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Now I have made up my mind about what to do... I thank everybody who helped me here to get through this and take a decision....
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goin back as far as 2017, second life has had problems with copybot and theft within its own platform and has never taken legal action to any extent.. they can ban a user who simply creates a new account. https://www.hypergridbusiness.com/2017/12/gacha-creators-f... here is another article dating back from 2017 https://www.hypergridbusiness.com/2017/11/content-theft-qu...
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For years, people have been repeatedly causing confusion by claiming that lawyers are interested in moving content from SL to OpenSim.
Under German law, they can only be prosecuted for physical objects that can actually be picked up.
Virtual items—and that’s 100% the case here—would therefore not be prosecuted.
I doubt the U.S. would bother with this for a value of $1–$10!
I’d take my chances on doing nothing and avoid panicking.
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Under German law, they can only be prosecuted for physical objects that can actually be picked up.
Virtual items—and that’s 100% the case here—would therefore not be prosecuted.
I doubt the U.S. would bother with this for a value of $1–$10!
I’d take my chances on doing nothing and avoid panicking.
I am curious - since very few of the grids here are hosted in the U. S., why does anyone care about DMCA crap? SL is very likely not going to do anything about it because there is no money to be made attacking people who never made any money on the stuff, either, so I am very much questioning the whole idea that anyone is trying anything "REAL" - that costs real money to do. It looks to me like someone is trying to get everyone running scared with pure BS.
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Few grids by number, but big grids by land area and users.
Even if only OSgrid and AMV, the two biggest American grids, are shut down by the authorities, you WILL notice. Yes, almost the entirety of OSgrid is hosted by its users. But the authorities will neither know nor care. Besides, the OSgrid admins could have detached those infringing freebie sims, now, couldn't they?
Besides, as @GentleDragonheart has pointed out, it isn't like all the rest of the world doesn't have anything like the DMCA. And it isn't like American copyright is limited to the USA, otherwise Mickey Mouse would have been in the public domain in Germany for decades.
Wolf Territories: UK. Groovyverse and Neverworld: Canada. ZetaWorlds: Germany. Kitely: Israel AFAIK (although Ilan probably pays close attention that at least nobody imports stolen SL stuff into Kitely anymore, and I guess that if bad came to worse, he wouldn't tolerate "found on the Hypergrid" freebie sims chock-full of SL stuff either, so it's unlikely that Kitely will even be targeted).
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Even if only OSgrid and AMV, the two biggest American grids, are shut down by the authorities, you WILL notice. Yes, almost the entirety of OSgrid is hosted by its users. But the authorities will neither know nor care. Besides, the OSgrid admins could have detached those infringing freebie sims, now, couldn't they?
Besides, as @GentleDragonheart has pointed out, it isn't like all the rest of the world doesn't have anything like the DMCA. And it isn't like American copyright is limited to the USA, otherwise Mickey Mouse would have been in the public domain in Germany for decades.
Wolf Territories: UK. Groovyverse and Neverworld: Canada. ZetaWorlds: Germany. Kitely: Israel AFAIK (although Ilan probably pays close attention that at least nobody imports stolen SL stuff into Kitely anymore, and I guess that if bad came to worse, he wouldn't tolerate "found on the Hypergrid" freebie sims chock-full of SL stuff either, so it's unlikely that Kitely will even be targeted).
You are correct, the DMCA is a US federal law that cannot be enforced outside of the US. But other countries have similar laws, Here in Europe that counterpart is split across two primary pillars: the E-Commerce Directive (which provides "safe harbor" liability exemptions for internet service providers) and the InfoSoc Directive / Copyright Directive (which governs digital copyright and anti-circumvention rules. These rules have since been updated by the modern Digital Services Act (DSA) and the EU Directive on Copyright in the Digital Single Market.
What is also important to mention is that the DMCA and its worldwide sister laws are not just in place to protect the copyright owners and give them a means to take legal action against infringements. An important part is also the safe harbor concept. In short: The safe harbor concept protects online service providers from monetary liability for copyright infringement by their users. Providers must meet specific rules, such as removing infringing material quickly upon receiving a valid takedown notice and having no actual knowledge of the illegal activity.To use the safe harbor protection, a website or platform must follow these rules:
Takedown promptly: Remove or block access to infringing material immediately after getting a proper notice from the copyright owner.
No financial benefit: Do not make direct financial money from the infringing activity if the provider has the right and power to control it.
No actual knowledge: Lack actual knowledge of the copyright violation, or be unaware of facts that make the infringement obvious.Repeat infringer policy: Adopt and reasonably enforce a policy to terminate user accounts for repeat copyright violations.
Designated agent: Register a designated agent with the U.S. Copyright Office to receive takedown notices.
When not located in the US, similar requirements must be met under the copyright legislation in their country.
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What is also important to mention is that the DMCA and its worldwide sister laws are not just in place to protect the copyright owners and give them a means to take legal action against infringements. An important part is also the safe harbor concept. In short: The safe harbor concept protects online service providers from monetary liability for copyright infringement by their users. Providers must meet specific rules, such as removing infringing material quickly upon receiving a valid takedown notice and having no actual knowledge of the illegal activity.To use the safe harbor protection, a website or platform must follow these rules:
Takedown promptly: Remove or block access to infringing material immediately after getting a proper notice from the copyright owner.
No financial benefit: Do not make direct financial money from the infringing activity if the provider has the right and power to control it.
No actual knowledge: Lack actual knowledge of the copyright violation, or be unaware of facts that make the infringement obvious.Repeat infringer policy: Adopt and reasonably enforce a policy to terminate user accounts for repeat copyright violations.
Designated agent: Register a designated agent with the U.S. Copyright Office to receive takedown notices.
When not located in the US, similar requirements must be met under the copyright legislation in their country.
2 things can be true at the same time. it could be scare tactics, but i definitely have friends that were threatened recently in this situation. i will never reveal their identities but i can be one to vouch that its not just a story. the extent of the threats and how much legal action was taken is unclear to me thus far, could be as simple as grids being asked to remove items.
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As long as grids comply and remove these items or have them removed, everything's fine and dandy. It's just a few freebies that are no longer available or maybe a few entire freebie stores that are gone.
But those who are laughing about this because "nothing won't happen anyway" WILL stop laughing once the Italian authorities pull the plug on Sciattisi. That is, I guess even then many will continue laughing until the impacts come closer because the first grid in their home country is forcibly shut down.
To copybotters who think that a small Outworldz DreamGrid is a good refuge: A tiny grid that's only one party location and one big Legacy/EvoX/Doux store is easier to shut down with no collateral damage than a huge grid with all kinds of places, only one of which is a copybotter's freebie sim. Also, if they find out that it's you who a) botted the stuff in SL, b) imported and reassembled it and c) offered it for free, don't believe they'll stop at just closing your grid so you can come back with a new grid with the exact same OARs easy-peasy.
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But those who are laughing about this because "nothing won't happen anyway" WILL stop laughing once the Italian authorities pull the plug on Sciattisi. That is, I guess even then many will continue laughing until the impacts come closer because the first grid in their home country is forcibly shut down.
To copybotters who think that a small Outworldz DreamGrid is a good refuge: A tiny grid that's only one party location and one big Legacy/EvoX/Doux store is easier to shut down with no collateral damage than a huge grid with all kinds of places, only one of which is a copybotter's freebie sim. Also, if they find out that it's you who a) botted the stuff in SL, b) imported and reassembled it and c) offered it for free, don't believe they'll stop at just closing your grid so you can come back with a new grid with the exact same OARs easy-peasy.
of course man. i state facts as i know them. if i dont know i dont speak up. lets just remember that nobody really needs to smash the big red panic button, yeah? i try to stay in the middle and see both sides of the coin. this too, shall pass. it always has.
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do as you wish. i can understand not wishing to be scared or intimidated; i personally can also understand why friends feel threatened and are taking measures to protect themselves. there is no right or wrong as far as i see it.
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But are you seriously worried about some ridiculous things like SL copyrights? This can actually lead to a maximum fine of a percentage of the profit you have from the stolen assets...
Your much more serious problem is cooperation with thieves from countries like Russia, Ukraine, Korea, China and the like. Everyone pretends to be distracted and tries to pretend that they don't know where these stolen assets come from. Well, from well-known Russian, Ukrainian, Korean and Chinese hacker networks. Everyone knows it! Some even know that some of these assets come locked (infected) by embedded special scripts. Don't tell me it's not so! I've extracted several of these scripts and I know what I'm talking about.
Violation of copyrights or cooperation with the above? Which of the two is the real problem?
"Don't worry, be happy"....
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Your much more serious problem is cooperation with thieves from countries like Russia, Ukraine, Korea, China and the like. Everyone pretends to be distracted and tries to pretend that they don't know where these stolen assets come from. Well, from well-known Russian, Ukrainian, Korean and Chinese hacker networks. Everyone knows it! Some even know that some of these assets come locked (infected) by embedded special scripts. Don't tell me it's not so! I've extracted several of these scripts and I know what I'm talking about.
Violation of copyrights or cooperation with the above? Which of the two is the real problem?
"Don't worry, be happy"....
And sometimes it feels like we brought the same attitude with us that many people originally wanted to escape from in Second Life — status, competition, obsession with having the newest things, and endless drama. OpenSim should be about more freedom, more creativity, and a more positive atmosphere. Instead of constantly trying to copy SL, I’d rather see OpenSim build its own identity, improve its own avatars and content, and become a place people actually come to relax and create
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OpenSim avatars are actually even more expected to always be up-to-date and state-of-the-art than Second Life avatars. After all, the total makeover every few months that'd cost you L$15,000 in SL costs you exactly nothing here.
I mean, sure, you can wear Damien Fate, Clutterfly and layer clothes on a Ruth2 v4. But then those with a PBR Legacy body, a PBR LeLutka EvoX head with matching PBR skins and PBR Doux hair, all decked out in PBR clothes released in SL three weeks ago and copybotted two weeks ago, feel both entitled and justified to ridicule the hell out of you.
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I mean, sure, you can wear Damien Fate, Clutterfly and layer clothes on a Ruth2 v4. But then those with a PBR Legacy body, a PBR LeLutka EvoX head with matching PBR skins and PBR Doux hair, all decked out in PBR clothes released in SL three weeks ago and copybotted two weeks ago, feel both entitled and justified to ridicule the hell out of you.
First of all: If this is of such critical importance, why is it an off-topic comment under someone else's completely unrelated post? As opposed to a post of its own? Is Cyber out of coins?
Anyway, of course grid owners are panicking now. They have tons of premium luxury state-of-the-art content available in their grids, current top sellers in the SL Marketplace, freshly ripped from SL. Entire sims base their OSW fame on such content. Entire grids exist only for such content.
And they haven't taken any safety precautions whatsoever. Some panicked about Mississippi or UK age verification laws, but they all stayed totally calm about the DMCA. Nothing had happened, so nothing would ever happen.
In the second half of the previous decade, this was different. I think it was in 2015, not long after Maitreya Lara stuff had started pouring onto the Hypergrid, that creators threatened to take legal action against OpenSim grids that illegally offered their contents. THEIR contents, mind you. Not stolen SL content in general.
Also, OFFERED. This wasn't about copybotted decoration on the sims. This wasn't about copybotted content in the asset databases (although there were grids that actually tried hard to scrub their asset databases clean of any potentially illegal stuff later on). This was only about freebie stores.
So the threat was like this: Either the grids remove all stolen items from a certain creator from their freebie stores, or the grids in their entirety will be C&D'd. As in, they'll have to shut down. Or they WILL be shut down by the authorities.
Especially American grid owners went into panic mode. They went around the freebie sims in their grids and demanded the sim owners remove all illegal items from that creator from the stores on their sims. Or all illegal items ALTOGETHER because they forgot which creator it was, or because nobody know who had made what, and it'd be safer to remove all botted stuff. If not, they'll delete the whole sim. Because otherwise the authorities will shut the whole grid down.
If the sim owners had rented store space to other users, and these other users had used their store space to offer stolen SL content, they got the same message: Remove all stolen SL stuff, or I'll clear your store, or the grid owner will delete the sim, or the authorities will close the whole grid. All of a sudden, stores that were chock-full of Maitreya and Catwa and BlueBerry and the like suddenly switched to Linda Kellie because Linda Kellie was the only creator whose items everybody know for absolutely certain were legal.
Mind you, this was before everything flooded in via The Harbor or The Conglomerate. This was when many freebie store owners copybotted content in SL, imported it, re-assembled it and put it in their own stores.
It was then that precautions were taken.
No longer did the copybotters import and re-assemble the content they had stolen from SL. They mailed or FTP'd it to other users who imported it into OpenSim and put it back together. Even if the authorities had been able figure out the real persons behind the OpenSim avatars who were the "creators" of this content, these persons wouldn't have stolen anything. Even if Linden Lab had helped the authorities find out who exactly had copybotted these contents, they wouldn't have been able to prove that the copybotters had done anything illegal with these contents.
Popular and expensive content such as mesh bodies and mesh heads were renamed and rebranded to make tracing them back to SL more difficult. This worked so well that many OpenSim users are still fully convinced that Athena was originally created in and for OpenSim from scratch, and they fight any claims that Athena is actually a copybotted Maitreya Lara tooth and nail. Even though Onyx LeShelle who is behind Maitreya demanded in an open letter that any and all Maitreya content be removed from OpenSim, and she explicitly mentioned all Athena versions existing at that time. (I have a copy of this open letter, by the way.)
The import and initial offering of ripped SL content was moved away from Western and especially American grids and to grids not only outside U.S. jurisdiction, but to places were U.S. laws were completely and utterly powerless. Sacrarium was perfect: It had a Russian domain. Even if Western authorities had been eager enough to try and find the grid owner in Russia, they wouldn't have found him because WhiteAngel Deed operated the grid on a server in his flat in Kazakhstan. Information which they would have had to extort from OpenSim community members.
On top of all this came "Sharing is caring," "Share with no mercy" and "Share or die." The idea behind this was for freebie store owners to pick up the boxes with the ripped content and offer them in their own freebie stores. Then for the next freebie store owners to pick them up from there and offer them in their stores. And so forth. Wash, rinse, repeat. Ideally, some of the freebie sims in the chain would be saved and re-imported as OARs, making the sim owner the creator of everything. The purpose behind this was to make it impossible to trace back where exactly these boxes were rezzed first, i.e. which grid brought these illegal items into OpenSim in the first place.
But: No legal action was actually taken. And so the content pirates in OpenSim felt safe. If no legal action was taken, none will ever be taken.
Fast-forward to 2020 when then-current Catwa and Genus heads were imported and offered under their original names.
Nowadays, you have popular freebie sims run by U.S. citizens in U.S. grids with U.S. grid owners running under U.S. domains. Literally everything there is stolen from SL. The most expensive and most popular items in particular, mesh bodies, mesh heads, mesh hair etc., are offered under their original names to show everyone that you can get a genuine L$5,000 Legacy body and a genuine L$5,000 LeLutka EvoX head here, exclusively!
Yes, exclusively. "Sharing is caring"/"Share with no mercy"/"Share or die" is dead. Superseded by "Don't steal my stolen stuff!" Everything is no-transfer nowadays, and if it isn't, it's no-copy. This isn't about "liberating" commercial content anymore. This is about having cooler stuff in your stores than the other stores, thereby having more customers, thereby having a higher ranking on OSW.
There's a whole lot of effort taken to keep these contents exclusive to exactly one sim in exactly one grid. But there's absolutely zero effort taken anymore to keep criminal investigators from finding the culprit who had stolen these contents from SL to offer them as freebies in OpenSim.
If the announced legal action is actually taken this time, we'll probably see not only a whole lot of popular freebie sims being shut down by grid owners, but we'll also see entire grids being shut down by authorities. Or by grid owners who know that it's impossible to remove all the illegal contents from all the freebie sims in the grid. Or by grid owners who themselves distribute loads of stolen SL contents in their own grids.
Let's just hope that, like back in 2015, this is only about freebies in stores. And not about decoration or items in the asset database. (Although "decoration" can and probably will be used as a loophole by some.)
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Anyway, of course grid owners are panicking now. They have tons of premium luxury state-of-the-art content available in their grids, current top sellers in the SL Marketplace, freshly ripped from SL. Entire sims base their OSW fame on such content. Entire grids exist only for such content.
And they haven't taken any safety precautions whatsoever. Some panicked about Mississippi or UK age verification laws, but they all stayed totally calm about the DMCA. Nothing had happened, so nothing would ever happen.
In the second half of the previous decade, this was different. I think it was in 2015, not long after Maitreya Lara stuff had started pouring onto the Hypergrid, that creators threatened to take legal action against OpenSim grids that illegally offered their contents. THEIR contents, mind you. Not stolen SL content in general.
Also, OFFERED. This wasn't about copybotted decoration on the sims. This wasn't about copybotted content in the asset databases (although there were grids that actually tried hard to scrub their asset databases clean of any potentially illegal stuff later on). This was only about freebie stores.
So the threat was like this: Either the grids remove all stolen items from a certain creator from their freebie stores, or the grids in their entirety will be C&D'd. As in, they'll have to shut down. Or they WILL be shut down by the authorities.
Especially American grid owners went into panic mode. They went around the freebie sims in their grids and demanded the sim owners remove all illegal items from that creator from the stores on their sims. Or all illegal items ALTOGETHER because they forgot which creator it was, or because nobody know who had made what, and it'd be safer to remove all botted stuff. If not, they'll delete the whole sim. Because otherwise the authorities will shut the whole grid down.
If the sim owners had rented store space to other users, and these other users had used their store space to offer stolen SL content, they got the same message: Remove all stolen SL stuff, or I'll clear your store, or the grid owner will delete the sim, or the authorities will close the whole grid. All of a sudden, stores that were chock-full of Maitreya and Catwa and BlueBerry and the like suddenly switched to Linda Kellie because Linda Kellie was the only creator whose items everybody know for absolutely certain were legal.
Mind you, this was before everything flooded in via The Harbor or The Conglomerate. This was when many freebie store owners copybotted content in SL, imported it, re-assembled it and put it in their own stores.
It was then that precautions were taken.
No longer did the copybotters import and re-assemble the content they had stolen from SL. They mailed or FTP'd it to other users who imported it into OpenSim and put it back together. Even if the authorities had been able figure out the real persons behind the OpenSim avatars who were the "creators" of this content, these persons wouldn't have stolen anything. Even if Linden Lab had helped the authorities find out who exactly had copybotted these contents, they wouldn't have been able to prove that the copybotters had done anything illegal with these contents.
Popular and expensive content such as mesh bodies and mesh heads were renamed and rebranded to make tracing them back to SL more difficult. This worked so well that many OpenSim users are still fully convinced that Athena was originally created in and for OpenSim from scratch, and they fight any claims that Athena is actually a copybotted Maitreya Lara tooth and nail. Even though Onyx LeShelle who is behind Maitreya demanded in an open letter that any and all Maitreya content be removed from OpenSim, and she explicitly mentioned all Athena versions existing at that time. (I have a copy of this open letter, by the way.)
The import and initial offering of ripped SL content was moved away from Western and especially American grids and to grids not only outside U.S. jurisdiction, but to places were U.S. laws were completely and utterly powerless. Sacrarium was perfect: It had a Russian domain. Even if Western authorities had been eager enough to try and find the grid owner in Russia, they wouldn't have found him because WhiteAngel Deed operated the grid on a server in his flat in Kazakhstan. Information which they would have had to extort from OpenSim community members.
On top of all this came "Sharing is caring," "Share with no mercy" and "Share or die." The idea behind this was for freebie store owners to pick up the boxes with the ripped content and offer them in their own freebie stores. Then for the next freebie store owners to pick them up from there and offer them in their stores. And so forth. Wash, rinse, repeat. Ideally, some of the freebie sims in the chain would be saved and re-imported as OARs, making the sim owner the creator of everything. The purpose behind this was to make it impossible to trace back where exactly these boxes were rezzed first, i.e. which grid brought these illegal items into OpenSim in the first place.
But: No legal action was actually taken. And so the content pirates in OpenSim felt safe. If no legal action was taken, none will ever be taken.
Fast-forward to 2020 when then-current Catwa and Genus heads were imported and offered under their original names.
Nowadays, you have popular freebie sims run by U.S. citizens in U.S. grids with U.S. grid owners running under U.S. domains. Literally everything there is stolen from SL. The most expensive and most popular items in particular, mesh bodies, mesh heads, mesh hair etc., are offered under their original names to show everyone that you can get a genuine L$5,000 Legacy body and a genuine L$5,000 LeLutka EvoX head here, exclusively!
Yes, exclusively. "Sharing is caring"/"Share with no mercy"/"Share or die" is dead. Superseded by "Don't steal my stolen stuff!" Everything is no-transfer nowadays, and if it isn't, it's no-copy. This isn't about "liberating" commercial content anymore. This is about having cooler stuff in your stores than the other stores, thereby having more customers, thereby having a higher ranking on OSW.
There's a whole lot of effort taken to keep these contents exclusive to exactly one sim in exactly one grid. But there's absolutely zero effort taken anymore to keep criminal investigators from finding the culprit who had stolen these contents from SL to offer them as freebies in OpenSim.
If the announced legal action is actually taken this time, we'll probably see not only a whole lot of popular freebie sims being shut down by grid owners, but we'll also see entire grids being shut down by authorities. Or by grid owners who know that it's impossible to remove all the illegal contents from all the freebie sims in the grid. Or by grid owners who themselves distribute loads of stolen SL contents in their own grids.
Let's just hope that, like back in 2015, this is only about freebies in stores. And not about decoration or items in the asset database. (Although "decoration" can and probably will be used as a loophole by some.)
Yes I am out of coins. It's a sad state of affairs unfortunately and no one can give coins to me b/c this site does not allow that and i cannot buy coins bc my credit cards apparently do not work with the payer person you have to pay on this site any more. For whatever reason.
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Dirty Helga poured this nonsense into my morning coffee.
This pattern is real and recurring, historically. SL content creators being furious about copybotted content flowing onto OpenSim grids via the hypergrid is a legitimate, well-documented grievance going back to at least 2009-2015; Linden Lab itself has sent cease-and-desists, and creators have periodically organized to pressure grid operators.
A "law firm" specifically being hired by a creator group is not something I can verify. No news coverage, no legal filings, no law firm press release; nothing turned up in search. That doesn't mean it's false; this kind of thing (a small firm sending demand letters to hobbyist grid operators) wouldn't necessarily make the news. It just means there's no independent confirmation beyond this one secondhand post.
The tell here is the vagueness. "They have already served several grids" with no names, no firm, no dates; that's exactly the shape rumors take as they get passed around a community. Real cease-and-desist letters get shared, screenshotted, and named pretty quickly in these spaces because grid owners want to warn each other with specifics.
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This pattern is real and recurring, historically. SL content creators being furious about copybotted content flowing onto OpenSim grids via the hypergrid is a legitimate, well-documented grievance going back to at least 2009-2015; Linden Lab itself has sent cease-and-desists, and creators have periodically organized to pressure grid operators.
A "law firm" specifically being hired by a creator group is not something I can verify. No news coverage, no legal filings, no law firm press release; nothing turned up in search. That doesn't mean it's false; this kind of thing (a small firm sending demand letters to hobbyist grid operators) wouldn't necessarily make the news. It just means there's no independent confirmation beyond this one secondhand post.
The tell here is the vagueness. "They have already served several grids" with no names, no firm, no dates; that's exactly the shape rumors take as they get passed around a community. Real cease-and-desist letters get shared, screenshotted, and named pretty quickly in these spaces because grid owners want to warn each other with specifics.
Hosting user content online has its risks. To qualify for DMCA safe-harbor protection, a grid owner generally needs to designate a DMCA agent and register that agent with the U.S. Copyright Office. A grid owner can handle this themselves or use a third-party designated-agent service. I provide that service if anyone needs it. The fee just covers the relatively small costs involved.
The Copyright Office is quite direct on the central point: providing designated-agent information to the Office is a condition for relying on the §512(c) limitation on liability.
If a grid owner does not have a valid designated-agent registration, they may not qualify for the DMCA safe harbor for user-hosted content.
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The Copyright Office is quite direct on the central point: providing designated-agent information to the Office is a condition for relying on the §512(c) limitation on liability.
If a grid owner does not have a valid designated-agent registration, they may not qualify for the DMCA safe harbor for user-hosted content.