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."
They deleted my virtual boobies (Score:2, Interesting)
Designer doesn't understand virtual worlds (Score:2, Interesting)
Having read the article, it's clear that the designer has no idea how virtual worlds and especially Second Life (SL) and its many clones like Opensim work. He's making up a legal theory about virtual property and artist rights in virtual worlds that simply doesn't exist, yet. It's wishful thinking.
If he created something in the physical world, the law provides him with some default protections, for good or for bad, and he still has those protections now. If he wanted permanence of his works, he should have held onto his own copies, not given away his backups --- that's his own negligence, nobody else's.
The following is how virtual worlds of the Second Life type work, condensed: If you make some object privately, nobody can see it. When you place your object into the virtual world, in order for others to see it the world has to make copies of it and send those copies to everyone in the region, so that everyone present can see your object rendered in their clients. Everybody gets a copy of your object: copying and distribution is an inherent part of the implementation.
Under such an architecture, real-life artist's restrictive expectations and control-freakism over distribution of their creations just doesn't work. This artist didn't understand the nature of the medium for which he was creating. And while he'll probably try to bring lawyers and the DMCA into it, that whole area is a complete unknown in the context of virtual worlds at present. Judges don't know and can't know how it works either (they're still catching up with how the Internet works anyway), and past legal precedent is largely inapplicable as it would break the worlds.
What's more, all of this is changing continually and at an increasing pace too, and nobody knows where it's going --- the 3D metaverse is still an extremely fuzzy evolving concept. The only thing that's very clear already is that virtual goods do not obey the same rules as physical goods, and so applying current real-world laws to the virtual situation is (i) broken by design, (ii) obsolete before it even starts, and (iii) not enforceable.
In addition, both the clients and the Opensim SL-lookalike world are open sourced, which is one reason why the pace of development is so huge, yet it also means that the guarantees are even fewer. It's important to understand this if you're going to work in the area. The artist is making up a case out of ignorance here.