What to do when your SL creation is stolen or copied?

I met in Second Life with eyeing Daigdig with the purpose of getting an answer to this question. His wife had been involved in a complaint over a creation’s property and they seemed like the person to go in our next step.

“If you see a breach of copyright, you need to notify SL and they basically take action,” eyeing Daigdig said.

Some of the most common complaints related to copyrights or an avatar’s property are when their texture, the script they created or the design of a building, for example, are copied by another avatar who takes what they did instead of creating their own.

According to eyeing Daigdig, there are no plans from SL to create an application or a system to make sure that a user cannot apply to his or her avatar the script for body language or copy the design for a building.

“It would be nice. As a creator/builder, to know when you spend hours working on things,  others can not copy it in 2 minutes and get a monetary reward for it,” eyeing Daigdig said.

In most cases, avatars don’t know that something they created, let’s say a building, has been copied by other user and placed in a different land. But in other cases -his happened to one of the avatars I interviewed, Kitty Tandino, an avatar will come and say they took some of the photos someone else had taken and publish them online. For Tandino, this wasn’t a big deal because the other avatar wasn’t making money out of it. But when it comes to script theft, avatars can sell the script to someone else without having spent a minute working on it.

Once an avatar discovers that something they created has been copied, SL verifies that the allegations of theft are true. In that case, SL deletes the items. According to eyeing Daigdig, “if the person renames or uses the item again, you again have to report it for Lindens to come in and delete it, they do not delete it from the asset server. After 3 reports, they do eventually suspend the account.”

SL has authority to do so under the DMCA: Digital Millennium Copyright Act. All SL users are under this regulation as soon as they accept the terms of use and agreement when they enter the in-world. The Copyright Act can be found in SL Official Web site:

“The DMCA provides a process for a copyright owner to give notification to an online service provider concerning alleged copyright infringement. When a valid DMCA notification is received, the service provider responds under this process by taking down the offending content. On taking down content under the DMCA, we will take reasonable steps to contact the owner of the removed content so that a counter-notification may be filed. On receiving a valid counter-notification, we generally restore the content in question, unless we receive notice from the notification provider that a legal action has been filed seeking a court order to restrain the alleged infringer from engaging in the infringing activity.”

You might wonder now if this complaints go outside of SL and if avatars file a court complaint in the real world. It has happened, but most of those I talked to agree that it is a long process, and not everyone is willing to go through it. This past week, two SL avatars settled an agreement over the “Sailor’s Cove” dispute, a claim of oral partnership agreement and property ownership.

According to this article published by the ABA journal on law news, there are since last year different law firms working specifically within second life. Sometimes they attend SL complaints and others they use the in-world to reach clients they couldn’t support any other way.

The question is now how well it’s communicated to users, when they enter SL, that they can be making a copyright infringement without knowing it or, most importantly, how does Linden Lab control that the avatar they just forced out of the in-world registers again with a different name.

Do not hesitate to come back later! More posts on copyright disputes and reporters’ work in Second Life are coming.

~ by onewayoranother on July 27, 2008.