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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."
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.
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!
The most retarded thing I have ever seen or heard of in my life.
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.
...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
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
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.
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!
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
...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.
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
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
..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?
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.
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.
The very idea of a flying penis scares the hell out of me.
The higher the technology, the sharper that two-edged sword.
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.
Actually I believe she wasn't on stage. She was sitting in front of a computer. Her character/avatar was on stage.
meh
I would think that you were falling victim to a slippery slope fallacy. Rape is rape. Flying penis interruption is not rape, not even close.
Frankly, I think this woman got off lightly. In a virtual world I'd be assassinating her annoying ass or burning down her holdings just for fun. If I really cared about the press fawning over a glorified real estate developer I could just watch TV in real life.
She should have passed on doing the interview if she didn't want it made public.
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.
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/
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
- 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/
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 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.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
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.
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.
Because it's less expensive, and you have a nicer environment to call your virtual home.
To buy land from LL you have to look at this breakdown.. first off you have to have a premium membership, which is $9.95 a month if you pay monthly - $7.50 month quarterly or $6.00 month anually, which is offset somewhat by a weekly stipend of (currently) 300L which equates to aprox $57 a year. With a premium membership, you recieve free tier of 512 sq meters of land which will support 114 prims. This means you only have to buy the land, which if you're lucky first land (land which can only be bought by an av as it's first purchase of land) will come available to you for L$512 (512 lots will normally be seen going for L$5k-9k). Note that first land has been really scarce nowadays, and the landbarons are using every trick in the book to obtain them. So, the first piece of land seems cheap enough, and maintenance is free on it, but there is still the money you are paying every month to have the privelege of "owning" this very, very tiny, peice of land. Sooooo... you buy more (cuz it's hard to make anything nice with only 114 prim allowance) paying some very outrageous prices for land right now as we are in the midst of a serious land bubble. Ok, you've spent 10's or 100's of thousands of Linden (or equivelant cash) for your spot of land that is large enough to support a nice build for yourself. Here come the maintenance fees (known as tier)... $5 a month for an extra 512, up to pretty much whatever you want to pay. A relevent example.. an extra 4096 is $25 tier, which in addition to the free 512 give you aproximately the same prim allowance I have on the land I rent, right around 1k prims. I pay the equiveland of around $18 rent for my place, instead of the $26.5 to $35 a month fees plus purchase of land outright. Now.. if you're not a land baron, why would you buy land instead of renting?
We have enough youth, how about a fountain of SMART?