Please Take This Short Survey on IP Rights in Second Life

Canary Beck's first post for New World Notes will be about topics related to intellectual property in Second Life, and she's taking a survey on that subject for it -- if you're a Second Life user, please take the 5-10 minute survey below:

Results to be posted next week (hopefully). Please share this with fellow SLers. See you Monday!

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Comments

[Aki Shichiroji]

Many questions would have benefited from a 'Yes and No' or 'Maybe, it depends' option. In some cases, I was forced to answer 'I don't know' because a simple 'true' or 'false' doesn't fully cover my answer.

Unclear to me:

The copyright law protects the content in blogs related to Second Life on the Internet
- what does this refer to? The post being generated by the blogger? Or the content referenced in the post?

In general it feels as though the OP is trying to make a case for fair use for fashion blogging under educational grounds, but I don't think this is the correct usage. The SL Snapshot and Machinima policy allows for snapshots to be taken of any work within Second Life. If this is about the DMCA takedown on Wordpress re: SL material, the blogger has every right to post about SL content in whatever manner they choose, be it crediting the work or not at all. While it may have been more ethical for Eve to point out what was and was not Neurolabs' stuff, she is free to have posted as she did and it is more an error on Wordpress's part for not understanding the original of the work than any particular failure of the blogger to credit, as ethically questionable as it may have been.

From the LL Official Snapshot & Machinima Policy: "A license to capture. You may take snapshots and capture machinima of the 3D content we created taht is displayed in-world" and "A license to Use. You may use the resulting snapshot or machinima within or outside of Second Life in any current or future media." "Both the License to Capture and the License to Use (collectively, the "Licenses") are non-exclusive and royalty-free. In addition, the License to Use is worldwide, sublicenseable, and transferable."

[Aki Shichiroji]

btw - i write this based on the assumption that the image used was of the blogger's own composition and not simply taken from Prometheus' own site or promotional materials outside of Second Life. That would be another thing entirely.

[Scarp Godenot]

You know who doesn't respect ownership of copyrighted materials? That's right. Linden Lab itself.

The reserve the right to take all of your inworld creations and property and delete them by fiat.

And they reserve the right to not tell you why you are under investigation at all.

How do I know this? A good friend and well know second life artist and creator was recently banned from second life because of 'suspicious activity'. This person has lost all of their years of creations and work and they don't even have the right to know why.

In order to even talk to LL again they are required to submit a copy of their Passport.

How invasive can you get?

Linden Lad doesn't give a crap about anything at all except covering their own asses.

[Ciaran Laval]

I largely agree with Aki, the snapshot policy really does seem to suggest snapshots are allowed. Machinima does require some extra rights when it comes to avatars, you're supposed to ask permission.

Land owners can forbid snapshots and Machinima, but that's not the default position and I haven't seen many places that forbid snapshots or Machninima.

Wordpress are probably not remotely familiar with Linden Lab's terms of service. Wordpress are a company who know about the flaws in the DMCA process and have campaigned against what they see as abuse of the DMCA process. They have a Hal of Shame in those cases.

There are a couple of questions where the answer does fit a true or false for me, and again I agree with Aki, a "maybe" or "it depends" answer would have felt more comfortable.

[irihapeti]

agree about some of the questions can be answered both True and False

like this one: "It is illegal to download someone else’s images and upload it to one's web site"

Is False when there is a license. Is True when is a license that forbids it

is quite a few other questions that are similar ambiguous so I never finished the survey

[Nathan Adored]

Yeah, I'm with Aki on this one, some of those questions were a little too vague or ambiguous, and it wasn't clear if we were being asked, say, if yes, the blogger has copyright protection on his stuff, of if it was yes, a merchant has the right to pull someone else's own-creation image of their product from another person's blog. I'm of the belief that copyright law as it exists today has some serious problems that need to be fixed, particularly in parts of it that make life too hard on innocent end-users, and also that DMCA abuse needs to result in some serious consequences for the one issuing the wrongful DMCA takedown request, such as large fines, and the requirement that if you lose in a dispute over a DMCA takedown request, you must pay all of the legal fees of the person who you made the takedown request on.

And for the record, I think it was wrong for that blogger's image to be pulled.

[Vanadis Falconer]

This survey is impossible to answer. It´s seems to be made out from US laws.
EU citizens dont answer to US laws it´s the legislation in our homecountry we have to live up to.
As an example we have in the Nordic countries, Sweden, Norway, Denmark and Iceland constitutionally protected right to collect text and images, to publish whatever we want in any media. The worst thing that can happen to us legally speaking, we will be thrown out of Second Life, Facebook, Blogger, or WordPress.
For us to be able to be sentenced in court regarding copyright, is the premise that we had an income of copyright infringement

[Canary Beck]

@Aki, @Ciaran, @Irihapeti, @Nathan @Vanadis

Thanks so much for your comments on the survey design!

In response, this survey is not designed like a quiz, where the respondent can achieve a score to reflect how much they do or do not know about the subject. If that was my intention, I’d have written a quiz, and you would have received a score upon completion.

Instead, this survey is designed to elicit a view on how people perceive legal issues and how they affect them in SL. With that said, “I don’t know” is a completely legitimate answer! Laws aren’t always easily applied to every case in a black and white fashion, and thus is subject to interpretation - by individuals and by the courts. Things even become more complicated when considering the differences in laws between countries, as noted.

Rest assured, when I summarise and interpret the general results from this survey, I won’t necessarily consider “I don’t know” as a sign of your ignorance, but in the more general sense that might suggest “I’m not sure” or “it depends”.

[sirhc deSantis]

Glad that the 'it depends' part was raised by others, it would have been my response to a few of them too.