I have thousands of customers who have purchased from me over the past year. Compound the time to replace the scripts and redo the menu positions for each item in my store with the months of customer concerns and replacement products and you will understand why I am participating in this forum this weekend.

Leaving aside how you go about it (and not focusing specifically on the non-infring script since that's LL's mistake), any consumer protection would have protected the ones you're highlighting in your post because they were consumers when they bought someone else's content to reuse in their own creations.

As someone pointed out in the other related thread, if anything were to hypothetically happen to TRU the damage would be immense. Any guarantee that either insures that what you're buying is properly licensed (preferable for everyone) or that insures that things balance out (you can't argue to retain the infringing items, you can't force the copyright owner to grant everyone who innocently bought a copy a personal license, which leaves only refunds as far I can see) isn't a bad thing in the overall perspective.

At some point someone is going to get fed up enough to take LL to court for only casually deleting a few copies here and there and leaving everything else intact and if that results in a court order to get rid of all of it then that'll just be the new policy, if they don't adopt it on their own before then.

The casual precedent is set now already anyway: "you deleted all of that avie's content, why are you trying to appease me with some token removals? Get rid of *all* of it, *now*".

Swooping a sim is likely to be far simpler than swooping the asset server.

Object rezzed in-world don't exist on the asset server anymore (the now orphaned asset likely still exists, but it's unreferenced and will get picked up by garbase collection), they exist only on the sim, so the cost of swooping the whole grid is spread out across 15,000 sims and probably not terribly costly.

Swooping the asset servers on the other hand might simply be impossible without taking the entire grid offline, or result in hours of database overload frenzy, or take days/weeks to complete. All depending on how LL actually stores assets and how easy it is to identify anything.

Textures and the like only exist as one single asset no matter how many copies are in inventory across the millions of accounts so those are easy to simply remove and we'd get "missing image", but that's not true for prims which seem to just be "blobs" of data all of which would have to be examined one by one to see if there's a prim that matches someone's name.

I'd guess that's what the Linden Stroker paraphrased meant: cleaning the sims might be trivial, cleaning the asset servers likely is quite complex when it comes to prims.

Oh yes, I also have a few thousand customers i expect to be sending me nasty messages into the next year i am sure. So much that I just folded my business entirely because I can't realistically offer any support. Thankfully I have other businesses and the sex world was trying at best. But this is huge, millions of items and billions of dollars i am sure. And just copying a script with a different name isn't the solution. And what if you didn't buy your secripts from any of the forementioned parties? What if it's just a full perm clone you bought last year, which has since been removed as well. Either way this is going to be a huge drama in the making. Good luck to all the vendors out there, hopefully people will be sympathetic, but we all know how crazy people are for sex, I predict a mass exodus at best.

And for me removing the business entirely was what i chose to do. I am a designer by trade and try and never pirate anything. Which apparently is enivetable. But why is this Eva person still selling these beds at her shop as we speak. that's what i want to know.

Wow, you were that big into the business and it never occured to you to wonder if the animations were legal, or to check???



Just ran into Qie there -- we were both curious, hehe.

As of this second, there's nothing there now, except at 280 metres some palm tree fencing owned by Pascal Theriac.

I thought we had established that not only was the script LL indiscrimately delete legal to use under a BSD license - but had a big comment at the beginning saying so?

Matthew

Yep, and since the original creators will have been on the purloined animations, those will have been left intact. The permissions setup is a little too coarse for this kind of thing, that's why I always figured LL didn't try to do this in the past.

Which is a distinct possibility given items that have recently vanished from my home.

THIS IS WHY PIRACY AND INFRINGEMENT SUCKS!!! This is why we all have to be vigilant and help protect each other, here's my take: In RL I started my music business career as a Business Affairs Exec for a major record company which is all about copyrights. The copyrights are the only thing of value since it's whole point is to create an exclusive control over a created "work" by it's creator. The public policy issue, going all the way back to before 1789, to encourage the creation of literary property for all our enrichment and enjoyment, but the creator must be compensated to encourage him/her to create. Think of the highly restricted selection and general low quality of "works" if respect is not paid to the creator.

I have seen many of the posts and all of the thousands of SL'ers that will suffer because of the theft and fraud of one or a few thieves and con-artists. Unfortunately, the stream of sales that occurred between millions of good and honest SL'ers who engage in commerce in good faith is irrelevant in copyright infringement. Like the counterfeit hundred dollar bill, the guy who has it when it is discovered as counterfeit, is sh*t-out-of-luck.

So sadly we have thousands SOL, and YOU SHOULD BE ANGRY, but not at each other, at the perpetrators. Let's channel our energies to work with LL on prevention and work together with a commitment not to let this happen again to such a magnitude. This is tough, but little can be done for the existing products, unless the copyrights owner just declares it public domain or a license to all of those who have been victims. Do not forget, the Creator is the single largest victim here.

Let's be together on this and fight for what is right.

Given that stores and sims associated with her have been scrubbed off the map... it does not seem at this point like normal, everyday content loss :}

Is this a conclusive list? Eva's bed had these and more from Nytemyst. It had only one from Craig.

Unfortunately, all these people who could be figthing together will be fire-fighting the aftermath for the next few days, and will be too busy rebuilding businesses and venues or responding to IMs from customers who have no idea that these forums exist let alone this discussion but do know that the furniture they bought last month has suddently stopped working/vanished and want to know what the person they bought it from is going to do about it....

Matthew

Having been at a shop 2 days ago in a shop which belonged to a group with EC as a member,
and my reason and lots of others was stolen content via a copybot viewer or explot then i suspect that is why her and others were wiped from existance. you will probably also find the scripts were sitting in stolen items.

I also find it funny in a strange way, that when copybot came out and content thieves get away with this, we scream for LL to do just what they have done. And yet your crying because THE content surrounding the script STolen from someone was removed or scripts.