do you think most in second life are comparable to “large companies with lawyers on hand”? are you kidding me? have you noticed that the vast majority don’t make enough to pay for a sandwich at the end of the month?

Enktan, my feedback for you and all people in your position is as follows: ignore shockwave and people like him/her completely, realize that if you’re going to go into business, real world or virtual, it’s a good idea be aware of business practices, laws, etc. dmca is a formal legal process, so if you want that to be viable, you’re going to need to know enough about law (don’t risk it) or have an attorney do it for you (linden lab claims a lot aren’t done correctly, which sounds right, and if they don’t receive correct dmca requests i don’t see that that have any obligation to do anything). then remember that things like deciding whether something is copyright infringement was deliberately enacted to be up to courts that have no vested interested either way (and in the case of juries, jury selection process attempts to weed out people with cultural biases like shockwave). if you’re not prepared to go so far as actually sue somebody for things created in second life, then don’t have an expectation that things like this will be resolved fairly, or at all (whether you’re really right or people like the guy who supposedly copied your work is right). then figure out how to work that reality in your business plan if you decide to continue to have one. but if you are in the right according to US law, then you do deserve just compensation.

also remember linden lab is a private corporation whose goal it is – by definition – to maximize profit for shareholders…not to fairly adjudicate legal disputes between others. and if those two purposes were ever to conflict, do you really think the latter would win? linden lab has its own contract fairness issues at the moment with a federal judge in the Bragg v Linden Lab case. and you know san francisco probably isn’t really the best place to generally find fans of the dmca anyway. yet even if everybody working there is 100% pro dmca straight as an arrow conscientious disciple of the pope..i doubt it but they may all well be, who knows..you’re not dealing with individuals, but the profiting company on whose behalf they are acting. they’re not charity workers after all…they get pay checks for accomplishing their duties. it serves best to view and interact with them realistically that way…and makes the most business sense

Try to use that thing mounted on your shoulders once in a while, Tenshi.

Between constant down time and retaliative Lindons, is there any wonder why so many won’t become paying members?

coco

YOU may not have the attitude I describe. But lots of other people do, particularly large companies with lawyers on hand. I grow weary of companies and VRbullies abusing the DCMA at every turn. I expect someone to slap a lawsuit on someone else for humming a song on a bus soon, thus distributing music to others without compensation for the copyright holders.

As I said before, I’ve no love for people who copy stuff, even by hand. But considering the Apple/Microsoft case where “Look and Feel” was considered to be insufficient to prove copying, you’ll need something more substantial than “his shoes look just like mine” to make a serious issue out of it.

Personally I would like to see a SL Copyright Court created to handle inworld IP issues like this one. Settle the matter inworld and keep the RL courts out of SL. It’ll take a Linden with Linden powers to examine the textures and the created on dates. Whoever created item X first wins and if the item IS copied, banning is possible. Simple, cheap, easy and fast.

I do not have an ‘I made a shoe so nobody else can’ attitude. There are 1000′s of shoes in sl, none of them have the same design as mine, I don’t see any problem with those. And I’m well aware that I didn’t invent the shoe, nor the process how to build them in a virtual world as sl.
But when I see exact copies of my designs, accompanied with my own instruction notecards I think it’s only normal to try to stop this kind of unfair competition.
Also I don’t pull out DMCAs at the drop of my hat, I filed a DMCA notification because Livechat told me that is the way to handle this kind of problem. It was my first DMCA ever. The 2e and 3th DMCA notification I filed because again Livechat told me that was the way to proceed.
Besides that copyrights do cover derived works. That something was build from scratch doesn’t matter. It’s not because all music is made out of the same 7 notes (our prims) someone is allowed to write the same string of music as an already existing one. What matters is how much the new work resembles a previous released one.
Last but not least I do not want to hit the guy where it hurts. I want to know what my rights are and how to defend them. This is not done by starting a personal little war against him.
The whole thing here is not about my shoes copied, it’s about copyrights in sl. LL says we have IP right over the content we create so imo there has to be an effective way to defend these rights. This is not published in pursue of my own little right but to point out there’s work to be done along this road.