Slashdot Mirror
Second Life Mogul Challenges Press Freedom
An anonymous reader tipped us to a post on ZDNet about some disturbing freedom of the press issues in Second Life. Content mogul Anshe Chung is filing DMCA complaints with organizations that post screenshots of her content, citing an infringement of copyright. From the article: "The issue has surfaced after the avatar Anshe Chung (real name Ailin Graef) was attacked by animated flying penises during a virtual interview with CNET news, conducted in their Second Life bureau last month. A video of the attack surfaced on YouTube, and was then taken town after Anshe Chung Studios filed a DMCA complaint. The Sydney Morning Herald and the blog BoingBoing have also received similar notices."
http://video.google.com/videoplay?docid=5387867190 768022577&q=Anshe+Chung
I'm still here you bastards!
It couldn't be that she's using the DMCA to take down something that could hurt her reputation, could it?
Nah... The law is never abused.
Why is a virtual avatar different from the real world? Could she sue the news companies if she wore a self designed dress during a similar accident in real life? I think it would be more appropriate to get compensation for damages for intrusion of her privacy etc, but then it is the question if that applies to virtual worlds.
Hate to be the one that mentions it but the "Sydney Morning Herald" is an Australian newspaper owned by an Australian company. There isn't much a US law can do to them.
Using the DMCA to tick off the press? We need more of this, bring it on, file DMCA on the press daily, PLEASE. While your at it use the unPatriotic Act on them and why not leave an anomyous tip or a thousand with the MPAA and RIAA as I am sure they must have some violations somewhere on their computers. Then let's see the power of the press!
I'd rather go to tokin' town.
I'm entirely happy with her having that content prohibited; no one is harmed by that material *not* being shown, which means its right and proper for her privacy and dignity to be respected.
What privacy and dignity? Something everyone involved seems to have forgotten - This doesn't really involve her . Just an avatar in a "game". And even if it did, the content doesn't actually belong to her, it belongs to (if anyone) Second Life. So what gives this bink the right to go around issuing takedown notices???
It's unforunate this idea isn't part of law
Except, it does exist as part of (case) law - You only have a reasonable expectation of privacy up until the moment you go out in public. The only way this varies from the norm, she can go "out" in public without leaving her computer room.
Someone played a joke on her in a public forum. Someone else captured that joke for posterity. Nothing to see here, move along please.
(IANALBIRGL)
This is trolling, correct? "If not showing the event is not harmful, then it is right and proper for it not to be shown - because it is embarrassing to her." Wow.
I have never participated in "Second Life," but understand that it wants to mimic the real thing. In real life, if flying penises attacked someone on camera, I think that any attempt to repress the footage would be a task beyond any force known to man (yes, even Ted Turner).
Andrew Borntreger
Champion of cinematic disasters
Except that completely ignores the fact she was attending the virtual equivalent of a public event. The law has recognized for some time now (at least in the U.S) that people don't have a reasonable expectation to privacy in public. I am not sure how you're arriving at it's ethical correctnes. I would argue that if this sets a precedent eroding freedom of the press then people are being harmed.
down with the b***h
The video is gone from YouTube... but is one Google Video.
I disagree. How much expectation of privacy can one have when one is "representing" as a software avatar in a forum? True, the forum is privately owned and the avatar is considered IP (I think TFA made an excellent analogy to a piece of haute coture), but if someone beaned Ted Kennedy with a rubber phallus at a private Democratic Party fundraiser and someone caught a picture of it, would that not fall under fair use for it to be distributed for no cost, regardless of whether Mr. K was wearing a bespoke suit by Jaques Penne?
:-)
I could understand your argument if it were a nekkid picture taken by a peeping tom in a persons bathroom, but lets take a step back, eh?
As far as "harm by omission" goes, isn't cumulative public opinion and devloping more's something that a court must take into effect? One might present logs showing a number of viewings vs. complaints lodged as a bit of evidence? Yeah, derivative, but I'm having a hard time finding harm on either side of this!
> What privacy and dignity? Something everyone involved seems to have forgotten - This doesn't really
> involve her . Just an avatar in a "game".
I think if my avatar was attacked by flying penis' during a CNN interview, I would be mortified. I expect she feels this way. I think asserting an individual would NOT feel embarrassed and belittled is fanciful.
> And even if it did, the content doesn't actually belong to her, it belongs to (if anyone) Second Life.
It seems to me that since no one is harmed by this material being kept private, and by doing so her dignity is maintained, it is right and proper for Second Life to do so; so I don't see this makes a difference.
"...was attacked by animated flying penises during a virtual interview..."
HAHAHAHAHAHAHAHAHAHAHAHAHA
The attacker KNEW this would happen, hence the flying penices.. so in my mind she got what she deserved.
Oh.. and serving DMCA takedowns because of her "copyrighted" avatar is pure bs too.
Sometimes the best defense isn't a good offense, it's a good sense of humour.
"Live as if you'll die tomorrow." Ridiculous. You could die later today.
I just wanted to say this tops my personal list as some of the most hilarious griefing I've ever seen.
We should all aspire to be more like the gentlemen of room 101.
The most retarded thing I have ever seen or heard of in my life.
I think if my avatar was attacked by flying penis' during a CNN interview, I would be mortified. I expect she feels this way. I think asserting an individual would NOT feel embarrassed and belittled is fanciful.
Really? I would be annoyed if my *real* self were attacked by *real* flying penises during a CNN interview, but in a video game? Especially one with incredibly crappy graphics? That's just funny.
"...always new atoms but always doing the same dance, remembering what the dance was yesterday." -Richard Feynman
""I'm entirely happy with her having that content prohibited; no one is harmed by that material *not* being shown, which means its right and proper for her privacy and dignity to be respected.
It's unforunate this idea isn't part of law, which means she has to resort to the DCMA to get the ethically correct decision made and enforced.""
You DO realize Second Life is a game, and we're now talking about changing LAWS because of disputes arising from GAMES which have consequences such as JAIL TIME, correct?
If ANYONE has been irresponsable here, it's the company which created and profits from second life and the users of that game. The company has been irresponsable for allowing its customers to get so involved in their game, which they provide, that they can not detach, and the users have become irresponsable for allowing their lives to revolve around a game. Trust me on this one; I was RAISED by a SNES and NES because my parents were too cheap and shitty to teach me things like social skills and now that I have social skills and a real life, I consider those more important than any digital personsa I may have.
I mean, seriously, the world CAN'T have gone THIS far down the tubes, to the point we're using laws to protect the "dignity and privacy" of digital characters within a game. For fucks sakes, if you've gone that far into a game, you need to shred your disks, delete your characters, unsubscribe your account then sledghamer, douse in gasoline and burn your computer.
After doing that, you need to wash the caked sweat and dead skin which has formed infectious rashes all over your body, off of your body, then eat some steak and salad and go get some sunshine. Find a job, lose or gain some weight (where applicable), then dress nice and go find yourself some friends or date. The first one is always the hardest and after that they come easier.
And if you have an itch for a game, go play something [b]with an ending[/b].
Go home. You're worse than Prokofy Neva.
Whether publication is justifiable or not is irrelevant to its legality.
I may make you feel, but I can't make you think.
Related Warren Ellis article for Reuters.
Linux, you magnificent bastard, I read the fucking manual!
...The issue has surfaced after the avatar Anshe Chung (real name Ailin Graef) was attacked by animated flying penises...
... "when I was young, at least you couldn't be attacked by a flock of animated flying penises"...
In hundred years from now as virtual reality will be everywhere and has become a core part of our lives.
I'm sure old folks will bring back aging memories from real life
The ./ mods really disappoint me.
My post - which has not been modded up - has now been modded "-3 Overrated".
This is, I think, because if anyone so much as mentions ANYTHING which implies complete and utter freedom of information is wrong, mods go bananas and suppress the post.
FUCKING ironic, isn't it?
Guess what? If you were attacked by flying penises in a public place in real life, I could publish pictures of it and there's not a damned thing you could do about it, no matter how embarrassing or mortifying this might be to you. I could even (gasp) make money off these pictures.
The fact that people are scared that the DMCA gives her this "cyber-power" is just another testiment to its utter malignancy.
Repetition does not transform a lie into the truth. - FDR
Theres the video on Google Video.
And a week or so back, Something Awful's "Second Life Safari" documented it: http://www.somethingawful.com/index.php?a=4336
Well said, although I would like to point out that since real money trades hands *both* ways in this massively-multiplayer online game, things become a little different.
"Anshe Chung" is a real-life multimillionaire because of "her" Second Life real estate speculation, hence the CNET interview. The economy of Second Life trades about a million USD every day. This, I must note, is also a game where you can put Hermione in bondage gear and have her raped on a rack by a half-naked Santa Claus and anthropomorphic foxes with multiple penises. Hence the griefers and Something Awful's Second Life Safari. I have to congratulate Chris "Petey" Peterson for what he's been doing with that.
I may make you feel, but I can't make you think.
cnet. a cnet interview.
Slow Down, Cowboy! It's been 60 minutes since you last successfully posted a comment.
The people who make Second Life remind me of the people who in school caused new and Draconian rules to be created by the administration which made life miserable for the rest of the students. The morons giving real life money for virtual real estate, the knuckle draggers who are doing basically MOO/MUSH objects then selling them for real money, and now the attempted use of the DMCA hammer on anything in their way.
End result is likely going to be the IRS (or whatever the country's tax body is) horning its way into every MMO and online game, wanting its cut of the online proceeds.
To boot, if the DMCA is successfully used in this context, this sets a bad precedent -- post a screenshot of your character, go to jail for copyright violation.
I can see it now in WoW... before you can loot a purple item, you have to pay with gold or from your credit card your country's VAT. Screenshots are protected with some type of DRM system that only allows authorized computers to view the files.
I don't know who is worse -- the people selling crap in 2L for real money, or the knuckle draggers buying objects in that game. At least people who buy gold/platinum/adena/pyreals in a MMO like EQ or WoW are usually doing it to save time, rather than mindlessly farm, and that sort of can be understood.
And while I might not agree with it, I'll go to bat for their right to do so any day of the week.
Repetition does not transform a lie into the truth. - FDR
This is something that SL users have been bitching about for a while - That their stuff shouldn't be screenshotted for the sole reason that it's their intellectual property, even if it's not being claimed to be otherwise. An example is SomethingAwful's Second Life Safari, where one such SL user went ape shit over the posting of "intellectual property" (read: Screen shot).
No. If your shit can be seen simply by logging into SL (which is free to roam around in), it can be posted anywhere. It's like clipping a Slashdotter's post and popping it on a site as a quote.
Now, I couldn't actually figure out what TFA was talking about, whether it was the SL staff involved, or SL users, but all the same, if it's the SL staff, people have no right to complain; It's their servers, and if they don't want you doing something, they have every right in the world to take you off, especially if you're one of those "free" users. People don't seem to realize that freedom of speech is restricted to political views and religion, and are rescinded while in private property. Censorship is wholly allowed in private.
Such a horrible "game" with a terribly whiny community, and this Anshe Chung person has had more press coverage than should be allowed.
Screw the rules, I have green hair!
While the Overrated mod IS frequently abused (take a look to what'll probably happen to this comment), the real shame here is that your original post wasn't marked -3 Troll instead. The Overrated mod is used because it's immune to metamoderation.
Did you even look at the video? She was _on_stage_ with CNet and an audience at a press conference/interview. There's no reasonable grounds for her to expect any sort of privacy in this context.
my sig's at the bottom of the page.
She could make money with that video, just call it "waltz of the penises".
Ok, so let's supress freedom of the press and freedom of speech. Let's hope the oversight committee which decides what's humiliating always agrees with you. We'll let the government decide what to censor. Every speech in which President Bush humiliates the country and himself will now be undocumented.
Do you even appreciate the freedoms you have?
Developers: We can use your help.
I'm getting just a little tired of hearing about this woman. "Oh look at me I own a million dollars of virtual real estate located on servers subject to regular DoS attacks. And neither insurance companies or the law offer any recourse if it all gets wiped out." Please.
She loves being in the news as long as the press is favorable, but one dildo attack gets written about and all of a sudden she brings out the DMCA stick. I will place a bet that we're about to see how mob rule on Second Life works. Attacks against her will most certainly be scaled up now that this news broke.
-R
I run a forum for folks involved in the punk scene in a certain midwestern city in the 1980's. We had a wiki (pikipiki acutally) that was created to describe some of the personalities that were involed and some of the very silly and fun times we had.
...) and other things that might cause one to get one's security clearance revoked.
...) to be the object of ridicule for acting like the sort of person one would want to see pelted with penii?
:-)
Some of these silly and fun times involved gobbling drugs, having sex with various other humans (of varying sexes - count them how you will
However, the events described ACTUALLY HAPPENED (or were purported to). Therefore any actionable position I was placed into by hosting this wiki were informed by the original poster's evidence (often photographic). That being said, I gladly redacted the wiki when asked, and occaisionally sent a 'stifle yourself' email to a couple of the more vociferous users.
However, if two of these people were arguing in a forum about what did or did not happen, I would not intervene. What purpose would be served by censoring an argument? Or, for that matter, a flamewar? One can point to exactly who the numbnutz' are in a particular conversation without much effort.
Was it impolite on the part of the griefers and embarassing to the 'victim' to see an puppet of herself pelted with penii? Probably. Is it going to be more embarassing (or perhaps more profitable? After all, there is no such thing as bad publicity
I suspect that the whole invocation of the DMCA was done, partly, in the hopes that it would push Slashdotter's buttons (not to mention BoingBoing or any other number of DMCA-loathers) thereby generating buzz. I suspect that we are both complete dipshits for adding pagerank for these people, but hey, I like a good argument!
Your post is as disappointing as the original moderation abuse.
/.ers, views that are not agreed with are considered trolling.
Like seemingly many
This is a desperately narrow mindset. There seems to be a fundamental inability to comprehend that other people can genuinely hold views that are not understood by the reader.
her upcoming alliance with the RIAA and the MPAA all you flying penises will pay!!!! (about $4534.79)
It's only paranoia if your wrong...
>Now imagine that a press photographer comes along - well, that's a completely different story. Now >I know whatever I do could be put on the front cover of a mass circulation publication and >literally millions of people would see it and read it. Then you would be completely within your rights to leave the party. You have no right to prevent someone who is allowed in by the host from taking pictures and printing them, and if you would be ashamed to have your presence or your actions in that place publicized perhaps you shouldn't be there.
If it's funny to you, that's fine. You won't feel the need to have that material kept private. But I hope you respect other people enough to understand that for some, it *would* be deeply embarrassing and they *would* want it kept private. It is not for others to live by your reactions.
Is there a way to set the default to text? I'd like to protect me from myself.
What *POSSIBLE* justification is there for publishing material where an individual has done nothing wrong,
Would it be ok if the individual had done something wrong? If so, who decides if it's wrong or not? Clearly, some people think Anshe Chung deserves the embarrassment.
Don't become a regular here -- you will become retarded.
...at crying "penis" in a crowded vagina.
> Whether publication is justifiable or not is irrelevant to its legality.
There is a blogger I've read for a while.
She's very sexually activate and she writes anonymously. Her family have no idea - they're rather straightlaced.
She received an offer to publish her blog as a book. She accepted, on the condition it would be anonymous.
Well, as you can imagine, someone somewhere was bribed and the press got hold of her details - and they had a field day.
The first she knew was when the doorbell rang early one morning. She opened it, and was presented with a bunch of flowers from a flower delivery boy - and a photographer, who was hiding in her front garden, took her photo and ran off.
The newspaper then sent her a letter telling her who she was and what she did, who her parents were, where they lived, and what they did, and told her they were going to publish her identity, and since her photo wasn't very flattering, it would be best for all concerned if she came in for a decent photoshoot.
The papers then published her identity, her family and everyone she knew found out about her and read her blog.
Her life was absolutely and totally devestated.
And for what?
Well, it was done so those papers could sell copies. There was no ethical reason or need for it - and indeed I say there was a bloody good ethical reason asserting that they should NOT publish that material.
So, as I've written in another post already, my point is that the law right now is wrong. People should have an expectation of privacy at all times in all places, UNLESS that privacy would lead to others being harmed.
And even if it did, the content doesn't actually belong to her, it belongs to (if anyone) Second Life.
Um, no. In Second Life, you own the content you create. Presumably this includes one's avatar.
Don't become a regular here -- you will become retarded.
I'll bet Dick Cheney was mortified when someone told him to to fuck himself during a CNN interview. That doesn't mean that Cheney has any right to squelch the footage.
Tom Swiss | the infamous tms | my blog
You cannot wash away blood with blood
You're funny
What?
Now we have lawsuits alleging gamers don't play fair? Jeepers...
This is a hacked account, for which the owner can not be held responsible.
> > Now imagine that a press photographer comes along - well, that's a completely different story.
> > Now I know whatever I do could be put on the front cover of a mass circulation publication and
> > literally millions of people would see it and read it.
> Then you would be completely within your rights to leave the party. You have no right to prevent
> someone who is allowed in by the host from taking pictures and printing them, and if you would be
> ashamed to have your presence or your actions in that place publicized perhaps you shouldn't be there.
Wrong. It is not for me to run and hide from where-ever the photographer goes. It is for him to only take photos *with my consent* (unless not taking them would lead to others being harmed, in which case he is right to ignore my wishes).
Your argument - it's like saying if the heavy mob come round and threaten to burn your shop down unless you pay, well, then you have every right to leave and set up shop somewhere else.
It's crazy - the real answer is that the heavy mob shouldn't be coming round and doing that in the first place.
It's one of the things art museums and some attractions at themeparks often like doing so they can sell you £2.50 postcards (it's for the protection of the exhibits, honest!).
However this often interferes with public interest which is a freedom granted to the press. Does public interest outweigh a private civil agreement made? I'm not a lawyer, I haven't a clue but it must've sparked a fair few expensive trials.
And yet its fine for you to try to make others live by your reactions?
Nobody is forcing you to look at it.
All right, I for one know that you are, in fact, incredibly naive and believe wholeheartedly that what "Anshe Chung" is doing is ethical.
You should try to understand that it is easy for many people to "mistake" your viewpoint for trolling because of several things:
Many of the people who are replying to you have written troll posts or been caught and embarrassed by trolls in the past. The humiliating experience of the latter is not quickly forgotten.
It is a likely viewpoint that a troll might take in order to get many heated replies.
It APPLAUDS the twisting of an extant US copyright law to cover a merely embarrassing situation involving things that happened in a public interview to a virtual avatar that Ailin Graef has probably attached a bit *too* much of her sizable ego to on what amounts to a video game.
You wholeheartedly endorse the overturning of United States case law that states that people have no reasonable expectation of privacy in a public place. We came to this understanding over many years in order to accomodate FREEDOM OF THE PRESS. Hence the article title. Whether you marred the distinction between public and private life intentionally or merely fumbled in your conflation thereof due to a grave lack of understanding, I do not ken.
You do all this because you think it's "not nice" to fling animated penises at people who happen to be playing the same computer game as you, so the ends justifies the means, and worse, that Graef's embarrassment over the humiliation her avatar suffered actually makes it "ethical".
These things are fairly outrageous to most reasonable people and whether your post was intended as a troll or not, I hope you can see how it was easily construed as one. Slashdot is subject to a tremendous number of intellectually dishonest and intentional troll posts, perhaps dozens in the larger articles.
I may make you feel, but I can't make you think.
She has a set of deed restrictions on her rental and sales to would make the most hardened lawyer blush (assuming a lawyer had a pulse). They include no screenshots without permission and no constant parties. No word if you mow your front lawn with your shirt off.
Youtube link! http://youtube.com/watch?v=29361_XFpTc Lets get this featured!
The bastards!
What?
I don't know anything about Second Live but I have found the WIKI article about her http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Anshe_Chung and after reading I think she might have deserved it.
Too bad we can't spawn massive dicks in real live. This would come in useful when our officials make an ass out of us on TV.
Everyone who buys Wild Hunt will receive 16 specially prepared DLCs absolutely for free, regardless of platform.
That was a show of pure freedom, as much as the American Founding Fathers could ever have hoped for.
Without even saying a word, whoever arranged for those pink penises to fly around like that managed to challenge anything the Anshe Chung character might have said during the interview. Such a tour de force only happens once or twice a decade. This video will rank up there with the likes of the "Raising the Flag on Iwo Jima" and the "The Unknown Rebel" photographs.
It's just a stupid video game, nothing more. And this woman has huge psychological problems if she is embarassed by anything happening in this game without any connection to her private life (which is clearly the case here). People need to relax and be human beings once again because what she does has implications in real life (with this DMCA crap) and hurt society as a whole just because of fkying dicks in a crappy 3D game... (the same kind of 3D we already had 10 years ago I'd like to add)
It was her decision to write about her sexual activity in an outrageously and exclusively public place called the Internet in the first place. I daresay that when she fell to the temptation of greed, getting her licentious book published, that her fate was already sealed and nothing would have stopped her family from knowing. If she was over 18 and not living at home, I don't see how her family knowing would've been a real problem. If either of those conditions were false, she shouldn't have written a public blog about her sexual activity.
Her life was absolutely and totally "devestated" because she was a slut and an attention whore.
I don't really have a problem with the paper as they seem to have only reported the facts.
If I was in her situation I would probably have deleted my blog when threatened by the newspaper.
I may make you feel, but I can't make you think.
If that video hadn't been published, I would have been robbed of possibly life-saving laughter. I would have been harmed. Yes, that's kind of sophistic, but the point is that it isn't so easy to define "harm", and frequently, in ethics, the magnitude of any harm (or any gain) isn't widely accepted to be the only issue, or even the most important one.
Let's turn this back on you. Suppose I claim that we should have an expectation of the right to pass on any information we want in any circumstances we want - UNLESS doing so would cause harm to other people. You may even be with me so far.
Now, suppose I further claim that this particular incident does NOT harm whatsername in any way that's important. Here's where you're going to want to fly off the handle. OK, explain to me why this "harm" to her, which has no effect whatsoever on her physical body, takes away none of her property, prevents her from doing nothing she could otherwise have done, and forces her to do nothing she otherwise would not have done, outweighs even the obviously pretty shakey claim of "harm" if I don't get a good laugh.
If you manage to do that, then you can try the really hard part... explaining why this notional harm that takes place in a game outweighs the very real and obvious harm to large numbers of people caused by people having control over all information about their behavior... or even the harm created by the chilling effect, if every time I publish something I have to guess whether some authority is going to agree with me as to whether or not it caused any possible kind of "harm" to somebody... especially if the authority seems to be willing to accept stick-up-the-ass, bluenosed embarassment at a joke in a video game as a legitimate form of harm.
Utilitarianism has sharp edges. Handle with care.
Oh, you're one of those people.
I remember the whole brouhaha when the "X-no-archive" header was created. That was before DejaNews came along, by the way, and DejaNews honored it from day one, so in fact you did have a choice about being archived by them, and you still have that choice, because Google still honors that header, as well as allowing you to rewrite history by removing your posts after the fact. Neither of those is a courtesy that I would extend to you, by the way.
DejaNews most definitely did not whip out some sort of magic time machine and recreate posts from the past. It's true that it got ahold of posts from the past, but it got them from archives made by others... and the existence of those archives simply proves that your expectation that your posts would evaporate was never correct, and was never reasonable. People were archiving Usenet in various forms from day one, and nobody ever had any control over who did it or what they did with the archives.
In fact, the early news readers used to print big warnings before you made your first post, telling you that posting should be treated as comparable to publication. There was never, even at the very earliest days of Usenet, the slightest reasonable expectation th
We all take for granted that the tools used to create a work aren't included as part of a copyrightable work. And when we use bits and pieces of existing works to create a new and original work, that is called fair use.
And when someone uses the DMCA take-down as a means to suppress others, especially in a creative or speech effort, there is certainly a cause for suit against the initiator.
I say that all people involved in the creation of the "attack scene" need to file suit against the people responsible for the initial abusive DMCA take-down.
While I basically agree with you, isn't this person making money off of the game? That might change my attitude a bit...
She's harassing users of the game in *real life*, having taken her grudge match outside of the game.
That's exactly the sort of behavior that - in any other game - would get users permanently banned.
And if Linden says that's not an option (negative press, etc) - then they have a larger problem in that one of their users has become more influential in their game than *they* are.
As an occasional 2nd Life "player", I thought the whole incident was hilarious until this abuse of the law kicked in - now I just think it's stupid.
I would think that in the context of SL she falls into the same catagory as real life stars that get harrased by paprazzi. by simple virtue of having her avatar specifically interviewed she is now a public figure.
We are all just people.
her dignity is maintained
dignity or 'freedom from embarrassment' is not protected under the constitution - free speech and peaceful protest are.
One thing that's interesting about this is that the very strong DRM in SL (at least inside the game context... it's not particularly effective outside the game) gives people an expectation of being able to absolutely control the distribution of stuff they make, because SL lets them control the distribution of stuff they make to an extreme degree (and, yet, a lot of people still argue they don't have enough control). The idea that a 512x512 pixel image (which is what a dress in SL is, basically) should get this kind of protection is typical of the game. SL clothing designers will argue with a straight face that it's a violation of their artistic expression for you to be able to let out or cut off the sleeves on a shirt you bought!
The thing is, if the people who are pushing for ever-stronger DRM get their way, this is the kind of future we're heading for, over the long term. As soon as they come up with a mechanism that would make your shirt disintegrate if you tried to change the tailoring, you're going to have people arguing that it's their right to control how you wear your clothes. Disintegrating DVDs are just the tip of the iceberg... and the changes won't come in big obvious jumps, just a gradual erosion of our rights as IP laws and DRM become stronger and stronger.
Earth to Toby, MOST of your posts in response to this article have been modded down as -1, Troll. I read at -1 and with no special modifiers to different types of moderation (everything is at +0, even Funny)
There's at least one Troll mod to your OP. It's already been explained to you that Overrated is often used in place of Troll because it is immune to meta-moderation. Whether or not most of the down-moderation on your original post is due to being modded Overrated is irrelevant to the fact that at least one poster has called you out as a troll and most of your posts are currently -1, Troll. That is how you are being perceived by the readers, like it or not. I blame a healthy respect for the Bill of Rights for this attitude towards your viewpoint. Simply put, you show no respect for freedom of speech or of the press.
Allow me to clarify, with apologies, insulting you was entirely unintentional. I believe the extent of your naievete is such that most people find it incredible, as in, unbelievable, hence, a troll. Please try to take constructive criticism with a little more maturity.
I see you did not address any of my actual logical arguments, which is somewhat disappointing. I'm starting to wonder myself whether you actually are a troll or are just infected with a trollish meme virus (expectation of total privacy in any place? c'mon!).
I may make you feel, but I can't make you think.
What's with the 1996 graphics?
Congratulations, that's one of the silliest analogies I've ever heard of.
So you think every aspect of your own personal view of ethics --- or indeed ANY view of ethics --- should be LEGISLATED? I'd think you were a Baptist if you weren't reading sex blogs.
Or maybe I still do.
..did these griefers make all those things fly at her? Did they break the game in some way, or is it part of the standard model?
You're wrong, and grossly out of touch with reality to boot. What you MEAN to say is that you blindly place your trust in the people around you, without their consent, and expect them to be held accountable for your misplaced trust --- indeed, you desire LEGISLATION to MAKE them held accountable for the trust you gave them THAT THEY DID NOT ASK FOR.
Your Usenet example is worse. You post something, knowing that a million people can read it, that it can be electronically stored forever, TRUSTING that it will only ever be visible to a PARTICULAR million people. And now you feel that your privacy is somehow violated because someone did what you blindly trusted them, for no reason, not to do?
You can force your trust upon people, I suppose, but it is unreasonable and unrealistic for you to expect them to be held accountable to it. And it is downright scary for you to wish for legislation that gives you the power to determine how everyone you encounter behaves.
the expected community standards of slashdot are such that your average poster here would have gladly flew penises at a female at a public event. I don't know why you expect otherwise.
Her life was absolutely and totally devestated.
And for what?
Truth.
If her life could be devastated simply by the revelation of her secrets--that is, without anyone doing anything unethical with those secrets once they're known--then the fault is squarely on her own shoulders. She should not have set her life up around a lie, and if she was not willing to face the simple consequences to her relationships of the revelation, then she shouldn't have done what she did in the first place.
Show me how this is different it she were a porn star who never told her parents until the new neighbor made the connection, and then you'll have a leg to stand on. Until then, the paper was entirely within its ethical rights (and possibly even its ethical obligations) to investigate her identity and publish their findings.
I've read your original post and this one, and I think the difficulty is the same: your expectations.
The expectation that what you do in a public forum will remain private or that you somehow can control it an expectation you can have only if you can create or rely on an environment of negative network effects. If there are resource limitations, such as disk drive space to hold Usenet posts or the combination of limited personal connections with limited interest in what you do or say, then you have "privacy" that is created by these limitations.
I can understand not liking the fact that networks and capabilities evolve. However, I do not understand why you don't simply change your expectations rather that propose creating artificial means of maintaining your "privacy" that if you think of all the implications will result in a great deal of harm and will likely not maintain your "privacy" anyway.
Using the DMCA to protect privacy is a bad idea. It is not the purpose of the law. Creating a law specifically for this purpose will have the effect of killing useful resources (or introducing a lot of ridiculous waivers) such as access to Usenet through Google. Technological means such as DRM have many of the same problems as legal means. Etc.
You can control what you say in public forums. You cannot control how other people might relate what you say to others, how this may be aggregated in the future (one day I may be able to just click on your Slashdot Id and find all your Usenet posts), how other people moderate what you say or what have you. Doing things in public means you have to deal with public consequences, such as moderations, that may not always be fair. But then again, life isn't fair. Deal with it.
No, it's not ironic at all. Even if your posts are moderated down to -3, slashdot users can still read what you have to say. Your post is not deleted. You are free to say what you like on slashdot, and others are free to mod you up or down. Total freedom.
This is a lot better than most forums, where posts get deleted if they don't agree with a moderator's sensibilities. Even if slashdot DID delete your posts, there's nothing wrong with that - because slashdot is a privately-owned forum. You still have your freedom to say what you want, but slashdot is under no obligation to publish it. Slashdot is not preventing you from saying the same thing in a letter to your local newspaper - or to say it while walking down the street.
However, you seem to be arguing for legal restrictions on what can be published - and using the threat of law to remove such speech from people's own private or public forums. Now that is a restriction on freedom of the press. Being modded down on slashdot is not.
... and then they built the supercollider.
If it wasn't for this stupid DMCA notice, I doubt I'd have ever known or cared about this video. Now everyone knows about it and millions of people will make copies of this just out of spite. Hasn't anyone learned this by now?
This level of 'brillance' is worthy of Paula.
Yes.
Preferences -> Comments -> Scroll to bottom, find "Comment Post Mode".
It still eats some stuff.
Nerd rage is the funniest rage.
So if I'm at the beach, and I actually want to take pictures of the ocean, but there a couple of people swimming where I want to take the picture, am I interfering with them, or are they interfering with me?
You are arguing against something that is the way it is because quite a few reasonable people prefer it.
Nerd rage is the funniest rage.
It would be doubly ironic if they threw you in jail for the offense given by your speech -- an action which you'd appear to condone.
If you think THAT'S bad, check out what happened when a Linden Labs employee tried to get me to take down photos of his "mate's" babyfur child porn.
Or maybe every instance that Prokofy Neva has called me a virtual Leninist griefing scum terrorist or whatever else has been on her litany of overreactions.
"Do you really need - should you actually have! - the right to find out my most intimate secrets, which harm absolutely no one else, and publish them in public?"
If you were acting out those secrets in public, then yes I do have that right, and yes I should. Of course, this is a red herring, as there's no secrets involved here The most hated company that pretends to be a person in the entire "game" got flying penised, there's no secrets involved, just hilarity.
True, but the perpetrators violated her reasonable expectation not to be attacked by flying penises in that context. I think this case is just silly, but the issue does come up with regard to more serious crimes. If a criminal films the rape of his victims, should newscasts be allowed to show it? Should pornographers be allowed to compile DVDs of such videos and sell them? If US soldiers strip and humiliate Iraqi detainees and take pictures/videos, should those be disseminated? Should they be edited to hide the genitals or maybe the faces?
I'm not arguing either way here, just noting similar (but obviously much more extreme) examples.
Speaking from a community management point of view, griefers (people who send flying penises into places to disrupt the activity) want attention. Knowing that the flying penises you sent to harass someone is being posted all over the internet? Holy crap, that's the griefer supreme jackpot. (That surely makes up for all the years that mommy didn't love you.)
So, I suspect that one of the real motivations here is to show that harassing Anshe Chung does not automatically equal free exposure on popular blogs and internet news sites, and to keep unflattering images off the net. The DMCA just happens to be a convenient and easy-to-use tool to accomplish these ends. In the end, it is possible that the takedown notices aren't anything truly malicious, just someone trying to make sure that they aren't harassed continuously on a game they happen to enjoy.
That said, I agree that it's a bit ugly the possibility of asserting IP rights just to get rid of something you don't like. In this case I'm not ready to get bent all out of shape, despite being a huge proponent of free speech, because there's a reasonable explanation. The ideal situation would be that online harassment such as what was experienced in the photos/videos would be illegal. Yet, I think we're still a long way off from having anything resembling enlightened laws when dealing with online spaces like this.
My thoughts,
Brian "Psychochild" Green
MMO developer's blog
The very idea of a flying penis scares the hell out of me.
The higher the technology, the sharper that two-edged sword.
No, "She" wasn't.
A bunch of polygons IN FULL PUBLIC VIEW by anyone signed on to second life were rendered near other polygons that look like a cartoon stage that doesn't exist.
This whole treatment of second life as if it were reality is completely silly.
Bavarian Purity Law of Rice Krispie Squares: Rice Krispies, Marshmallows, Butter, Vanilla.
If you have not "set up your life around a lie," then you won't mind having the answers to all these questions made public under your own name with the full knowledge of all of your family, friends, co-workers, enemies, and the public at large:
Have you ever told a lie? What was it and when and to whom did you tell it? Have you ever digitally stimulated your own anus? Did you enjoy it? How about anal insertion of foreign objects? Which kinds and for how long? Privately or with others present or assisting? Have you ever fantasized about having an underage person perform sexual favors for you? Which favors? By whom? A family member?
Tell us, please, for the sake of truth. What harm could possibly come of it?
Shop as usual. And avoid panic buying.
I know too little about SL's terms of service, etc. to have an opinion about this censoring of videos, but I have a hypothetical question about an analogous situation.
What would people think if YouTube or its ilk featured videos of actual rapes?
Shop as usual. And avoid panic buying.
Of course, the editors here would probably like nothing more than for users to regard reading and posting comments as an online game, with its concomitant addiction.
damaged by dogma
"If you were attacked by flying penises in a public place in real life, I could publish pictures of it and there's not a damned thing you could do about it, no matter how embarrassing or mortifying this might be to you. I could even (gasp) make money off these pictures."
Yes, but your constitutional rights wouldn't make you any less of an ass for doing so.
Actually I believe she wasn't on stage. She was sitting in front of a computer. Her character/avatar was on stage.
meh
Message to the plaintiff... Get a first life. Largest byte-holder on a server is definitely something you'll go down in history for.
Thank you very much!
Actually, Linden Labs (creator of Second Life) gives all intellectual property rights to the creators (i.e. those in the game). This is significant because Liden dollars (in-game money) can be exchanged for real money. Obviously, the design is the key in a virtual world so it's like unauthorized filiming at an art exhibit. I'm not saying that enforcing copyright with the DMCA is good or bad, but get your facts straight.
Or he could just go ahead and NOT publish it all over the internet? Gee, what a concept!
Sorry dude, you tell anyone your secrets and you've got to be willing to accept that they're no longer secrets.
She should have passed on doing the interview if she didn't want it made public.
And that's coming from someone with ScrewMaster for his handle.
Nah, someone worse than Prokofy Neva would make a post 10 miles long, as opposed to the usual five.
True, but the perpetrators violated her reasonable expectation not to be attacked by flying penises in that context.
Are you brand new to the internet or something?
Literalism isn't a form of humor, it's you being irritating.
He posts the Second Life Safari features at SomethingAwful, including the one that caused this.
I believe Michael Crook did the same thing with 10zenmonkeys when they show a pic of him while he was interviewed by Fox News. He tried to pull the same DMCA crap and the EFF is suing. Hopefully the out come of the case would set a precedence and let people know that this kind of crap won't work. See: http://www.10zenmonkeys.com/2006/09/18/in-the-comp any-of-jerkoffs/, http://www.10zenmonkeys.com/2006/11/01/eff-crook-d mca-lawsuit/
This Anshe Chung/Ailin Graef is just as bad as Michael Crook.
The very idea of a flying penis scares the hell out of me.
My high-school Latin teacher used every opportunity to remind the class that in ancient Rome, a winged phallus was a symbol of luck and protection.
Just thought you might want to know, in case you start having nightmares or something.
Don't become a regular here -- you will become retarded.
But I hope you respect other people enough to understand that for some, it *would* be deeply embarrassing and they *would* want it kept private.
As far as I'm aware, there are no laws protecting you from embarrassment. Nor should there be. Slander and libel laws protect your reputation, that's the closest, but not by a long way do they protect you from embarrassment. As you say "It is not for others to live by your reactions."
http://marriedmansexlife.com/
I can see you very fervently believe what you're saying. Foruntately for the free press, the law doesn't agree with you.
-- I'm old enough to have lived through six different meanings of the word "hacker."
And in that context, if anyone "owned" the experience of what ever transpired, wouldn't it more likely be CNet?
If you want news from today, you have to come back tomorrow.
Some people just don't know how to take a compliment.
+0 Meh
Well said. I was about to reply to his ludicrous USENET comparison (where he could have SIMPLY used X-no-archive), but you summed it up perfectly. Too bad people like him wont reply to posts that destroy his comparison so finitely and make him look even more stupid than his posts this thread already have.
Microsoft has a copyright on MS Word. Microsoft does not own copyright on any screenshots taken of MS Word. In this case CNN owns the copyrights on the footage in question.
There's a difference between being an ass and being an ass that should feel the wrath of the law.
Civil Liberties guarantee a certain degree of assdom, because if they didn't, we'd devolve into a fascist police state overnight.
Repetition does not transform a lie into the truth. - FDR
She's just like a guy in that ugly guys will create these online personas that make them rich, handsome, and strong.
She creates an online persona that makes her look hot. And then when you see the picture, she looks homely and is apparently a big pain in the ass.
She should thank god the guys put a digital penis in her hands... it makes her slightly interesting.
Um, no. In Second Life, you own the content you create. Presumably this includes one's avatar.
The content she creates, yes. The avatar, sure (as one of her creations).
But documentary footage "filmed" in a semi-public place? No. Though an easily-blurred line due to the abstract nature of the medium, this has a clear real-world equivalent - Someone taking pictures at a press conference.
Would the speaker at a press conference own the copyright to those pictures?
The detail about the penises doesn't matter one bit. Attribution of copyright has nothing to do with whether or not someone heckles the speaker.
Or to put this in a different light, on the same merits by which she could claim copyright, so too could the creator of the penises appearing in the video.
"Her" in this context is her avatar that is subjected to a (lame) parade of penises moving across the 3d scene in front of _it_. The way I see it, Graef should be the last person to turn to the state and its courts for enforcement .. unless she wants to really go Virtual=Real and pay _all_ the taxes in due on the "Lindendollars" she has accumulated.
Well, that is what I wrote =-)
No, it wasn't.
It's not difficult. All contracts must be voluntary...blah blah blah
I said who not how. Clearly you think that it should be you, or those that share your shallow and unrealistic views.
a silly example, but it highlights the point.
No it doesn't, it conceals it behind a smokescreen in the vague shape of Bertrand Russell's head.
Don't become a regular here -- you will become retarded.
- You become a 'mogul' in a VIRTUAL GAME, you make heaploads of money from it, then you file copyright. Well well, WHERE is the content you are 'creating' residing in ? In some virtual world which SOME OTHERS HAVE CREATED.
Who has the greater right on virtual stuff there now ? Definitely not you. The company has - the fact that they have had signed a contract with you to the effect that you can hold the rights there does not make what you create here rightfully yours.
Its just like living in an omnipotent creator's universe as its creation, and then 'creating' something and then suing the source creator over it.
Im a person of no religion other than my own spirit, but i have this to say to you :
Fuckin greedy bitch !
Read radical news here
Reasonable expectation. You have the reasonable expectation that things you do in private are private. You do not have the reasonable expectation that things you do in public are private. That's the difference between public and private you see. Things that happen in public are *drum roll* PUBLIC.
http://marriedmansexlife.com/
However, in this case, the entire scene, situation and video is probably copyright Linden Labs as any images would be generated by their software. The models and textures in the scene would be copyright their respective creators.
Just in case you where living under a rock these past few years, here is the link:
a _Bean.aspx
http://thedailywtf.com/Articles/The_Brillant_Paul
if someone beaned Ted Kennedy with a rubber phallus at a private Democratic Party fundraiser and someone caught a picture of it, would that not fall under fair use for it to be distributed for no cost
No, I don't think fair use (does that even exist anymore?) would apply here, since copyright isn't involved in any way. The person taking the picture would own the copyright on it, and could distribute it any way they see fit: for profit or not.
Unless you are suggesting the picture would be a derivative work of the suit? Which I would think would be utterly ridiculous.
Now, I have a fairly fuzzy (ok, extremely fuzzy) understanding of the case law around this, but a lot seems to hinge on whether the person taking the picture is actually a member of the press (isn't everyone nowadays?) and the delectably vaguely defined "legitimate news interest". Then again, I don't think you have a "reasonable expectation of privacy" when speaking at a function, even if it is held on private property (I'm pretty sure it's only your home that counts for this purpose).
sic transit gloria mundi
the fact is, just because you dont' like what some one has to say that doesn't give you the right to silence them. you are also allowed to copy works for use a parody, which is 100% what this was. if this bitch sent me a dmca for such a thing i'd say bring it on
If you mod me down, I will become more powerful than you can imagine....
I consider myself seriously hurt by not being allowed to view, and laugh my ass off at, that incredible video.
...she orchestrated it herself. As they say, there's no such thing as bad publicity.
If you can read this sig, you're too close.
Is that really a photo of her holding a giant penis prop ? Did she get where she is by doing porn or somthing ?
I can't think of any other reason why someone would have giant penises come back to haunt them.
Wanna fight ? Bend over, stick your head up your ass, and fight for air.
I don't think flying pensises would have been listed on the interview agenda. Even so, I think she's way out of line using DMCA to force take downs:
- There's no way a DMCA take-down notice could work on published video of a public gathering in real life - why should work for Second Life?
- She's the content owner of neither the video itself, nor the avatar and artwork, which were rendered using Second Life's proprietary engine and artwork.
She might have a chance at a general take-down notice for offensive content, but what's "offensive" to one person is hilarious to the rest of us.Yeah, that statement you made was stupid. Let's act like you never made it, okay? If you argue that it wasn't, I'll know that it's a trend and not just a simple slip-up.
US copyright law protects copying content for journalism and critical reviews of even fictional content. It doesn't protect copying for mere replay of entertainment. The court has to decide whether the copying is "informational" or "entertainment".
Now that US journalism is largely indistinguishable from entertainment, it will often lose its copyright exemption protection.
Not that you'd know that from watching TV.
--
make install -not war
Perhaps not, but now that's completely besides the point.
Beware: In C++, your friends can see your privates!
You're treating this like the room is REAL. It isn't. You can't compare rooms that can be created/destroyed/copied ad infinitum on a whim to real life situations.
-- David
I mean, I guess you're right, assuming a camera can steal your soul.
I do believe this has been addressed before. Furthermore your right to privacy is not guarenteed while in a public place.
It really amazes me that some people think they can dictate what happens on the internet, especially when they got money.
Support your local school shooter, give them your firearms.
I really do not care a fig if this violates AnsheChung's privacy or not, nor do I care which way this particular dispute is resolved, whether in the court of law or the court of public opinion. What interests me is that the issue and challenges thrown up in this case in SecondLife is very close to what would have happened in RealLife as well. ( The analogy of Mr Kennedy being insulted at a private Democratic party fund raiser ... as quoted by another post ... is particularly accurate)
What this means that SecondLIfe is approaching RealLife in many aspects ( OK, agreed, there is no hunger, no starvation and no terrorist related death, AS YET ) ... and this is a sign of convergence.
As we have more and more such convergence, we will see more and more MMORPGs like SecondLife emerging out the woodwork and entering mainstream, digital cyberia.
That is when a universal, 'open', browser like client will become a reality, and this will force the 'open' VRML( or equivalent ?) based servers to become the backbone of the new 3D-worldwideweb.
If flying penises and law courts further the cause, let us have more of it :-)
Insight into much, Influence over nothing !
I for one welcome our flying penis overloads
Just checking to see if you realize that this person.. whom you are so concerned about the dignity of.. started her SL career as a hooker.
We have enough youth, how about a fountain of SMART?
I was present back when Anshe pulled some nasty underhandedness with some a group of "furries" and removed all their content from an area they rented from her for disagreeing with her. This sparked a full on second life riot in the said area.
Hillarity ensued."
You know Anshe wouldn't get this treatment is she wasn't such a stuck up shark who abuses her position. No one has a problem with her being a business woman. The real problem is her attitude and her bad business practices.
I'd highly recommend that people simply stop renting from her, because the true cost (her attitude and DMCA crap like this) is really not worth it.
--Won't that be grand? Computers and the programs will start thinking and the people will stop. - Dr. Walter Gibbs
"However, what happened was that someone else humiliated her in public. *She did nothing wrong*."
Umm.. she might not have done anything wrong *at the event*, but let me be the first (evidently) to enlighten you that it doesn't take a whole lot of looking to find a whole lot of people that do not like a whole lot of things that she has done in her quest to accumulate a whole lot of land and make a whole lot of money.
We have enough youth, how about a fountain of SMART?
This is no different than someone getting a pie to the face, like when Bill Gates got that pie in his kisser. She wants publicity and to get all these interviews, but she also wants to perserve her privacy. Sorry babe, you can't have it both ways. Once you enter that public arena you can reap the rewards and but you also suffer the draw backs of that fame.
Just what the heck copyright prevention technology is being claimed as violated???
What you said.
Anshe's not pissed because of the flying weeners. She's pissed because a few weeks ago, she was on the cover of a mainstream business magazine. This isn't a DMCA violation. The DMCA is being used as a real-world club against folks like Peteykins, whose only real crime is Failure To Take Anshe Chung Seriously.
The RL assets of the person playing Anshe Chung aren't worth shit if people figure out that Second Life isn't a place for CNet interviews and Sun Microsystems press releases. Hence, her flailing and legalistic overreaction. She likes the perks that come with being on the cover of real-world business magazines, and Failure To Take Anshe Chung Seriously is the only thing that could stop her gravy train.
Flying penis attack on an avatar. Aha. Exciting. Wow. I can barely hold my water. Almost as exciting as watching the living room linoleum warp.
That would have been my reaction if I was just told that some avatar on some online game was attacked by waves of flying penises. Now, though, since the owner of the avatar caused a riot about it, I went out of my way to see it. After all, there's gotta be something worth being seen if she's actually going out of her way to start a lawsuit (or whatever) against a video.
Turns out my first hunch was correct, it ain't worth seeing. But, and that's the catch in it, I only saw it because she caused a riot about it.
So this was either a publicity stunt by her to get some attention (though I dunno why, I didn't buy anything from her yet and as far as I'm concerned won't in the future), or just really, plainly dumb.
We used to have a Bill of Rights. Now, with the rights gone, all we have left is the bill.
(+6, Fuck, I just laughed so hard I spewed beer all over the monitor as well as the keyboard.)
Well, as this is a DMCA issue, I think that UK law is as irrelevant as Turkmen law.
:P
Anyways, in the US the copyright on a public photo is held by the photographer. There are laws to protect people in their homes, and even to keep snoops from peeking over walls (in my town, if a wall is > 5' high, it's illegal to peer over, like trespassing). There are also laws to prevent hounding of people by photogs. However, it's generally felt that if you make too many limits on taking pictures in public, the same laws could be used to squelch media freedom in legitimate cases.
As for screenshots, I believe that's where Fair Use would come into play. So far the only way computer companies (ahem Apple) have been able to attack "sneak peaks" of their new OS's is from the angle of broken contracts (NDA's). One would expect that if there was a copyright issue, it would have come up already (e.g. the particulars of the desktop elements could be copyrighted by Apple).
Sorry, it's late, i've got the flu, and I'm rambling
Repetition does not transform a lie into the truth. - FDR
And she wasn't actually attacked or taped, unless somebody videotaped her in the computer room where flying wangs were somehow attacking her in real-life, as well.
I'm sure her public image is really suffering because of this alleged violation of the DMCA. And I'm also sure she had nothing whatsoever to do with this unprovoked penis attack. It was probably just a freak coincidence that all those penises decided to attack this relatively unknown wannabe celebrity all at once.
If you can read this sig, you're too close.
Ted Turner, maybe. But what about, CAPTAIN PLANET?
http://youtube.com/watch?v=QYFu__Q9ASU
I'd pay a hell of a lot of money to see it happen!
Now...if only I had a hell of a lot of money...
If Star Trek had the internet: Captain, we've received an IM from the romulans. "Surrender or be destroyed. LOL. o.O"
do you feel like a bigger man now?
i spent five minutes thinking and all i got was this crappy sig
What if someone took a video/picture of a public place that happened to have a monitor showing that scene?
I doubt that guy who takes those gigapixel pics of cities etc gets permission from everyone in his pics. In one of those "panoramic city skyline" pics apparently you can zoom to an apartment window and be able to see a poster on the apartment wall!
What a "dick-head" stunt to pull, an even bigger one she must be to think she has any expectation of privacy during a news conference. Isn't it ironic!
HAHAHAHAHAHA
Democrats and Republicans are like AIDS and Cancer, I want neither!
IANAL, but several visit Wikipedia, which completely disagrees with you.
The question about who owns the copyright here is murky, at best. It would probably be Linden Labs, except that they consider themselves an "online service provider" under the DMCA. Operating under this portion of the law means that you don't claim copyright on the creative works you host; you merely act as a conduit.
My guess would be that at this point, copyright for the individual objects is owned by the creator(s) of each object. The question then becomes whether the public performance of each object is fair use. I'd argue that in most cases, it will be. There's only one copyright holder complaining here.
LMFAO!!! You were modded "troll" for violating groupthink.
Slashtards -- stupid and happy as pigs in shit!
he had to take that in stride... it was, after all, the same phrase he'd used (i believe on the senate floor) when a democratic senator started asking about Halliburton
> And for what?
Beside the point; if it came out that Bush indeed invaded Irak under false pretences there would also be zero reason to tell the world of this truth? Lest it devastate his life?
The point is not the hurt that comes from revealing the truth, it comes from the fact that the lies that have been hold back can no longer be told.
And if you can be told only certain truths, it follows that you can be told what to think and do. That's why we have freedom of the press.
Microsoft has a copyright on MS Word. Microsoft does not own copyright on any screenshots taken of MS Word. In this case CNN owns the copyrights on the footage in question.
1. It's CNET, not CNN.
2. The "footage" is a video recorded by the people responsible for the, er...penis attack, not CNET.
3. The DMCA complaints is that that video contains Anshe Chung's copyrighted avatar, not that the video itself is copyright Anshe Chung.
If you don't have any idea what you're talking about, then why bother posting?
Don't become a regular here -- you will become retarded.
Nope, the copyright belongs to the person taking the picture (in the UK anyway).
Apparently he's afraid of competition.
Why not?
I had a run in with Anshe when she was new in SL. My partner and I had just bought a parcel of land from a club owner to have space to build and mess around. BigJohn was his name I think. Well the poor man set it with $L1 as my partner paid him with real cash (I know.. wtf, we fought over that one) and didn't set anyone on the list of who could buy. Along comes a 2 day old Anshe and buys it right in front of him, my partner and myself.
Long story short BigJohn had to contact LL and go through a grievance process as Anshe wouldn't speak to anyone on the matter, nor sell it back for less than 15k. We ended up getting it back, but her name stuck in my head as a sneaky unreasonable @#$$^. I haven't been on SL in a year or so. It's kind of sad I'm reading about her after all this time doing things like this, I'd had doubts that I'd been fair. Maybe I was. Then again, she makes decent money selling fake land. =P
I'll believe in corporations having personhood when Texas executes one... - advocate_one
What about the freedom of speech of whoever launched the flying penises? Besides, where are you guaranteed freedom of anything in a place owned by private citizens? If there's a "right to free speech" in Second Life, then there's a right for me to force you to let me into your house to preach about the Flying Spagh... er, Flying Penis Monster.
Read the First Amendment. The first four words are "Congress shall make no law". You only have a right of speech free from government censorship. And that's a specific real government, so don't go saying that Linden Labs is the government in Second Life, so therefore the First Amendment must apply to them too. It's their sandbox, they can do as they like. If you don't like it, start your own.
That being said, this Chung bitch was way out of line to abuse the DMCA and whine a complaint. HowTF does the DMCA apply?
#naabhaprzrag, #sverubfr-000, #agi-fcbafberq, negvpyr[pynff*=' negvpyr-ary-'] { qvfcynl: abar !vzcbegnag; }
...err, unless you were talking about teh FoS of the people posting the videos. In that case, in the immortal words of Emily Latella, "Neeeever Miiiind."
#naabhaprzrag, #sverubfr-000, #agi-fcbafberq, negvpyr[pynff*=' negvpyr-ary-'] { qvfcynl: abar !vzcbegnag; }
Under US law, which this is, the recorder of the video owns the copyright, or if someone paid them to record the content, they hold the copyright unless contracted otherwise (which it virtually always is for photographers).
So, everyone at the event, by invite or not, against instructions or not, *owns* their screenshots of the event and is fully entitled to publish it and/or grant others (YouTube) the right to do so.
This is true unless everyone at the event was being paid to create/film it, in which the organizations which paid them would have the rights mentioned above.
As someone else points out, there are exceptions to the ownership of a picture you take. Usually, you own the copyright to your additions to the derivative work (If you take a picture of my sculpture I don't own your picture - you merely can't lawfully publish it). The picture becomes a non-derivative work when the interest is mainly not my sculpture, for its own artistic reasons. For instance, if my sculpture broke, you could sell a video of the breaking, but not the high-res stills you took while it was in one piece. Further, a photo of the sculpture again becomes publishable if it's newsworthy and people can see if from public property - the picture isn't the sculpture, it's the sculpture in the park, which is not just a blatant copy (depending on context).
The essence of this is that there are very few times when someone isn't able to video something, or own the content when they do. They might not be able to publish it without violating other copyrights, but this almost always goes in favor of the creator of the potentially derivative work.
It was to take place in the Fecund Life virtual world, that _was_ clearly on the agenda. Therefore anything that can happen within Fecund Life should have been expected as a possibilty.
I was expecting the 2 101-ers to jump on stage and start taking part in wild and rampant buggery to be honest, just to complete the whole farce.
Also FatPhil on SoylentNews, id 863
I'll pass. My *first* life is already busy enough.
The creator of the visual is the person with the virtual camera.
As mentioned above, a photo of a man wearing an Armani is not copyright Armani.
Also FatPhil on SoylentNews, id 863
That was CNET, not CNN. Different things.
Call it nitpicking, but personally I'd consider an interview
by CNN (which was not the case here) more significant, than
an interview by CNET (which was actually who conducted the interview)
Let alone one in an online game. I guess spending that much money on
what essentially amounts to an online game makes people take the game
(and themselves) a little bit too seriously.
No, it's not ironic at all. Even if your posts are moderated down to -3, slashdot users can still read what you have to say. Your post is not deleted. You are free to say what you like on slashdot, and others are free to mod you up or down. Total freedom.
/. I bet if there was a poll taken, or maybe the /. admins could tell us, that we would find most people filter at 0 or 1. That is the result of the voting and filtering system.
/. members tend to be rabid (to the point of detriment of the results) freedom of speechers and if they have mod points will mod downwars any *perceived* threat to freedom of speech whether the threat is a true threat like state sponsored censorship or non-threats like copyright issues where a copyright owners rights are violated.
/. works is silly. It is NOT a warm and fuzzy eglatarian (sp?) society.
Nah, your ignoring how people use
It is also a a blinding reality that the most vocal
That is the point the GP was making. Ignoring how
So people are buying virtual land which has been artificially restricted. Only in 21st century 'RealLife' could this concern people. What happens if Linden Labs allows a virtually infinite map, or gateways to private SL world servers? And why would any sane person give a shit?
http://www.internetisshit.org/print.html
Roger that, folks: I was wrong.
In this case, the claim made here - "copyright in a photograph belongs to the subject" - is wholly incorrect. According to the UK Patent Office,As anyone who's ever been involved in organising a wedding will be all too aware...
We must have had the same teacher. I don't think he had giant pink wiggling, dancing, computer-generated floating dicks in mind though.
The higher the technology, the sharper that two-edged sword.
My Crocodile Sense is tingling... Given how much she enjoys being in the media, I suspect she also loves being at the center of this controversy.
Prokofy Neva once called me the most dangerous person she had ever encountered in Second Life.
I took that to mean that I was doing something right and talking sense against her views, which she didn't like.
She seems to have bought herself a really heavy duty Reality Distortion Field. The sad thing is, the more mind-bonglingly ridiculous her statements become, the more exposure she gets.
The likelihood that she's actually someone's experiment in social AI is growing stronger, because it's unlikely that a human could keep up such a vitriolic one-sided tirade of utter nonsense for so many months and years. She's like Eliza, but abusive instead of quaint. They're both equally uncomprehending of the other side of a discussion.
"The question of whether machines can think is no more interesting than [] whether submarines can swim" - Dijkstra
I think if Anshe Chung has an issue with ANYONE, it's CNET. They failed to turn off public rezzing of items and scripts in their area, therefore they failed to take reasonable measures to prevent this attack. The video is a straw man... it'd happen in RL as well if someone "crashed" a live interview throwing hot-dogs across the stage. It doesn't happen much during professional interviews because security is usually tight. This simple switch on the land owned by CNET would have prevented this attack. By failing to do so, they're liable by failing to secure their land from such an attack.
Yeah, I realize the griefer himself was in the wrong as well, but he actually just didn't take Chung as seriously as she apparently takes herself. Honestly, I couldn't care less and I'm not a griefer, but I actually found it rather amusing.
I don't know why people think there is any question as to the legality of these threats.
In the real world, you automatically own the rights to your likeness, just like this woman owns the rights to her avatar. However, this woman is a public figure; she is the public face for an entire realm of in-game players and has already been interviewed by some big-name magazines. She obviously doesn't mind the media attention, because she was on stage for yet another interview when this happened. Libel law rules that no member of the press can be held liable for reporting something that happened to a public figure in a public space.
So, remember when Fabio was attacked by that duck on that rollercoaster? Same thing, except drop the coaster and add a flock of flying penises. She was a public figure in a public space and something newsworthy happened to her. Fame is a bitch; deal with it.
DejaNews invented the X-No-Archive header, so it can hardly predate DejaNews. And yes, I was there as well.
And even before DejaNews, one of the standard pieces of advice given to new users on Usenet was "Don't post anything you wouldn't want a potential employer to read 10 years from now". Not everybody read these advices though, and some people was chocked when they discovered their posts wouldn't go away.
> My high-school Latin teacher used every opportunity to remind the class that in ancient Rome, a winged phallus was a symbol of luck and protection.
...
Odd. They sound a lot more like something normal people would want protection from
>Odd. They sound a lot more like something normal people would want protection from ...
Whoever said the ancient Romans were normal?
There's a (very short) debate on the talk page about this, but excluding vandalism, the wording has essentially stayed constant since it was added in 2005. I'd argue that that's a strong sign of community consensus.
That just shows a lack of creativity. Not sure though if it'd be on his part or that of the Romans.
Anshe Chung is an *hole, but didn't know that she is also lunatic/psychotic. She WILL fall.
For me it seems, that "world police" goverment's president and Anshe Chung shares the same degree & type of mental illness, unfortunately, there's a lot of people that fails to notice that from being too naive(or something else, which i won't mention here).
These are my 2 cents, like it or not.
.
.
.
(Do i now get sued by Anshe Chung for my opinion?)
Pulsed Media Seedboxes
"... grandfather liked it," said Chester, averting his eyes from a lithograph titled Rush Hour at the Insemomat."
I've always wondered about what exactly the Insemomat in your sig looked like. I have a mental picture now, and it's rather disturbing.
Not in all of the US, each state has its own copyright laws. In California all photographs are copyright of the people in the photograph. Hollywood made damn sure of this, so its illegal to photograph celebrities, even when they appear in public ;)
ASCII stupid question, get a stupid ANSI
Now that you mention it, Wikipedia has an article that includes at least one example of this phenomenon.
MediaWiki developer, Total War Center sysadmin
But the posts are still available if one chooses to see them. Nothing about freedom of speech says that I must read your speech, or that slashdot is obligated to publish them. The fact that they are not deleted, but just modded down makes slashdot far more open than the majority of forums, which do delete posts.
... and then they built the supercollider.
Yeah ... no kidding. If you want an actual picture, go watch the video of the "interview" the article talks about.
The higher the technology, the sharper that two-edged sword.
I just saw Ailin Graef and she looks ugly and fat.
But I guess in SL no one knows you are an ugly fat dog who gives you an imaginery blow job.
In virtual worlds seems that virtual sex sells too....uglllllly
Since you seem incapable of not reading, I'm compelled to taunt you some more, especially by insisting on the point that you find so "disgusting." You claim there can be no analogy between the public penis-swarming and a rape, on what grounds? that one is legal and the other is not. Bravo! You've recognized that for two things to be analogous, they have to be different. Have I ever claimed otherwise? No, I haven't. However, here's a news flash (news to you, that is): two things different in one respect can be the same in another. This claim is what you find so "disgusting" that you can't respond substantively to it? I patiently tried to explain to you just what the issue is, and you insist on not getting it. It's kind of like the stupid debates people get into about the analogies between the Iraq War and the Vietnam War. (The question is not stupid, but the way people deal with it is, one side shouting "they're totally not the same" and the other "they totally are.") You seem particularly enraged by my little (TM) comment, so let's talk about that some more, too! You claim that I responded that you "forgot the /. tradition of 'TM' after Real Life": I did no such thing. I'm not aware of any such tradition. My only (snarky) point was that you treated the ordinary phrase "real life" as if it were a trademark by capitalizing it. You keep fulminating about this, as though I were some kind of Slashdot pedant, policing people's posts for proper procedure. Not so. I still don't know what you're talking about. Hope you enjoyed your tiny spittle-flecked, back-arching ragegasm.
Finally (unless you respond with more abusive illiteracy, moral and otherwise), let me say that you missed the point about my picking out the word "illegal" in your euphemistic and pleonastic "illegal sexual assault against a person": that it was a pleonasm. You seemed to recognize the problem earlier, but now have forgotten it again. So sad.
P.S. The "charitable" reading I offered relied not only on the words of yours that you helpfully reproduce, but also on your incoherent vitriol against VRML, whatever that is.
Shop as usual. And avoid panic buying.
That's the tradgedy of Second Life. You can't give a huge gaggle of people the ability to make anything they can think of, and assume that nobody is going to make guns, or large flying pink members, or whatever. Second Life gets hit with grey goo attacks and vandalism because Linden Labs did not prepare properly, and do not handle problems very well when they spring up. On a side note, I did not anticipate seeing anybody being showboated by gigantic flying wangs today.
A lot of the discusion here seems to focus on dignity. If this statement is true, this person obviously didn't see dignity as a problem in the past when profit was more important.
You'll have to forgive some of these guys, WNight. See, we in the U.S. have gone through roughly a century in which every single thing that could conceivably benefit anyone had a UPC symbol attached to it and started getting traded on the commodities market.
Criterion, it's like this: it is only rational to exchange scarce tokens (i.e. money) for scarce resources (CPU cycles). Pretend your brain is an SL server. Now picture two things:
1. A ten-foot by ten-foot square
2. A ten-mile by ten-mile square
During which of those did you use up more of your breakfast?
My turnips listen for the soft cry of your love
My high-school Latin teacher used every opportunity
Did he like gladiator movies?
Would you complain if he preferred mussels to clams?
Wrong. The first four words are "Congress shall make no". :P
Isn't this just a video game? Griefing happens in every online game you play, why is everyone going apeshit over it in Second Life? If you aren't having fun because of griefers, play a different game! If you still want to play Second Life, ignore the griefers! If you're main source of income is through Second Life and the griefers are making it difficult, either find another source of income or deal with it. Why is that so fucking difficult for these people to do? The internet is so stupid.