I am an artist in many different mediums. I work in digital arts, graphic design, sculpture, spray paint, found art, you name it. I have in the past made a living (a small one) from these pursuits. I was always amazed about how anal people could get about intellectual property rights. My amazement dissipated once I started working as a professional graphic designer for a bank. All of a sudden I was thrown into a world of copyright and trademark issues explaining to real estate lenders why they could not in fact publish an ad for a property with a Burger King prominently in the background.
Once I got into SL the issue was driven home over and over and over again. Every time you swing through a SIM, and you know what sort I mean, and you are assaulted by the plethora of “art” for sale you can bet that 90% of what you are seeing was not created by the person who slapped the piece on a prim and put it up for sale. I am sorry but I refuse to believe that Boris Valejo, Olivia or Larry Elmore are all maintaining dozens of alt accounts just to sell their art work. Fighting that battle is difficult those artists are often unaware of the pilferage and possibly unlikely to take action especially if the offending party is on a different continent. Personally I just wont shop anywhere that that is selling “art” of that nature.
What about building tools? Textures? I started out in SL selling textures and to date I have only had two issues of someone blatantly using my work as their own or passing my work to another as a “freebie” item. Both situations were taken care of with civilized dialog thankfully. My texture work is distinctive, I have a style that is pretty much my own and I know many content creators in SL. Everyone tends to watchdog not only their stuff but the work of their friends too.
What about artists without an SL presence? I know a fellow who is a professional game artist. His work is awesome. He is not involved in SL. He also has a gallery page with examples of his published work. This is work he has done for various companies which has seen professional use. You know where else I have seen it? Swiped and being sold on XStreet. Twice I have had the regrettable responsibility of dropping him an email with a link to someones product and their SLX handle. There are tons of articles and blog posts out there concerning LL and the SLX requiring the offending party to take their own action, document the incident and file DMCA notification. They do this to avoid making themselves actionable which is fine. I am not harping on that at all. In fact all I want to do is to make people a bit more aware or remind them that the situation exists.
The person (who shall remain nameless) who was selling the pilfered textures had an indifferent attitude toward my notification that I would be telling the artist that his work had been kyped. She seemed offended that I would even bring it up implying that I should let bygones be bygones. The sub text there was, “everyone is doing it, why are you picking on me?” Artemis, I am not picking on you (damn I said nameless didn’t I). I looked at all of the texture sets that were offered by her. I can honestly say that I recognized many from other SL content creators as well as textures from Deviant Art and Share CG. Her style of presentation and many of her products were nearly the same as those of Accel Foxtrot. Now I don’t know who came first on the scene but I didn’t find Accel selling other people’s work this morning. That says a lot to me.
So if you read this please do not discount the importance of IP rights. No one goes into SL looking to get rich (ok except Anshe Chung) but it really blows galactic space goats when you work up a nice project and someone comes along and takes it and sells it as their own. It is even worse if SL is a means of income for you. I was ecstatic to find that famed TRU owner LilyBeth Filth came down hard on the merchants in her shop. She took a huge hit in sales by dumping a great deal of product that was questionable in origin. Now TRU products are better than ever. Like wise there are a great many content creators who have had to deal with the issue of IP rights just because someone thinks it is ok to swipe something from someone else and sell it because it is just SL and it is all game right? Well maybe not so much to some of us. It may not be real life but to a certain degree how you compose your self in SL is an indication of how you will compose your self in RL and if you are fink one place you are probably a fink in general.
