There’s a big firestorm right now over repeated, blatant theft and resale of skins by certain SL users. I’m sure you’ve seen it all over the aggregator feeds. I’ll note that this particular story first really broke last month when Sae Luan posted about these thieves in her blog. But it took several creators taking drastic action to really get the public involved: Emilia Redgrave has said she’s quit SL, and Minnu Palen, Popfuzz Bamboo, and perhaps others have decided to make no new skin releases until something is done to deal with the rampant skin theft. You can find discussions here, here, and elsewhere.
It’s been popular to point people to SVC-676, which calls on Linden Labs to do something to stop such skin thefts. It’s a reasonable idea to vote for this item, just to make it plain that there’s discontent out there. However, creators and users have several weapons at hand to try and deal with this issue, both directly and indirectly.
First and foremost, the DMCA notification, which only a creator or their authorized representative is able to do. Tenshi has posted the DMCA notification requirements, and this should be something all creators should be familiar with. I believe it would be very wise for creators to get together, and post their DMCA texts for a sort of peer-review to make sure all their ducks are in a row. Legally, LL may place itself in legal liability if it acts on an improperly filed DMCA, so you need to do it right. Once it’s done, LL is supposed to act promptly to respond to it and take down the allegedly infringing material. That said, their legal responsibility is to “disable access” to the material, which technically does not actually require the asset to be deleted. As an additional thought, content creators are very busy people. A group of trustworthy people, possibly individuals with RL legal experience, authorized by a consortium of content creators to act on their behalf could greatly take the pressure off of the content creators when it comes to checking out allegedly infringing material and dealing with writing up the DMCA requests, gathering evidence, and so on. Remember, DMCA’s can be filed only by creators and their authorized representatives.
What happens then? The alleged copyright infringer might counter-notify, in which case the matter is out of the hands of Linden Labs and you’re going to have to pursue it in the court of law unless, perhaps, it can be found that they have provided false information in their notification. For example, if an infringing person were to give a false name and address on the counter-notification, and you could verify this, you might be able to go back to LL and tell them that the counter-notification was improperly filed and should be ignored (just as they’d ignore an improperly formatted notification from you). If the infringer doesn’t counter-notify, I believe it’s completely reasonable to press LL to delete the infringing textures from its asset servers (more on this later). Especially if the infringer just opens up shop somewhere else. Siyu Suen has said that LL has indicated that an infringer who is DMCAd and takes down the material (voluntarily, or by LL but without counter-notifying) only to put it up again will be IP banned.
Second, there’s always publicity. Contact Reuters in Second Life and any other media you know of, and turn this into negative publicity in the mainstream media. Consider this recent Reuters interview with Philip Linden, held during the Davos economic forum, in which towards the end a question of mine is asked of him specifically regarding content theft, DMCA response times, and what tools LL can provide to content creators to better safeguard their work. Note that Adam Reuters repeated he has heard similar stories, and Philip sounded like he took it seriously. It’s well known that people are often dubious about his responses to anything, but here’s at least a statement that might offer a sliver of hope ... or might be something to bring up when talking to any media you can get a hold of, to make sure no one forgets that the Lindens have said they’re aware of the issue and that they want to do something about it. Keep on them about what they’re doing.
Third, there’s JIRA. As I said, I think it’s a good idea to vote on SVC-676. But I think there are at least two or three other potential JIRA items that can be made, more specifically targeted to increasing transparency in the DMCA process, improving response times to DMCA requests, and getting LL to commit to asset server deletion (or, at least, sequestering so as to no longer function on the public grid) of textures which are infringing and are not counter-notified. I believe a specific DMCA ticket system should be created by LL, which will give people submitting DMCA requests a clear idea of whether someone is assigned to reviewing it, and gives a sense of where your request is in the queue. A JIRA item of the type New Feature might be appropriate for this. It might be good for those who can get the ears of the Lindens to urge them to see about writing up some information on the number of DMCA requests they get, how many are not actionable, and what their turnaround time is as well.
I believe it’s very probable that LL does not have enough people working on the job of dealing with DMCA requests. Coupled with a more transparent ticket system for dealing with DMCAs, I’m almost certain LL will also have to assign more people to dedicated positions as DMCA notification agents. As far as I know now, there is only one Linden in charge of this.
Finally, another New Feature JIRA item might be to propose asset deletion in the case of infringers who do not contest the notification. As far as I know, LL never deletes assets and may not do so as a matter of current policy, and if that’s the case it needs to change. Alternatively, perhaps a New Feature proposal for asset sequestering which disables them on the grid but does not literally delete them. Possibly Linden Labs can already do this, and I welcome any remarks pointing me to this information. The worst that would happen with a JIRA issue is that perhaps a Linden will say whether they already have this ability or not.
And then there’s the users. Don’t bring down sims, don’t spam passersby, but do peacefully protest if you feel like it, to warn people off a skin rippers store. Do vote on relevant JIRA issues. Do talk to Lindens, media, etc. whom you know about the issue and at least make them aware that there’s a problem. In the end, it’s about supporting the creators.
Two final notes:
A common misconception is that LL can actually stop people from getting a hold of textures. Put this out of your mind. LL has to send the texture to you, and your graphics card has to be able to read it properly to display it on your screen. LL cannot control how your graphics card behaves, and it’s at the graphic cards point that skin ripping takes place. They could encrypt textures until they looked like nasty blobs of nothing .... but they would look like nasty blobs of nothing on your screen. It will take hardware makers to create systems for DRMing content passing throught the graphics chip, and in the end, there’s only so much that they can do. Indeed, I’m not sure that graphics hardware can ever do anything DRM-like with content such as LL provides, but I could be wrong.
Finally, in the end, it’s up to content creators to protect themselves. LL is definitely not capable of policing the grid, and copyright law largely puts the onus on the creator to discover and report the infringement. All we can hope for are tools that lead to speedier and more effective solutions to the problem within the law. There are a lot of things Linden Labs can improve on, but there are a lot of things we as users of Second Life can do as well to get things moving in a positive direction.
A well-reasoned post summarizing the issue. Thank you.
Thanks, cyn. I just noticed that I had a part for another post shoved in there, which is now fixed.
I’ll be very curious to see what develops over the next weeks.
