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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."
The fact is that this guy was commissioned for an artistic project, retained full rights, and then had his property deleted.
No, not quite.
He did some code work but retained some rights to it. The client sold it contrary to their agreement. Simple contract issue, has little at all to do with "virtual property" as the concept is being bandied about here, has to do with some code and artistic work that was misappropriated.
If you want news from today, you have to come back tomorrow.
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.