Stop Content Theft : Art in a Virtual Era

Yesterday we posted that Rezzable was possibly selling stolen content. We were wrong. This is a new post going up for you to comment on if you want. The old post will be deleted at the end of the day since I don’t think Rezzable really wants our unfounded accusations turning up when someone googles them.

Here’s our retraction:

(Editor’snote: We have comfirmation from Rezzable that the content was purchased in good faith from a 3rd party. Shopping Cart Disco apologizes to the Rezzable team for flinging the mud in their eyes.)

Update: It’s come to our attention after speaking to multiple people that the original content creator, Victorias, gave permission to have her textures uploaded and sold in Second Life. We apologize to Moxie Polano for any hurt our wrongful accusations may have caused her.

Someone is STEALING my work…
====================

Please read the following, and look at the photos, you decide for yourself if she has been using copybot which violates the LL Terms of Service.

I would appreciate if you could help me by filing an ABUSE REPORT (Help menu —> Abuse Report) to Linden Labs, if enough people do it, then she will be banned from Second Life.

A future DMCA will remove her sculpties from the database, so do not purchase them.

…

Seems rather calm for somebody who has been accused of stealing my sculpts don’t you think?

[3:56]  Tesla Miles: have you any idea how long it takes to make a good sculpted shape?
[3:59]  Tesla Miles: please stop selling my sculpts, thanks
[4:00]  Phoebe Loring: what sculpts? i dont sell your sculpts. i make them myself with ac3d
[4:00]  Tesla Miles: yes you are selling the sculpts from my Sherry shoes
[4:01]  Tesla Miles: i’m the only person who closes a sculpt like that
[4:01]  Tesla Miles: nobody does it like that, because I use unorthodox techniques
[4:01]  Tesla Miles: so stop pretending and remove the sculpts, thanks
[4:01]  Phoebe Loring: like i said, i make them myself
[4:02]  Phoebe Loring: i make the shoes myself and thats that

Please compare the photos below, mine is the lower ad. They are clearly the same sculptmaps that I created, except she may have scaled parts of her copy differently.

Ban Phoebe Loring and Markus Senne from you lands to protect your work!

Thanks,

Tes

Well, it appears upon clarification from our friend and fellow skinner Annyka Beckers that Redgrave has indeed violated copyright with at least a few of her celebrity skins… best of all being the new Naomi Campbell skin.

Skin on the right is an example of the copyrighted image used in the Sims 2, previously mistaken for  cross-virtual-world ripoff.

Read the rest of this entry »

Just an update…

This morning, the House of Representatives passed H.R. 4279, the so-called PRO-IP bill. The entertainment industry is crowing about that one, which will give them a long-sought after prize: a government commitment  to federal copyright cops at the Department of Justice.They’ll not only get a new “Intellectual Property Enforcement Division,” but the bill would carve out money from existing grants to combat computer crime and earmark part of that to police copyright infringement. Basically, the bill is meant to put some FBI muscle behind those FBI warnings on movies and TV shows.

Government lawyers, of course, would be far cheaper copyright cops than litigators at Hollywood law firms like Munger Tolles & Olson or Mitchell Silberberg & Knupp; especially when taxpayers foot the bill. And the industry might eventually get what it really wants—enforcement of criminal penalties.

The bill was sponsored by Detroit Democrat John Conyers. Only 11 Representatives voted against the bill on the floor—seven Republicans and four Democrats, including Silicon Valley Democrat Zoe Lofgren and former Democratic presidential candidate Dennis Kucinich. Before they took a mile, they gave an inch: the House IP subcommittee passed H.R. 5889, an “orphan works” bill that removes the massive penalties associated with copyright infringement if the work belongs to a copyright holder who can’t be identified or found. The bill was sponsored by Rep. Howard Berman, known as Hollywood’s man in Washington. The bill moves ahead to the full Judiciary Committee. If passed, it goes into effect in 2013. Freedom to use orphan works has long been a cause of library activist like Internet Archive founder Brewster Kahle.

Thanks to The Prior Art.com for that little tidbit that missed the major media.

I’ve had more than my share of these sorts of emails recently, so I’m taking one to make an example of. I recieved a less than stellarly written email, with the sender saying she thought that Redgrave had ripped off the Sims 2 skins.

Redgrave, left, and Sims 2, right.

Read the rest of this entry »

Disgustingly enough, Siyu Suen has now found herself the latest victim of copybot.

The observant Hirokii Hyun sent me a notecard this evening, which was a notification that my Desperado Hat and Guy Fawkes mask had both been copybotted. The worst part: that they were distributed with full permissions in a group with over eight hundred members. This left me shaking, upset, and panicked.

Luckily, Siyu knew what to do and acted immediately. She’s a paid Second Life account, so she contacted concergie, AR’d the guy, found the item ID’s and asked that they be taken down, and deleted from the group notices. She also quickly filed a DMCA.

I sent a notice requesting my friends, my loyal customers, my Illusionists and members of Masqueraderie to send their own abuse reports on the thief and his alt. All of a sudden a rush of IM’s in the group channel were asking for details, expressing their support and their outrage at the thief. In less than a half hour, his name was removed from search. Less than five minutes after that, as the group turned their AR’s against his copybot alt, that name disappeared too.

I just want to say I have never seen that quick a response from the Lindens. I’ve seen swarms of fashionistas descend like a plague of righteous AR’ing locusts, and never seen a response like that. Abuse reports can still take a day or two, or at least a few hours(!) to be processed, even when filed en masse by angry shopping addicts. I’ve heard that even then, sometimes the culprits are only suspended, despite clear copybot abuse. I have simply never seen anything like that happen, which means you guys are clearly Extra Special Grade A Awesomesauce made from freshly grown organic Awesome. Just knowing that all of you showed such overwhelming support that the Lindens had to panic and remove his names just to stem the unending tide of reports made me feel so protected, grateful, and much more likely to sleep well tonight.

In thanks, Siyu made a special mask… a wolf mask! You can view more of her entry and see the mask by clicking here: http://masklady.blogspot.com/2008/07/copybot-drama.html

I know I encourage people who feel that they’ve been stolen from to air their grievances, but this is a little ridiculous. Several blogs have covered this “disagreement” - which has become a pretty big war thanks to the participants. What am I talking about?

Delora Starbrook vs. Tekelili Tantalus.

Tekelili has been going on for about a week, saying that Delora “stole” his work. Made a statement on his blog, sent out a notecard to a group of over 2,000 members squealing that people shouldn’t buy from Delora because she stole his work. Forget that they’re not the same textures. Forget that they’re not even the same prims. They just look kind of alike ENOUGH to make this much trouble for another designer. I should clarify that statement - Delora’s hairs look enough alike Tekelili’s hairs that Tekelili feels he should be upset.

Restating: NOTHING HERE WAS DIRECTLY RIPPED. People accused Delora of reassembling Tekelil’s prims, but that doesn’t appear to be the case here. They’re just too similar. As I was inquiring about on this post.

Delora’s Hair, above.

Tek’s Hair, above.

So Tekelili muted Delora after giving her a diatribe about copying people’s work. Then Delora’s good friend Munchflower Zaius hollered at her about artistic ethic (after Delora tried to talk to her about it - they were good friends, the type that know your kids names and what they got for christmas) and kicked her out of Nomine, along with defriending her, and sent Madagascar Few in to drive the stake a little deeper. Delora, upset, confided in Stroker Serpentine, who in turn (and in good friendly support) kicked Munchflower Zaius out of his land, vendors and all.

Good lord. I’m getting a little overwhelmed just typing all this.

Read the rest of this entry »

DUCK AND COVER!

A French court has ordered eBay to pay 40m euros (�31.6m; $63m) to luxury goods group LVMH for allowing online auctions of fake copies of its goods.

LVMH said eBay’s French site had not done enough to stop the sale of counterfeit bags and perfumes.

The brands affected include Louis Vuitton, Christian Dior and Givenchy.

An eBay statement said LVMH was trying to “protect uncompetitive commercial practices at the expense of consumer choice” and added that it would appeal.

‘Illicit’

The case against eBay in a commercial court in Paris was brought jointly by six brands belonging to the LVMH group.

Louis Vuitton Malletier, the group’s handbag and luggage section, and clothing brand Christian Dior Couture accused eBay of “negligence” in allowing illegal copies of their goods to be sold in online auctions.

Four perfume brands - Dior, Guerlain, Kenzo and Givenchy - sued for what they called “illicit sales” of their products.

They alleged that even auctions involving their legitimate perfumes were illegal, because only specialist dealers were permitted to sell them.

The court barred eBay from selling the four perfumes in future.

LVMH spokesman Pierre Godet welcomed the decision, telling French news agency AFP that it “protected brands by considering them an important part of French heritage”.

The rest of the story: http://news.bbc.co.uk/1/hi/business/7481241.stm

PARIS (AFP) - A Paris court is to decide Monday whether to make eBay pay 51 million euros (80 million dollars) in damages to Louis Vuitton and other French luxury groups for letting fake copies of their goods be auctioned on its website.

Louis Vuitton Malletier, the handbag and luggage section of the LVMH group, and Christian Dior Couture are seeking 20 million euros and 17 million euros respectively for “negligence” on the part of the online auctioneer.

Four perfume subsidiaries of LVMH are between them seeking 14 million euros for “illicit sales” of their products in the proceedings that began a year and a half ago.

They say eBay knowingly let people use its site to sell fake bags, lipstick, perfumes and clothes from the famous brand names, and that even when authentic goods were on sale this was in violation of their authorized sales networks.

None of the parties to the case would comment when contacted by AFP.

Full article

Can you imagine? A website is being slapped for allowing sale of counterfeit goods. Imagine if this translates into Second Life - a website, a service, allowing sale of virtual goods, including those I covered previously in other articles here at SCD, being supoenaed to court for allowing such things to go on, knowingly. The article doesn’t state whether this is over brand names / logos or designs.

Read the rest of this entry »

These idiots are killing me.

They’re backtracking on their proper DMCA execution. After they began removing DMCA’d content this weekend, they made a post basically backpedaling as fast as they could.

“Linden Lab inadvertently disabled some inworld content this past weekend”

INADVERTENTLY? Oh, I see, you mistakenly removed specific content that just happened to be DMCA’d. Did someone sneeze and hit the delete button? How convienient.

Just when I think Linden Lab does something right… they screw it up again. I guess it’s a good thing we’re going forward with that content theft record blog… because we’re basically fighting this battle on our own.

Eff off, Linden Lab.