I got those Second Life blues…

I’ve been feeling pretty depressed overnight. I bought a garage sale in a box from John Trihey on the ONREZ website yesterday and it is crammed full of things which are other people’s IP. When I say crammed, I mean quite literally crammed — it took me about four hours to unpack it all. It was like a nightmare cross between aRussian doll and a hydra … open a box and another ten fell out … and inside those another ten.

For years I have been saying that there are only a few dishonest people in SL, and I still truly believe that. The trouble is that the dishonest people who take other people’s things and abuse them are making it now so complicated that people simply can’t know if they are given or get something at a freebie place, whether it is a “legal” item or not.

I have nothing against freebies … quite the opposite. The first thing I made in SL was a freebie candle and candlestick that I see all over SL. I have made any number of things since. I am just as angry when I see someone selling something which its owner intended to be free as I am seeing someone giving away something that someone has worked hard to produce, and which they are giving away for free.

For a long time, the biggest threat to the economy working right for everyone was the yard sales. People would go and buy full perms textures or animations and instantly resell them at a yard sale, as if buying them to use in your own creations gave you the right to sell them on too. Thus something which cost them 1000 lindens would be put on sale full perms for $50 lindens. The next person to buy it might put it out for $40, then next for $30 and so on until those pose balls of boxes of textures found their way into a freebie site. Sometimes, the original owners, still selling the goods at the original price, would then start to get hate IMs asking why they were selling a freebie, from people unaware that the freebies in this case, were the ones at fault.

I haven’t been touring the yard sales and malls in the way I used to. I have been working and making things myself, but also I went through a long spell when to teleport was to crash, and so generally I haven’t explored as much as I used to do. The things I saw at GamersBrand Island shocked me because it was such a mess … things being sold which ought to be free, things free which ought to be sold and a whole lot of other stuff for which goodness knows what should be done: big boxes which mix free and gnubie and commercial stuff altogether where if the box is being sold it ought not to be because it has freebies in it, but if the box is being given away free it ought not to be because it has someone’s creations which aren’t supposed to be free in it.

It has to be said that Gamers Brand island is very busy. There are a lot of people in pursuit of the goods there … 90 on a couple of occasions. Most of them don’t realise I expect, the finer points of permissions and licences.

The trouble I see with the world is that it is hard to focus effort and attention anywhere. You know what I mean — everyone agrees that the SL search — when it is working — sucks for finding things in world. so lots of people have started alternative systems, from the Electric Sheep search to the 404 HUD. Some people have started qualitative systems for scoring sims, and some commercial companies –a Belgian airline, for example, have jumped on the bandwagon to provide a sim rating system. Because it is so dispersed and so diverse, it becomes just as useless as the in world system. Some people block the sheep info gatherer, some try to game any system set up, most fall by the wasyside either half complete or hardly used because the next best thing has turned up to make it obsolete.

There have been various attempts to control piracy in world, including the sellers guild, individuals taking people to court, blog outings like the ones I have done, groups to promote better business, or to penalise poor business practice. It’s all too spread about, and the problem is too big for a group to be able to handle. It seems to me that we have to look to the people who are controlling the means to rip people off to get some action, and that means Linden Lab and ONREZ and SLX, I think. I’m considering gathering creators together to talk about it, maybe in a couple of days’ time?

At the moment, the system requires creators to find the things that are being ripped off and to issue a DMCA to Linden Lab or SLX or ONREZ to take down the item. This costs time and money as the creator has to be aware it is happening and then pursue it by sending faxes and letters to get things taken down. Some of the things going on at present though … any one of a dozen creators could DMCA them. Shouldn’t we be asking why our rights aren’t better protected? Since I joined SL three and a half years ago, we have been promised a better permission system, one which allows you to set the permissions permanently to no selling for freebies, for example. I can see that changing horses mid-race on permissions is a huge headache for LL, but something needs to change.

I’d like to think that we could change it as a community, but that means educating people to the point where they understand how to find creators and to be honest even then it has become virtually impossible. Inside this garage sale in a box is a hair business in a box. Someone has put considerable time and effort into it. They have 220 styles of hair, all in separate boxes, all with pictures of the hair on the boxes etc. I have *no* idea whether it is intended to be sold on for as little as $25. If so, what value does that put on each of the hair styles in the box? How was it intended to be used, by the creator. It’s a stone’s throw from being made free to copy by someone who gets it in a bargain assortment.

I realise that websites with a big volume of items coming onto and off their list of items may not be able to check each one for infringements of IP. But I do think that big boxes of garage sale stuff, or dozens of businesses in a box should ring alarm bells. Maybe people who list their stuff on SLX or ONREZ should be required to send one copy to a library avatar, so that it can be checked if any questions about IP arise? I cannot understand why the same bed has had to be served with a DMCA about 6 times over because it is put on SLX by another avatar. Where items are so notorious, it seems to me that there should be a list of items to be deleted as soon as they are posted again to the site. And I do think they should be thinking about banning people who have been caught selling other people’s IP, on SLX, ONREZ and SL. It won’t stop them, but it might make life a bit more difficult.

The alternative is that we are going to drown in a sea of the same recycled ripoffs, all over SL.

Edit: corrected heading!  Can’t believe that I looked at it multiple times and didn’t spot the typo!