Sex Gen Removed!

I don't think it is necessarily common sense. It probably seems sensible to you because you've been in the business of content creation for a while, whether on Second Life, or in real life. After you've been burned a few times, or heard a few horror stories, or just have receivecd some good advice, you start to develop that sensibility.

Many content creators in Second Life have no prior experience doing so, at least on some sort of professional level, and probably don't have any prior business experience. If you're coming to Second Life, and honest and smart person, but still a blank slate, these things that seem easy in hindsight might not occur to one trying to apply foresight.

The Second Life web sites invites anyone to come make "real money, yes real money." That advertising is geared to the newbie with dollar signs in her eyes. What the Second Life web site does not provide is any sort of education or information about the pitfalls of the Second Life economy.

A potential Second Life business person comes brand new. Easily through Search, the person finds all the stores selling Business-in-a-Box. This person goes to the stores, with signs explaining how permissions work, and explaining the use of these full-perm items for reselling. If this Business-in-a-Box store is freely and openly advertising its wares, why should the new Second Life resident be on guard that anything shady is going on? If it were shady, it couldn't be advertised so openly, or else Linden Labs would have already closed it down on a DMCA complaint.

Where in real life is there something analogous to trade based on the permissions of copy, modify, and transfer?

I don't think there's a problem of Second Life residents not applying common sense.

I think the problem exists in the information available to Second Life residents. The rosy advertisements promising that one can make "real money, yes, real money" are easily available. Information about the potential problems with making that real money is not easily available.

Maybe this question has already popped up somewhere in this thread, but I ask it anyway.

I make high quality animations myself and would not think about selling them full perm. Because, even with strict license rules, you know eventually they will turn up as a freebie somewhere. What happened with these animation creators? Didn't they pay attention?

Wouldn't it be much safer if you sell poses or whatever by the bundle? I mean: in 'boxes' of 10 of the same animations, or 100 or 1000. Of course with a discount.

I'm prepared to be reasonable. Once he retracts the "every single instance used the stolen animations along with the removed scripts".

1) He can't possibly state that as a fact (as he has) without having personally inspected each item.

2) I know of at least one pair of content creators who had all their stuff blasted by the removal of these scripts, who did NOT use any of the pirated animations.

His stubborn repeating of his claim, while saying that "people like you" (me) "can keep clinging to the belief if we want to" that there were legitimate users of the scripts, who didn't use the stolen animations, who were hurt by this, is also a personal insult. You going to call HIM on that one? I'm betting not.

It's something I've thought about, but I can think of several problems with that just from the statpoint of the person buying the animations for value added products.

1. You don't want to be in the situation of running out of product inventory, should you have better than expected sales.

2. If the original creator of the animations goes out of business, that shuts down any of your product lines that use that animator's animation.

3. Dealing with 1000 non-copiable animations in your inventory, rather than 1 copiable animation in inventory, is just a huge inventory-management pain. Especially considering that if you are buying animations to put in your furniture, for example, you're probably not just buying one animation- you're talking 10, 20 or more animations, at 1000 copies each. That's an inventory nightmare.

One thing that I've seen some merchants do is make full-perm items available for resale to a limited list of residents- say, I'll only sell my Business-in-a-Box to ten residents, and no more. I can see several advantages to doing that. One is the fewer people who are receiving the full perm animations, the lower the risk that one will either accidentally or dishonestly let the full-perm cat out of the bag. If a problem does come up, there is a limited number of suspects. And then, by only making it available for resale to ten people, for example, the re-sale value of the product is protected because there is less of a chance of ten people competing the value of the product down to $0L.

I bought anims this way a long time ago, to "animate" a scripted thing with particles and moving temp-rezzed prims and sound and... Anyway, back then, it felt like a big investment in inventory, since I paid about as much for 10 anims as I was paying for (much more sophisticated) full-perms from another animator. But I totally understood the animator's concern.

It was a tremendous pain in the butt. I had to make a little assembly line of product and stuff anims in each instance. But of course, I was prim-poor back then so it was a very short assembly line before I'd run out of parcel prims. Then I had to take all the animated product and stuff it into a vendor that sold the copies one at a time. If I'd known then what I know now, I would have just made the animations myself to avoid the hassle.

So, it works, but it's a lot handier for the animator than for the seller of animated product.

Well, two things can happen:

1) They sold a full perms animation intentionally to a furniture maker and the furniture maker failed to change the permissions or didn't realize that they had to set permissions on the actual animations themselves, not just the piece of furniture. A customer gets ahold of the item and realizes they can rip the animations out of it and have their own set of full perm animations for their own use or resale.

2) They sold a full perms animation intentionally to someone who claimed to be a furniture maker but who was actually just a skeevy reseller with the morals of an alley cat. Or, in Craig Altman's case, you can actually buy his full perms stuff right off the shelf (although these are only furniture poses, no "naughty" ones.)

Failing to adjust the permissions on the animations themselves is a frequent mistake by newbie furniture makers and before they've realized it, they've released dozens of copies of items with the animations at full perm. I bet everyone on this forum has a piece of furniture in their inventory with a full perm animation in it.

One idea I've been toying around with would be to only sell full perm animations by custom order and the agreement would be that I'll sell you the animation but it will be no mod and in the description I'm going to put your name as the licensee.

Name: Couch Sit 4 licensed to Paulo Dielli
Description: subject to DMCA if being sold seperately or by other than licensee.

Cops who deal with burglaries will tell you that not much is going to stop a determined thief, but what you can do is cut down your chances of being a victim of a crime of opportunity by making it really difficult for the thief.

Actually, I've been thinking about just this approach myself.

Given that once an animation is uploaded you can't change the priority, framerate, etc. is there anything that WOULD need to be changed, apart from the name? And if not, making it no mod with the description holding the name of the licensee seems like a good approach.

Wonder why so much stuff has been stolen and given away for free?

Isablan,

I think thats a fantastic idea, actually, even if not really "custom" animations. But "custom ordered" Simple to see who did what, what went wrong and what should be done about it.


But.. in cases like this AND others.. what about businesses where there are "partners" and more than one person creating content and joint builds?

It could be far simpler than that really, every copy of an animation references the same UUID.

Create the animation intended for use in others' embedded creations, upload it 100 times (minimal cost really) and have a vendor that sells a different one to every different seller (each buyer ends up with an animation with a UUID that is specific to them and only them) and upload more copies as the need arises.

Make a note in the accompanying license that distributing the animations as anything C/NT or NC/T will be considered a breach of the license and subject to L$xk in damages, failure to pay the damages will result in voiding the license and make that particular instance subject to DMCA removal.

When one of the anims turns up where they shouldn't, grab the UUID and contact the person you sold it that particular instance to, offering them to pay the damages. If they refuse they void the license which revokes their permission to use them in any way so you can file a take-down against the UUID to have it removed from the asset server altogether. It won't affect any other copies of it you sold, only that particular instance of it.

It doesn't matter how or why the anims turned up somewhere they shouldn't, it doesn't matter if a creator made a "mistake" and didn't uncheck full permission for next owner, it's a license violation no matter how you turn it and the effect of it on the animation creator remains the same as if they had deliberately given it away as full permission.

You don't have to sue either if they refuse to pay damages, you're virtually guaranteed to cause anyone who used that particular copy to close up permanently since consumers would never think to buy from them ever again because your DMCA would make everything that contained a copy of that particular instance to reference an animation that no longer exists.

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I don't necessarily agree with the above, but as far as protection for animations goes, it would achieve everything that's currently lacking in terms of protection from full permission accidents/resale/giving it away for newly released animations.

More importantly, it doesn't require any hacks, or rework of the permissions system. Nothing changes for people who buy it, they get a full permission item and it's their full responsability to take proper care in what they do with it.

Actually, I would prefer a "grandchild" set of privileges.

IE, you set grandchild no-transfer on a texture or animation and sell it. The buyer cannot uncheck the transfer privilege for next owner, but he has transfer privileges for it. Would stop a lot of these shenanigans.

Oh. This is becoming a very good idea.

I wonder if the labour cut be cut down any, but I guess not. With scripts we can do llSetObjectDesc() with prims rezzed in world....

with anims, that can never be rezzed, we can llGetInventoryName(), but can't llGetInventoryDesc() or llSetInventoryDesc(), which is what would be needed to automate the process.

It would be wonderful. A vending machine. Process purchase request. Does llSetInventoryDesc() with the purchaser name. Then spits out their animation to them, with licence info stamped on it in the description line....

You'd make a killing selling such vendors...

Sadly, no llSetInventoryDesc() that I know of :} Or there is, and I've just given away a million dollar biz idea, LOL!

Textures might need to be saved to disk (not that LL ever did fix the fix of being able to save to disk regardless of permission on it) and you can't currently apply a no transfer texture to a prim in the RC without llSetTexture and having the texture in the prim's inventory which makes the entire prim no transfer and hence worthless for creations that need to be sold.

Well, the idea is that the buyer (ie, "middleman" can still do what he needs to do with it, just as if he had full perms; the transfer flag for the next owner from him just couldn't be set, is all.

Let me use a more elaborate example:

I make a texture for furniture upholstery. It's a goodie, and lots of people want to buy it and use it for their furniture. OK. I set full perms for them, but set "no-transfer" on grandchild perms. I stick said texture in a vendor.

Let's say you are a furniture maker, and buy my texture out of the vendor. You can then apply it to your furniture and do whatever you want, since you have full perms to it. The difference is that you can't tick the transfer check box for the Next Owner. That means when you sell a piece of furniture to a consumer, the texture itself becomes no-transfer to the consumer. Whether it would make the entire piece of furniture no-transfer as well is an implementation option. However, let's say you decide you wanna be devious and sell my texture in a freebie box. Well, you CAN do it, but it becomes mostly useless for anyone buying it from you, since it becomes no-transfer to them, and there is nothing you can do to change that. Distribution pretty much is stopped at your level, and since I know who bought my textures, I can probably figure out who leaked them.

But that puts the onus on the animator to chase down UUID's and only he/she knows what those are. If the item name clearly lists the licensee then someone who picks up the animations in a BIAB or freebie box knows right away that the animations have been ill-gotten and they could get nailed by using them. Also, a customer can go to buy a couch and go into Edit to see the contents it will say right there who the animation is licensed to and you'll know right away what is legit and what isn't. Having the licensee name right in the animation name allows anyone to know whether the item they are about to buy is "legal."

As pointed out above, there is no reason for furniture animations to ever be mod ok - the only thing you can modify on them is to change the name. As long as the furniture piece or pose ball they are in is mod ok then the user can still adjust positioning.

I don't see what it would actually accomplish though?

Someone buys a full permission of your animation and puts it in a BIAB. People are going to buy it whether that warning is there or not. Honest ones *might* notice, but they'd have to be suspicious of a BIAB/freebie/reseller anyway so I don't think there's really all that many of those. Dishonest ones aren't going to care, "yay cheap full permissions animations. *Buys*".

Eventually you find out about the infringement, but what are you going to do? File a DMCA on the item's description? That's not in the asset server as far as I know but on the inventory servers, it's not something they can match against and get all of it, the full permission ones in prims are going to still be there after the sweep.

So you'd have a protection scheme that's really no different than what's happening today: you can file a DMCA against one specific person, but you can't instantly remove it from the dozens or hundreds of other they've given the animation to as full permission.

But you're using an implementation detail that is in no way certain to remain that way. Not being able to rename "no mod" items actually makes no sense, it's the item you want to stay no mod in nearly all cases, not the name. Maybe "cpl f z nb " made sense to the creator, it personally makes no sense to me and it's a pain to know what is what. Items with "worn" in their name are downright annoying even.

LL was/is considering adding tags to inventory items to facilitate searching for groups of items with the same tag. Not being able to tag "no mod" items wouldn't make any sense, and if you open up tagging you might as well open up renaming as well and *poof* your entire scheme is trivially bypassed.

There's no guarantee we won't ever get an in-world animation editor either and the animations could be changed which would result in them getting a new UUID, but no mod is always going to stay no mod which means that every copy of a no mod animation is always guaranteed to reference the same UUID.

That's because we are approaching the issue from two entirely different perspectives. You are looking for a punitive measure where LL can just delete a UUID of someone breaking the rules AFTER they've been caught.

I'm looking for a way to eliminate the 90% of why the problem happens in the first place while realizing that nothing I or anyone else does is going to stop those determined to steal the work of others for their own benefit.

Most people are honest and would not wish to purchase goods that have been pirated. Right now, no one has any way of telling what is and isn't legit. Even looking at a UUID won't tell you if the couch you just bought has animations that were purchased legitimately from the original animator.

/me applauds

Well said! Very succinctly and accurately put, Isablan!

Ahh, and *then* you'll be reasonable?

It's a hassle for builders to have to manually drop the content in for each item sold. So much of a hassle it's a non-starter: they want to be able to put copiable items in a vending box and let people buy them. Can't do this with no-copy/xfer bundles.

Then vote for http://jira.secondlife.com/browse/SVC-1654 .
It's not flawless. The biggest weakness is that someone could still buy your restricted full-perms item and sell it for L$0. But their customers wouldn't be able to also flood it, and therefore distribution growth would be linear rather than exponential. Much easier to police and keep a handle on. (You'd need a license agreement to prohibit selling the item for under some set cost.)

Erm. Well it is remotely similar, but that JIRA has a lot of baggage that I don't think is even possible in SL, like the Resell flag.

It is not rocket science that we as the general public do not need to know the personal information, just what items are going to be affected and why. I am certain you all understand the meaning of the word "redaction" and its uses. If LL is going to put some teeth into the DMCA takedown, you must do it - but that doesn't mean that the entire user base has to be in the dark, or in the dark for very long. Maybe you need to set up your own DMCA clearinghouse similar to the police blotter/incident report on the site so we can see what objects are affected and why, and deal with it accordingly.

/me nods her head in total agreement.

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I started a separate thread vaguely related to this:

/327/c2/265609/1.html

Yes, it's not going to solve every single little problem in SL, but hey, I ain't aiming to :}