Another Bad Hair Day: Virtually Blind Enters Fray
by Alphaville Herald on 16/02/07 at 1:40 pm
Same or different? Virtually Blind calls attention to the radical differences in the hair designs. (Image on right from Virtually Blind)
Herald readers will recall a recent article by Seola Sassoon on the alleged design copying by Rach Snookums. Now Benjamin Duranske (Benjamin Noble in SL) an IP lawyer currently working on a novel has written a very interesting article on the controversy in his blog Virtually Blind. Benjamin contacted Rach, and reports that she has taken a fair bit of grief since the Herald article — “after the story broke, she was banned from many designers’ parcels, and about sixty Sellers Guild members came to her shop and were abusive to her customers”. 60? Bajeebers!
Of course the central question is whether this was a case of infringement, and Benjamin weighs in as follows:
In the real world, there aren’t copyright suits over hairstyles for at least two reasons: (1) enforcement would be so expensive and the value of a potential win so low that the question is unlikely to ever make it to a courtroom, and (2) there’s a threshold question as to whether a real-world hairstyle is sufficiently “fixed in a tangible form of expression,” to qualify for protection under US copyright law.
But in a virtual world, avatars’ hairstyles are just as “fixed” as any other user-created content, and mass production of identical hairstyle designs means lawsuits are at least potentially feasible.
It is an excellent article and the Herald Brain Trust strongly recommends that interested readers check it out.
Prokofy Neva
Feb 16th, 2007
The link doesn’t work, and there doesn’t seem to be an article like this, just a brief mention of the hair issue and a reference to Slashdot?
Prokofy Neva
Feb 16th, 2007
The link doesn’t work, and there doesn’t seem to be an article like this, just a brief mention of the hair issue and a reference to Slashdot?
Urizenus
Feb 16th, 2007
wtf? it looks like he took the link down. The story was up earlier today. Maybe Benjamin will put it back. Benjamin? you there?
Baba
Feb 16th, 2007
Ask your tekki friends Prokofy. ;0 Oh, right..
Urizenus
Feb 16th, 2007
The Virtually Blind article is back up, in case you missed it earlier.
Benjamin Duranske
Feb 17th, 2007
Sorry, folks. I somehow managed to make the post private, quite unintentionally. It’s up (and has been most of the day now). Enjoy.
http://virtuallyblind.com/2007/02/15/second-life-hairstyle-copyright-question/
Lukas
Feb 17th, 2007
Just cause you make a hair style doesn’t mean no one else can ever make that hair style again. Certainly the original SL artist was copying it from a real life style in the first place.
Urizenus
Feb 17th, 2007
Lukas, Benjamin’s point is this: if you design an original hair style and sell it in SL as prim hair, it may well be that close copies infringe on your IP. Yes, other people can copy it, but it is not clear that they can copy it and sell it.
Seola Sassoon
Feb 17th, 2007
I sent Pix a story about his story, so if she decides not to run it, when I get back in several days, I’ll post most of what I said to her.
Seola Sassoon
Feb 20th, 2007
K, I’m reproing what I had written up, without links to the pics, but the explanation is still there.
————————————————————————————
I’ll start with Snookums quoting ME as the reason for the bannings. That article was written AFTER the bannings. The names go around in Sellers Guild long before people report it on the internet. She was banned as I was writing the article from at least 30 parcels that I had counted. So don’t blame me. Even if I hadn’t written the story, the bannings already happened so it’s got nothing to do with my story. Sellers are very protective and pass that info quite freely. Dominik even posted in the story that he was banned from there after banning her from Gurlywood. His name was already on that list as of the time, since I obviously referenced it IN the story.
She’s laying quite the heavy blame on that story. Not to mention that people have come to me after the story and said she was blaming me for this all happening to her.
She actually lied in her own quotes for Ben’s story. I’m surprised he didn’t pick it up.
Per the article:
“”””According to ‘Snookums,’ after the story broke, she was banned from many designers’ parcels, and about sixty Sellers Guild members came to her shop and were abusive to her customers.””””
“”””The SLH post also claimed that ‘Snookums’ banned designers from her shop to keep them from seeing her designs”””
“”””‘Snookums’ said that she started banning people from her store only after posts””””
K, so she was banned after the story, which is why she banned others before the story? Which I reported on in the story? Maybe I can see the future? I should start a psychic hotline.
I don’t know about other people reading this, but it certainly sounds like track covering to me. The whole ‘I did it because she wrote on it’ banning thing is certainly fishy enough, especially since it was in the story I wrote in the first place. However, if you are trying to prove innocence, why are you not inviting these designers in to see for themselves instead of banning them?
As for banning the artists from seeing her work, I got reports from the names on the ban lists that they hadn’t even spoken to her and wanted to see for themselves and found out they were banned. Most of the people I spoke with, are very trustworthy and are only concerned about their products. It’s her word against their’s as far as I’m concerned, but I tend to believe a throng of people over a designer with ‘questionable’ products.
Yours truly, also had nothing to do with Seller’s Guild members coming to her shop. That was already in progress before the story was published, I also noted in my writing that seller’s were meeting up. Another future foretold!
Per the article mentioned:
“””Virtually Blind contacted ‘Snookums,’ who admitted that “most of the design” for one hairstyle line (which she has since pulled from inventory) “was based on another designer.”””
Most of the design, the only thing not copied is the texture itself. Secondly, this guy has ZERO clue how textures or prims work, if this is his basis to show they aren’t the same.
Per the article mentioned:
“”"To illustrate this, Virtually Blind highlighted four matching prims from the SLH’s picture of the original and allegedly infringing hairstyles in red, blue, yellow, and green in the image to the left. Pay particular attention to the red and blue highlighted prims in each. The two designs are simply not the same.”"”
Let’s apply this method of proving different to a prim I’ve created.
These two prims are EXACTLY the same.
Now here, I’ve added a texture for a simple thong.
Now here, I’ve added a pretty set of colors to the picture in Photoshop.
As you can see it looks totally different, all because of the texture I applied that has transparency. The same prim, same prim size. That little color trick he did is useless in proving a difference. You can see even there, that the coloring didn’t even pick up the ends of the thong texture.
Now imagine creating tons of prims, contorting them to a finished design and having someone else try to sell that.
I’ve also taken the pic and laid the designs over each other. First, on the right is an overlay with Babe Too more transparent, the second is an overlay of Alluring more transparent. Not color coated in Photoshop. Take into account also that Babe Too is rotated slightly more clockwise and is a touch larger, which could be due to distance from the camera or size used, since Gurl 6 provides 3 different sizes for each wig.
He did this in apparently in with Photoshop (or similar program) which takes zero account for transparency in the ends of the prims. Simply throwing some color on a picture does absolutely nothing in the way of actual prim sizes or count. It’s well known, Gurl 6′s designs have transparencies at the end of the prim to help give a textured streched hair look. So taking a picture and editing it in photoshop isn’t exactly a smart thing to do.
If this were a true picture of Gurl 6 wigs, not once does it ever look so scraggly at the ends, which is further proof there’s missing transparency in the picture, that cannot be picked up cleanly by the method he used.
Either way, for someone to say how hasty and shoddy the story was, he obviously didn’t do too great a job himself. *ring ring* Hiya pot! This is kettle! Did you hear? You’re black! *click*
Seola Sassoon
Feb 21st, 2007
Forgot to mention:
I didn’t do anything within SL to help OR hinder efforts of other seller’s. I only reported the story based on what was given to me in interviews and what I saw for myself, and that was quite a bit of time after the Sellers Guild got wind.
From what I understand, it took a mere 24 hours for this to get around, I reported during the 25th hour.