Tuesday, May 31, 2011

My DMCA Saga Drags On

It's been two weeks since I submitted my DMCA. The Intellectual Property Team took down the items the copier had made with my textures and/or sculpt maps - the ones I identified by their (Italian) names that I found inworld.

But the copier continues to list new houses featuring the same stolen content, which tells me that all content with the UUIDs provided were not removed -- or if they were, have been replaced by identical content.  And my emails requesting that content made with these UUIDs be taken down continue to be ignored. I mean, that is why I filed the DMCA notification, so that my content would be removed from this account.

Therefore today I wrote another DMCA -- for the same content, only this time  I only included the UUIDs, the same UUIDs included with the original DMCA and ignored.

Forget the names of the objects, forget what they look like -- if they were made with these textures and/or sculpts, just take them down.

After talking to someone knowledgeable about the asset database, I understand that it is 1) possible but 2) difficult to do what I am requesting -- identify content using UUIDs.  I have told the IP Team I understand this -- this whole process is extremely time-consuming for both them and me.  But this is the course LL has chosen -- it would be far easier, when presented with incontrovertible proof of copying, to ban the accounts and all those associated with them. Which I understand would not stop them, but would at least inconvenience them a bit.

I also understand, from talking to someone knowledgeable about DMCAs and takedowns, that the current LL policy to not delete infringers' accounts until they can be said to have "continually" been caught infringing, is based on fear of litigation. Someone will sue them for taking down the infringing content and then banning their account. Something like that. Which, frankly, seems an unsupported fear in the vast, vast majority of cases, few of which are on the scale of the bunnies vs the horses, but  involve garden variety rippers of very limited means and capabilities (I am being polite) ripping in the most obvious way.

The bottom line here:  There are no consquences for ripping content in SL unless you get caught "continually" doing so.

Only the creators of original content are punished -- along with LL, who has to expend so much time doing the takedowns involving the same people over and over. The infringers like mine just shrug and keep copying.



No comments:

Post a Comment