Ten

Yup.

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Humps

Now who is being patronising? I can hold my own thanks in social situations but I do appreciate your concern.

I was not nasty or personal with you. I have said before that I don't like your methods and the joyful glee with which you 'out' your victims. To be brutal I think it is repulsive how you moralise and pontificate with no regard for the damage you may do. I was not however so rude as to phrase it like that. I wrapped it up, hoping to get my point across without being offensive.

In return I got insulted with pearls worthy of a twelve year old. 'Don't quote Wilde at me ...you smear his name' ..... 'Oh Lord you have a point and finally got to it' were my particular favourites.

You are nasty and vicious.....all the while demanding respect yet giving none. If you and your kind are really all that protect us from content theft then God help us all.

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Hypatia Callisto

I learned how to draw people in my teens by drawing fashion models in photographs, complete with their clothes. I never considered what I was doing wrong, and neither did my art instructors

Although, I never claimed they were my designs... I just drew them There is a whole industry of people who do that, they're called fashion illustrators

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"To begin with," said the Cat, "a dog's not mad. You grant that?"

"I suppose so," said Alice.

"Well, then," the Cat went on, "you see, a dog growls when it's angry, and wags its tail when it's pleased. Now I growl when I'm pleased, and wag my tail when I'm angry. Therefore I'm mad."

"I call it purring, not growling," said Alice.

"Call it what you like," said the Cat.

Siyu Suen

Lol, hell yeah. I just made a Napoleonic bicorn complete with a revolutionary cockade, glad some crazy irate dead frenchman isn't going to file a DMCA on me for that Hurrraaaay for historical reproductions!

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"Your reality, sir, is lies and balderdash and I'm delighted to say that I have no grasp of it whatsoever" -Baron Munchausen

I'm attempting to bring about the end of the world to usher in a new era of mask wielding overlords. This is how!

Iris Seale

No, seriously, like, mean. /goes off to recite plays into a mirror.

Io Zeno

Joannah Cramer

But then as long as no actual laws are being broken in the process and the best accusation one can make is "lack of artistic integrity" ... then calling it thievery is dishonest stretch at best, and technical libel at worst. Which i think is Ingrid's point etc.

Chip Midnight

That was a good article, Ten. You had your facts straight about copyrights relative to clothing (there aren't any, except for textile patterns), and design patents. I honestly don't think that a lawsuit where a real world clothing company sued an SL photosourcer would hold up in court. It's definitely an ethical gray area but it's not cut and dried. If the test is being able to tell the difference between the original and the knockoff (as far as a design patent is concerned), there's a rather obvious difference between an article of clothing and a texture on an avatar. It isn't actually clothing so can't possibly be mistaken for anything other than what it is - a representation of it in an entirely different medium. They aren't in any way competition to the original article because, obviously, they aren't clothing. I'm rather surprised that LL removed those items from inworld if they weren't using the real world brand name, but I guess money talks.

For that argument to hold water, that a virtual replica of a real world piece of clothing, is a violation of something that has extremely limited copyright protection even in the real world, then if you took a photograph of someone wearing brand name clothing and sold the photograph, you'd be just as much in violation. At that point you've reached the level of the absurd.

Io Zeno

And there is Herman Miller, Chip, with their furniture designs. If they can, they will. If they care enough and honestly, the only ones who care are those setting up shop in SL themselves.

I think they are assholes, myself.

Hypatia Callisto

Actually, I commented on that on Twitter But not about the design theft, about the incredible LULZ when that fellow got all huffypuffy he found out poor Persephone was a guy IRL.

My sympathies are with Persephone, NOBODY should have to deal with some asshole coming onto you in a situation like that, its sexual harrassment in my book. Absolutely incredible.

Uh, yeah, I preferred Twitter because I just didn't want to get involved with debating a sexist moron without any braincells. Is that bad of me?

Io Zeno

To me the story with that wasn't that she copied the design, who cares, it was that she copied and pasted a photo of the belt itself off the runway photo instead of making it herself.

Cocoanut Koala

Tenshi could unmask Jack the Ripper, for all I care, and my sympathies would still be with her target.

coco

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Joshua Nightshade

Great Coco.

Kalia Meiklejohn

Wow.

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SLShop-A-Holic

Hypatia Callisto

and now for something completely different.

Josh has one post before hitting 15k. (next one's the charm I believe!)

Io Zeno

What did Tenshi ever do to you, lol?

Jeez.

Humps

It is not really the same thing at all. Persephone was copybotted even down to the musical alchemy logo on the piano. There is no ambiguity there. No room for error or creative similarity. It was what it was....a blatent rip of Persephone's product.

I also had the utmost respect for the way Persephone handled the situation. The kid concerned even confessed. What is not to support there?

A skin made from a texture that may or may not have been derived from a render is not quite as clear cut to my mind.

Quiplash

OK I am going off to bed. Please try not to add another 700 posts overnight, OK? kthxbai

Chip Midnight

This is paraphrased from one of my posts on this subject from an archived thread on the SL forums about the ethics of photosourcing, rather than reinvent the wheel...

"I differentiate between a photograph that exists merely as a document and one that's an artistic expression in its own right. Taking a photograph of something that's not under copyright doesn't suddenly infer a copyright on the subject. If for example I photograph a still life, and one of the items in the composition is an apple and someone takes the apple from my photograph I wouldn't care. I never owned a copyright on the apple and my document of that apple by itself isn't art. It's simply a document unless there's some special artistic merit to the way in which that apple was documented (say with a bullet going through it captured with a very fast camera). The art is the composition, the arrangement of shapes, the positive and negative spaces, the interplay of light and color, or the frozen moment in time (if it contributes to the message of the photograph). If someone took a bigger section of my still life in order to copy those broader compositional traits, then and only then would I take issue with it."

Now that opinion might not agree with the letter of the law, and I don't know if it would hold up in the face of an expensive lawyer, but I think being absolutist about it takes you just as quickly into the absurd. It's like saying that if someone xeroxes a page from a book that's not under copyright, and you use that xerox to copy the text to another medium, you've violated a copyright on the xerox.

Ethical gray area? Sure. But not one I lose any sleep over.

Io Zeno

Ah, but Chip, that photograph is itself a copyright protected product. For the same reasons you buy the photos you use for sources for your skins rather than just download photos off the net, it's a violation.

However, even that wasn't my gripe. It was just so lazy and unnecessary. She was charging a lot for this dress, that not only wasn't her own design, she didn't even bother to take the time to make a simple red belt, she copies the photo? Like I said, it was a red flag to me.

Chip Midnight

Most of the clothing in my store is photosourced. Granted, most of it was made before it was possible to cash out, but I still don't see it as a very bad thing. Making a good seamless piece of SL clothing from photographs isn't easy so I don't really see it as lazy. I haven't done any photosourced clothing in a couple of years now because I do have mixed feelings about it, but I'd put it on the crime scale at about the same level as jaywalking.

Io Zeno

Chip, she was making thousands of dollars a month with the skins and cashing in on her name with her clothing line that she didn't even bother to make a belt that if you gave me 20 minutes I could do. It says to me that she is more concerned with pumping out product than the quality and yes, it is coloring my view of all this.

Look at the work and care that goes into Nephaline's clothing and on top of it, it's some of the most reasonably priced, for the work, clothing in SL. If someone accused her of theft, that would also be taken into consideration to me, because her work and her attitude is the opposite.

CoyoteMomiji

I'm still waiting for my summons from last year.

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Slick closed until further notice.

Recidivist Sideways: YOU'LL TAKE MY ROUGH, BUTTERY FRIENDSHIP, AND YOU'LL LIKE IT

Io Zeno

Buy Coy's corsets. kthxbai.

Joshua Nightshade

I wasn't threatening.