Designer Fights For Second Life Rights 64
An anonymous reader writes "A London-based industrial designer has had his work ripped off in Second Life and is now looking to file a DMCA grievance against his client. Commissioned to recreate the French Quarter in New Orleans, the designer, Gospel Voom, spent six months on the project, only to sign on to Second Life after its completion to find it was deleted by the client. She claimed it was taken down because it wasn't making money. However, despite having signed a contract that let Voom retain creative rights over his work, he later found out it was sold to another community, OpenLife, without his knowledge or permission."
Re:Virtual Court? (Score:4, Informative)
It's not a virtual dispute. It's a dispute between a real-world business who hired an artist to create something which was paid for with real money, and an artist who got a contract before performing or being paid for the work that assured the artist he would keep certain rights.
And the business taking his work, and selling it lock stock and barrel to a third party, which they had no right to do, and resulted in a "clone" of his work appearing in another virtual world, where he wasn't given any credit for it (thus a very real breach of his creative rights).
This would be as if an artist for a character in any video game licensed artwork to the game publisher to be used in a specific production, and required a certain royalty for every copy of the game published.
But shortly after release, the game publisher decided it wasn't profitable, scrapped the game, and sold all the bits (including the artwork) to another company, who picked up the picture and displayed it for various uses as their own creation.
Re:Doesn't take Karnak the Magnificent... (Score:5, Informative)
The fact is that this guy was commissioned for an artistic project, retained full rights, and then had his property deleted.
No, not quite.
He did some code work but retained some rights to it. The client sold it contrary to their agreement. Simple contract issue, has little at all to do with "virtual property" as the concept is being bandied about here, has to do with some code and artistic work that was misappropriated.
Re:Was there a contract? (Score:3, Informative)
Actually, no. If there was no contract, he wins. Slam dunk. Because copyright is automatic, and has to be explicitly transferred.
Re:Doesn't take Karnak the Magnificent... (Score:5, Informative)
Liken it to Rembrandt or some other painter having been commissioned to paint an artwork (or in this case; a painting of an artwork), then seeing the painting get sold by the party that commissioned it.
Except in this case, the original signature was replaced, the original painter lost all the credit to his work, and the original client is pretending that the original work was so bad -- it had to be destroyed.
Re:Designer doesn't understand virtual worlds (Score:5, Informative)
If you commission me to create some graphics for a website, and the contract says I retain the copyright; you can't then sell my graphics to another website.
That is essentially what happened here.
Re:Was there a contract? (Score:5, Informative)
Actually, no. If there was no contract, he wins. Slam dunk. Because copyright is automatic, and has to be explicitly transferred.
I've been in an intellectual property dispute over some code I wrote, a situation very similar to Voom's.
If I remember all this correctly, there are five or six situations where it's not true that explict transfer of copyright is required. "Work-for-hire" is almost one. IIRC, to be a "work-for-hire" requires a written contract that specifically uses the words "work-for-hire". So the author of a "work-for-hire" does NOT retain copyright. The other four or five situations which I don't recall also do NOT require a written contract to transfer copyright.
The reason why you hear phrases similar to "copyright must be explicitly transferred" is that it's very, very easy to make sure those four or five situations don't apply to you as an author. And any author with half a brain makes damn sure they put themselves where they retain copyright by default. It remains to be seen if Voom has half a brain or not.
FWIW, I recall that there are also some legal hurdles from case law that Voom has to clear before it would be found that he retained copyright. I think the case most of those hurdles are from is CCNV v. Reed. I know two of those hurdles are (1) where the work was done, and (2) how much supervision the author was under while creating the work. (I remember those because in my dispute I did all the work on my hardware and was under no supervision whatsoever.)
If Voom did the work on Second Life servers and was under close and continuous supervision of Second Life management, he may not have cleared those hurdles and may very well not have retained copyright. If, on the other hand, the product was developed on his own hardware and the only contact he had with Second Life after signing the contract was using FTP to send them the results, he probably did retain copyright.
So no, this doens't appear to be a "slam dunk" at all.
Re:Designer doesn't understand virtual worlds (Score:1, Informative)
FTFA, it sounds like a "work for hire." (can't tell for sure, since we don't get to see the actual contract, but if the contract was clear that it wasn't work for hire, then why not post it and resolve this matter?) Work for hire == shit out of luck..
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You've actually got that backwards. IANAL, but my understanding of copyright law (that comes from actually having been in a similar situation...) is that unless there's a written contract that clearly uses the exact words "work for hire", it's NOT a "work for hire". The contract doesn't have to be clear that it's not a "work for hire", it must be explicitly clear that is IS a "work for hire". Also, IIRC if the work does not fit the legal description of a "work for hire", it's NOT a "work for hire" despite what the contract says.
In other words, it's pretty much impossible to force any randomly-selected work into being a "work for hire".
I do clearly recall that when opposing counsel sent my lawyer a letter claiming my work was a "work for hire", my lawyer and I got a good laugh out of it because that was the point we both knew I had won.
Once again, though, IANAL.