Permission Fraud - They Sell You Textures and Hinder You to Use Them

[Rita Munro]

Permission Fraud - They Sell You Textures and Hinder You to Use Them

I am a merchant and busy builder. This happened to me in MULTIPLE cases:

Somebody gave me a texture with a permission notecard like "you may use the texture (or sculpty) in your own builds."

Fine. I did my work. I created something new, may be with a tricky script, several more textures. Then I took fotos and put the item for sale. A lot of work behind me.

And you know what? As my new build is fresh on the market, I receive a message from the one texture vendor, claiming the permission or copyright ON MY BUILD! I shall take it off at all or restrict the permission or something else.

Happened SEVERAL times to me: I searched my inventory for the notecard of the purchase. There I can read, that I am perfectly inline with the granted permission. I show the notecard to the vendor.

You know what? - Those guys hand me new notecards with changed permissions and ask me to take off my item. Or those guys claim their own TOS sentences would be "an error" or "a hole" or "mean something differently". And I would be responsible for their lack in language skills. I shall take off the item from market.

They threaten you with DCMA, the litter your shop, they difame you in groups. Just because they want to force you under their jurisdiction. It is about might. I received hate-IMs from avatars, I never met before. The guys had diffamed me everywhere. btw: The worst here is a shop for animated textures.

So here comes my WARNING:

If you can avoid, DO NOT BUY TEXTURES. 99% of them are free copies of the internet. Google shows them to you. Upload them by yourself. This is much cheaper, the choice is much better and you avoid so many troubles.

This way you will live a better Second Life in creativity and peace.

Rita Munro

[Pell Juran]

This is quite worrying. Have you reported them to Lindens? You really should.

You could also find out what country they are in and report them to their police, It probably won't do much good but could scare them. If I were you I'd name them very publicly.

 

[Chelsea Malibu]

The truth is I know of few good texture companies who actually have their own textures as most just steal them anyways.  3D Concepts is an inworld division of Merlin Textures one of the leading texture companies for RL Architects and game modelers for many years. TRU is also a good source.

However, what I find is always the best path is to make all of your own.  If you are adapt at PS then you are half way there.  I modify each texture for that surface it's on with shadows, highlights, etc.  My position is that anything you sell, you need to make 100% yourself to keep protected.  In that way, there is never a dispute over IP.

This whole permission thing that people do here in SL when they are claiming to sell to "Builder" is BS, unenforceable and by far one of the longest running scams in SL.  Legally, their ToS holds no water and lacks definition.  Furthermore they sold you the content under terms you did have access to BEFORE you purchased them.

Like I said, avoid these pitfalls and just make your own.

 

[Madeliefste Oh]

A merchant can change his eula, but the changes don't work backwards for already sold objects.

The limitations set to the object at the moment of buy are valid for you.

The moment of buy is the moment you agree on the limitations that come with the objects. When a merchants changes his mind afterwards, you are not obligate to stick to the new limitations.
Compare it to prices. When a merchant changes his price to a higher amount, he cannot ask customers who already have purchased the item to pay the price difference. The price at the moment of buy is the valid price for the buyer. 

With tos or eula, it's the same. You bought the item with the eula that was valid at the moment of buy. It will stay valid, no matter how often the merchants changes his mind and applies new conditions. The new conditions only count for products sold under the new conditions.

[Ciaran Laval]

Are you selling your builds full perm? A lot of texture artists do have conditions that you don't sell items full perm if you use their textures.

[Chelsea Malibu]

---

Madeliefste Oh wrote:

The limitations set to the object at the moment of buy are valid for you.

---

Fortunately, that is not true. There is a legality of "Disclosure" and it is why all ToS and AUP documents are shown to you BEFORE you make the buying decision.  To do so after the fact invalidates anything within it.

However, as none of these will ever be litigated from SL (though I would love to debate one in front of a judge or jury) any enforcement or challenge to enforcement will never come to fruition.

Example, I sell you a car and after you pay for it and it's delivery to your house, I suddenly inform you that you are not allowed to drive that car any further than your driveway.  I had you a ToS AFTER you paid and then try to enforce this as a contract. 

Yes I can change my mind about the EULA at anytime provided I made adherence to that EULA part of the original agreement. However, what is happening more and more in SL is that one Use is not defined and second, the EULA or any mention of a EULA is often delivered AFTER the product is purchased ( known in legal terms as Consideration)

All contract are validated by either a Signature or at the time Consideration is made.

Here is where this and most all of the EULA's in SL don't hold water. 

"Can Only Be Used for Ones Own Build"?  What does that mean? Everything I build is my own build including what I sell.  It implies that you cannot sell the texture which again is unclear.  A texture is never being passed when it used on a object as it technically is transfered as a UUID that is associated with an object and therefore, not a usable texture outside the build.

The intent of most who say this in their EULA is that you may not transfer or sell the objects they provided in and of them selves and NOT part of a build or that you do not allow them to go out full perm.

It's a tricky one that I wish had enough value to actually make it to a court however, since the potential for damages would be miniscule to what court cost would be, I don't see this being litigated anytime soon.

[Toysoldier Thor]

What Made posted is dead on in that whatever the merchant's stated licence or conditions of use is at the time you purchased the Texture or a Sculpt Map or any building material from someone, it is cast in stone.  You are obliged to follow this stated conditions or you are in violation of this creator's copyright.

BUT, if after you purchased the material the creator changes the licence or conditions, you are not obliged to follow these new conditions - it is your choice if you want to or not.

But you must understand that if the licence in the product told you that the texture can only be used for your own personal use creations, then that is imply that you cannot use the texture on any of your builds that you intend to resell or redistribute.  I think from your OP you are suggesting that the creator's licence was implying that he did not want you to use his texture for any build that will be resold but that the wording might have been weak and open for interpretation.

If that is the case and if he feels the wording is strong enough to convince a court that the spirit of the stated conditions should have been clear that it could not be used for resale, then you would still be in trouble for selling it.

You might have put a lot of work into integrating his texture into your build - but if you use his element in your build - you are obliged to honor it.  Your effort has no bearing on your rigthts to his texture.

I deal with this all the time in my world / role as a Digital / Photo Manipulation artist.  Even if I use a simple cloud brush to make 1 small cloud stamp on my artwork... if that brush creator says I can only use the brush for personal use - then my art is not resellable.  Solution.... dont use textures or brushes with this limit and/or create your own textures.

LAST POINT.... you mentioned that a solution is to upload your own images from google.  Response... this still puts you on the ILLEGAL side of the law since you are now likely violating copyright from this RL source.... UNLESS the source states that the images are free for use without any conditions.  And no creator in SL can upload one of these no-condition images from google and subsequently apply conditions on it.  He is not the owner of that image and is in fact a licence holder of a free for use image.

Hope that helps.

[Madeliefste Oh]

Sure there is a legality of disclosure. You must make the conditions of the buy available before selling.

But when you sell me a car that is for example guaranteed for five years, then next month you change your policy, and only put a guaranty on the car for four year, you still have to stick to the guaranty conditions for my car for 5 years. Because that is the deal we made on the moment of buy. 

[Josh Susanto]

I'm no lawyer.

That said...

It's a basic principle of contract law, practically anywhere in the world, regardless of language, that ambiguities in the text of a contract are to be construed to the favor of the non-drawing party or parties (in this example: to you).

People who write documents don't get to just rewrite them or redefine them any time they want them to say something different. 

So unless they included a clause indicating that the terms would be subject to further modification or "clarification", they really have no evident right to stop you from doing what they already said you could do.

If you could post an image of the text here, I'll be happy to take it apart for you word by word; again, not as a lawyer, but as an English teacher (which, among other things, it happens that I am).

BTW: I consider my own textures to be free content. What I charge for the complete item is essentially a user fee for the sculpt map.  If you see anything you want, give me a list (the word "everything" is not a list, sorry).

[Smokey Newman]

Please don't tar all texture makers with the same brush I make all my own textures for SL. If a texture maker is hasseling you report them and if you do buy textures and are unsure what you can use them for contact the creator there are pleanty of honest texture makers in SL. I will agree that there are lots of textures taken from the web but if you do a quick search online they usually show up pretty quickly as the people who use these can't be bothered to search passed a couple of pages.

 

 

[Sea Warcliffe]

Really? May we please see the link to the build in question? If I am not mistaken, I believe Rita is the same person who informed a group of creators in chat last year that their "EULAs or TOS" do not mean anything at all. Since then she has backed down from that statement. Now she seems to cherry pick the very earliest TOS a creator may have used, maybe when they were not so savvy.

So yes, she is within the LL TOS. But if memory serves, that is not where she started.

I do believe I was once informed by this person, that downloading and re-uploading a sculpt map and then selling under her own name was ok? Because the permission system allowed it? Was that you Rita? Honestly, if these creators make you so mad, why do you continue to try to get your hands on their product by circumventing bans?

As far as purchasing? In reality most of what I see this person sell full perm are items made from maps and textures which she did not actually purchase, but received as an MM for creators gift, or in a group or hunt gift. And the "build" created consists of taking the included sculpt, included texture and popping it up for sale full perm as her very own creation, undercutting the original creator. The "build" is in fact identical to the original creators example. Can you really call it "fraud" if you did not pay for the sculpt map or texture?

Honestly, I can not understand why you do not create your own sculpts and textures - the software and tools to do so are free. There are so many wonderful resources to do so, and the classes are so much fun!

However, I do have to thank the OP, for she has opened my eyes to how the sharks really do circle sometimes here in SL, and the pitfalls that new creators can so easily fall into.

[Josh Susanto]

Good catch. 

I have at least asked to see the pertinent text, and I suppose we might wait for that before getting into this much further as regard the specific issue.

That said, 1% of any normal population is psychopathic, so that will naturally tend to include texturers and merchants.

There's a difference between being cautious of that 1% and being contemptuous also of the other 99% just because you can't be certain who is who.

If you need to find someone to ruin your SL experience, not only can you find that person, but that person will probably find you first.

And if you let it ruin your day, that's how they win.

Why let it?

[Sea Warcliffe]

Oh - she doesnt bother me, so much as baffle me. There are some very very good in-world resources and classes, as well as unlimited tutorials on line available. Yet for over a year I have watched her rail against the TOS of content creators, looking for loopholes, and playing the vicitm when she gets does get caught.

And her first suggestion in the OP is to use google to search for the images you want - no regard for the copyright of those images that I can see. And no exhortation to actually MAKE original textures. I dont understand that.

Honestly, I would be SO happy to see her in one of Gramma Fiddlestix's classes on Rokuro for beginners, or in the Sculpt Crafter sandbox using the free demo version to MAKE her very own sculpts. I would happily point her to wonderful tutorials on how to make textures in Gimp. I would be the first to cheer if I saw her setting up her own shop of sculpts and textures that she herself made.

It seems clear that she does want original things that she can sell as she pleases with no limitations - so why does she not make the components for them?

[Ishtara Rothschild]

---

Rita Munro wrote:

99% of them are free copies of the internet.

---

Where do you get this number from? You can't just make such a claim without any proof.

[Josh Susanto]

Not everything comes easily to everyone.

But if someone is already being selective about texture use in builds, they probably have enough of a natural eye for texture that they could learn the technical principles of texture production very quickly.

But of course that would mean trying a lot at first without consistently great results, for which some people think they can't develop the patience. 

But waiting for the world to stop persecuting one for failing to solve any of one's own problems also seems like a pretty long wait - basically forever - so maybe such people are actually the most patient of all.

 

[Rita Munro]

Dear Mate-Avatars,

thank you so much for all the comments!

I followed e.g. the suggestion of Pell Juran to report the guy for fraud.  

And thank you so much for your kind words of so many, which give me much as person.  The hurt emotions of all those hate are painful. And I liked the wise comments about "find somebody to spol your SL"

Thank  you all for the legal suggestions, e.g. of Josh Susanto 

And you can see the persisting problem very easy, if you read the posting of Deep Blue: He does not feel responsible at all for his own tos. Instead he accuses me for "searching holes". 

Deep Blue,

why do you think, I would not be able to make my own things? 

I do not need those Rokkura tutorials in a sandbox, because I took Blender tutorioals at YouTube long ago. Blender is much more powerful than Rokkura (IMHO). I really can recommend everybody to use those YouTube tutorials, because they are that fine and so many. And the ressources of the Blender organisation are gorgous. btw: you need not spend money on Primstar 2,  if you do not like to. Those tutorials show you the use of color-textures instead.

And I use Gimp since that long. Never the less I personally prefer a software not too wide spread, but in some aspects even more powerful than Photoshop: This is PhotoImpact.

Blue, try both of these programs, before you hold tutorials.

And this is exactly what I suggested to SL builders: Make your own textures and sculpties! Do not buy them any more. The time you save is in no relation to the unpleasant discussions some people like to have.

I regret that I ever used building tools. I have about 600 items at market. They may use in average 5 base-elements. If only 1 percent of the vendors are psychopatic as Sea Warcliffe suggested, this means: 30 people give you troubles.

The problem is: You never know in advance who it may be.  Smokey Newman thinks, I use the same brush for all. He is right and I really dislike, that I do. But what helps? One drop of poison spoils a whole bucket of water. And if merchants fail to clean their own rows, the customers will decide to stay away of possibly poisoned water.

At least I did.

And I talk about my experiences to warn others not to put poisened elements into their valuable builds.

 

Rita Munro 

 

 

  

[Rita Munro]

Blue does NOT belong to the ones who troubled me recently, but he gives us a very good public example, how "they" work. 

1) You see him not feeling responsible for his Tos.. He tries to tell the customer afterwards what his tos mean.  If the customer wonders and cannot find anything like this, then the customer is guilty for "searching holes" .

2 ) The customer is devalued. Blue is not bothered by the fact, that I am a very old avatar. He is not bothered by the fact, that I have not more than 600 items for sale. All in all there shall be about 2000. He is not bothered by the fact, that I know all about building software. He just devalues, "I want to see anything you built."

3) Step 3 is defaming. He tells a blanc lie with the idea, to move the emotions of the community against his customer which is not obeydient.

I experienced this style more than once.

WHO READS THIS: Please make up your mind, if you want to be a customer of such vendors. Do you want to have my troubles? Do you want to be difamed in public? If not, rather do not do business with those people.  Not even take their freebies or their Midnight-Mania prices. They are not worth the human problems.

 

Rita Munro 

 

 

[Toysoldier Thor]

I am gonna ask a general question about how this thread has been progressing.

Why is the moderator not stepping in to shut down this thread or at least the posts that do seem to violation forum posting conduct (i.e. no accusations or personal conflict attacks) when both sides are accusing each other of things and calling the other a liar.

The topic had some merit as to the questions being asked about permissions of content sold and licence rights, but seems like it has now degraded into two merchants attacking each other.

Since the Mods of the forum do not want to do their job (except when they remove some other forum posters with no notifications), may I suggest that the two of you IM each other or PM each other and take out this battle there?

The only reason I really care is because my email system is being loaded with SL Forum posting from this thread with no value to me or most others.  And since I posted in this thread, thanks to the forum system, I get double notified of each post.

Just a suggestion.    Knowing the Forum Mods, they will remove this post of mine which they seem to like doing.

[Josh Susanto]

For the record, I haven't seen anything on any thread, yet, that I thought really needed to be deleted.

I am personally as adverse to deletions as anyone else you're likely to find.

That said, I think the excuse for the mod not deleting something would be that the mod acts on complaints, not on what is merely open to complaint. 

Not that I necessarily believe that's how things actually go... I'm just saying it's probably a viable excuse.

[Tigger Genira]

There is a duty on a merchant to make it clear that a thing being sold is limited beyond the usual level of the permissions, but how far do you have to go ?

Personally I always ( I think always ) put a note to the effect that the use of my creations is limited by a terms of use agreement and my vendors can give you a copy of the terms, or I use notecard givers to make sure they are always available.

Of course I still get IMs now and then asking what the terms are, and I'm entirely certain that there are pople who don't read the text on my vendors at all, either because they are just looking at the pictures or maybe english isnt a language they are skilled in. 

But when have I done enough to try and notify someone in advance of the TOS? 

 

To my mind, the best way to solve these issues would be to have a new set of permissions implemented.

At the moment you have current owner permissions and next owner permissions. If there were a set of 'resale permissions'  then content creators could sell re-usable textures, scripts or whatever and limit the follow on uses of them.

This would let me set 'next owner - COPY/MOD/TRANS' 'resell COPY OR TRANS ok'

[Josh Susanto]

If the problem can be reduced to pushing or not pushing a button, I think that that, in principle, is absolutely the right idea.

[Ladybird Mystiere]

Are you the same Rita Munro who has dozens of creators after your blood for selling their items full perm after downloading their sculpty maps and textures then reuploading as your own?

 

[Rita Munro]

Josh Susanto, the reason that you cannot see any of the defamations is, that Lindens deleted them very quickly. Tigger Genira: I cannot stop warning you of using / buying building tools!! You say "dozens of creators (are) after your blood" for "reselling sculpty maps and textures": This shows you very clearly how many they are and how INSANE they are. Fact is: I do not sell textures and sculpties at all. Everybody can check my items and convince himself, that THERE ARE NO textures under my 600 items. Never the less they accuse me for uploading and reselling their textures. And not one texture and not one vendor but "dozens of resellers and textures in the plural" as you say. If you have a look - there is nothing. https://marketplace.secondlife.com/stores/14052 (oups, I just see, that my items count nearly 800 in the meanwhile) Under the line I wonder, why they do not use their textures by themselves and build by themselves. My answer is: They do not search creativity, but drama. Do not give them an option for!

[Josh Susanto]

I can't pretend to know what all the facts are in the disagreement about use of sculpt maps and textures.

But, inasmuch as my opinion matters at all, I categorically oppose the deletion of content which does not actually violate someone's legal rights or does not violate some kind of law (literaly duplication of text, or the equivalent might be an exception, OK).

Will anyone on this thread take credit for the deletions?

If so, will that person please explain himself/herself in this matter?