Copyright question in classifieds

So here's my situation. Some nasty underhanded person ripped off some of the language from my classifieds, word for word, and put it in her own classified for a competing store, pricing her ad $5 more than mine so people will see hers first.

Do I have any recourse here? I mean, I wrote the text for the ad, and she took a good chunk of it verbatim. What do y'all think? I sent her an IM advising her that I was displeased with her copycatting, but is this AR-able?

To be honest.... No. They are words. Unless you have a legal copyright on the exact wording and such I don't see how there is anythin you can do.

Its definitely rotten though.



Id file a Abuse Report the Lindens could check whose classified went in first Id think.

One of those 1 in 10000 shots though.

A lot of people generally look at the low-priced classified first, so they'd still see yours first.

This happened to me quite a few times.

It`s really upsetting but not much you can do I guess.


Twice happened to me with classifieds, I just thought "thief" (As they also copied my actual AD art as well)..and left it at that.


The other time someone ripped my rental notecard as their own, I imd this person and he apologized and said he was new and didnt know how to do it and meant to change it when he gained more experience..which is understandable. I know ive done things before just out of ignorance. It may be in your best interest to im the person and just let them know whats up and that plagarism is real even in second life.

Nothing you can do, this is the nature of competition. You could escalate it by pricing your next ads higher and higher to see who runs out of money first?

But otherwise: Content yourself with the knowledge that your copy was so good that they cannot beat it. Be a better store when people get to yours, offer stuff that'll make them come back, be cooler.

Pale imitators will fall before you do, especially as the only way to get higher in the list is for them to spend more money. Give it a few weks and then skip a week in classifieds after they've posted their ad. It'll barely dent your sales of people using "search places" and it'll hit your competitor's profits if they advertise and you don't.

Under U.S. law, you hold the copyright, regardless of whether it is registered or not. However, it's very difficult to prove that you hold the copyright unless you register it, or somehow record the date in a way that is hard to tamper with. (The so-called "Canadian Copyright," for example, where you put a copy of a manuscript in a sealed envelope and mail it to yourself in order to get a dated postmark, used to be admissible in court. I don't know if it still is, though.) If you have such information (for example, a record of all your transactions in SL, including classified ad charges), you might get lucky. I'd talk to the other person in question and see if you can get them to change their ad. If they don't, try filing a DMCA claim against them with Linden Lab. I don't know how far you'll get with this, but it's worth a shot.

Kam

As it turns out, I did hear back from the person who did it - she said that her English wasn't very good, and she liked my store, so she used the language from my ad. Okay, maybe imitation is a form of flattery - but still, the ad was placed directly above mine in the search. She agreed to change the wording.

Actually, I was thinking of rewriting parts of the ad anyway. It's just really unsettling to search to see my ad placement in the classifieds and find a twin of it. I suppose I should be happy that I'm not back in the copybot days where people would just copy the products themselves.

Kamael is correct. (Though, no, sending it to yourself doesn't work.)

However, in this case it's easy to prove that your listing predated hers. In court, you would have an easy time showing the judge that you are capable of writing this text, and the other person would probably have a difficult time. (Of course, a matter like this wouldn't come to court since nobody would want to spend that much money over it.)

In court, its testimony that counts. Yes, evidence counts, but only to the extent that someone can testify about what that evidence means. However, a notable exception to this (among others) is a copyright registration: without testimony, it's assumed to be legit, and it's up to the opposition to prove that it wasn't (in the case of fraud, registering a copyright of someone else's material). That's one of the reasons why it's prudent to register before publication on anything important.

Clearly, it would be silly to register a copyright for every ad (or even a whole big bunch of them at once, which you can do). I mean, the $40 fee is L$10K, is it worthwhile? That's for you to decide but I bet it's very very rare.

In any case, you have the legal high ground. Glad to hear that you settled it amicably. And it's unfortunate that the default listing is highest price first. That's in the interest of the website (since they get commissions from sales) but it's not in the best interests of the customers or value-oriented merchants. But that's a whole 'nuther subject.

I'm not an attorney, but my father is a patent attorney, and I've researched it pretty carefully for my original music and discussed these issues with my father for practical aspects. You can learn a LOT about copyrights at http://www.copyright.gov, which is written for the layman.

By the way, there's a trick you can use to beat the price listing issue.

List your product in a new entry, same wording, but with a higher price. Then edit the original listing as the same item ON SALE! And put an obvious link to the "sale item" from the higher priced one. You might need to put two objects in your SLX box to do this. I don't feel this is any more underhanded than selling a copy at a higher price to beat the listing issue.

For my merchandise, I set the price I want and let the customers choose. If I wanted a more prominent listing, I'd pay SLX to promote it. But, I wouldn't call myself a marketing genuis! Only my business-oriented products sell; I've had no luck with consumer merchandise so far.