Sex Gen Removed!

Another right thing to do would have been for the person who made and sold the couch to have checked on the content s/he was using. The retailers are not innocent in this. If you know how to make an animated couch, you know two things: you know how to check the creator on the properties of an item, and you know how much animations are worth -- witness the price you say your friend paid.

If the set of animations was got for, say, $L100, wouldn't any furniture builder say, hmm, knowing how much I can charge for animated stuff, that price seems too good to be true. I better check the creators of those anims, and IM them to make sure what I bought is on the up and up.

I suspect that instead, many furniture makers just tapped the side of their nose with their finger, and said, "oh these? they fell off the back of a turnip truck", and assumed a "don't inquire any further" approach to them.

I know many reputable, quality furniture makers whose radar went off when they saw the cheap prices this animation set was going for, and decided not to touch it with a 10 foot pole.

Lizz.

In one of the threads, I suggested that it might be a good time for creators to expand their SL hobbies and learn to make everything themselves. Someone pointed out that having 100% your own work in your items still wouldn't help if someone filed a DMCA against you. Dealing with DMCAs seems to be shoot first and ask questions later.

Also, who are the creators of the stuff you use? Copyboted items don't have the original creators' names on them. So you may get the all clear from a 'creator', but it doesn't mean that the person is the real creator.

The real problem is that these same concerns apply to the end user too - even if you have created something yourself, how does you potential customer know that. The only way that the end user can know that their nice home and furniture will not go poof is to build it themselves!

Matthew

Lizz, Eva wasn't the person to IM. You bring up properties on the animations, and IM Craig, and Johan Durant, who show as the creators of them. That's what I did, and I don't think I'm necessarily any brighter than anyone else -- it was just the obvious thing to do.

I think it is exactly the right thing to do, in the case of animations.

How to proceed? Buy directly from quality merchants. One has to of course develop your own list of quality merchants over time.

I'm not discouraged at all by this event; in fact, I'm going phew! Because I made it a policy from day one to make sure everything I used was legal just so I could sleep at night and never have anything like this happen to me.

How can you say who the creator of the deleted notecards and scripts were? Most likely, it was EC. I agree that LL's attempt at a solution here didn't really solve the problem and created a lot of new ones.

And how do you know that the person marked as the creator of any textures, animations, sounds, sculptmaps etc. are the actual copyright owner of that material rather than someone who stole that asset from a website and uploaded it, or used copybot so that they would appear as the creator?

And don't forget that the script which was deleted *was* legal for anyone to use - anyone getting a copy of that script could have IM'ed Muffy (identified as the author in the license agreement) and would have been told it was fine for them to us!

Matthew

As some of you that have been around a couple of years probably know I used to be in the sex animations business. Myself, Paul Lewellyn, Hol Alexander, and Flip FItzsimmons created all the animations for Cheap Sex Animations, PL Gay Love Animations and Night's Crypt.

Due to concerns about Age Verification we ceased selling any of our non-PG animations about 2 years ago (+/- 6 months). We NEVER EVER sold any of our animations ALL PERMS. Not for ANY reason. When we closed the businesses we did NOT sell off the animations to other creators.

If you ever come across and ALL PERMS version of an animation by any of the above mentioned people it is STOLEN. To my knowledge this has never happened but given the current climate this weekend I felt it necessary to make a blanket statement in this regard.

It is generally recognized that intellectual property is not treated as goods. This has been recognized by federal courts in numerous cases (see Systems Unlimited, Inc. v. Cisco Systems and and Microsoft Corp. v. AT & T Corp for examples). As Matthew noted, there was an unsuccessful attempt to cover intellectual property in a proposed Article 2B which was met with skepticism and resistance and was never incorporated into the UCC. One of the reasons also answers another one of your questions:
Generally speaking under the Supremacy Clause federal law would preempt any state law regarding intellectual property transactions and the UCC is state law. This is one of the reasons that Article 2B ultimately never made its way into the UCC.

As for animations, I'm willing to take a flying leap of faith that Craig Altman and Johan Durant actually know how to animate :}

I meant the creator of the couch, the scripts were obviously EC's or they'd still have been in there .

My point (as far as I get things) was:
* EC obtained the animations and used them in a bed she resold/gave away
* the creator of my friend's couch apparantly got a hold of EC's full permission distribution and decided to put them in a couch he made selling it as a high priced "naughty couch"

EC violated the licenses on the animations, was DMCA'ed and had everything she created in-world deleted.
The other creator is guilty of the same violation as EC, the animations he has aren't properly licensed.

So what happened EC to should now happen to the other creator and everyone else who is or at any point in the past did resell that same set as part of anything.

If not then what was the point of all of this? If noone is going to care about all the others currently redistributing the exact same unlicensed content why bother with EC in the first place? It seems kind of pointless to go "ok, we got one, we'll let the other dozen off the hook".

Thanks Darkness. I have seen some of those anims floating about, can't remember where. Circumstances were vaguely dodgy, though, I recall, so common sense told me to stay clear.

If people do come across full-perms versions of them, or have them in their tool kit, what would you like people to do?

OK, Kitty, thanks for the clarification. I agree.

IMHO, LL could simply delete all copies of the anims that are full-perms. Yes, that would hit a lot of innocent parties too, but it would at least focus on the infringed material itself.

I would like it people would contact me about it and let me know all the information you have on it. Then delete all copies.

WHen I left the business I left the business. ALL PERMS versions are ALL stolen content.

If all the animators involved kept their sales records that would actually be a good solution.

Give them time to compile a list of who bought those animations for resale, reupload them to create them under a new asset UUID and they could just use a script to drop new copies in everyone's inventory.

Meanwhile LL can replace all in-world rezzed full permission copies of the old UUID into C/NT (* see below), the ones in inventory can easily have their permissions changed as well (they directly reference the old UUID), which leaves only those as part of a prim object in inventory which can be change on rez.

(* C/NT is necessary because the item in inventory would seem like full-permission while rezzing it would reduce the permission of it to either C/NT or NC/T. NC/T would result in someone being able to create 1,000 copies which they can still sell, so C/NT is needed to prevent that)

It wouldn't affect end consumers at all and would only be a minimal headache for creators and has the added benefit that it instantly regulates *everyone* since it's likely that hundreds if not thousands have unlicensed full permission copies of those animations.

My understanding is that Eva (who was the alt for a man, actually) got about 497 cease and desist notices, including some from RL lawyers, and that the response to them all had essentially been "take a flying f*ck at a rolling doughnut."

As for the rest, it may be like cheating on your income tax: how lucky do you feel?

Another recent hotbed for pirated items was Commerce City sim, run by Jakko Rau (aka Man Sporleder, aka Bank Andrew, aka many other names.)

On his website, he even had this posted

http://imperialfoundation.club.officelive.com/animationpermission.aspx

to justify his right to resell licenced full-perm animations as full perm, if he chose -- which, quelle surprise, he did.

The Lindens terminated him last week.

In April, Everett Streeter had a full sim chock full of full perm animations from just about every animator in Sl. A very professional operation. Actually made it quite easy to shop the way it was organized, having every full perm animation all in one place, and organized by category. I was impressed. A builder's dream, all under one roof. Pity none of it was legal. It would actually be great if the animators got together to do something like this -- who'd spend days hunting through yard sales when you could snag exactly what you needed in 5 minutes? At any rate, it had disappeared by the end of April under protest from the animators, is my understanding. I also understand that he complied of his own volition.

Kitty, this is a fabulous idea.

Pity he didn't understand the difference between a patent and a copyright.

It was due after all my ranting posts .

Part of the problem in all of is this is that people just dont understand what copybot can and cant do. No one will discuss it.

I was lead to believe that it could not grab animations or scripts unless they were full perm.

From now hearing some of my stuff might be out there I am wondering just how true that was. If anyone has definitive information on what exactly copybot can grab please IM me in world. I don't want to know HOW to do it. Just what is at risk.

While I agree with this in theory, the actuallity of doing so is something else entirely. Learning to master Photoshop to the point of being able to create from scratch complicated and realistic looking textures requires hundreds of hours of work and practice. Creating realistic animations requires even more time, and both skills require a particular artistic talent as well.

This is not really a viable solution for most people. I have RL job, and family that take most of my time. I don't have hundreds of hours to devote to these hobbies.. And so that means I cannot be a creator then? So you must be a master of building, scripting, texturing and animations before you can be a content creator? Too high a bar for admission I think.

It can't grab scripts. As far as I know, the original one could not grab animations - though, technically speaking, it would be possible I think.

Plus, no one's every really good at everything. You know the old saying, jack of all trades -- and master of none.

For me, it's a full-time job in SL just writing scripts that don't decide to run out of memory the second I put the finishing touches on them :}

I can't animate or do graphics to save my life, and i can barely make a plywood prim box. I turned on physics on a plywood box the other day up in my workshop to see what it would do, and heard my dog yelping down on the ground, cause it hit her on the head.

The lindens will probably post a blog after the database scan is finished deleting all the effected items.

No, it is not practical, and it is getting less practical day by day. Creating a professional product nowadays requires mastery of sculpting, scripting, texturing, prim positioning and tweaking, let alone having the idea in the first place.

In my experience this is _particularly_ the case with scripts; I am fortunate in that I have the ability and tendency to write every script that I use from scratch or my own templates, but may others do not, at best doing a bit of tweaking of full-perm scripts. Which has resulted in the problem here.

I have one of those beds, that, at least according to information in this forum, may contained pirated animations. At some point I may go down the animations and try to confirm from the creators directly whether they may in fact be pirated.

At the moment, however, I'm keeping the bed rezzed on my home land. Not to actually use. But to serve as a visual reminder to me why I don't want to waste even more time creating original animations to start an animation business in Second Life.