Sex Gen Removed!

I too visited that store of baby stuff, a protester had signs up when I arrived, a Linden arrived ans asked he take down the signs, she spent quite a lot of time there and was examining content, a few other creators arrived and also had conversations with the Linden, but the Linden conducted them all in IM which is sensible in my view, and I really didn't expect any action to occur till later in the week, but the Lindens had the issue on their table, so I left.
I didn't recognise any content, as I'm no expert in anything I saw, but a few other people obviously know their own or others stuff. I thoughts some landscaping was fishy but nothing I was in any position to judge.

The beds are using the stolen animations from Johan, mainly. A different engine I bought is exactly that list posted earlier. Great... this is disconcerting.

Johan does not offer licenced animations, so those you just have to delete.

There are, however, some, um *vivid* couples animations available from Sinamatics, and from Essensual, that have the advantage that your customers haven't seen them already 1,000 times before and go ho-hum.

MikeD Street is another good source, in addition to Bits & Bobs, for non-risque animations.

I wish there were some kind of programme whereby the people that make sure to use only legit animations could advertise that in our stores, to show both that it's a higher quality product, and that we support the animators in SL.

I am very happy to support them cause I need them around: scripting takes up all my time, and I don't want the stress of learning Poser added to my workload! Plus, I just don't have that kind of artistic mindset.

This is an interesting point.

I wonder if it would have been any easier if LL had clamped down ont his sort of thing when SL was small.

One of those small mess that became a huge mess due to how long they waited.

This doesn't even happen in real life. Not in the US anyhow.

No retail store is forced to offer refunds. They do it because they are competing with other stores.

Same in Canada. North America sucks. In Britain however what North American retailers practise out of courtesy is embedded in something called Trading Standards. You have actual, genuine rights. Still a fight sometime, but actual rights nonetheless (oh, yes, and use-by and sell-by dates on food too, not just cryptic codes :}

Again, as I stated earlier, I spoke to Boyscout Linden in live chat and they are "taking " responsibility for this and stated they have removed any occurrance of these scripts from the grid.

So Stroker is wrong in assuming this is just an anomoly. Linden Lab has already taken ownership.

Now why would they do that, Stroker?

Just maybe because a resident did something morally wrong, illegal and against the TOS perhaps. Don't poke the stick at a retailer for standing up for his rights, perhaps LL went a bit overboard, perhaps they were following a court order.

I will be very surprised if we see the promised blog announcement before Monday. LL is going to have to be very careful with how its worded to avoid even more outcry. They also probably want to run it by their legal dept. I doubt the lawyers work weekends.

I spent nearly 10k on sculptie textures that were from that loni person. My boots in the shop didnt vanish but I did voluntarily take them down till I know what is going on.

Illegal and against TOS DEFINITELY, but morals are always subjective. To you it's morally wrong; to me it's morally wrong; to another culture it might be no big deal. However legality and TOS trump moral interpretations.

Stolen content has been sold in SLX before... Like any other company they require a DMCA to be filed before content is removed.

Oh great so some GENUINE content creators who do not have much capital are FORCED out of business because they cannot put a large amount of money in with LL.

No, LL have to be more effective on DMCA takedowns and suspend/ban accounts (and IPs) that continue to sell copyrighted content AFTER a takedown order. It generally takes a long time for a business to get going properly. I should know this because my SL wife has been in business over a year and between us we must've sank well over 100,000 lindens (probably near 200K) plus the amount we have made (less than half that) into the business.

Publicising the fact that they are banning AVs for reselling stolen content would also act as a deterrant.

Well it's morally wrong to a a mojority anyway, maybe immoral users have aproblem with this, basicly if you had to choose is theft an overall good act or overall bad act?

Only if they care about their disposable unlimited supply alts. These aren't noobs doing this.

If you bought something phsyical it doesn't suddenly vanish if it turned out to be infringing, noone bothers to come collect every copy sold at everyone's doorstep.

That's not to say it doesn't happen at all, but the risk becomes substantially less with time. In SL the risk increases with time as it becomes more and more known and non-SL content creators suddenly find out that some content "creator" has been reselling their work in SL. Infringement in a texture store in particular could be devastating if it causes *everything* that uses that/those texture(s) to suddenly become unrezzable/vanish.

How would your suggestion help at all? It still puts the risk entirely on the consumer's shoulders. You get their money and if you turned out to be infringing you get to walk away with the money while they end up with nothing.

If you can come up with another way to inspire confidence then by all means, but registering the copyright of all creations is going to be far most costly than deposting a few thousand US$ depending on someone's sales volume to reimburse people if they turn out to be less than legitimate.

If smaller stores have to make way for big ones to get rid all the dishonest ones, it's still a major improvement.

It's not just content creator who are entitled to any "rights", consumers get their share as well and increasing one at the expense of the other (whichever way) is just not the way to go about it. Even if it wouldn't cause legal issues, you can't argue against *not* removing infringing content so there has to something else that balances out the consumer loss (or establishes independantly verified trust) and my suggestion was that the infringer should bear the costs.

I'm just going inworld now pls LM me, or drop me a notecard with a list of effected creators. Touch wood I'm not one of them.

I'm not convinced by this - profit margins for content creation in SL is already tight, and selling content creation is still very high risk (espeially given downtime, inventory loss, transaction failure, updates breaking existing content, etc.). It is probably only the big stores that make any money anyway - many of the smaller ones do it for enjoyment, and even the big stores would in general not make enough to cover such a deposit.

Unless the consumer is going to tolerate a sudden upward movement in SL content prices either such a deposit will be too small to have any real effect, or else would kill off the bulk of the content creation market leaving only Anshe Chung and a few other really big players. The variety of niche markets would vanish.

Matthew

I just see it as unfair... Linden steals a piece of furniture from someones house. Disable the scripts, take the scripts..issue a warning to delete the scripts.. by all means.... but to wake up one day and find yourself sleeping on the fllor....not the right way to do it.

Im all for copyright protection or whatever its called.... protecting creators work and art.... but to take the bed or whatever... dont get it. Especially if it was no copy.


EDIT: So what ARE we safe to go out and buy for "SL nookie" How can we be TOTALLY SURE that a bed ..with maybe 100 or more scripts/poses in it ..doe not have ONE script that belongs to someone else and will lead to this in future.

I could go to a particular store today... spend 12000 on a particular bed .... the store owner and bed creator being a rather well known (and hunky btw ) person ...... but what is there to ensure my new bed wont go poooof tomorrow..next week..next month?

I'd be surprised if they do a blog announcement at all really (unless it's about a general change in DMCA policy).

Their policy has been to only make blog posts when it affects literally everyone for a while now. When the support portal had a security issue that required a password reset of everyone who'd used it up till then, that was handled with a private email only to those affected. When JIRA exposed emails for a few days, that was handled with a private email only to those affected.

I'm sure there's more, but those are the ones I can recall right now.

I think the other suggestion also works: copy the open source code into your own script but set it Mod/Copy and No Transfer. The recipient still has open access to the source and can use that source in their own scripts by doing the same thing, but cannot transfer any mods they make to your script and distribute it as a griefing tool. (I suppose they themselves could grief with it, but they'll be the Owner, so determining guilt shouldn't be too tough.) The only minor advantages to this approach are that you don't have to transfer the extra notecard, and the recipient can see the code formatted a little more legibly in a script than in a notecard and can make quick changes for their own use without the extra step of copying the notecarded source back into a new script.

Good that you mentioned in another post that as open source, the original author isn't responsible for support (except in this case with a special donation, as noted in another post). So, really, to keep people from contacting that author, the scripts really should have been treated this way all along (although, in practice, people contact the prim creator for support, regardless of who made the scripts--a hazard to folks like Ziggy when they distribute great stuff like ZHAO 2).

I'd agree with that. I'd be delighted to put sign up stating that my store is 'LL verified' or whatever. I doubt it will happen in the forseeable future though, because it would mean LL being involved, and it would close a huge number of shops down instantly.

MLP is licensed under the BSD license though, you don't have to provide the source with the product, or even provide it on request.

sexgen is free?!?!?!? wtf I paid a lot of money for my box to put in my bed.

im in the south and I call a coke a coke, a pepsi a pepsi etc.. I also say soda if generally refering to carbonated drinks.

To the first question: copybot isn't a script, it's a specialized client. (And I mean *really* specialized -- some folks are confused, thinking that LL making the viewer open source made copybot possible, but in fact it existed before the source was opened, based on libsecondlife and reverse-engineered client messaging.)

But the second question really gets to the heart of the matter for me. I think it's safe to assume that LL was well aware of much of this illegally copied content long, long ago, and it apparently took a sim full of the crap to get them to act. (That sim even had a copybotted version of Arcadia Asylum's free-to-copy full-perm Metro Taxi Cab, for decoration!)

Why did they wait so long? Is there something especially scary about DMCA that makes them more reluctant to act on ARs alone, unlike their response to every other infringement (e.g., underage accounts)?

I'm thinking the response was appropriate, just much too late. They've certainly blacklisted creators of stuff that infringes in other ways (e.g., the jerk-off who made the offensively griefing Choppaman cubes, among other detritus, way back when). But they acted swiftly in those cases. The pain this time is that thousands of innocent purchasers and merchants got burned by LL's delay.

Let's hope *LL* learned their lesson. This I'll believe when a blog post says "We apologize for not having acted sooner. You can expect our response to IP infringement to be more timely in future."

I'm not holding my breath.