Sex Gen Removed!

As I was saying before.. there are many of us out there (ok well, maybe not many.. but we DO exist, and know each other) that have been competing in that EXACT same market..with the full perm animations out there..and NOT using them them the entire time.

Many of us are NOT animators ourselves.. we pay and are careful with our full perm products..for many reasons - not just licenses, but selfishness. It does not SERVE me to have those animations out there floating around.

As we have seen, it only hurts...everyone who tries to do it the right way. We have been griping right along with the animators, and script folks we use.

This happening.. could be a good thing if I believed, that the many many businesses out there who might *not* have known they were doing the wrong thing (even if handling the permissions correctly after the fact) would now..step up.

But, they wont..because they will be in the place that we have been the entire time. Paying for the stuff you cant make yourself, and hoping to god your builds and ideas are worth it.
(while grumbling sadly that you really need to put down the dang prim and learn to animate)

Anyway..for the people who have been legit from the beginning, truly.. it doesnt hurt our market at all. (except the loss of confidence in SL businesses over all) if anything it could still help it.

There's a potentially big problem there though (I'm going to use the more general "someone" since it just seems odd to use "you" for something you never did ).

The problem is that that person would then know that the animations they sold as part of something were/are infringing.

Creating a patch to get the beds they sold in working order again just seems like facilitating further infringement to me though, however well intended it might be. Those animation aren't licensed, they shouldn't be used. Fixing those beds/item wouldn't be much different than selling a new one, they'd be creating new infringement where there currently is none (the bed/couch/something stopped working).

From a compliance point of view, I don't think there's really any other option except to get everything properly licensed, you don't have any choice except if the creators let you off the hook if you simply stop selling them.

I couldn't even guess how much buying all the animations used would cost, but if it's a substantial amount that they can't afford then that's the point where they're likely forced out of business permanently. They can't fix the beds, they can't afford to get the licenses sorted out, they likely can't refund every single customer for the bed/couch/something and if they don't refund they'll have the reputation of a scammer which pretty much means noone would think to buy from them again.

Yeah, you're right. Sorry; it's just pretty difficult not to automatically respond with something that will help out the customer who purchased one's product in the past.

So one really has to make a choice, I guess: screw one's customers or screw the animators.

On reflection, if I were in this business, I'd close shop, cash out anything I could, and switch to a nice fresh account. And never even look at any animated furniture again.

Which some have stated as doing - although there may be a slight variation, namely

"On reflection, if I were in this business, I'd close shop, cash out anything I could and never even look at SL again."

Matthew

CONTENT THEFT !!! Terrible... hang the thief I say

Someone stole CONTENT from my friends house..... a legitimately purchased bed... yep... thieved it one night. Whatever was inside the bed was targetted for removal..quite rightly.

But WHO stole the bed?? Ohhh... LL .. NOW who is the "Content thief"?


EDIT: OK smart a$$ spelling mistake corrected. Or maybe it was a freudian slip..hmm !!

Do fiends deserve a bed?

Oh come on....that's so "-ist"; EVERYONE deserves a bed, and noone can make use of it quite as well as a fiend.

I think LL is in damage control mode ............
And I thought some animations had dissappeared from my Zhao but I was wrong I put an extra line in the notecard at some stage somehow

'just wank'

Fiendistish?

I really can't wait to hear the spin they try to put on their actions. I've got the feeling that if we were to build a generator around it, the amount of spin would provide us with free energy for decades.

I never bothered to look inside the "SEXGEN Insert" that has been going around the grid for months and is apparently the one that has been renamed and tossed from alt to alt with Eva C's cut/pasted scripts.

There was a notecard inside named "!!IMPORTANT READ THIS!!" I had a great laugh when I read it....

!!! IMPORTANT READ THIS !!!

*English is not my primary langage...

DONT FORGET TO CHANGE THE PERM IF YOU RESELL (OR GIVE TO A FRIEND) THIS BED AND (OR) THE ANIMATIONS !

Mod the animations, inside the bed :
no copy - transfer
or
copy - no tranfer

Don't resell it with full perm!
Why ? Because you have a very good product in you hand, don't kill you business!
Do you want to see this bed or the animations in thousand of shop in SL ?

Do you want to see it at low cost ? Surely no, don't be silly and use this precious item correctly.

DONT RESELL IT LOW COST!

Sexbed,cuddle and sex animations have a great value in SL. Dont resell them for a ridiculous price! Look around you and align your prices! .
Only bad seller think that sell low cost = sell more. That wrong!
Selling with quality and good service, that's the right way for success...

You've got the luck to have find it at a amazing price but be smart and don't ruin your fabulous chance!

Eva C
IM if you need help or advice.

It showed they cared for your product, which is a good yes?

Ah...another Brit with a sense of humor. Damn, I thought that was an oxymoron.

That's "humour"... not.... "humor" (PS .. I'm a Brit too)

Nope - but an American with a sense of irony - *that* is an oxymoron

Matthew

Perhaps, or perhaps not, but that is actually beside the point and out of context. I specifically commented on whether you should fold up business because somebody can pirate your wares (or something similar) and offer it cheaper that way, or if you still believe there is a large enough slice of the market left for it to be viable.
Some pirates may go under the radar, but that doesn't mean that people will not in general try to "do the right thing", and yes, I actually think that people *are* fairly good at it (or, conversely, that most pirates are pretty blatant about it), even if you can point to specific instances where something went undetected.

The biggest problem is when something is taken from "offworld" and incorporated in builds inworld. That can be practically impossible to detect, but that's a bit different from cloning somebody's wares and wiping out the original business by undercutting it.

Thanks for clarifying the issue Kitty. For the record, I am offering exactly that; anyone who can't or doesn't want to officially license my animations can simply stop selling them to be in the clear with me.

With this post I'm not speaking for anyone else, but note that with Craig at least I have personally experienced him to be a quite upright and reasonable person.

All I can say is that a great and honest seller of high quality items may be closing her store this weekend from this mess. She happens to be one of the first persons I met in SL and is a great asset to the community. She did nothing wrong and its just a shame, it is what it is.

You all remember NAPSTER! Well they had claimed to be just a platform and had no liability with respect millions of dollars in copyright infringements against music publishers, recording artists and their labels. That proved to be a wrong legal position and it cost them hundreds of millions of dollars and so massive that CNN.com reported on February 21, 2001,

"Acting on the eve of the Grammy awards, Napster Inc. offered $1 billion Tuesday to the recording industry to settle a copyright infringement lawsuit..."

Think about it, NAPSTER didn't download those copyrights, but they did not prevent, they actually facilitated, copyright infringement, having constructive knowledge that infringement was occurring.

LL is only slightly distinguished here in the fact set and the magnitude of the damages could quickly nip the heels of the NAPSTER case.

Check it out: You create a script or animation and put it out for sale for what exchanges into $2.00 US. You wind-up selling a few thousand copies and your script is a "HIT" and everyone wants it. So, EVA comes along and repackages as her own and sells it for $1.00 US sells 1,000,000 copies of your copyrighted "Work" and did not pay a royalty to you for the sales. On top of that, you only sell a couple of hundred more copies because you charge twice (2x) as much as EVA. You just lost $2,000,000 US and Eva is now a RL millionaire. So under US Copyright Law and all the International Treaties, specifically the Berne Convention, the numbers add up like this.

Infringement Damages = $2,000.000 US
Civil Damages (3x Damages) = $6,000,000 US
Costs and Attorneys Fees approximate = $500,000 US

Grand Total of Liability = $8,500,000 US

Even though Eva, as the actual infringer is liable for the entire $8.5 million, LL could wind-up paying the entire damages to the copyright owner. The NAPSTER precedence has made this a real possibility.

DAMN RIGHT LL will take strong action and then hopefully get it sorted-out in a equitable fashion. I just suggest that we all cooperate and try to get the effected Creators and their Patrons who have, in good faith, bought and sold the infringing Works, back into business.

Unfortunately, we all are left holding the bag, but we must give LL some time to sort this out; otherwise, there may be no SL in the future. And YES, LL has been lax regarding setting a better permissions and copyright protection system. Pound LL for that!, and because of LL's failure in this area, millions of creations with these MLPs have been taken away from the good and honest SL'ers.

Up to a few months ago, that was my thought, too -- that permissions in SL were primitive and that they should do something about it.

I've started to wonder though if it's not that simple. Inside our tea-cosy world of SL, we're stewing and brewing about all this. Outside, however, there looms the possibility of Open Sim -- where interoperability standards may just become the price of admittance. Think of all those people who installed the AOL CD's and got the AOL client and thought that was the end all and be all -- and then along came something called a web browser that let you hop from site to site.

So, that's what makes me wonder if the lindens aren't faced with something like this -- redoing the permissions system in SL is one thing. Bit of a challenge, yes, but perhaps do-able. But at the same time, I know they're also at all these open standards meetings, and it could be that they're having to take the results of this open standard direction into their thinking. (And no doubt, because it's all committees, wait as fast as they can for something concrete to actually think about.)

Does anyone know what OpenSim plans to do about permissions? If anything?

I have to agree with several of the posters here that the real problem was NOT solved at all. The animations are still out there as full perms. While I have a set of these animations I did not sell anything using them, nor did I intend to. I acquired mine in a BIB that I got when I bought some land. It seemed very dodgy to me that so many well known animators work were included in this with full perms..

The real issue is a that of a very widespread violation of a license agreements. Now most (if not all now) of the people that have these animations were NOT the ones that violated the agreement. But the animations are still illegal. I cannot speak for the animators involved, but I think the only way to end this illegal use with a minimal impact would be to change the perms on all the existing animations in question to no copy/no mod/no transfer. This would leave the customers with a working bed that they paid for, and the vendors with now useless animations. The creators could then issue new full perm animations to their legitimate customers. If LL could track the creators of the objects these animations were detected in then the creators would even have a list of vendors to go after for re-compensation.

My real concern here is that what LL did only made a lot of innocent people very unhappy, but left the real problem unaddressed. The total lack of any sort of announcement from LL has only served to make this situation worse. Many creators used the scripts but not the animations, and even more used the animations but not the scripts. As only the scripts were removed, the problem remains, many innocent people were affected needlessly, while the guilty ones are still in business.

Oh, that's a can of worms.

The first thing to remember is that the permissions system is really at best indicative rather than enforced. By which I mean that in order to render information has to be sent from the server to the client. As the client is opensource, there is little point in encrypting this information as it is trivially easy to modify the client to reveal this information to the user. In most cases enough information has to be received by the client to duplicate the object.

So the permission system indicates what you should and shouldn't do - but it doesn't really prevent anyone doing something not permitted by the should you really want to - the same way that a No Entry sign is meant to be obeyed but doesn't physically stop you from entering.

The exception here being scripts since to work these do not have to leave the server.

With OpenSim you could end up with a script running on a third party non-LL sim which could in theory copy the script.

I think that the likely outcome is to accept that the protection that scripters currently have (but which animators, texture creators, sculptors, prim builders etc. do not) has been a temporary luxury and that ultimately the permission systems are like any other license - a description of what you can and can't do, and it becomes a legal matter to challenge anyone disregarding that license rather than a technical matter.

Not everyone is happy with that perspective - not least of all since persuing a DMCA over multiple grids is going to be more work than on one - so there is some heated debate.

There is also the question whether someone who has bought/licensed content is entitled to move it between grids without explicit permission of the content creator. Unfortunately due to the lack of case law, you can argue this one quite convincingly on both sides!

Matthew

I'll just BET LL is rewriting their TOS right now. I suggest everyone interested reread Section 3.2 of the current TOS.



That seems to override any DMCA concerns since it basically sounds like any thing you upload and allow someone else to use becomes theirs to use indefinitely.

Patent != copyright != trademark.

Giving up your patent rights is not giving up your copyright protection.