What can Linden Labs do to protect against sales of stolen merchandise in the market place? Resubmitted without the example of the criminal action of theft currently in the market place

[Sorina Garrigus]

I posted about repeated issues of posting of illegitimately copied items via exploit issues.  The post was pulled for "publicly discussing a dispute with another Resident" I posted a snap shot from the market place which showed the name of the "resident" an alt created in late September for stealing the work of others and profiting off of it on the market place. I have no dispute with this non resident. My dispute is with theft of people's work in general and basically criminals profiting off of said theft. So reposting without the marketplace snapshot because in order to protect criminal theft and sales of stolen goods. this is a very important issue that needs to be worked on instead of being profited off of. 

The example: Game Maker X is a fake name and the victim in this example and I have zero dispute with just the opposite. I am calling him game maker X to protect the guilty thieves who make new accounts steal again likely using VPN to hide their ip. Also so people don't search Gamer X to find the name of the non  resident who only exists because they likely were banned before for repeated thefts and will do so again. So their name was never relevant since they will be banned shortly when Game Maker X reports them ... who reports them constantly without any real solution.  They will  I was informed I can report the individual by a mole ... but the report options cautioned me not to because reporting a thief of someone else's property is against community guidelines.  Now the legal mumbo jumbo is out of the way. I don't have a way to report a market place of something that is not my own. 

The issue is posting stolen property on the market place using various techniques. These unnamed individuals who are slime ball thieves are doing this respectively to profit off of other people's hard work. The solution I proposed so nobody is profiting off the sales of stolen property be it the perpetrator or indirectly Linden Labs who will get a small cut of sales ... which hopefully are all refunded to the actual creator of the stolen items, was to alert a creator of a second hand sale so they can verify if it was legit or stolen through various means. And keeping that sale on pause from being listed for say a week so they have time to check and then being listed. 

Another solution would be for third parties create like what Aargle Zymurgy did years ago when Zyngo was still around a way to protect from such thefts. OR Linden Labs create a serial number system for individual non copy objects themselves. 
 

"Game Maker X" told me he has this problem all the time and described it like playing whack a mole ... no moles were harmed in the writing of this message. And the issue is they LL doesn't have time to respond in time 

I also mentioned Amazon in the post who in real life have profited off of counterfeit sales for decades and is a billion dollar industry.  In this real world example of the same problem. 

Hopefully I stayed within the community guidelines and protected a criminal alt who will be banned shortly as per community guidelines. But this is a serious ongoing issue which needs solutions to protect the creators of the things we all enjoy ... not alts created for the sole purpose of repeated thefts. 
 

[LittleMe Jewell]

51 minutes ago, Sorina Garrigus said:

I posted about repeated issues of posting of illegitimately copied items via exploit issues.  The post was pulled for "publicly discussing a dispute with another Resident" I posted a snap shot from the market place which showed the name of the "resident" an alt created in late September for stealing the work of others and profiting off of it on the market place.

I'll respond as I did in the other thread, specifically talking about the case that you posted. 

If a merchant sells their product as Transferable and someone else buys a bunch and resells them cheaper, they are not stealing someone else's work.  That is legally working within the rules and permission system of SL.

 

The biggest reason that LL cannot just jump on stuff without the original creator making a report is because a very large number of people in SL are legally selling things that they did not create.  Either via purchase of full perm kits or by uploading assets from elsewhere.  In all cases, the only way LL can ever really know if someone is stealing someone else's work is if the original creator files the necessary paperwork.

Edited October 11, 2022 by LittleMe Jewell

[Gabriele Graves]

It all depends on what you are calling theft.

Objects if set to no transfer can still be ripped.  That is copyright violation and can be pursued by the creator serving LL with a DMCA.
Scripts if set to no-mod, no-transfer cannot be ripped at all.  They are stored server-side and are never exposed to the viewer if you cannot modify them, so there cannot be any theft of those.

If the permissions are set to allow someone to make copies of the objects and transfer them to other people then I'm not sure there would be anything they could do about it.  A DMCA by the creator is still the only possible thing that might work.

If the items are merely look-a-likes, use different mesh/prim models and different scripts then I doubt there is anything the creator could do.  If they were using trademarks then the trademark holder could take them to court over a trademark dispute.  If the items are using copyrighted textures made by the original creator then again a DMCA would be the way to go for them.

There are no shortcuts to this.  LL has to respond to a DMCA, they do not have to respond to anything else or investigate anything further than that should they decide not to.  Any complaint to LL would have to come from the creator themselves.

Edited October 11, 2022 by Gabriele Graves

[Kathlen Onyx]

If the creator themselves has tried unsuccessfully to stop this from happening it's really up to them to be the one to deal with it. They have to do the work if they are that concerned. If they are unwilling or just threw in the towel then there is really nothing more to be done. Users on this forum can agree it's a terrible thing to happen until the cows come home but we have no power to stop it or do anything about it at all. Nor do you. I don't even think LL would even engage in a conversation with you about it as you are not the creator.

If it makes you feel better I actually just purchased about 5 of these objects, from the original creator. Yes, I did see the discounted ones on the MP and decided for myself that I'd rather pay for the full price item from the creator in case something went wrong with the actual object itself.  Better safe than sorry I say. I know not everyone will see the discounted ones as a red flag but I did and decided not to buy from them.

[Rowan Amore]

1 hour ago, Sorina Garrigus said:

posting stolen property on the market place using various techniques

If the account selling these 'stolen' TRANSFERABLE items originally purchased these items on their main account, unless the original creator includes a NO RESELL notice with the purchase, how is it stealing?  It's kind of sleazy but a transfer item can always be resold somehow.   The original creator could and should simply make his products NO trans.

Years ago, I purchased a lot of jewelry from a store that no longer exists.  It was all No copy, mod, transfer.  I've passed most of it along to my current avatar but I could easily have sold it to friends.

[Sorina Garrigus]

1 hour ago, LittleMe Jewell said:

I'll respond as I did in the other thread, specifically talking about the case that you posted. 

If a merchant sells their product as Transferable and someone else buys a bunch and resells them cheaper, they are not stealing someone else's work.  That is legally working within the rules and permission system of SL.

 

The biggest reason that LL cannot just jump on stuff without the original creator making a report is because a very large number of people in SL are legally selling things that they did not create.  Either via purchase of full perm kits or by uploading assets from elsewhere.  In all cases, the only way LL can ever really know if someone is stealing someone else's work is if the original creator files the necessary paperwork.

That isn't what they are doing ... at all. Nobody buys something just to sell it for more at a loss. Nobody. Maybe if they were insane I guess? There are a few ways people can make illegal duplicates. I won't go into them here but some are pretty well known.  In this case these are not full permission anything. They are items that are very well known and been around for over a decade. 
Yes will sell their old non transferable stuff. Obviously that isn't the case with an account made a week or two ago. But that is why I put the idea out there of a cool off period before it can be listed and the legit creator can be alerted. In the real world they pawn shops do something comparable to reduce criminal theft and sales of stolen property. 
Again the problem is ongoing as these thieves just create new accounts and rip off these creators. This particular victim did tell me it is constant. It is years and years over do that LL should take more action and introduce more protection tools to avoid these issues. 

[LittleMe Jewell]

1 minute ago, Sorina Garrigus said:

That isn't what they are doing ... at all. Nobody buys something just to sell it for more at a loss. Nobody. Maybe if they were insane I guess? There are a few ways people can make illegal duplicates. I won't go into them here but some are pretty well known.  In this case these are not full permission anything. They are items that are very well known and been around for over a decade. 
Yes will sell their old non transferable stuff. Obviously that isn't the case with an account made a week or two ago. But that is why I put the idea out there of a cool off period before it can be listed and the legit creator can be alerted. In the real world they pawn shops do something comparable to reduce criminal theft and sales of stolen property. 
Again the problem is ongoing as these thieves just create new accounts and rip off these creators. This particular victim did tell me it is constant. It is years and years over do that LL should take more action and introduce more protection tools to avoid these issues. 

Unless the person originally purchased a bunch of the items on sale and thus is not selling them at a loss.

How do you know for sure what the particulars are in this case?

Unless the creator files a DMCA or someone can prove theft, there is nothing that LL can do.

[Gabriele Graves]

6 minutes ago, Sorina Garrigus said:

That isn't what they are doing ... at all. Nobody buys something just to sell it for more at a loss. Nobody. Maybe if they were insane I guess? There are a few ways people can make illegal duplicates. I won't go into them here but some are pretty well known.  In this case these are not full permission anything. They are items that are very well known and been around for over a decade.

Nobody can make copies of scripts unless they are mod and/or trans permissions, nobody.  There are no exploits that will allow this.  Considering that games are useless without the scripts, it suggest strongly that no illegal copying will have taken place.

[Sorina Garrigus]

1 hour ago, Gabriele Graves said:

It all depends on what you are calling theft.

Objects if set to no transfer can still be ripped.  That is copyright violation and can be pursued by the creator serving LL with a DMCA.
Scripts if set to no-mod, no-transfer cannot be ripped at all.  They are stored server-side and are never exposed to the viewer if you cannot modify them, so there cannot be any theft of those.

If the permissions are set to allow someone to make copies of the objects and transfer them to other people then I'm not sure there would be anything they could do about it.  A DMCA by the creator is still the only possible thing that might work.

If the items are merely look-a-likes, use different mesh/prim models and different scripts then I doubt there is anything the creator could do.  If they were using trademarks then the trademark holder could take them to court over a trademark dispute.  If the items are using copyrighted textures made by the original creator then again a DMCA would be the way to go for them.

There are no shortcuts to this.  LL has to respond to a DMCA, they do not have to respond to anything else or investigate anything further than that should they decide not to.  Any complaint to LL would have to come from the creator themselves.

I am not sure how long you been in SL ... but yes you can duplicate illegally scripts along with entire objects and it isn't that hard at all. Linden Labs has policies in place to minimize that but it still happens.  There are ways and for obvious reasons I Am not going to say how but anyone that has been in SL or at least in business in SL for at least 5 years or so knows how it can easily be done. Back in the day skill games were duplicated with the most well known method. It is why Aargle Zymurgy set up a protection system for Zyngo and why some other game creators still have their own system. But not everyone has the skills to build outside servers to act as copy protection. 
The solutions are to build a system of serial numbers into each object that sticks with it regardless of when it was rezzed or rerezed. Or offer a copy protection service. The problem is when these blatant thefts happen Linden Labs profits off of them the same as when a counterfeit product is sold by a third party seller on Amazon. Amazon still profits from that particular crime. So there seriously needs to be something in place to reduce these issues. really hardly anything has been really done since the beginning. I mean without the content creators ... where would any of us be? They should protect them from these blatant slimey acts with new tech to avoid it from happening in the first place. 

[Gabriele Graves]

2 minutes ago, Sorina Garrigus said:

I am not sure how long you been in SL ... but yes you can duplicate illegally scripts along with entire objects and it isn't that hard at all. Linden Labs has policies in place to minimize that but it still happens.  There are ways and for obvious reasons I Am not going to say how but anyone that has been in SL or at least in business in SL for at least 5 years or so knows how it can easily be done. Back in the day skill games were duplicated with the most well known method. It is why Aargle Zymurgy set up a protection system for Zyngo and why some other game creators still have their own system. But not everyone has the skills to build outside servers to act as copy protection. 
The solutions are to build a system of serial numbers into each object that sticks with it regardless of when it was rezzed or rerezed. Or offer a copy protection service. The problem is when these blatant thefts happen Linden Labs profits off of them the same as when a counterfeit product is sold by a third party seller on Amazon. Amazon still profits from that particular crime. So there seriously needs to be something in place to reduce these issues. really hardly anything has been really done since the beginning. I mean without the content creators ... where would any of us be? They should protect them from these blatant slimey acts with new tech to avoid it from happening in the first place. 

I've been in 15 years and I'm a scripter myself.  No you cannot illegally duplicate scripts, they are never sent from the server to the viewer unless they are being edited.  Never.  You can accept this or not but nevertheless it is the truth.

Edited October 11, 2022 by Gabriele Graves

[Sorina Garrigus]

1 hour ago, Sam1 Bellisserian said:

If the creator themselves has tried unsuccessfully to stop this from happening it's really up to them to be the one to deal with it. They have to do the work if they are that concerned. If they are unwilling or just threw in the towel then there is really nothing more to be done. Users on this forum can agree it's a terrible thing to happen until the cows come home but we have no power to stop it or do anything about it at all. Nor do you. I don't even think LL would even engage in a conversation with you about it as you are not the creator.

If it makes you feel better I actually just purchased about 5 of these objects, from the original creator. Yes, I did see the discounted ones on the MP and decided for myself that I'd rather pay for the full price item from the creator in case something went wrong with the actual object itself.  Better safe than sorry I say. I know not everyone will see the discounted ones as a red flag but I did and decided not to buy from them.

The do deal with it ... on a weekly to daily basis. He has been dealing with it for probably a decade now and still does. I mean someone with a dozen games for sale  that created an account two weeks go .. that goes beyond sus. 

[Sorina Garrigus]

Just now, Gabriele Graves said:

I've been in 15 years and I'm a scripter myself.  No you cannot illegally duplicate scripts, they are never sent from the server to the viewer unless they are being edited.  Never.  You can accept this or not but nevertheless it is the truth.

Sorry you can. It is actually shocking someone been in SL that long would even say that.  I won't tell you what is done here for obvious reasons but if you IM me I will tell privately. It's not exactly a big secret but I really don't want to help noobs wanting to do the wrong thing steal stuff.  Heck I did it on accident without thinking once. But pretty much everyone that has been in business with a high profile product knows this. I been working with games for over 15 years worked with game creators for most of those years. 

[Gabriele Graves]

2 minutes ago, Sorina Garrigus said:

Sorry you can. It is actually shocking someone been in SL that long would even say that.  I won't tell you what is done here for obvious reasons but if you IM me I will tell privately. It's not exactly a big secret but I really don't want to help noobs wanting to do the wrong thing steal stuff.  Heck I did it on accident without thinking once. But pretty much everyone that has been in business with a high profile product knows this. I been working with games for over 15 years worked with game creators for most of those years. 

Whatever, not interested. You believe what you want.  Good luck with it though, nobody on the forums can help you or the creator at all.  Only LL can.

[Sorina Garrigus]

15 minutes ago, LittleMe Jewell said:

Unless the person originally purchased a bunch of the items on sale and thus is not selling them at a loss.

How do you know for sure what the particulars are in this case?

Unless the creator files a DMCA or someone can prove theft, there is nothing that LL can do.

The particulars in this case are I talked to the game creator that is dealing with these issues constantly. And the unnamed "resident" created their account about 2 weeks ago and is "selling" stolen property via illegal created copies for a profit of at least $68 US dollars. Possibly more for what already may sold. It is safe to say they didn't buy 10 to 12 games  just to sell them again in the span of a couple weeks. Thus the proposal of offering more protection for content creators. 

[Sorina Garrigus]

12 minutes ago, Gabriele Graves said:

Whatever, not interested. You believe what you want.  Good luck with it though, nobody on the forums can help you or the creator at all.  Only LL can.

It's not a belief. It is experience and for most that been in SL for a long time ... common knowledge. 
Yes LL can help. That is why I am bringing up this conversation so they can be encouraged and come up with ideas to help protect content creators from low life thieves leaching off of their hard work. 
Kind of shocking that there are people defending thieves in a forum about merchants. 
Your saying "not interested" sounds like you already know about this common knowledge.

 

Edited October 11, 2022 by Sorina Garrigus

[Gabriele Graves]

Nobody is in this topic is defending thieves.  You are out of order.

[Sorina Garrigus]

1 hour ago, Rowan Amore said:

If the account selling these 'stolen' TRANSFERABLE items originally purchased these items on their main account, unless the original creator includes a NO RESELL notice with the purchase, how is it stealing?  It's kind of sleazy but a transfer item can always be resold somehow.   The original creator could and should simply make his products NO trans.

Years ago, I purchased a lot of jewelry from a store that no longer exists.  It was all No copy, mod, transfer.  I've passed most of it along to my current avatar but I could easily have sold it to friends.

It is stealing because they are making illegal copies and selling the copies. Which is the case here. Making illegal copies ie copying a no copy transferable object with scripts and then selling those copies is a violation of LL policy and a way to get banned without warnings. It can and does happen. The problem is VPN is fairly common place and a sponsor for half of all the youtubers so LL can't really ban you very easily by IP anymore like they might have in the past. Instead of defending theft which on this scale you are stealing food off someones table at this level given he is not microsoft, how about ideas on how to prevent such theft? Like I said some had servers the scripted item did call outs to prevent such things. Why can't LL have something like that. I mean have them give Aargle Zymurgy or Karsten Ruteledge a call. they have done licensing protection approaches in the past or currently? They bought Caspertech ... they can probably do this. Charge a mimiminal fee for it if they like. Better than nothing and it would free up their employees from daily trying to whack a mole a ton of stolen sales in the market place. As would a cool off period and an alert to the creator of the item. How about some ideas on keeping people from being ripped off. Why defend actual obvious thieves? 

[Sorina Garrigus]

9 minutes ago, Gabriele Graves said:

Nobody is in this topic is defending thieves.  You are out of order.

What was your idea to prevent such theft and profit of theft? That was the point. You are saying it's not possible to duplicate a scripted item ... but most everyone knows it is. Maybe you only worked with scripts alone maybe? but scripted objects not hard to make illegal copies. It has happened through out SL's entire history. 

[Kathlen Onyx]

2 minutes ago, Sorina Garrigus said:

It is stealing because they are making illegal copies and selling the copies. Which is the case here. Making illegal copies ie copying a no copy transferable object with scripts and then selling those copies is a violation of LL policy and a way to get banned without warnings. It can and does happen. The problem is VPN is fairly common place and a sponsor for half of all the youtubers so LL can't really ban you very easily by IP anymore like they might have in the past. Instead of defending theft which on this scale you are stealing food off someones table at this level given he is not microsoft, how about ideas on how to prevent such theft? Like I said some had servers the scripted item did call outs to prevent such things. Why can't LL have something like that. I mean have them give Aargle Zymurgy or Karsten Ruteledge a call. they have done licensing protection approaches in the past or currently? They bought Caspertech ... they can probably do this. Charge a mimiminal fee for it if they like. Better than nothing and it would free up their employees from daily trying to whack a mole a ton of stolen sales in the market place. As would a cool off period and an alert to the creator of the item. How about some ideas on keeping people from being ripped off. Why defend actual obvious thieves? 

I don't think you understand how these forums work. This is a resident forum. We can't actually help you do anything and LL doesn't monitor the forums for these issues. What you need to do is contact LL directly or have the creator do it. If you've tried that already then there really is nothing more to do.