Well, not often, and not like a new resident. Until I created a new character as part of the testing for a client. Starting with a fresh new inventory, I reported on my visit to the Gnubie store the other day. In the Gnubie store, the creators of items make them for the store, and charge $0 or $1 Linden at the most for the items that they sell. It is well organised, and well ordered. You won’t find any creator’s sales items given away free, and notices ask people not to sell the items that they gather there. Gnubie store gets an A+ for honesty, organisation and generosity.

Fast forward to today, and I visited a freebie place which could not be more different….

GamersBrand has a professional logo and a private island and a lot of visitors. The traffic on the island today is 86,514, and that doesn’t surprise me as there were 90 avatars on the island when I visited, all exploring the island and everything it has to offer.

I visited the group website, but I must say that I was still a little confused about what they do. This is what they say about themselves: “GamersBrand Entertainment, LLC is an internet network featuring web service, content, and community websites devoted to the gaming community. We offer a wide varierty of online entities satisfying many needs of the online global market.” So far, so good. A little further down they say: “Our overall goal is to create a variety of entertainment sites to offer a variety of services in order to satisfy the need of an ever growing global marketplace.”

GamersBrand Island in SL consists of walkways linking vending areas containing piles of boxes. It is fairly confusing when you first arrive: some of the boxes have prices on them, and yet seem to be selling for $0 Linden. There is a huge range of stuff… clothes, shoes, jewellery, textures, sex stuff, combat stuff, almost anything that an avatar might need.

I looked into some of the boxes, and they seemed to be giving away full perms merchandise. Now I was already starting to be fairly attentive to the range of material on offer, but what really caught my attention was the fact that a number of items came up with “unknown” creator, and others showed that creations from several different creators had been crammed together in a box.

After some digging around in the boxes myself, IMing people named as creators of objects in some of the boxes, and some pretty long notecard conversations with Doug Pau, who is in charge of GamersBrand island in SL, I discovered that:

- they are selling items such as the infamous sex bed, for free, a bed which has been the subject of repeated DMCA takedowns. To be fair Doug Pau did eventually remove the bed from sale, but the rose rug — which has also been the subject of successful DMCA takedowns — contains similarly illegal animations;

- they are selling items from shop-in-a-box deals, which they may have paid 20,000 lindens for, but which they are selling as individual items for $5 lindens, thus undercutting ordinary residents who have bought the same shops;

- they are giving away items originally from shop-in-a-box schemes, and don’t seem to have much idea about whose IP they are, or on what condition they were originally released. One set of jeans, which were all boxed by the same person, shows an outrageous number of lindens on the box, but is actually free. The jeans inside have a variety of creators including “unknown”. The creators I tracked down told me that they had been chasing down these boxes all over the grid, because the jeans inside were meant to be free, but had been packaged up as part of a shop-in-a-box scheme. I’d hazard a guess that some of the boxes being sold originate here and get sold elsewhere;

(There are boxes and boxes of stuff all over the island. There are shop-in-a-box scams all over SL, involving freebies or a collection of full perms material that people have picked up from yard sales, some of it exploited, some copied outside it’s licence, some just free. Some of these are being sold, full perms here, sometimes boxed up with a price on the box. )

- they are giving away a huge range of items, having received them from diverse sources, and not necessarily the original creator. There are literally *hundreds* of items over the island now, and the IP status of many of them is necessarily unclear. I was told that they do not sell things full mods, but this is demonstrably not true. Many of the items which my alt bought or copied for free, were full perms inside restricted perms boxes. I could pull full perms animations out of the pole dancer poles, for example, too.

I have started the process of tracking down the originators for some of the full perms items, to see if they are aware that their creations are being given away for free, or in some cases, sold when they are meant to be free, and I assume that process will continue for some days over the items I chose to look at. I am also hoping to make contact with the RL company GamersBrand to see what they have to say for themselves.

At first glance, you may think that this is no different from a hundred freebie and yard sale places where things that ought not to be given away free are given away and things that ought to be given free are charge for…. But I would remind you that this is a commercial company who wishes to promote online gaming and provide what the player wants. Is this what *you* want? It looks as though they have decided that making a splash in SL and maybe a fast buck too, given the number of avatars on their island, is worth the chance that the odd creator or three will notice them and start to ask questions. Well guess what? I am a very odd creator and I ask a lot of questions when I see something that is this wrong going on.

Now you know, I feel I ought to be investigating everything there, but honestly! I could work at it from now until Christmas and still only cover a small part of what is there, because they didn’t do what they ought to have done. In the end I decided that I couldn’t investigate all … but looking more closely at the big box of textures demonstrates nearly all of the types of situations which arise with the many items on the island.

It’s a BIG box of textures… 10,000 and more it says. It has a price of $499 on it. Bargain! But wait, it is actually “selling” for $0. So… I look at the box and it tells me that lex Fitzcarraldo is the creator. I buy a box. A folder with many boxes opens in my inventory. 302 ultimate interior textures, 100 beverage textures, 100 churches and temples and so on down the folder..

Looking into the boxes, 302 ultimate interior textures all show lex Fitzcarraldo as the creator of the textures in that box – many of them 1024×1024 textures. So … if lex Fitcarraldo intended his textures to be sold for $499 dollars, how come they are set for $0 on GamersBrand?

But wait a minute… here are Linden textures, textures from Gnubie by Jai Nomad, bundled up together in one of the boxes, and without the Gnubie store terms and conditions. The box says $200, although it was inside the box with $499 painted on the side which I bought for $0.

Another box from inside this box… Drift Monde textures – never to be resold, I know, I’ve read the agreement – a whole series of Drift Monde’s textures. So… in one package we have Drift’s textures which she sells full perms on condition they should never be resold or given away… Gnubie textures which need the licence with them… textures that are the IP of the originator of the boxes, which he appeared to intend to sell bundled with the others for $499, but which are huge…. I only opened three of the boxes out of about 30 in the folder. Many have such a lot of textures in, it is quite painful to look at items in the box, and I didn’t want 10,000 extra textures in my inventory.

GamersBrand appear to me to have demonstrated no concern for the right ordering of their business in SL… the impression I get, is that if it looks as if they can attract traffic and do it on the backs of the SL creators, they will. They have not spent the necessary time in ensuring that they are not selling things or giving away things they ought not to. I have emailed the RL company for their opinion on it. When I receive a reply you can be sure I will let you know. Meanwhile, if you are as appalled as I am by what you find on GamersBrand, abuse report any IP infringements but why not email them to tell them how you feel?

Remember what they said about themselves? “Our overall goal is to create a variety of entertainment sites to offer a variety of services in order to satisfy the need of an ever growing global marketplace.” In SL that seems to involve infringing the IP and rights of creators, and promoting poor business practices. Frankly, if Gnubie store is an A+ model of what a freebie store should be, GamersBrand is the Z- what-not-to-do example to us all.

I can’t finish without a word about the lack of protection from Linden Lab of our IP as creators. Some of these items were created by people who have been issued with more than one DMCA takedown notice. Shouldn’t deliberately exploiting someone’s IP in this way be a once a warning, two times you’re suspended and three times you are out sort of deal? And shouldn’t a Linden be taking a very close look at GamersBrand Island for themselves? Is it REALLY necessary to make the individual creators issue DMCA after DMCA to take this company out of business in SL until they can tell a freebie from a full perms object and know how to work out whether something retains full permissions? Can you hear me in Chicago?