Respecting Intellectual Property

[Graham Mills]

Hi Snoots,

Just one note, if you set your account payment method in your Kitely account settings page to one of the options that include Kitely Credits then you'll be able to use your Kitely Credits to pay for your Kitely world(s) subscription.

[Christine Nyn]

...ALL of my creations rely on scripts to function. So someone might copybot an avatar or a blaster... but all of the animations, gestures and functions won't work...

Assuming your creations stay on the grid they were made on this strategy certainly should protect the complete functioning of your creations. I'm assuming here that you don't patronise those grids where the owners are known to pirate anything that passes through their hands.

A further aspect of this that I have employed with ships in particular is that set-up scripts are required to configure an item before it will work, and those set-up scripts are removed before an item goes on sale. Copy one of those and you have a static model, and even if you put some standard scripts in there strange stuff will happen.

[Snoots Dwagon]

That is a very good coupla points Christine. I had totally forgotten about Godmode... which is a standard part of Opensim and completely overrides pretty much any defense against copybotting. Cos what a lotta copybotters do is actually buy one copy of the item... and then they take the box to their Godmode land and do whatever they want.

A lot of what I mentioned was in regard to people taking stuff from Second Life to Opensim. In that case (to my knowledge) they can't grab scripts with the object, which is why my items always contain scripted functions. Even with clothing many merchants are making them no-mod and using resizer and texture scripts... so even if the clothing is copybotted the scripts that make the clothing work doesn't go with it.

But Opensim is by its very nature is pretty much designed to be a copybot system. That's simple reality. Anyone who sets up their own micro-grid has full, 100% Godmode capability which can copy scripts and anything else a creator might use for security, so there we are. And some people live in countries that don't honor copyright law at all (or don't enforce it)... which the online video industry has to deal with all the time.

There is the occasional creator who has totally disarmed copybotters... by simply giving their stuff away free. Some do it for the reputation (Arcadia Asylum), others for donations. Wee Wonders makes incredible stuff, amazing stuff, wunnerful stuff... and give away ALL of it, no charge. In the middle of their store is a donation jar-- and those donations come rolling in because many people are down deep generous, and Wee Wonder stuff is awseomsauce. I kinda think they are the ones who understand the reality of copybotting... and have found a way around it: They just don't care. ;D

Sadly that doesn't help grids like Kitely, who do have to follow the laws and be conscious about such things, so Ilan's post is spot-on. But there's only so much a grid owner can do. It's like trying to remove roaches from a city; no matter how hard ya try, they'll still be around.

[Vixy Sharpfang]

There is the occasional creator who has totally disarmed copybotters... by simply giving their stuff away free.

That's our solution: Making all our items full-perm Freebies.
We pay, I think, good money to artists we hire for special functions - although some dropped the projects wholly when they heard it was for full-perm-freebies.

But for us the decision was really simple: We can't "earn" money inside OpenSim anyway, we got banned from SL for the misbehaviour of others whom we reported, which got some from our group to tears and others to screaming rage, despite us sinking a lot of molah into Second Life for a huge ice cream cafe with all the bells and whistles and our various avatars and clothing.

Now we sink that same money into artists willing to earn a few hundred bucks for making us avatars similar, but not identical, to those we lost when we got banned. As we spent that money for our own enjoyment anyway, the fact we can share them with others is a nice bonus for us.

We just wish there were more concurrent users in OpenSim, but then again as Corona was fading, the user numbers inside Second Life also dropped down to the middle 5-digits again.

[Gregg Legendary]

I had a discussion about this years ago to Kayaker Magic (a wise soul) just before I started selling on kitely market with the export option.
He told me you'll have to expect at some point you'll probable get copybotted, its the price of doing business on the hyper grid. SO I accepted that went forward, I do however do walkabouts on the hyper grid to look for my stuff. In all these years I have never found my stuff copy botted, so ether they are hiding it well or my stuff isn't good enough to copy bot lol...

[Tess Juel]

In all these years I have never found my stuff copy botted, so ether they are hiding it well or my stuff isn't good enough to copy bot lol...

Or not fashionable enough. Generally copybotters suffer from a serious case of Second Life Envy so what they steal is usually products from the best known SL merchants.

[Trouble Ahead]

I think SL's market is just a thing about making money of other people's content, for using the platform is way to expensive for the service they offer. When sims prices are high, builders ask higher prices as well, etc etc etc. Plus it will be " the happy few's hobby" , well the ones that invest in sims. It seriously kills creativity and sharing creativity. ( and yes people will come to copy it as well I guess)
The more exclusive the lesser the buyers and people who use the platform ( and they will never reach the level of popularity they wanted in the beginning, they ruined the market, just my opinion

[Vixy Sharpfang]

Hello!

One of my fellows, Haidi White, reported a few days ago that it is flawlessly possible to import .fbx files into Blender and export them to DAE's .... which include then the colors / textures, i.e. no postprocessing inworld needed!
These files she had from itch.io.

She found that many assets intended for use in games and demos are very cheaply licensable and funnily then are themselves licensable under literally ANY LICENSE WHATSOEVER!

Because the asset creators want their names and their products out there - and that won't happen when they limit what game creators can do with these assets.
So, for us content creators, we only need to pay their license - seriously not much given the amount of items and the quality of the items. And being social, it should be fine to refer to whom actually created the items.
And then we can market the items.

I also am unearthing and updating ressources for animations, though I had so far no success testing them so I'll throw them Haidi's way and will wait for her feedback if those items are actually usable.
If yes: 2500+ Animations ahead!

++++ Longform: ++++

Example:
https://styloo.itch.io/dungeon-asset-pack

Styloo, the creator of that pack, gives an extremely open usage license.
However, Haidi mentioned that she checked out the "low Poly Assets" of other creators, and found that many of them can be used "commercially or privately, in games or projects, with no limitation other than not to just republish the package as acquired from itch.io."

These packages are intended for the use in 2D or 3D games, asking for either moderate fees to acquire the license to use them or just ask to be attributed. The latter should pose no problem for anyone able of written communiction, and the prior is nice in that it either explicitely says that the "game or content" can be whatever license one wants, or does not mention anything about what kind of license the "game or content" one uses the assets for may use.

The latter might be problematic for use in OpenSim unless somebody with an inch of legal expertise took a look (but really, take look at what the license with each package or creator says yourselves, some are very open!).

But the prior opens up a treasure trove of content that can be easily imported, has just about the perfect complexity for OpenSim, and can be used easily for us here in OpenSim and Kitely in particular!

Because:
a) Usage as "content" under other licenses is legal
b) NOT distributing the package as acquired off itch.io ... should be really easy to do: Just pack the items by type, by arrangement or whatever else... Actually uploading to OpenSim is already a different package form than what was on Itch.io!
c) Attributing the Creators is not a issue - Add it as comment into the objects and / or add a notecard that refers to them: Bingo!


NomNom!
Vixy

[Snoots Dwagon]

Such packs are great for Opensim... which has no upload fees. For Second Life, one has to calculate the benefit, because sure as earth has gravity LL is going to suck all the profit they can from upload fees. Every time I upload a mesh item there I just wince. Which is why I very, very seldom upload anything to SL. (Good news residents! You can now upload 2048 x 2048 textures to SL... for L$50 per texture!).

I do have a major SL hobby: see how much I can use the system without paying a dime.