Slashdot Mirror
Designer Fights For Second Life Rights
An anonymous reader writes "A London-based industrial designer has had his work ripped off in Second Life and is now looking to file a DMCA grievance against his client. Commissioned to recreate the French Quarter in New Orleans, the designer, Gospel Voom, spent six months on the project, only to sign on to Second Life after its completion to find it was deleted by the client. She claimed it was taken down because it wasn't making money. However, despite having signed a contract that let Voom retain creative rights over his work, he later found out it was sold to another community, OpenLife, without his knowledge or permission."
Well, if they are going to use virtual currencies for virtual "property," they might as well settle this through a virtual court or at least beforehand let a (virtual) third party somehow be able to serve as a court with virtual enforcement. I'm serious.
Tonight at 11, a developer performs work for a client, then whines when the client does what he wants with the work! In other news, scientists say they've discovered that water is wet, and that fire is hot. All this and more, after Scrubs.
Hey, maybe they should get a FIRST life, amiright?
Slashdot: providing anti-social weirdos a soapbox, since 1997.
... at least, if the summary is accurate and precise.
Oh wait, this is slashdot. Of course the summary's incomplete and/or biased. I haven't RTFA, someone tell me what's missing?
... to see how this thread will go. Soon it'll be flooded with debates about virtual property, whatever that means, and whether you should be able to prosecute someone for murdering your Elf Lord or whatever. The fact is that this guy was commissioned for an artistic project, retained full rights, and then had his property deleted. Take an entirely analogous situation: suppose that Ray Charles -- whose contract stated that he owned the original masters of all his recordings -- goes into a studio to record an album, and the studio subsequently throws said recordings away. Ray would have a pretty solid case, and so does this guy. This case has nothing to do with the MMO aspects of the incident; however, I can solidly say that at least half the population of Slashdot will *make* it about that, somehow.
I used to read Caltizzle. I was a lot cooler than you.
Sounds like a simple contractual dispute. Why is this a story?
If you want news from today, you have to come back tomorrow.
It was the designers fault for giving his work full permissions. Welcome to Second Life, if we can copy/resell/give out for free, and we want a quick buck, chances are we will no matter what you tell us. Even with Second Inventory you will need full permissions to move it across SL grids, and CopyBot (last i checked) was rendered useless by the latest SIM software.
On first sight this news item seems to be about a copyright infringement case, but then the real news struck me: Apparently there are people who still use Second Life! Who are these people? Why haven't they moved on to a fresh hype?
If no, then he's fucked.
If yes, then, if it was any good, it covers stuff like this.
No story.
Who gives a shit?
I remember when SecondLife opened up the French Quarter area and had a virual mardi gras fund raiser for New Orleans disaster relief efforts. Virtual crews made virtual floats and everything. I'm sad that it's gone. Here's a screen shot from the event... http://livejournal.3feetunder.com/slmardigras.jpg
She claimed it was taken down
he later found out it was sold to another community, OpenLife, without his knowledge or permission
From the actual article sounds like it's a he... why the crappy editing?
Having read the article, it's clear that the designer has no idea how virtual worlds and especially Second Life (SL) and its many clones like Opensim work. He's making up a legal theory about virtual property and artist rights in virtual worlds that simply doesn't exist, yet. It's wishful thinking.
If he created something in the physical world, the law provides him with some default protections, for good or for bad, and he still has those protections now. If he wanted permanence of his works, he should have held onto his own copies, not given away his backups --- that's his own negligence, nobody else's.
The following is how virtual worlds of the Second Life type work, condensed: If you make some object privately, nobody can see it. When you place your object into the virtual world, in order for others to see it the world has to make copies of it and send those copies to everyone in the region, so that everyone present can see your object rendered in their clients. Everybody gets a copy of your object: copying and distribution is an inherent part of the implementation.
Under such an architecture, real-life artist's restrictive expectations and control-freakism over distribution of their creations just doesn't work. This artist didn't understand the nature of the medium for which he was creating. And while he'll probably try to bring lawyers and the DMCA into it, that whole area is a complete unknown in the context of virtual worlds at present. Judges don't know and can't know how it works either (they're still catching up with how the Internet works anyway), and past legal precedent is largely inapplicable as it would break the worlds.
What's more, all of this is changing continually and at an increasing pace too, and nobody knows where it's going --- the 3D metaverse is still an extremely fuzzy evolving concept. The only thing that's very clear already is that virtual goods do not obey the same rules as physical goods, and so applying current real-world laws to the virtual situation is (i) broken by design, (ii) obsolete before it even starts, and (iii) not enforceable.
In addition, both the clients and the Opensim SL-lookalike world are open sourced, which is one reason why the pace of development is so huge, yet it also means that the guarantees are even fewer. It's important to understand this if you're going to work in the area. The artist is making up a case out of ignorance here.
"The question of whether machines can think is no more interesting than [] whether submarines can swim" - Dijkstra
And they're so much work to change!
On the upside, attacks of flying penises are all but unknown. Nearly.
http://rocknerd.co.uk
Please note i am a SecondLife member not a lawyer or any kind of legal person
First off the contract should has very clearly stated "the work being done has been created for use on the SecondLife Primary Grid and is not authorized for use on any other grid Beta Teen or other"
Second if you want to "backup" a build like that then all you have to do as the creator is install a copy of say the Greenlife Emerald third part client and then select the item and pick "export" from the pie menu
this will create a full copy of all prims and textures in the folder you select.
Third part of the metadata of an object is
1 the creator
2 the current owner
3 the group as set by the creator or current owner
Fourth you do not receive a "copy" of the object just because you happened to go to that sim apart from the other
thousand prims data that you have in cache (and somehow fishing the object out of the cache is non trivial)
if anybody is confused hang around the NCI Kuula setup and find the Wolf
Any person using FTFY or editing my postings agrees to a US$50.00 charge
Yeah, there's a lot of stuff I'd like to try to build in virtual communities like Second Life, but it's stuff like this that makes me shy away. I think if I had to create virtual mockups for architectural / engineering review, I'd try to use blender and maybe try to get it working in the unreal engine if the blender game engine wasn't enough. Not as much community access as SecondLife provides, but at least you work would be safe.
Is there a better summary of events available somewhere? A lot of people are talking about the original buyer of the work having re-sold it, and there's nothing about that in the linked article. Also it mentions the DMCA without explaining how that could be relevant.
Today I have founded a new organization, the Virtual Worlds Liberation Front (VWLF)!
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We shall agitate against "permission flags" and others forms of DRM and copy protection in virtual worlds. If necessary, we shall strive to create new worlds free from these digital chains!
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Think about it. . . How would the WWW have been hobbled if nobody could look at the HTML code of most web pages to learn how it works? How about you couldn't link to websites outside of your own domain? (That would pretty much kill the whole point of the thing, wouldn't it?) What if you had to buy JPEG images, and they couldn't be modified, or transferred to other servers, or even used on more than one page at a time? (Forget about Google Images!) The inhabitants of Second Life have come to take these kinds of absurd restrictions for granted. Plus, there are occasional witch hunts against "pirates" running copybot, or glintercept, or various hacked viewer programs -- even though these tools can be used for perfectly legitimate purposes.
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This sad state of affairs, more than anything else, is what's hobbling the growth of virtual worlds. The VWLF will work toward establishing environments based on sharing and collaboration, not restrictions and punishment.
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For those who think it can't work. . . The WWW works. Linux works. Wikipedia works. A virtual world with freedom can work!
Second Life has a piss-poor reputation for helping content creators retain control over their creations. Skins (texture over avatar models), clothes, etc. are routinely ripped off because, amongst other reasons, they're cached as individual TGA files on the client computer, and 3rd party SL clients are allowed. These 3rd party clients (e.g. CopyBot) can and have been coded to save any texture desired to a place where the user can then upload to SL and use as their own (complex models are made from what are called sculpted primitives, or "sculpties", which are stored and uploaded as UV map images in TGA format)
Also, Linden Lab (the creators of SL) offer little to no recourse for stolen property, and have very arbitrary and frequently ass-backwards policies. For example, you can make a claim (true or not) that a user is underage and have them banned for 1 or more days almost instantly; to challenge the claim you have to contact Linden Lab (I think by phone, or snail mail) by which time you have been unbanned.
However, when dealing with content theft, you have to file a DMCA request and - this is the best part - FAX OR MAIL IT to Linden Lab, and they may or may not put it on the back burner. You can wait days or weeks while they get to your complaint.
An analogy is a country in which there is almost constant theft and assault, you are allowed almost no tools to protect yourself or your property, and a small number of magistrates wield arbitrary control over property, life and death (i.e. temp and permanent banning) with no real laws.
That SL isn't failing as fast as it should be is probably due only to a fairly large user base's average noobishness and inertia. /rant
"I would say that 99 per cent of what my father has written about his own life is false." - L. Ron Hubbard Jr.