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."
Virtual Court? (Score:2)
Well, if they are going to use virtual currencies for virtual "property," they might as well settle this through a virtual court or at least beforehand let a (virtual) third party somehow be able to serve as a court with virtual enforcement. I'm serious.
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Unfortunately, there exists no Internet Court of Law existing solely on the Internet with Internet-spanning enforceability for regulating disputes over downloaded music.
Oh, look, I can already see in the distance the World of Warcraft players flooding into Slashdot to tell people to get a first life.
Re:Virtual Court? (Score:4, Insightful)
You're incorrect from what I read from the article. He did not sell all rights to his artwork and it was basically moved to a different game with his name removed.
I can see his point, but if he didn't have it in a contract in writing, he's probably screwed. I sympathize. My only real payment for my Open Source work in Linux is that if you grep for my name in the various ChangeLogs, you will find it. I do feel his pain.
Oh, look, I can already see in the distance the World of Warcraft players flooding into Slashdot to tell people to get a first life.
/rude
That was uncalled for.
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.
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ive got 2 things for you
1 Linden Dollars are currently trading at L$251 to US$1
2 it is often customary for large projects to be settled in real world currency (the better land sellers are setup with Paypal)
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Actually it sounds more like the developer is claiming the contract was for him to produce and license a work, rather than to sell the work outright. However, he seems to have given away the original and/or developed it ON the client's system, instead of developing independently and supplying a copy to the client.
Normally, if I license software to a client, and the client burns their DVD, I'd
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I'm not 100% sure it's possible to develop a SecondLife object outside SecondLife. I'm sure someone here knows. I've tried it in SL and there's too much fussy mousing for me to ever do it. I would guess the textures get done in some normal graphics editor like Paintshop or Gimp or whatever.
He probably developed it then transferred ownership of the objects within SL to the client. SL objects have both owner and creator attributes, and rather complicated permissions about what can be done with the object base
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Your life must be so boring, having chosen to completely ignore your fantasy.
Clear case of copyright infringement (Score:3, Funny)
... at least, if the summary is accurate and precise.
Oh wait, this is slashdot. Of course the summary's incomplete and/or biased. I haven't RTFA, someone tell me what's missing?
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Honestly... After years upon of goatse.cx, tubgirl, and penis bird links; can you blame someone for not clicking on a link out from slashdot?
And no, the link being in the summary is no protection. I recall at least three separate cases when some poor individual had his server crushed by a slashdotting and did a redirect to goatse.cx out of either spite or mischievousness.
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goatse.cx is very broad, there is just so much of it. Tubgirl, I have seen. One. Sick. Bitch.
Penis Bird Links?
Never heard of that.... mind.. posting some links? For research purposes of course?
Doesn't take Karnak the Magnificent... (Score:5, Insightful)
... to see how this thread will go. Soon it'll be flooded with debates about virtual property, whatever that means, and whether you should be able to prosecute someone for murdering your Elf Lord or whatever. The fact is that this guy was commissioned for an artistic project, retained full rights, and then had his property deleted. Take an entirely analogous situation: suppose that Ray Charles -- whose contract stated that he owned the original masters of all his recordings -- goes into a studio to record an album, and the studio subsequently throws said recordings away. Ray would have a pretty solid case, and so does this guy. This case has nothing to do with the MMO aspects of the incident; however, I can solidly say that at least half the population of Slashdot will *make* it about that, somehow.
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.
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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.
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:Doesn't take Karnak the Magnificent... (Score:5, Insightful)
Soon it'll be flooded with debates about virtual property...
[...]
I can solidly say that at least half the population of Slashdot will *make* it about that, somehow.
This debate isn't about virtual property, it's about stolen credit.
This guy basically negotiated the fact that he would get credit for his work. The original client resold his work (erasing all traces of his authorship). And adding insult to insult, the original client is telling people that the author's original work was so bad for its purpose, that it was purposefully destroyed (this isn't what I'd call a great reference by the way). If I was that original artist, I would certainly be pissed.
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1. "retain[ed] creative rights" is nowhere near "retained full rights", so you're wrong on that account.
2. The deletion is probably irrelevant. Just because Voom "retain[ed] creative rights" almost certainly does not mean Second Life could never delete their copies. But I've done independent coding under similar conditions, and I don't think I've ever had a "You must keep this forever" clause, and I seriously doubt Second Life did.
3. The sale may or may not violate the contract between Voom. Without a
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It wasn't Second Life that contracted him to do the work, it was someone with a Second Life account. I don't know anything about Second Life, but context seems to imply that there's no straightforward way to do a local backup of these things, i.e. apparently they can only reside on the Second Life servers. As such, the client did not have the right to delete them, because the creator had some rights to them.
A roughly analogous situation would involve your building a duplex (in real life) and selling half
Hih? (Score:2)
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I guess because - rather than sue the company who presumably violated their contract they had with him - he's chosen to use the taxpayer-funded hammer of the DMCA to go after them?
Full Item Pemissiosn anyone? (Score:1)
Was there a contract? (Score:2)
If no, then he's fucked.
If yes, then, if it was any good, it covers stuff like this.
No story.
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Actually, no. If there was no contract, he wins. Slam dunk. Because copyright is automatic, and has to be explicitly transferred.
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.
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There is always a contract, even if verbal. If the client won't admit that in court, it becomes more complex, but if it's a simple case of two people misinterpreting the contract, that shouldn't be an issue.
They deleted my virtual boobies (Score:2, Interesting)
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If you read the summary, it shows SHE was the person who comissioned HIM.
Of course you could always RTFA to find out that is the case, but this is Slashdot after all. ;)
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 ha
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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.
It's not virtual property, it's intellectual property and courts have plenty of experience dealing with it.
The way that the program distributes temporary copies, the fact that it's a virtual world and that's it's an open sourced simulator are completely irrelevant.
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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..
If it isn't in the actual contract (and it d
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There is no such thing as implied work for hire, it must be expressly written in the contract, if its not clearly written that it is work for hire...its not.
Im sure the client would happily have included a work for hire clause if they could have.
The fact that its a virtual is irrelevant to copyright, if the client had simply deleted the work, there would be no case. Not having a backup is clearly
the authors fault.
However putting on another site clearly violates the authors rights. Of course remedies would h
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There is no such thing as implied work for hire, it must be expressly written in the contract, if its not clearly written that it is work for hire...its not.
No. In fact, it often won't matter whether a contract asserts that a work is a work made for hire.
A work made for hire is defined in the Copyright Act at 17 USC 101 as:
(1) a work prepared by an employee within the scope of his or her employment; or
(2) a work specially ordered or commissioned for use as a contribution to a collective work, as a part of a motion picture or other audiovisual work, as a translation, as a supplementary work, as a compilation, as an instructional text, as a test, as answer material for a test, or as an atlas, if the parties expressly agree in a written instrument signed by them that the work shall be considered a work made for hire. For the purpose of the foregoing sentence, a "supplementary work" is a work prepared for publication as a secondary adjunct to a work by another author for the purpose of introducing, concluding, illustrating, explaining, revising, commenting upon, or assisting in the use of the other work, such as forewords, afterwords, pictorial illustrations, maps, charts, tables, editorial notes, musical arrangements, answer material for tests, bibliographies, appendixes, and indexes, and an "instructional text" is a literary, pictorial, or graphic work prepared for publication and with the purpose of use in systematic instructional activities.
Also note section 201(b), which relies on the above definition:
(b) Works Made for Hire.--
In the case of a work made for hire, the employer or other person for whom the work was prepared is considered the author for purposes of this title, and, unless the parties have expressly agreed otherwise in a written instrument signed by them, owns all of the rights comprised in the copyright.
Thus, any work done by an employee within the scope of his employment is a work made for hire where the employer is the auth
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Their stance reminds me of the "If the facts are against you, pound on the table" school of argument. I want to see the contract, or they're just blowing hot air.
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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..
...
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" despit
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US law doesn't apply - the guy is based in London.
The very terms used indicate it was what you would term "work for hire" - he admits he "was commissioned to" render the objects in question. In other words, the work was done in exchange for money. How is this different from you accepting a fee for producing some of the artwork for a video game? The contract is the governing document, and not any later emails from him to the client trying to retroactively withhold more rights.
We need to see the actual
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It's called software and copyright. You know, that stuff that gets run to make the virtual world come alive? Maybe it shouldn't exist, but it does.
If you're actually holding courts INSIDE a virtual world, then you might need virtual laws. That would be over things like whether the virtual cash from one virtual country was traded at the correct virtual exchange rat
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The client hired the contractor to do some work for him. They had a real-world contract stating that he was to be paid with real money and was to retain full rights to his creations. From a legal standpoint this is no different from doing graphic design for a website, writing a book and selling limited rights to a publisher, etc. If you hire me to make a baseball bat for you and our contract states that I retain copyright to the design, and then you start selling knockoffs of it, you are not going to be
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.
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In legal terms, is there any difference between a website and a second life virtual world?
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Personally I don't believe so.
This man had his work sold, even if it does fall as a different category as a website, it is an intellectual property.
Say someone sold a book to a publisher, who in turn sold the rights to that book to another publisher, the act is highly illegal.
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What website? Do you even know what this topic is about? Are you even on the right planet?
The Second Life creators themselves keep on making that same comparison. They see virtual real estate on their servers just like a hosting company would see a web site that one of their customers uploaded on there. The customers who upload virtual real estate retain all rights to their intellectual property, Second Life makes absolutely no claim over it. Those customers just have to rent the virtual land that's occupied by their virtual real estate, that's it. If you don't believe me, you can hear it strai
Okay lemme explain this (Score:2)
Please note i am a SecondLife member not a lawyer or any kind of legal person
First off the contract should has very clearly stated "the work being done has been created for use on the SecondLife Primary Grid and is not authorized for use on any other grid Beta Teen or other"
Second if you want to "backup" a build like that then all you have to do as the creator is install a copy of say the Greenlife Emerald third part client and then select the item and pick "export" from the pie menu
this will create a full
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So, according to your theory, by publishing in a format that requires duplication, you lose the rights to your creations? Fine, then I claim ownership of the following text:
First Life avatars are scarier (Score:2)
And they're so much work [today.com] to change!
On the upside, attacks of flying penises are all but unknown. Nearly [youtube.com].
Other engines (Score:2)
Yeah, there's a lot of stuff I'd like to try to build in virtual communities like Second Life, but it's stuff like this that makes me shy away. I think if I had to create virtual mockups for architectural / engineering review, I'd try to use blender and maybe try to get it working in the unreal engine if the blender game engine wasn't enough. Not as much community access as SecondLife provides, but at least you work would be safe.
Resale? DMCA? Confused. (Score:2)
Is there a better summary of events available somewhere? A lot of people are talking about the original buyer of the work having re-sold it, and there's nothing about that in the linked article. Also it mentions the DMCA without explaining how that could be relevant.
The Virtual Worlds Liberation Front! (Score:2)
Today I have founded a new organization, the Virtual Worlds Liberation Front (VWLF)!
.
.
We shall agitate against "permission flags" and others forms of DRM and copy protection in virtual worlds. If necessary, we shall strive to create new worlds free from these digital chains!
Think about it. . . How would the WWW have been hobbled if nobody could look at the HTML code of most web pages to learn how it works? How about you couldn't link to websites outside of your own domain? (That would pretty mu
IP rights in SL (Score:2)
Second Life has a piss-poor reputation for helping content creators retain control over their creations. Skins (texture over avatar models), clothes, etc. are routinely ripped off because, amongst other reasons, they're cached as individual TGA files on the client computer, and 3rd party SL clients are allowed. These 3rd party clients (e.g. CopyBot) can and have been coded to save any texture desired to a place where the user can then upload to SL and use as their own (complex models are made from what ar