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."
Unfortunately, there exists no Internet Court of Law existing solely on the Internet with Internet-spanning enforceability for regulating disputes over downloaded music.
Oh, look, I can already see in the distance the World of Warcraft players flooding into Slashdot to tell people to get a first life.
It's not a virtual dispute. It's a dispute between a real-world business who hired an artist to create something which was paid for with real money, and an artist who got a contract before performing or being paid for the work that assured the artist he would keep certain rights.
And the business taking his work, and selling it lock stock and barrel to a third party, which they had no right to do, and resulted in a "clone" of his work appearing in another virtual world, where he wasn't given any credit for it (thus a very real breach of his creative rights).
This would be as if an artist for a character in any video game licensed artwork to the game publisher to be used in a specific production, and required a certain royalty for every copy of the game published.
But shortly after release, the game publisher decided it wasn't profitable, scrapped the game, and sold all the bits (including the artwork) to another company, who picked up the picture and displayed it for various uses as their own creation.
... 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.
Actually, no. If there was no contract, he wins. Slam dunk. Because copyright is automatic, and has to be explicitly transferred.
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
You're incorrect from what I read from the article. He did not sell all rights to his artwork and it was basically moved to a different game with his name removed.
I can see his point, but if he didn't have it in a contract in writing, he's probably screwed. I sympathize. My only real payment for my Open Source work in Linux is that if you grep for my name in the various ChangeLogs, you will find it. I do feel his pain.
Oh, look, I can already see in the distance the World of Warcraft players flooding into Slashdot to tell people to get a first life.
/rude
That was uncalled for.
If you commission me to create some graphics for a website, and the contract says I retain the copyright; you can't then sell my graphics to another website.
That is essentially what happened here.
Actually, no. If there was no contract, he wins. Slam dunk. Because copyright is automatic, and has to be explicitly transferred.
I've been in an intellectual property dispute over some code I wrote, a situation very similar to Voom's.
If I remember all this correctly, there are five or six situations where it's not true that explict transfer of copyright is required. "Work-for-hire" is almost one. IIRC, to be a "work-for-hire" requires a written contract that specifically uses the words "work-for-hire". So the author of a "work-for-hire" does NOT retain copyright. The other four or five situations which I don't recall also do NOT require a written contract to transfer copyright.
The reason why you hear phrases similar to "copyright must be explicitly transferred" is that it's very, very easy to make sure those four or five situations don't apply to you as an author. And any author with half a brain makes damn sure they put themselves where they retain copyright by default. It remains to be seen if Voom has half a brain or not.
FWIW, I recall that there are also some legal hurdles from case law that Voom has to clear before it would be found that he retained copyright. I think the case most of those hurdles are from is CCNV v. Reed. I know two of those hurdles are (1) where the work was done, and (2) how much supervision the author was under while creating the work. (I remember those because in my dispute I did all the work on my hardware and was under no supervision whatsoever.)
If Voom did the work on Second Life servers and was under close and continuous supervision of Second Life management, he may not have cleared those hurdles and may very well not have retained copyright. If, on the other hand, the product was developed on his own hardware and the only contact he had with Second Life after signing the contract was using FTP to send them the results, he probably did retain copyright.
So no, this doens't appear to be a "slam dunk" at all.