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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."
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.
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.
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
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!
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.
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
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.
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.
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
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.
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
Actually I believe she wasn't on stage. She was sitting in front of a computer. Her character/avatar was on stage.
meh
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/
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
The ideal situation would be that online harassment such as what was experienced in the photos/videos would be illegal.
Seriously? You think it would be "ideal" if there were laws regarding what kind of polygons people can put on the same screen as other people's polygons? Unless they are exploiting game mechanics, the "griefers" are just as much "playing a game they happen to enjoy" as anyone else. Oh, and it's a "reasonable explanation" for someone being able to use criminal law to avoid "unflattering" attention? Give me a break.
Saying that you are a proponent of free speech in the middle of that nonsense is a huge freaking joke dude.
sic transit gloria mundi
No, why do people have this broken property metaphor? Virtual space is infinite, why buy into a system where it's artificially limited.
Why "rent" a tiny plot from some virtual landlord who thereby controls your server resources? Why are acreage and CPU power linked?
SL is a horribly designed system, imho because Linden Labs wanted to design a cash cow - have people paying maintenance fees on their creations when they total a few K in a database. If Ms Chung didn't exist they'd have invented her - someone to convince everyone else that "land" in the game has value.