–Aya Pelous—

Unless you’re concerned that all the dress designs there are “rip offs”, I suppose, but given that she explicitly called attention to the “Miss Hathaway”, doesn’t that suggest that that was a one-off?

In any case, I think there’s a fair amount of substantial discussion regarding this post here , following Tenshi’s posting of it at her own blog, that might be useful.

I follow my own moral compass, not some one-sided rules written by a team of lawyers with questionable agendas.

Through some of my contacts, I managed to track down first Rowling’s agent and secretary, and patiently stated my intentions. I did also propose a licensing scheme, where I would pay a percentage of the revenues from selling items for the Magic Wand Duelling Game, and send them to Rowling’s estate. I made it very clear that we would be talking about “pennies” here, not millions of pounds, but that the model would give (even) more recognition and awareness to Harry Potter, I’d be bearing the costs of labour and in-world advertising and promotion, and Rowling would get a cut of the meager income that would come from selling items in Second Life. Their advantage? “Being in a virtual world” without absolutely no investment.

Rowling’s agent was curious and open-minded, but they had already sold the licensing rights on anything that sounded like an “online, multiplayer game” to Warner Brothers. They very nicely pointed me to their lawyers.

Fortunately, I got in touch with a computer-literate lawyer. He reviewed my arguments (‘Second Life is a platform for social, inline, 3D environments — not a “game” — although “games” could be developed inside SL’). The exchange of emails were incredibly polite, helpful, and I felt I was communicating with someone who found the idea interesting.

Unfortunately, they were also working on the development of the “Official Harry Potter MMORPG” at that time. So they declined my proposal, and urged me (always in very gentle, patient, and friendly tones) not to use any trademarked or licensed content for my own game. After some consultation, they internally decided that they would NOT allow ANY Harry Potter content on ANY online platform whatsoever, since they expected to launch their own.

I thanked them for their patience and open-mindedness in spending the time to explain it all to me, wished them good luck in launching their game, and stated my willingness to continue the discussion if at some point they considered rethinking their statement. Obviously, I never expected that would ever happen (it didn’t).

A few months after that, I suddenly was teleported to a WHOLE SIM with Harry Potter content. And after a short tour buying a few items (mostly clothes…), someone told me: “Oh yes, this is just one of the many sims about Harry Potter, although we’re the ones with more shops and with better designs.” I was shocked. Naively, I teleported to all those sims, and saw not only piles and piles of clearly HP-related content, but at least two different systems of the Wand Duelling Game, from different designers!

I couldn’t do anything. In fact, I was probably the *only person in Second Life* that was *explicitly banned from creating Harry Potter-themed content in SL*, since I had a few emails from the license holders that stated exactly that. I couldn’t claim that “oh, I didn’t know”. I could not protest: “why are you forbidding *me* to promote Harry Potter in-world, and even pay you royalties on the copyrighted material, while at the same time, dozens or hundreds of people are making small fortunes out of completely unlicensed HP-themed content??” If I did, I would attract attention to myself. In fact, I’m happy that we have LL’s permission system in place; I was a bit scared that some of the lawyers would log in, get shocked about what they saw, and blame *me* for that — since I was the only person ever asking for permission.

I mean, we weren’t even talking about “imitations”, “derivative art”, or something like that. It was content using all trademarked names, all copyrighted designs, etc. that are lawfully held by Rowling’s estate.

I remember that I was both sad and furious, but I did nothing…

After a year or so, I think that the IP owners to the HP content “on virtual worlds” filed a DMCA claim, or sent the content creators some nice cease & desist letters, because they have since then at least changed the *names* of their items. But in the mean time they had swamped the SL market for HP content and established themselves as providers of cool design. Who cares if they changed names from “Hogwarts” to “Pigwarts” or something like that?… Their customers would still come and buy things from them.

Probably they are still laughing at how someone could be so silly and naive and ask permission *first*.

I believe that this article fails to mention a very important side-effect. Piracy actually *helps* to get a content creator *started*. They might just copy a design from Vogue, and promote it “get a dress just like Armani launched this spring in Paris”. People will talk about how cool it is, and come to the shops, and buy like crazy. At some point, of course, Armani might file a DMCA claim against the avatar, and get them to willingly or forcefully remove all Armani-branded content. But if this is done cleverly — begging for forgiveness — they’ll have established themselves already. People will have landmarks to the “Armani” shop, even if it is now called “Armandi” and the designs are ever so slightly different. Or even totally different. They might be even above average.

However, the harm will have been done. Ripping off designs, illegally using trademarks or copyrighted content, pays off to establish a reputation. You can always claim to your customers “oh, I was a big Armani fan, I was promoting their brand in-world, but the big, mean, lawyers don’t care about SL residents and are always happy to squash the small people like us”. And the customers will only nod and shake their heads at the Big Brands’ lack of openmindedness.

Being a content pirate — specially if you’re starting and need to get a reputation very quickly, in order to start selling like crazy — is a very profitable business, even if it’s only to get you started. Being honest and asking for permission first is just being naive.

My morals, however, don’t give me a choice — I’ll remain poor and unknown, but I’ll keep my honour, reputation, and honesty intact, even if none of these help to pay the bills

Being inspired by things you see is normal. It’s the basis of everything we do as the human race. When learning to walk and talk as an infant, it’s by observing and imitating the people around us. Learning at the root is observing, memorizing, and imitating. There’s nothing wrong with that in itself.

Imitating and Copying are different however. Copying is a push-button prospect, none of your own indivdual style, flair, personality, or perspective ends up in the result. Imitation should be a re-interpretation of the original, with your own impression left on the result. That is at the core of creativity, taking something and remaking it anew. At least in my humble opinion. Thanks for the thoughtful article.