Sex Gen Removed!

There are some in this thread who are blasting Linden Lab for the whole thing.

I think the retailers who sold stuff with the pirated goods in them, though, need to step up to the plate and accept a good share of the responsibility. In business, I feel (warning: opinion ahead), you have a duty of care to your customer to ensure that you are selling your customer quality.

You should know what you are selling. Have checked it out, kicked it in the tires, researched it, asked about it, informed yourself.

Had more retailers done this, perhaps none of what Linden Lab did would have been necessary.

And yes, of course, there were many who certainly knew in their hearts that there was something dodgy about the whole pirated kit, but just decided not to think about it.

A lot of SL retailers let their customers down for one of the two above reasons, and it showed this weekend.

Good point. It's also really easy to put stuff into Onrez & SLX where it goes on autopilot.

All of the above, and what is being done doesn't change anything.

Situation: an unknown amount of people are using a certain set of animations they obtained directly or indirectly from EC and reselling them as-is or as part of something they created. EC isn't even going to be the first person who ever gave those animations away as full permission so the infringement is likely far, far worse.

The creators of the animations are understandably upset and issue DMCAs/have a lawyer issue a take-down notice.

LL doesn't quite know what to do since it can hardly delete the animations themselves without affecting a whole lot of legitimate content so it decides that simply deleting everything with EC's name on it is a great alternative.

Result: hundreds of legitimate items that just happened to use a perfectly innocent script with EC as the "creator" are affected and to top it all of the animations that started the whole thing are still there, just waiting to be used again and those reselling them just drop in new MLP scripts without giving it a second thought.

I don't see how anyone could possibly argue that the solution took care of the actual problem. All those animations are still there, they're still unlicensed, they're still being resold by dozens and sitting in the inventory of hundreds more as full permission animations most likely.

Yes, you shaved off the tip of the iceberg, and you can pretend it's no longer there because the bit that's underwater isn't obvious, but that's self-delusion.

What should have happened in my opinion was that the animations should have been the target of a purge (although not actual deletion, but merely subject to a permission change to C/NT) which stops nearly all infringement dead in its tracks right there. No need to file dozens of DMCAs, no further distribution, a nice and clean solution that doesn't inconvenience any end user in any way. It does inconvenience anyone who did buy a full permission set from the creators, but they could get sent a replacement set before LL starts the purge and since they create themselves they should be understanding of the dilemma.

If it's just about mere pennies in your opinion then why do you even care about content theft? It's just pennies according to you so it's not like you're loosing any money.

You want protection for what you create, I want protection for what I buy, there's no difference between those two unless you want to invoke the "content creators are inherently superior to the consuming masses" argument. Neither should trump the other and there's a perfectly happy balance to strike which is benefical to both because stores need consumers.

Would you rather punish consumers or deter infringers? Because you seem determined to just focus on belittling people who buy content that isn't worth anything in your view and completely ignore the fact that *nothing* is currently being done about the actual infringers other than two lawsuits so far and both of those by the same person.

Edited to add: I spent L$95,385 in the last 30 days (sum of all debits of the transaction history). L$43,000 of that was on rent, which leaves L$51,885 or about $188 I spent in the last 30 days on furniture, clothes, etc. That's actually a lot more than I usually spend (generally $50-100/month), but either way your "few pennies" add up to quite a lot and if there's no guarantee that what I buy is going to stay in my inventory then it's just not worth it.

Oh well, it's done, and it's a start.

To make an omelette, you have to break a few eggs.

And Lord knows, there were Eggheads aplenty in all this.

This pretty much sums up my feelings and perceptions on the matter.

I'm annoyed and disgusted at how LL handled this, not that they decided to do something.

I have not been personally impacted by this, so far as I know... I write my own scripts, not use other peoples', so to my knowledge none of my stuff has gone non-functional because of this. That doesn't stop me from being outraged at the complete balls-up the Lindens made of this.

And yes, I'm a content creator (obviously not one of the big guys) and I have stuff up for sale in-world and on SLX. Yes, it could be the subject of content theft. I in no way support content theft or believe that content creators shouldn't have LL helping them out about theft.

But just because I loathe the idiotic, heavy-handed, and utterly frikin' USELESS way the Lindens went about trying to handle this, does NOT mean that I am (a) not a content creator or (b) am condoning content theft.

Long time reader, first time poster folks. lol

A LOT of us who build and sell menu furniture, completely on the up and up, and don't use freebie/pirated animations, and use.. either the MLP/xpose or.. other Menus...not through EC have been quietly watching and talking behind the scenes lol

We have been aware of Eva, and are pretty sure we even know HOW she got the menu/animations full perm (a certain store.. messed up perms) AND have had issues with her actions for a long time now. ( I told Nytemyst when I saw them, and we all had many..not so friendly conversations)

The problem a lot of us have is
1) while we are glad LL did something.. we dont get really quite WHAT they did cuz... really nothing happened cept cause some inconvenience

yes it DID raise awareness about content theft..so thats great, but I think for the average user..it did no such thing. It raised.. wtf my bed is broken awareness. Cuz, I don't think the average business owner is going to explain to their customer .."well, ok, so the scripts I had were from a total leach..along with all the animations..actually I got the first bed for free on slex..and ripped the scripts and animations out, so.. yeh they deleted it" What they are saying is.."oh well here, let me fix it for you"

Well, EC is gone..so I have to confess that makes me happy.

2) It worries me when I hear that if its an altman or nytemyst animation, its pirated, cuz.. thats not always true. I am very familiar with the evil line up of the dread menu..and even its variations. But it IS possible to get builders versions of Craigs and Nytemyst's animations. I know. I have them..and we protect our animations with our lives..cuz, it does NOT help our business if *anyone* can have everything we have.

3) I felt badly for the businesses that started *based on the ill gotten animations..just because I know it has to suck (til I realized all they needed to do was rerez) but at the same time.. alot of us, have been around for a long time.. working hard, paying through the proverbial nose for legit animations (I really need to learn how to animate, some one needs to teach me lol)

Content theft ..is an issue. A big one. Has been for awhile folks. Its been very talked about for a long time, at least with the people I know in world. I dont know what the actual answer is.. I just know LLs response was at best...flaccid.

Jake

That's a very good way to put it, and now I know why we still haven't seen the promised blog entry...

...the Lindens are still waiting for their shipment of Lie-agra to come in to firm up their flaccid reasoning.

I guess I'm waiting for a suggestion from that constitutes a reasonable solution. Not a perfect one because there isn't one.



Kitty, you have another problem in trying to show that the creators ALWAYS intended that their animations never be sold with full perms. Or that they always had a specific license. Etc.



Well of course you can't say it solved the problem. No one here has said that. Only that it's a start but a royally screwed up one at that.



Putting myself in LL's prim shoes, how would they prove the creator intended those anims to be sold without full perms?? I've released a few freebies into the wild. Barbee (??) released all her dresses with full perms. ETD has sent out hair with full perms. Another put out their skins full perm. The task of trying to police perms after the fact would be incredibly big!! You can't just stop at animations either, you need to look at textures, clothing, prims, weapons, buildings, vehicles, etc., etc.



Yeesh. You seem to see things only in black or white. If things can be done to strongly discourage theft, then yay!! But if it's going to cost huge amounts of $ or time, then sometimes it isn't worth the effort.



Say what??? I'd rather deter infringers. In fact, your solution of changing perms on items after the fact would punish consumers and legitimate vendors alike. Heck if I HAD to redo every single prim skirt I've sold for some reason, I'd fold up shop. It wouldn't be worth it.

I appreciate people who spend money in SL. Believe me, I spend it too. I've also lost money to items that just plain don't work. Thankfully MOST vendors try to satisfy their customers (like I do). I made a totally new version of a retro outfit last month and added a prim belt + 2 new flexis to it. I looked up ALL my customers who had bought it before and sent them the new outfit free.

This is not a situation you can solve with black & white answers. Most of the time, 1/2 a loaf is better than none.

Meanwhile folks, we ain't seen nothing yet re permissions.

This month, Tess Linden and Layla Linden logged in to Linden Lab's Aditi test grid, and were able to jump from there to OpenSim.

http://zhaewry.wordpress.com/2008/06/05/happy-jumpy-ruths-interop-takes-a-step/

You realize what this might mean if you jump to an Open Sim whose operator perhaps has "observe permissions" turned off? Someone might be able to, some have said, literally steal the skin right off your back :}

These grousings about the *method* in which Linden Lab tries to help content creators may seem like golden, halcyon days.

That's something you'd worry about in a court setting, it's irrelevant for a DMCA.

The copyright creator files a DMCA stating "this and this and that infringes, get rid of it" and LL complies. If the recipient counterfiles LL neatly puts everything back and the two parties either figure something out, or the infringement continues, or one takes the other to court.

If this whole debacle was indeed about the animations, or even just in part about the animations, then LL utterly failed in acting on the DMCA because they're all still there. EC is gone, but the damage is still ongoing and far from even stopped.

LL doesn't have to prove or decide or figure out a single thing. The only thing they have to figure out is how to best comply with a DMCA or take-down notice they get served. They don't get to have a say in any of it, they merely have to act on it and it's up to the affect other party to counterfile, or take some other action. LL's only interest in any of it is to avoid being liable for anything which they aren't as long as they comply.

It wouldn't affect consumers in *any* way at all. If they have restricted permissions on the animations, nothing changes. If they have full permissions then it gets changed to C/NT which would make a transfer item untransferable, but since the animations in it are not properly licensed it shouldn't be anyway.

As far as vendors are concerned: the original post which you apparantly missed pointed out that as long as all the animators involved have kept their transaction logs, they know who to send a new copy of the animation to. They can do that *before* LL does anything and the work involved is editing their base copy, deleting the old animations in it and putting in the new ones. That shouldn't even take a minute per item.

As far as vendors who have unlicensed copies of the animations are concerned: the animation in their inventory and prims that have them in inventory turn C/NT so they can't further profit from their infringement and will be forced to buy properly licensed copies of all the animations involved if they wish to continue on selling the item.

You'd stop further distribution of the unlicensed animations dead in its tracks and the only inconvenience is for those who did actually buy the animations. That's unfortunate, but they'd have advance warning and could fix it with minimal effort involved, and a bunch of their competitors will rightly be prevented from selling items containing animations they never paid for.

If you see a flaw there, then please do point it out . The only other option is to file a few dozen DMCAs against those who are reselling the unlicensed animations one after the other, knowing that LL can't actually do anything about it anyway which makes it rather pointless since at the end of all of it the animations will still be in everyone's inventory as full permissions.

You kinda ignored 1/2 my post. Again, you're asking LL to unilaterally change the privs on a whole class of items for a number of (unspecified) vendors who prolly can't prove for sure that they have never sold full priv items. That's not a DMCA takedown. It's like saying, well we think there are 50,000 pirated versions of Fergie's albums so instead of removing the ones that were pirated, we're going to damage all of them. And now it's up to the consumer to figure out how to get the album fixed. Oh and LL does NOT HAVE TO comply with all DMCA requests. They should be using reasonable judgment to decide what should be taken down. (I know reasonable and LL don't really go together but...)

And like I said, the problem doesn't just extend to animations. In fact, we still don't know for sure if the animations are it issue or just a whole range of stolen content.

I think the horse is now dead.

Nah. We're at 535. Let's take it to at least 600 :}

Really. I just got involved. I hate it when I touch a thread and it dies.

Me too. Let's talk about perms in Open Sim.

Yeh I was reading the link you posted, Its late here, so not all of my circuits are working correctly, Im sure... but it sounds not good.

Yes I am excellent with words tonight.. "it sounds not good"

Okies. So now I'll add my thoughts from another thread just to keep it going. One of the things that makes this situation unique is that LL has purposely damaged legally "purchased" content.

A normal DMCA takedown generally keeps people from obtaining material going forward from the time of the takedown. LL has done this but has also gone into individual accounts and yanked stuff out retroactively. LL has also profited from the illegal content through the fees it takes from creating new $L that are used to pay for the stuff.

So I dunno, it's a weird situation because it's a weird world.

/end ramble

Now that i have read the entire string thus far of over 500 entries i'm totally confused. Guess it's that old saying of a little bit of knowledge can be dangerous.

Maybe someone can make it clear to me on the following..... i bought about a year ago a MLP pack with Miffy scripts and anims from 3 of the animators mentioned in this string. When i check in contents the only thing i see with the name EC is the prim for the balls and though the scripts are Miffy's the properties show EC. Was this an illegal package that was sold to me and i have put into my own created items for sale?

i do NOT want to be a part of profiting from the theft of others property however i also dont want to trash my own hard work if this is not the case.

Thanks for any clarity offered

phifer

I think you've said it all, Phifer. Until LL posts an explanation, no one will know the real facts.

Although we don't know officially what happened or why, we do know some things that may help you make decisions about what to do. First, there is nothing wrong with the *code* inside those scripts, so if yours survived, just copying and pasting that into new scripts you create yourself should be fine. Same with the notecards. Same with the embedded ball prims and the script inside those. And of course you should be using your own parent prim, not one with EC as creator. As far as is known, that should stop the damage from the botched attempt to wipe EC content from the grid, if they're still doing it or try it again.

The big problem is the animations. It seems almost certain that, if you have full-perm animations obtained from anybody but the animator's shop, those were not sold to you in accordance with the animator's license agreements. It really would be wrong to keep using them (except for any you might have obtained separately, full-perm, from the animators, and are distributing them *not* full-perm in compliance with such a license).

And that's where you have to make the business decision: If you were to pay to get licensed full perm copies of those animations under normal conditions, you'd have to generate several hundred thousand L$s in revenue before breaking even. Now, maybe the animators will cut you a special deal in this case, but they're certainly not obligated to do that--they were the ones who really got cheated out of revenue from all the prior sales of cheap sex beds. So the decision is: can you compete in a market totally different from the one in which you operated before, with a much different cost structure? And is it worth it?

Frankly, if I were in this market at all, I'd stop selling beds, make a "patch" package of replacement scripts, etc., for any existing customers with problems, and either do something altogether different, or start working with Qavimator to make all my own animations for a new line. That's because I really wouldn't expect to be able to compete with the folks who are just going to keep right on using the infringing animations in essentially the same old beds, either because they don't care about the IP problem or simply never learn about them. But if you made your own animations, you might have a product differentiated enough to be viable at an honest price. But it won't be easy.

Or you may make a point of branding yourself as a legit reseller, however difficult that reputation is to establish. I honestly believe that most people would rather pay a bit more than buy pirated goods if they have the option.

Well, that's kinda come up before. There's no mechanism afforded the seller to substantiate such a claim, nor the buyer to confirm it. Bluntly: if I'm sleazy enough to keep selling bogus stuff, I'll be damned sure to post big signs about what an honest reseller I am.

Yet pragmatically, people seem to be fairly adept at picking up when something is rubbing the wrong way.

So now we are what, two or three days after this action and still no official word? I notice that there is no blogs since Torleys on Sunday, will they wait to post the next blog only when they think the situation as dissipated?

Or for LL to do so.

let us suppose that on Friday you were selling a bed including some pirated animations (but not realising they were pirated). Due to this weekends fuss, you contacted the creator (let's pick on Craig), via IM, came to some arrangement and paid a license fee.

The bed you are selling today is identical to the bed being sold on Friday - however on Friday it was a pirated bed, today it is a legitimate bed (by virtue of some stuff in the IM and transaction logs).

This poses an interesting conundrum for any Linden wanting to unleash a seek-and-destroy-pirated-content bot onto the grid as some content creators wish they would do. In the absenced of some extremely complicated AI analysis of chat, IM and transaction logs or a much more complex provenance metadata system for assets, about the only way at the moment that LL could remove all the pirated copies of Craig's animations from the grid (which Craig presumedly wouldn't object to), would be to remove *all* of Craig's animations from the grid (which presumedly, Craig wouldn't be too happy about).

Matthew

Ya think? Do you trust Minnu? TRU? Should you?