A lawsuit was filed yesterday against Linden Lab, Second Life developers, for essentially having poor customer service.
Specifically, two of the most well-known merchants within SL, Munchflower Zaius (Shannon Grei), who runs a boutique (pics within NSFW) that sells gothic-oriented skins and clothing, and Stroker Serpentine (Kevin Alderman), who sells, um, a lot of sex toys, complain that Linden Lab’s procedures for protecting merchants within SL against theft are failures, and it results in lost business. Which becomes srs bizness when you realize that Alderman has sold over $1 million worth of cybersex animations. Alderman’s view on the subject (as quoted by Massively):
When public service announcements and nudity both fail, bring in the lawyers
Our intent is not to take down Second Life, nor create a division amongst the community. It is apparent to many of us that our concerns have gone largely ignored. Copybot, Builderbot, CryoLife [content theft exploits] et al are but symptoms of an ambivalent approach towards IP theft on behalf of Linden Lab. For years we have been promised better tools, more metadata, sticky licenses, aggressive response, verification, watermarks … ad nauseum. Seven years later and all we are given is a ‘Roadmap’.
The pirates know full well how to hedge their bets and leverage the DMCA in their favor. We are virtually defenseless unless we have the financial means to pursue expensive litigation. We do not expect miracles. We understand the nature of our chosen environment. Unfortunately, there is little to no deterrence under the current regime.
The wording here is important, since this lawsuit is essentially a political act. Alderman and Grei, both well-known community leaders within SL, have said, in the most direct way possible, that the community they are a part of is run so badly, legal redress is needed. Alderman even refers to the “regime”, as if the current governance of Linden Lab is something that is temporary and replaceable.
Like many lawsuits involving MMOs, this essentially says “You didn’t pay attention to us. PAY ATTENTION NOW.” In this case, the real problem is that Linden Lab is essentially being targeted for not investing enough on a police force and effective governance. This traditionally is not something that MMOs worry about, save at the last minute and with the least expense. Yet in such an environment, content creators, feeling million-dollar markets at risk, are threatened that they will be put out of business by exploits they have no power to combat. Alderman in particular has been aggressive about responding to these via the legal system (Grei joining him in the second suit), and this suit is the ultimate expression of that. There is also the not insignificant matter of Linden Lab profiting from Grei and Alderman’s work directly, through server rentals and commissions on advertising and direct sales – while also profiting from pirates who then turn around and resell their work through the same tools that Grei and Alderman use. So from a simple customer service standpoint, the solution would seem obvious – spend more money on customer service dedicated to copyright theft (which will be a thankless task) and develop tools that automate already extant procedures to address theft complaints. Simple, though painful since both will involve investment in profit sinks, not profit centers (thusly, refer back to MMOs worrying about this at the last minute and the least expense).
Yet there is another problem, and that is the political, not merely the technological. Alderman and Grei, by insisting that Linden Lab benefited from theft of their work and should be held accountable, are denying Linden Lab’s status as a neutral host of content. Given Second Life’s status as the most freewheeling, open and libertarian virtual world, that seems a dangerous assertion to press. Holding Linden Lab legally responsible for all the various misdeeds of its denizens means that Linden Lab, if sane, will promptly cut back its liability as quickly as possible.
Which, not to put a fine a point on things, will mean that there will no longer be a $1 million market for cybersex animations.
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“It is, I think, a fair assumption on the grounds that if I were to log in on Second Life late Friday Evening and try to find out where the majority of players are right now, the path will lead directly to the red light districts. Consequently, those looking to make a profit in Second Life are highly encouraged to develop content for the red light district. Ergo, the average content creator in Second Life will be a pornographer.”
Actually, geldonyetich, if you made an account in SL right now you would be unable to find ANYTHING of an adult nature until you verified to LL that you are an adult by providing personal information.
Then, after you do, you’ll discover that only less than about 4% of the server space (sims) are flagged as “Adult” where that naughty disgusting sex stuff happens. The rest of the grid is mostly clothing stores, dance clubs, public service builds, educational sims, amusement parks and so forth.
The co-plaintiff in this lawsuit, Shannon Grei, sells clothing and custom avatar skins. Her stores have nothing to do with sex or the sex biz.
So no, it’s NOT a fair assumption at all.
@Gx1080
“Are you saying that Linden Labs told the guy to sue them? There must be a more educated way to say it but: What the fuck are you smoking? ”
——-
I don’t smoke. Linden Lab made it clear that the only thing that could break through their lethargic corporate red tape would be litigation. That is also consistent with the way they’ve worked for the last 6 years.
You don’t have to believe me, I don’t really care. It’s still true.
Which I’ve already done by simply filling out my account creation information…
What I really need to see to counteract my subjective experience is some official published statistics.
Of course, I’m not talking about server space, I’m talking about where the people can be found in the game.
So the truth comes out, geldonyetich! You do really want to find the sexy stuff!
j/k
You can use the search function in world, or pull up the map and look for green dots. Double click the map to teleport to wherever the green dots are.
As for percentage, Linden Lab has done extensive surveys and estimated that between 2 and 4% of the content in SL is adult-related (this includes combat sims and violent roleplaying areas, not just sex). There really is no way to survey how many residents engage in such stuff, or to determine what percentage of their time is devoted to it. Most SLers vary their time between shopping, chatting, dancing, building, roleplaying, etc. Somewhere in that mix might be some pixel-bumping but it’s usually not the entirety of anyone’s Second Life.
This blog entry gives the LL estimate before they began the segregation:
http://nwn.blogs.com/nwn/2009/03/red-light-segregation.html
I’m just jaded about Second Life because, the last time I tried it out, I was basically looking for a good chat — you know, it’s basically a graphical chat room you build upon. Most of the people I ran into were simply AFK, or else engaged in private conversations, because they certainly didn’t seem interested in saying anything to me. When I went to where most of the green dots were, you can guess where I ended up.
Granted, this was prior to the segregation. Whether or not Second Life made a sweeping change since then, I’ve yet to test.
Things aren’t that much different now, geldon. It requires some patience and perseverance to find groups with common interests. And when you do, there’s still a lot of turnover as people come and go. Probably not much different from most MMOs, really.
Hi, gang!
Not sure how many of you burrowed through the complaint filing. Seriously, not many people actually enjoy reading legal docs. I find them to be good reading, myself, though.
The core of the complaint involves whether or not Linden Lab acted lawfully or unlawfully once notified of an infringement. Obviously, the complaint asserts the latter. Alderman’s previous two infringement lawsuits (from memory) arose when Linden Lab apparently took no action in response to infringement notices.
Most of the rest of the material in the complaint is supporting information, describing how the digital assets work for the court, the circumstances surrounding infringement and so forth.
@ Stranger
“If someone can steal it not Lindens problem,it same like u rent appartments in hotel and some fool steal your clothes in room,u will sue hotel owner too ?”
If the hotel owner had given every guest the same key so that anyone could open anyone else’s door, and if they hadn’t stopped and questioned the guy who walked out through the lobby with 23 different people’s suitcases… then yeah, I’d hold the hotel owner responsible.
At the end of the day, SL allows players to make money from it and here are content creators taking what pretty much amounts to their marketplace to court in order to protect their investment / revenue source.
This isn’t like piracy elsewhere on the internet, since LL has a lot more control over its internal systems (maybe not absolute, but a lot more).
And yeah, LL aren’t a neutral host any more – they tried it and it didn’t work.
I do feel for the weird virtual penis merchants in this case. LL is functioning as a marketplace much the same way as say E-bay or the Apple iTunes or iPhone application download service. If anyone could crack the iTunes store itself and simply copy whatever movies and music they wanted for free, from that marketplace, you had better believe that RIAA and the various artists would be suing Apple.
This doesn’t change the fact that the typical elderly white male technophobe judge is going to order all parties, plantiffs and defendants horsewhipped as soon as he starts to comprehend what exactly they are buying selling and doing. heck he might even buy the plaintiffs “virtual erots horsewhipper” attachment to do it with.
@faefrost I think the closer analogy would be that someone starts selling pirated copies on e-bay or itunes.
Of course, DMCA notices would be the first thing to be sent (accompanied, I daresay) by angry phone calls.
But what if they didn’t take the content down — or didn’t take it down for a long time, or accidentally disabled every track you’d sold previously?
Then you’d reach for the lawyers, right?
That’s essentially the case the plaintiffs are making.
I hate to point out the huge pink elephant in the room, but it’s not been brought up in the whole debate over the philosophy of suing a service provider.
Munchflower and Stroker’s stuff really isn’t that good. Yes I said it.
Munchflower’s biggest business, which are skins for people’s avatars, is really starting to get hammered by vendors selling skins that are of vastly higher quality. Her skins make ones avatar look like Jeff Goldblum.
Stroker is getting hammered by vendors that sell much higher quality animations (his make your avatar look like you’re having a seizure) and better bang-for-the-buck gear.
So in the end this is starting to sound like what happens in terrestrial business all the time: if your business starts to slack off because of your inferior product, don’t buck up and actually compete – use that money you’ve earned and sue somebody.
@Keenan
Ha. I knew that “Linden Labs told us to sue them” was bullshit. And I also knew that Linden Labs couldn’t control what their costumers produce (they can regulate all the stuff, but they cannot regulate who does what, reasons up in the thread).
And of course that they are acting like a terrestrial business, we are talking of million$.
I’m actually sort of chagrined there’s enough Second Life players to generate $1M for some guy’s cybersex animations. Perhaps the purging of fire that comes at the end of the Mayan Calendar will be me finally having had enough of this silly race.
@geldonyetich
Well, bored middle age women (and a few men) is a really big market. They just want cheap impulses between their legs, so its also an easy market. See: Romantic Novels, the hard-cover version of crappy fan-fiction.
@Larry Lard
Actually Kevin was featured in the mmo documentary “another perfect world” from by Channel 4 television.
Like anything crazy that makes people money I say – nice work if you can get it. Its just like that Office Space comment on the pet rock (paraphrasing here) – “well… the guy made a million dollars – of course it was a great idea!”
The landfills overflow with such great ideas.
@geldonyetich
Yeah? Well the guy made a million dollars!
.
on the canal street thing… the brand names bag makers in real life cant get the canal street knock offs stopped. i dont remember exactly why– something like its legal to have knockoffs but illegal to sell them on public streets– something like that. in any case its almost unenforcable. the enforcement problem changes in teh internets, because there is always an easy trace of everything, so if there were to be an actual law, would it protect better online?
…to that end– my question is, is it harder to build the equivalent of a truly black market on the web?
Such is my way of thinking, I find making a million dollars causing harm to the planet to be a bad thing. Go figure.
@Gx1080: “Ha. I knew that “Linden Labs told us to sue them” was bullshit. ”
You just keep believing that. And it wasn’t a directive, it was a statement of reality in the corporate world. I worked for a major corporation for over a decade, and I know from personal experience that any company with stockholders and a board of directors is reluctant to invest in maintenance (including security) unless it demonstrably adds to the botom line profits. IP enforcement doesn’t have a direct tie to profits. Thus, the only way to get a company to invest in tighter enforcement is to make it a litigation issue.
That’s the facts of life in the corporate world in which Linden Lab lives. Your doubts have no relationship to reality.
@Cindy Claveau
Ok, putting the believe that suing Linden Labs is the holy duty of their costumers aside, how any of you expect Linden Labs to control who does what? Serial codes? They are going to be hacked. A huge database of everything that is made? Cost a lot of money. Costumer service based on reports? Not affordable unless you are Blizzard.
Do you even understand that if Linden Labs have to choose between the viability of their business and the viability of third-party pornographers they are going to choose themselves?
Second Life can be likened to a 3D web browser. Once a picture is on your web browser, you can take that picture. If the website uses fancy code to prevent you from simply right-clicking and saving that picture, and you can’t get it from your cache, but you want it, chances are you’ll find some third-party software that rips that picture.
Linden Labs is essentially being asked to do the impossible for the same reason all other forms of information piracy can’t be stomped out: it’s a situation that can’t be reliably policed. People can get around any kind of software copy protection.
I’m sure they not only knew this, but knew it so implicitly that they made very clear in their terms of service agreement that they will not be held responsible in the event that any content developed by the users is duplicated without consent. It’s like any other developer of online platforms which content can be made that people expect to make money producing and selling.
Even though this threat has existed in there since the beginning, people seem to still manage to succeed. I bet that the creators that do quality work and get ripped, still get high volumes of traffic and business. This is really a point that needs to be stressed here.
I’m more apt to believe that these two creators have been around for a while and thought they would ride the money wave forever and were sadly mistaken when other people saw how easy it is and started making better. I’ve seen some talented people on the Internet, but in reality it’s hard to make money from it. I can’t help thinking that these people should feel lucky that they can make enough to buy a meal at McD’s just from sitting at the pc in their underwear all day and playing with software. I know plenty of people who do this every day outside of Second Life for zero profit, yet they still do it.
I really don’t see how LL can afford the manpower to stop this. You can pretty much guarantee that whatever defense they put in place, someone will circumvent it in a matter of days, likely hours. Then, where will all this have gotten you except for a buttload of restrictions that give you less freedoms than you had before? What will you do when the very next week another friend gets ripped off and you realize that all of this was in vain?
Software and movie and music companies have been trying for years and so far it’s a (very) losing battle. I just don’t see a virtual sex toy or painted skin that anyone with a free graphics program can make as being anywhere close to the same level. What you expect LL to do is next to impossible and I doubt they’re the big monster that some of you portray them as.
Of course, Cindy Claveau herself has run a club called Archan, and a store called Cyn City, and surely she’s not going to pretend these had nothing to do with pixel sex, so she’s being awfully disingenuous here.
The solutions she’s proposing are almost as bad as the rampant copyright and lack of respect of IP incited by the Linden copyleftists — only from the other extreme. It introduces a creator autocracy where only skilled craftsmen in a guild approved by the platform providers, like latter-day Medicis, can participate in the economy, and all those with free accounts or people without credit cards (many of those outside of North America) cannot enter the market even at its lowest levels of amateur content.
There has to be a better way, and it does start with the Lindens disciplining their own cynical and extremist code cave — the very people in charge of security who themselves used the hackers’ third-party opensource viewers which inevitably incite or cause copyright theft with all their “special features”.
The Lindens make people register to view porn on the adult grid and register their credit cards to buy land, but any teenage code kiddy can hack a viewer and log on and steal everything with copybot and builderbot without having to register himself or his lovely creation, with the Linden overlords beaming at him in the sandbox the whole time.
There is something sick about making hard-working merchants have to put up and chase thousands of DMCA takedown notices when the thing that needs taking down is the third-party viewers. And no, the problem isn’t that “if you can see it you can copy it”. We got all that the first million times you geeks told us that. I’m glad Lum is at least intelligent enough to understand this is a *political* problem and one with therefore *political* solutions. It’s about psychology, too.
http://secondthoughts.typepad.com/second_thoughts/2009/07/open-source-shakedown-why-i-do-not-believe-it-is-technically-impossible-to-secure-digital-ip.html
BTW, I don’t like this new layout, and I don’t like Lum’s behaviour lately, either, and Lum is free to apologize to me at any time.
I agree, it was cruel for him to post that Microsoft video.
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