Remember remember the fifth of November
Gunpowder, treason and plot.
I see no reason why gunpowder, treason
Should ever be forgot…
I don’t know if 1605 conspiracy to kill King James I of England and some members of aristocracy has anything to do with this and if there will be any gunpowder barrels and fires on Linden’s sims, but the call is here and we should talk about content theft before we start the particle scripts.
While I wholehartedly support the action and the idea behind it, I’d like to chit-chat a bit about it with you.What always bugs me when content creators ask Lindens to protect the rights of the creators is how to effectively do it. First thing that comes to mind in the digital realm is to protect the data by tech means. But if I knew a way to protect digital data from copying and not to cripple it in the process, I would be hellishly rich by now. Many people are banging their heads about the case, and it doesn’t give much results. Actually, Second Life™ is one of the safer places to publish your digital stuff. Just compare it to good ol’ web where you have no protection at all. But, it’s far from good and satisfying.
Other way of protection, one that is usually applied, is protection by the law, which is how modern societies are supposed to work. But there is just one slight problem. It doesn’t work. Not in the publishing and media industries, let alone in the second life. While the big corporations can sue somebody’s ass for unauthorized duplication of digital material, that won’t be so easy in our world. Not only that the copyright laws are made to protect the monopoly of big corporations and not the artists and creators, but also because, in the case of big corporations, there is a huge amount of money involved. Even if you are big in second life, you are still working for L$ peanuts that hardly covers lawyers fee.
Sure, one can say that amounts of money in SL are not big anyway so the loses of creators, and profits of the thieves are not big either, so the whole case is not worth the fuss. But that’s not true. Loses of the creators are big. Maybe they are not big in terms of real currency but count the time invested in the process of making things, count the expenses. Last but not the least, count the right to get compensation for own work and creativity, no matter if that compensation is small or big. Other thing is, thieves do make a considerable amounts, especially if you consider the effort invested. Yes, they steal things that, in real currency scope, doesn’t cost much. They sell it for even less. But they steal large amounts of items from all over the grid and they sell it many times. Small price * many sales * many items = considerable profit. And then, that kind of behaviour seriously damages the economy of the grid. It’s not just creator’s loss. In the long run, it’s yours and mine as well.
One of the ways of fighting the content theft menace is educating the customers. It has been done before. Creators appealed to all of us not to buy stolen things. And it seams that kind of action gave some results. But there are two problems. First, you can’t get everybody in. I will join the cause, and as I know that buying stolen goods is wrong and even damaging to all of us, I won’t buy from the thieves. I guess you won’t as well. But you and me are the minority here. Because, there is a huge amount of people that are just quickly passing through second life, most of them came just recently. They don’t know about the content theft, nor about the bad things that happen because of it. Nor they would care if they know. They just came, they are short on money and they don’t know if they are going to stay. It’s just a game, after all. They will more likely beg for money and bitch about the freebies than to support creator’s rights. And then, even you and me and people who do care, do we always know if the item we’re buying is from the vendor of the real creator? I don’t think so. We avoid bad looking malls with full permission things sold too cheap, but there is no way to know if something we bought is an original.
SO, I’d like to hear from you. Is there some way I missed and that would end all this, bring some order and make both creators and shoppers happy?
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