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Virtual Fashion Thrives in Second Life
Carl Bialik from WSJ writes "The game Second Life — a simulated world with more than 700,000 'residents,' or players, who sometimes refer to their offline existence as their 'first life' — is breeding a virtual world of fashion design, with the same complications as the real world of fashion, the Wall Street Journal reports: 'A continuing headache for many designers is the ease with which others can copy their creations, and several have discovered boutiques that sell knockoffs of their clothes. A well-known Second Life designer was recently accused of stealing skin textures and withdrew from Second Life after receiving harassing messages. Linden says it investigates accusations of design theft, and repeat offenders can have their online accounts closed. Some designers, like DE Designs' Mr. Hester, have taken steps to copyright their work.'"
If you're worried this much about your online clothes, there is this thing called the OUTSIDE!!!
bypass TFA
"We found out pretty quickly that people loved owning things," Ms. Smith says.
there you have it folks.
some designers, like DE Designs' Mr. Hester, have taken steps to copyright their work.
Like what? Creating it. Because that's all it takes. Once you create a new work, it's copyrighted. Period. You can register the copyright which helps with enforcing it, but there are basicaly no steps to copyright a work.
Nathan Friedly
So real world copyright law will apply in the virtual world. Will real-world designers start to steal from the virtual one? Is that a copyright violation? Hmmm.
...wants to be free!
Step into a huge movement. Don't Tread In Me.
sharing should be mandatory.
Test 1 2 3 4
Doesn't exist in game
What if I'm caught walking the streets in my "First Life" wearing, like, a skin texture that, like was created in "Second Life"? Will I be sued in my "First Life", or, like, in my "Second Life"?
I'm, like, totally confused! You know, like???
My social paradigm would collapse on itself!
Ok, if you want to make money, try putting some effort into something that is actually USEFUL! Virtual fashion design is not useful, its not even SANE!
Greed seems to have no limits, and no IQ requirments either...
As a rule, I never trust dark brown ketchup.
Seems like real-world clothing manufacturers could easily take advantage of such a system to provide low-cost marketing data. Is someone trying to pitch a potentially risky line of avant-garde designs? Create a quickie virtual mock-up and see whether the Second-Lifers go for it. Overhead is reduced to essentially nil, and you have the added opportunity to create a built-in customer base if you ever do decide to sell the clothing in real life.
Sounds like 700,000 users seriously need to get a life.
By April of this year, though, Ms. LaRoche no longer had that day job. Her online design business had become full time, aided by the success of her fashions and other contract work, such as helping American Apparel launch a store inside Second Life.
So when the game eventually ends or goes under because no one is playing any more not only will Ms. LaRoche not have a job she won't have any marketable skills either.
Interviewer: So, I see you have been working for yourself for the past 2 years. What business are you in?
LaRoche: I designed clothes for characters in Second Life.
Interviewe: Thank you I've heard enough. Don't call us, we'll call you.
What the article doesn't say is that female fashion is what prevails in Second Life. I played for 2 weeks as a male avatar, and I had a difficult time finding clothes for my character. However, I had no problem finding places selling/giving away dresses, skirts, tanktops, lingerie, etc.
It would be curious to see the true male to female ratio of players in Second Life. I wouldn't be surprised to learn that it's males driving the fashion, even if they're dressed as women.
That place creeped me out, so I closed my account.
The game Second Life -- a simulated world with more than 700,000 'residents,' or players, who sometimes refer to their offline existence as their 'first life' -- is breeding a virtual world of fashion design
And right along with that is the herds of fashionistas, strutting and posing. It's ironic that despite being a "virtual" world, Second life is one of the most shallow, materialistic communities I've ever experienced.
The theory of relativity doesn't work right in Arkansas.
Are the people who play online virtual-life games the same who would buy real-life avant-garde fashions, even if they find such things suitable enough for their avatars?
Computers are useless. They can only give you answers.
-- Pablo Picasso
I don't see why people should get so upset, its just like the corner street knockoffs. Make your brand famous and people will come to you, especially if you continue to innovate. You're only wasting your money and time trying to knockout the knockoffs... hmm this sounds a lot like the DMCA debate...
My preschool was arrainged in open activity stations. We were taught explicitly to enjoy one station as long as one would like and not share. There were plenty of stations, so if you waited your turn, you were free to use it as long as you wanted. If you got bored waiting, there were other things to do. The real reason to share is when you like someone and want them to be happy, not because you feel some social pressure.
The result was that the children did not bug each other or whine about not getting as much as they wanted. No one was hurried. Anyone who is hurried out of a restaurant after a long wait knows how frustrating being hurried out is.
(Yes, this is Off Topic, but I could not resist a reply)
Last time I saw a Second Life article on /. (a few months ago) I decided to try it, met a few persons, all in there recently for 2 or three weeks. I wonder how many people spend more than 3 months in Second Life (yes, I only logged in two times, I didn't like their creation methods)
The Wise adapts himself to the world. The Fool adapts the world to himself. Therefore, all progress depends on the Fool.
Well, I have to say it. Not only does second life irritate the CRAP out of me, but its whole 'system' is a mess.
.. I instead got a big 'box' hat that covered my little character and said 'sucker' on all sides.
.. the video game for folks who are/were/might be coming out soon. So maybe that has something to do with the endless fashion parade. Really, in the end of the day though, not only is this story moot, but second life is moot. Its a failed experiment, pumped up by marketing PR, hoping to last long enough so that the folks who own it don't need to get real jobs. The Sims online, has a larger marketshare, and sony called that game a failure.
I honestly played second life for like 2 days, to see what all the fuss was about. Not only was the game slow, and unresponsive, but it was dull as shit too.
It was basically a giant SHOPPING MALL. you could go to remote islands, and shop. You could go to the desert, and shop. All the while spending 'real' money for virtual clothes, so other people could watch you 'shop' in style. [As an added bonus, you could sell your virtual life $$ for 'real' money, allowing chinese etc. money laundering and farming.]
You are given an allowance of Lydon(sp) dollars every week. and my first (and only) $250 went to buy a t-shirt that said 'you all suck' on it, of course, I didn't get that
So not only can you SHOP online, but you can get ripped off online too.
The company is just biding its time trying to get series-A funding. Something to drive the price up so the CEO can retire, or sell to warner brothers or something.
Now, its also well known that Second Life has a HUGE gay following, its like
--Ne auderis delere orbem rigidum meum, non erravi pernicose!
It's official, Second Life now sucks just as much as real life.
____ plex
...is the bloody horrible LAG in this game. It has nothing to do with your hardware; I can only stumble around at about 5-10 FPS in moderately populated areas with my dual-core, 7900GT machine with 2gb ram. I want to like this game so much but when you're used to playing other huge MMO's like WoW at smooth-as-glass framerates, walking around as if you are trapped in a slideshow is unbearable.
I hope they upgrade their hardware soon, because I'm willing to give it another go.
There is simply too much glass..
*sigh* And as usual slashdot forgets the digital realm isn't like the real one. That's why analogies break down.
You can register the copyright which helps with enforcing it...
This is almost certainly a bad choice of words on the part of the author. The only real reason I can come up with for anyone to "take steps" to copyright their work (really, as you've said, to register the copyright) is to enforce it. Why would anyone bother to register their copyright unless they suspected they may need to prove that it was theirs? The author certainly intended to say that the designers have taken steps to prepare to enforce their copyright--which, to most people, is the same as actually copyrighting it.
I very much doubt the average person--maybe even the average journalist--knows much at all about copyright. I certainly don't.
Fashion designers, having taken a clue from the digital world, have recently decided to use survey results from trial marketing data floated in a number of MMOGs, for example "Second Life".
2007 fashions, as a result, are predicted to consist entirely of micro bikinis, Robotech suits, and "Furry" costumes with gender-appropriate orifices/prostheses.
-Styopa
(somehow /. stuck this in the PS3 article....)
What I find so amusing/ironic/sad is that Linden Labs had built 2nd Life on a kind of cool idea - a pseudo-utopian experiment where they were going to build the world and, as I understood it, essentially keep their hands off, letting the social systems and communities grow organically.
Until something doesn't fit their PC-vision of what utopia should be, apparently.
Like utopian socialists whose Pollyanna ideals of "from each...to each..." don't quite survive their impact with the real world, they then turn to despotism to FORCE people to conform to (what they think) is best. The Lindens don't seem to hesitate to employ a mechanistic "hand of god" when it suits them.
Hint: Tyranny for a good reason is still tyranny. It's their world, their money (mostly), and they can ultimately do what they like, of course.
But what value is a 'virtual' version of Biosphere II, if the irresistable, implacable Hand of God can come in and magically set things right?
I was peripherally involved in the "Jesse War" so many ages ago, and I was saddened then as I'm saddened now. They have chosen once AGAIN to insinuate themselves directly in world-affairs and thus taint the entire experiment.
Wouldn't it have been MORE interesting to see how the community might have handled this WITHIN the bounds of the tools available to the avatars in-game? It might have provided a creative insight to our real-world issues of IP, patent, and copyright infringement.
Experiments are worthless if it's impossible for them to go wrong. If they can only travel down the pre-planned course, that's not an experiment, that's NARRATIVE. How do you study how the human animal behaves in the wild, if every misbehaving member of the study group is removed? What sort of valid result will that leave you?
But no, unless we have the magic Hand of God who can fix things in real life for us, too?
-Styopa
Now where's the torrent?
Justice is the sheep getting arrested while an impartial judge declares the vote void.
If you've spent any time in second life, you'd know that the clothing strongly ignores practicality and sensibility. Part of it is that virtual clothes weigh nothing and are indestructable, so you can make any shape or size of outfit you want (even including costumes like Ed-209, and people can wear them with about as much effort as a bikini without having to worry about getting into a car, or even about ever having to wash it. A second lost consideration is fabric. In real life, the difference between satin and cheap cotton is horribly obvious to anyone. In second life, you have to go through a lot of effort to even make that kind of thing noticable, and even then there's no way to make a difference in stiffness. A look at walks down some of the fashion show runways gives people a clue what designers would produce if practicality were meaningless, and second life is an order of magnitude worse than that.
Wake up - the future is arriving faster than you think.
Interestingly, because fashion designs in Second Life fall within the bounds of copyright, they are more protected than fashion designs in real life. Because real life designs are considered a "useful article," they fall under patent law rather than copyright law. Since patent law moves so slowly, designs wouldn't be protected under patents until after they're no longer worth protecting. Because computer code is not held to be a "useful article" (I have no idea why clothes are and software isn't... *shrug*) fashion designers who design virtual clothes can copyright their designs and sue infringers. I'd be kind of curious to find out what would happen if a real life designer started creating copies of their own work in Second Life and then attacking other real life copiers for making derivative works from their virtual copyright. The outcome would likely be the court deciding that the Second Life designs were similar to paper designs, making no difference to the current regulatory scheme. It's an interesting question nonetheless. (If you're interested in the topic, there's a paper on the topic here: http://www.law.virginia.edu/pdf/faculty/sprigman_p iracy.pdf)
I'm a lawyer, but not yours. I wouldn't represent someone who thinks taking legal advice from Slashdot is a good idea.
Person who uses computer for work wants to buy food. Controversy erupts. Film at 11.
Business isn't willing to pay for products, innovation and careers, so we get brands, mortgage commercials and layoffs.
she won't have any marketable skills either
Fashion design isn't a marketable skill? Huh?
Thank you I've heard enough. Don't call us, we'll call you
And there you have it folks. The fuckitude of the workplace in 11 words. Now let's all sing the company song while our "interviewers" wait for a Nobel-Prize-winning astronaut with four PhDs and an Olympic Gold Medal to respond to our ad for a "self-starter with a winning personality" to work 12/7 for $15 an hour while some phone-flipping crouton-stuffing fuck tells them how their education doesn't have anything to do with the real world.
Business isn't willing to pay for products, innovation and careers, so we get brands, mortgage commercials and layoffs.
I mean, these "virtual" clothes even perform the same function as their real-world counterparts: to be aesthetically pleasing.
There's an interesting DRM angle to the "fashion designer who quit" story. She was a popular designer but had bought a "skin" from someone else. A skin is like clothing but an inner layer - it has facial makeup, tatoos, body shading, coloring, etc. Anyway she liked the skin but didn't like the face makeup, so she wanted to change it. But she couldn't.
Here's where the DRM comes in. The item was sold "no modify" (as many or most clothing items are) meaning you can't edit it, you can't change it. However, we all know that DRM is often easy to work around. In this case there are plugins which will capture the data going to the graphics card drivers and save it as an image file. So she was able to save her "skin" as a file on her disk. Then she loads it into Photoshop or whatever and edits the face makeup to be more to her liking. She uploads it to the game and wears it.
Now, she wasn't selling the modification, she was just wearing it. This was for her personal use. But still, she had made a "derivative work" in copyright law terminology, without the permission of the original designer. And had violated the game's Terms of Service as well.
So, she got caught and people really came down hard on her, so she quit the game. She had been a popular designer herself but didn't want to put up with the criticism.
So, a couple of lessons:
1. This kind of DRM doesn't work
but
2. If you make a derivative work anyway and wear it out in public, you'll probably get caught.
before you put on clothes, you have your be'fore skin'? :)
See my art -> http://herbevore.deviantart.com
I remember reading about an article I believe on slashdot on how people wanted a third life. One at work, one at home, and one on second Life. Well, I believe people who want on second life have no first life to begin with. My brilliant two cents.
Come on most people did it for the furry community anyway,no cloths needed there. Boing
Second life? More like "Get a life".
OK, let's play this little game again. The actual human being behind the computer (unless there's a bot controlling it) is 87.5% male. Just like WoW. Just like every computer program since computers were invented. It's just the way it is. There may very well be more female avatars, but that means very little.
What the hell is a "Jesse war" anyway? I envision some kind of Zoolander-style fashion walk-off between avatars, with the designers at the side exclaiming "Oooh, get her, the steaming great Jesse!"
As computers get more powerful, where is the limit to virtual world participation? suppose that in 20 years quantum computers allow the perfect rendering and raytracing of virtual online worlds, with instant communication between server and client. What happens then? obviously, there should be a limit, because people would get hooked so bad in it that the society's structure will be severely destroyed.
Like what? Numbers in a bank account? Real estate? How does one own land or air? Virtual property is just an extension of the provisional reality of "real" property. Not to say property is all bad, but this Second Life stuff does make me reflect on how far capitalism can shift our perspectives.
...too bad it was ruined by complete psychopaths like Prokofy Neva and the completely opaque and even arbitrary Linden banhammer. If you're seriously considering trying out Second Life, keep these forums close, they're the one becon of sanity in this whole sad minagere http://forums.secondcitizen.com/ (I myself have only made one post there, so I've got nobodies adgenda but my own here)
I'm the guy with the unpopular opinion
Freakin losers with no lives.....Hahahahaha....Go outside, you jackass!
- (pre-) Teen-agers. Surprisingly, these are NOT the overwhelming majority.
- Corporations hoping SL is "The Next Big Thing". In some places, you can hardly find an actual person, for all the corporate entities. They open "virtual" stores to enhance their brand. They also have casinos and porno complexes where you can watch "real" pornos. All of which are aimed at trying to make SL virtual-money ("Linden dollars"). Kinda wierd.
- Geeks. People like me. They usually are either just killing time, or have a "message" they want to get out, and hope SL is a good medium.
To the latter end, there is the Gimme Liberty Bar (here is the SL teleport URL). There's also a listening party there every night except Sundays, 7-10PM Eastern time. Pretty whacked-out. You can also pick up some free (as in beer) clothes and virtual pets there, and watch freedom-oriented videos.Part of the Second American Revolution!
I find it terribly ironic that even with the draw of an idealistic computer-generated world, the people (both at LL and the payers) have mostly structured it with all the ills of the real world.
IP??? in a virtual world? it don't even make no sense in the real world. Except in the interest of keeping people with busi-ness -- we don't need IP and the world would be better without ownership of ideas.
I took about 30 minutes in 2nd life to realize it was the RL equivalent of a massive strip mall.
> prove to me that culmination of these skills into making FAKE clothing is worth REAL money.
People are paying Linden dollars (which are convertible to real money) for them. That's all the proof I need to say it's worth real money. Still, the greater point is that people pay for non-corporeal stuff all the time. They pay to play MMO games. They pay for rides on a rollercoaster. They pay to visit a zoo. They pay to watch a boxing match. The simple fact is, if getting cool clothes on an avatar in a game entertains you, and you're willing to pay the equivalent of real money for that entertainment, why shouldn't someone make those virtual duds for you? If you consider the person making virtual clothes in Second Life to be an entertainment provider, it's rather obvious why they can make money. If their designs are so pleasing that lots of Second Life folks want those cool clothes, then it becomes viable. Sure, it relies on Second Life continuing, but then one of those professional hula dancers at some resort in Hawaii relies on the continuing function of the hotel to keep working. If Second Life dries up, she'll have to find another venue where her skills are marketable, or get into another line of work. Sounds like how First Life works for everyone.
Virg
WTF?!? Seriously.
http://teasphere.wordpress.com - A little spot of tea
Led me to conclude that it is mainly male _players_ (not avatars!!!) playing with only one hand dedicated to the _computer_. Did I miss something?
So the next time I came in with a snack, I made sure it was crackers with limburger cheese, and there was enough for the whole class.
Actually, that only happened once. And it didn't last long. Women usually play women. Men usually play women. Sometimes a man plays a man. And that one time, a woman played a man. But that's still a rumor.
I may be an offtopic coward with no mod points, but the link is appreciated. Merci beaucoup!