Sex Gen Removed!

Somehow people need to figure out a way to do a chargeback, that's currently not possible when paying in Linden, but perhaps one day if there is a paypal option in which to buy with (hence able to use chargeback rights from your credit card)

However, these get abused all the time from the consumer side, so who knows. :/ its a minefield.

If there was a way that LL can facilitate consumers getting the money back from the person, but its all fraught with problems. I still cannot see how LL is responsible for private transactions with linden dollars.

Letting blatant theft go on is just not right, so I find it difficult to fault LL here. Only fault I find is they should have been prompt with these things a long time ago, and not let it slide so long till it caused such a huge problem as we see now.

Just like RL.

Reputation matters. People who stand behind their products will still get sales, don't worry about it

edit - don't assume that this is a loss to sellers long term. Sellers don't have to refund products, they can choose to offer replacements. Most stuff in SL is replaceable in some fashion. Sellers who do customer service and offer replacements in good faith are very likely not to lose anything at all - in fact they might win quite a lot of repeat biz.

This was sort of addressed a few pages back with the "deposit" suggestion.

The L$ would be long gone and charging the infringer's payment method is just going to result in them disputing LL's charge and LL is in no position to prove that the infringer did actually infringe since they're not the copyright owner or can act on their behalf so it would get stuck there. It's too big of a mess, and LL won't agree to fund all the lawyers it would take with no gain for them .

I agree that you can't let it go on, but who gets punished here now? The infringer? Their account gets closed, they'll have a new one before you notice it's gone and they'll have the profits from selling your creation sitting in their bank account.

Filing a DMCA and just leaving it at that won't deter anyone, they get off without as much as a slap on the wrist.

Totally agree, that is why I am saying what I am... LL seems hell bent on making people want to LEAVE SL.... This why it is in the shape it is now.

Another thing I want to point out is there is a company that says they will download your SL INVENTORY and make a "backup" for you.

http://blog.magrathean.ca/2007/12/planet-builders-re-orientation-island.html

Now if these guys can do this that means anyone that knows programming can do this! This isn't copybot either.

This suggestion will not go over.. so I am prepared for the flames..

but...

If I were in a position at LL to do this I would allow only premium accounts to cash out. Also limit the amount of L that can be transfered from a NPIOF per week. Maybe even not allow anons to transfer items for a set amount of time. Something along that line.

Yep, I know there are tons of "what abouts" in that idea, but it sure would stop the anon NPIOF copybots, etc that are taking content. And NO they are not all NPIOF but I would risk a throw away alt quicker then an established one if I was a crook.

I don't like this feeling, but I feel it too. I don't have a clue to what end unless it is to turn SL into a corporate used only platform.

Pretty sure you cannot cash out unless you have payment info on file already. However that is where alts come back into play.. Do your dirty work with alts and transfer the money to your legit account and cash out....

actually, this is all about LL following the DMCA to the letter. They weren't doing that before.

Yeah, I should have thought of that hole in my idea.

So slowing the transfer amount allowed by NPIOF to Payment info on file could help with that.

This is such an emotionally charged thing to say. Facilitating *copy right violation* in the interface would be if LL actively had a user interface function that let you save a texture to your hard disk without restrictions. Clearly it does not. LL choosing not to put onerous and easily defeatable copyright infringement protection schemes inside the viewer to attempt to deter some copyright violations is a perfectly valid choice, lots of software don't have them either, and it does not constitute facilitating piracy.

The more fun thing to discuss might be what Linden Labs ought to do about enforcing its DMCA policies, when it comes to balancing content creators' rights and the potential damage to otherwise innocent buyers of infringing content.

But in this particular case, it seems that Linden Labs has neither protected the content creators, nor done any favors to innocent consumers.

Linden Labs's sweep of certain rezzed objects broke a lot of non-infringing objects by deleting a perfectly legally passed script (the MLP with Eva Capalini tagged as the creator.)

The sweep, however, did not remove the infringing items. Since they are still in inventories, they can be easily re-rezzed. And there is no indication that Linden Labs is going to deal with inventories. In fact, the database structure may make it impossible for Linden Labs to effectively sweep inventories, and Lindens providing support to some residents have encouraged them to just re-rez the infringing items back out of inventory.

So Linden Labs disrupted a lot of innocent people with legal content, while failing to remove the illegal content.

And sure Linden Labs has to remove the illegal content that has fallen into the hands of otherwise innocent buyers. But that's not exactly what happened, now is it? It appears that I'm one of those people who bought the illegal content without knowing at the time. I still have that content, I'm looking at it in-world right now.

Those who know they were getting something illegal with these beds are merely minorly inconvenienced, since they can just rez the stuff right back out of inventory. Many of the people who didn't have any reason to suspect the have something illicit are probably the same people who aren't familiar enough with SL building to adequately evaluate the product, only they get hurt.

No bad guys have been punished by this sweep. No one's property rights greatly vindicated.

There's a very good reason transfer is inextricably linked to resell. If you can transfer it, you can sell it. I can do it in person, manually ("Give me L$4000 and I will give XXX object to you", or even via script right now (vendors).

There's simply no feasible way to unlink the two. People make assumptions that something can be done when, in fact, it simply cannot.

Now you can petition for a ToS policy statement against it, but that is not anywhere near the same thing.

That's a rather obtuse comparison.

1) You don't NEED to run the WoW client to grab textures, they are right there on your HD!
2) Likewise, you do not need a subscription to infringe on their IP rights to them.
3) You can't infringe textures in WoW, since you can't "upload" them to perform the act of infringing anyway.

Not even two fruits you are comparing there.

LL could do the same, and it would have ZERO net effect on the problem. What, you want The SL Warden(tm) running on your comp? Those who steal textures don't NEED to circumvent it, and even if they do, it is trivial once the software is out there.

There would be one reason to have a transfer but no resell option, even if it could be circumvented.

If someone buys a an item, and upon receiving it sees that it's set for no-resale, that alerts them that they have been ripped off, and have something to report.

One of the many reasons that IP infringement is so easy in Second Life is that consumers have no idea when they are receiving infringing goods, and if they have no idea, they can't report it. If there were more ways that consumers could know that they were being ripped off, there would be more and quicker reports of infringement, and infringement can be dealt with more easily and quickly.

Actually the guts of Second Inventory are very likely to be simillar to a copybot. It needs your user account to log the software into SL as you (just like a bot), then it copies all the items you have rights to. It could just as easily copy items you do not have rights to also but is limited in order to be legal.

I would even speculate that it is likely the Second Inventory team started out using libSecondLife (a good number of programs that login to SL without using the viewer use libSecondLife including copybot) and/or looking at copybot to work out how to write their software.

What problem would this even solve?

I think this is very unrealistic. A very small group of long-established content creators knows each other by reputation. If the SL economy is reduced to this small group shifting L$s amongst themselves, times are going to get pretty tough. If average SL customers are expected to now educate themselves about which sources are (allegedly) reputable, it simply isn't going to happen.

And which reputations should they trust, really? Do we trust TRU? Did we, when the rumors hit? Should we have? And why should those answers differ from Minnu's, if they do?

But that's all assuming there's any business left for anybody. Residents are missing completely non-infringing content that disappeared by virtue of being linked to some prim that happened to be created by an account they never did business with and never even heard of before. Here on Earth, that doesn't instill confidence.

How would this help? If the owner did not want resale then they would set no transfer. If you are saying no transfer can be easily circumventy by things like prim by prim copying, then a no resell marker won't help either. Unless you meant something different and would liek to clarify?

In copyright case resolutions for "hard" media (books, CDs, DVDs, etc), they do not confiscate consumer-purchased copies; the defendant is simply charged the damages for the copies and awarded to the plaintiff.

Why this is different in an online medium, I don't know. At the very maximum, the only thing LL should have to do is clear the transfer right for any infringing content. The damages should have already been taken care of in court.

Of course, with the half-arsed action reported thus far, and Lindens scrambling to make a blog post about it before the weekend is up (4.5 more hours, guys), I have a feeling something different is going on.

The NPIOF alts that are created by the basic/premium mains that are used to copybot, texture rip etc can't pass the money to be cashed out quickly to their main. It would slow down that process quite a lot and in the meantime DMCA's filed will have a chance to be acted on when the original creator discovers the theft and the crook won't get to cash out tons of lindens for their involvement.

Not fool proof but a step above what is going on now.

I don't think there would be the need for anything like that - that's what part of the risk api detects. It analyses patterns of monetary transfer that seem suspicious and flags them, at least that how it was said to work. There must be some other bit of the puzzle we are not seeing if this is still happening on a large scale. I know people who have had single transactions between alts cause their accounts to be suspended and so something is being monitored.

Yes, it seems though when those accounts are flagged more often then not (based on forum posts) it was a bogus call. I wonder if LL even knows what the risk api is looking for.

These are things we do not yet have full knowledge of. If it was clear, then both Miffy and Lear would be posting in this thread with a link to where the updated "EC" scrubbed versions of the MLP scripts could be purchased on SLEX and everyone would be quickly rebuilding going about their business taking care of customer service. Since neither Miffy nor Lear have chimed in here, it is a safe bet that they are waiting for some kind of word as to what is actually going on and why before they put updated scripts out on the market. Right now nobody has any concrete information beyond the fact that all scripts with "EC" as the creator have been disappered and there's just a lot of jumping to conclusions and speculation.

That's not an argument for a "no resale" flag; that's a good argument for a "license summary" or license notecard in the object description.

Still, neither would work to the same extent as the present technological protection measures, since it still boils down to policy enforcement. Most people aren't going to pay attention to license statements and "no resale" flags. Do you read every word of every license you are presented with before you install/use/buy something? If you are like 99.999% of the population, I know the answer.

This doesn't even touch on First Sale Doctrine, which is a very sticky bit of law, made even stickier by recent court cases, but it does play a role in how any kind of "no resale" flag could be implemented.

True, well pattern matching behaviour is always going to be problematic and need constant tweaking to be anywhere close to right but it seems harsh to penalise honest people who might want to cash out from their business alt in order to make it a little more difficult for the violators. Sadly that seems to be the trend though, penalise the honest and the dishonest find another way to continue to cheat and violate their way around the roadblocks