Sex Gen Removed!

Stroker is the personification of the best in customer service. In SL as in RL, that can be THE deciding factor when choosing between competitors - IMHO, frequently more so than cost.

Sir, I salute you, and will happily steer people to your products.

/me madly starts rezzing beds hoping she has an EC version.

/me sadly notes that all 4 of her beds are Miffy-based and thanks Stroker for his offer anyway.

Interesting reading, I have the Miffy version of old but never used it having discovered Stroker.

A comment on customer service - I have met the best creators (Stroker being one of them) and some awful ones for customer service lately. I like a good news story/happy ending having experienced too many losses to list for other SL related issues and not content theft related issues. I have made 1 legitimate purchase where the goods were not received and the creator does not respond to notecards or IMs so they got money for nothing - Albeit not their fault, still outrageous though. Not huge sums but still irritating.

I have been thinking a lot lately how nice it would be if there was more consumer protection in-world as well as protection of intellectual property - But that is too idealistic and unrealistic I expect. I don't make sex beds so I am not affected, my MLP complete beds were for furnished starter apartments that I have not reinstated.

I wish you all luck in resolving your issues.

JB

Removing the kingpin is important even if the bit players manage to slide.

ADDITION: Chaz made the point further down that page.

The real problem I have with how this was handled John. Is that in world objects were nabbed, but for the most part copies in people inventories were left untouched even with the culprits name on them.

Linden Employees have been telling folks just rez a new one and you should be ok. Well if we can rez a new one that contains stolen content I really dont see the point in the whole exercise.

There are always those who will find ways around copyrights regardless of enforcement. Think file sharing. So you go after the really abusive ones. It ends up mostly about keeping honest people honest.

As I tried to say earlier LL needs to learn Public Relations skills and some Customer Relations skills..

You Stroker, should be hired on as a consultant for LL on those skills... Props to you for understanding what it takes to keep people happy and coming back and the willingness to follow through on it.

Linden Labs, start taking notes......

It does seem more like a PR + "making a statement" exercise.

Nah where's the fun in that - if I were Stroker I would rather be playing with my super cool movie motion suit too

OK, color me stupid, but I would SWEAR LL put out a new blog entry about new "office hours." A couple of us responded wondering WHERE the entry was explaining this whole MLP/DMCA nightmare. Now the entire blog post is GONE? Help me out here...am I hallucinating again? Has a statement been posted elsewhere explaining what happened and why I can't have SL sex til I figure out where to buy a good, legal bed? (OK, that part isn't true, but it did add a nice finale to the post)

As badly as it was handled, I DO see a point in the whole exercise. It has raised awareness considerably, for both end-users and content creators. One item that I had purchased remains rezzed in-world but all the scripts and notecards are gone. That sure is a wake-up call.

Believe you, as a (somewhat-new) content creator, from now on I will be double and triple-checking all scripts and textures that I don't personally create.

They made a statement, alright: "In the name of saying we're doing the right thing, we destroyed lots of content that was innocent, pissed off a lot of people, and left the actual offending content free to be re-rezzed, re-used, re-copied, and re-sold."

Let's not forget giving the thief's a better idea how to cover their ass from getting caught...

You didn't imagine it . It was there and talked about a Google calendar for Linden events and office hours.

Err... hold on a second... *rustling and counting of bank notes can be heard in the background*

As I was saying: I never saw such a post, you're imagining things, likely from the lack of SL sex you mentioned. Drink plenty of fluids and see a doctor in the morning .

I think it also made a huge point. That there are consequences. Hitting the sex world like that is huge. Tens of thousands of items corrupted, at the least. I had those awful scripts and used them for over a year as a shop owner. And i buy tonnes of components and scripts all the time. So just a bit nervous. I have a few people I have come to support quite exclusively for components. But I am a graphic artist, I can't script my way out of a wet paper bag. So I buy retail, full perms. And for the past 2+ years that was just fine. So yes, definately will think twice when I shop. Because it was never intentional on the part of myself to be involved in such a scandal. And honestly if I did infrings on somebodies rights then I am sorry, I happen to be very well educated in the world of advertising and copyright laws.

Duly noted...and hoping the dr. has a nice full perms sex bed I can take with me when I leave. OMG, pass the water.

You took out one person selling full permissions animations she didn't have permission to resell as full permissions.

Dozens or hundreds of people are meanwhile selling those same unlicensed animations pulling in hundreds of US$ combined from continuing infringement since all they're doing is replacing the MLP scripts and keeping on selling since copies of the animations were never impacted as they should have been since they're the actual infringing items.

Yes, quite a victory .

(Edited to add that I'm not disputing going after EC was wrong, but going after her and letting the rest just keep on doing their thing and pretending it all isn't still happening just as much as two days ago really is pointless)

Funny how 99% of the people outraged in these threads are not people making or selling original content in danger of theft. So, go roll your eyes all you want -- when you have hundreds of hours of work being stolen I think you'll change your tune.

Hm, your post makes one unwarranted assumption, implies another, and misses the point of my comment.

The first unwarranted assumption is that people are now pretending that content theft is over. Who ever said that?

The implied second assumption is that I had anything to do with this. As I mentioned before, I first found out about this situation when someone pointed me to this thread earlier today.

As for the point of my comment that you missed, I suppose "kingpin" and "bit players" were a little vague, so I point you to Snickers' clarification: stopping everyone is impossible, so the most effective policy is to concentrate on the worst abusers. As Chaz pointed out, the situation with EC was considerably more involved than simply "look what I found, this person has a few pirated items, ban-hammer!"

Probably because I asked if the creators involved cared about ongoing infringement and wanted to know about it in this thread and it was ignored?

I've never had any luck with reporting any wrongful use of animations specifically to their respective creators in general either, it's always just been ignored.

I pointed out a way you can have *all* infringement of those particular animations cease simply by issuing new ones to those that paid for them and changing the permissions on all existing full permission items. It's a minor inconvenience and certainly far less destructive than what happened this weekend and would stop most of everyone who's currently using the unlicensed animations which should be the real goal.

If you have 100 leaks in your boat, fixing only one isn't going to help and there's nothing wrong with pointing out that obvious fact.

If this is pointed to my comment what I was getting at was the fact that LL has not done a compelte enough job on the thief. WHich allows what she/he began to continue in rerezzed objects. Possibly with the culprit returning on a new freebie act to continue what they started with those rerezzed objects.

I like you am/was an animator. I found out in this thread that some of my stuff may be out there freebie that should not be. I can't agree more that this needed done. I just don't think that LL did enough really.

Not sure what you're saying?? That designers/builders aren't doing enough? LL?? Who??

Do you make anything in SL?? Do you have any idea how much time it takes to AR, follow-up, go after, report, whatever someone for content theft?? You seem to want a whole mess of protections for the SL consumer but OMG we're not talking $10,000 new cars here. We're talking about outfits that sell for $.33/each, sex beds that sell for $2 - $20. In aggregate, the content loss to theft is probably huge, but it's spread out over so many creators that even I can see why LL would just say wtf.

I do PR as a RL job. I make far more doing that by several orders of magnitude than I ever would on SL selling $200L outfits. I'm sure other designer/builders are in similar positions. I could sell 100's of outfits in a week and that wouldn't begin to cover the cost of trying to "legally" pursue even ONE thief.

/RANT OFF

There's really a lot more agreement on the basics here than is evident from the posts. I think everybody really supports the objective of more effective IP protection for creators.

The main difference, I think, is that some of us are just more concerned about the negative side-effects. Some of those concerns are unique to this particular action: it was so botched in execution, so late in coming, and so poorly communicated. And some concerns are about the DMCA itself and how (among other problems) it doesn't seem to offer enough flexibility in enforcement to actually be effective, nor adequate protection to the falsely accused (if the accusers are from outside the US, for example). These latter concerns are hardly new, nor unique to SL.

For example, for all my bitching about how badly this was handled, I was one who filed an AR (#1209031) against ALOHA FREE PARADISE on Friday night. And on balance I'm glad LL is taking some visible action toward protecting IP.

I just wish, one of these damned times, it wouldn't be necessary to add: "if only they hadn't screwed the pooch so badly."

Brilliant and kind

Smexy too.