Animations in Stroker Serpentine's SexGen 5.0 engine

[Celestiall Nightfire]

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Lillith Firebrand wrote:

You know it amazes me how something like the post I wrote spreads over the internet,

before posting anything about me not having permission to post an IM log kindly read the last few lines

 

[15:04] Lil' Devil (lillith.firebrand):

May I share a copy of this IM with the

rest of the company staff

so they are aware which animations not to

use?

[15:05] Corsi DeAllura (corsi.mousehold): Please yes.

[15:06] Lil'

Devil (lillith.firebrand): again thank you for taking the time to deal with my

enquiry, it is much appreciated, as it is the hope of our company to start out

on good footing ~smiles~

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Yup, I read the last few lines.  You asked permission to share a copy of that IM "with the rest of the company staff".  

So, when do I get my company pay?   Because unless the entire SL forum is "the rest of the company staff", that IM does not give you permission to post here. 

Now, if you'd asked this question: "May I post this entire conversation on the SL forums for the whole world to read"?   You might possibly be in the clear.   But, I doubt it, as the SL forums have a pretty detailed TOS. 

http://wiki.secondlife.com/wiki/Linden_Lab_Official:Community_Participation_Guidelines

I'll quote you a section: 

"Personal Information: Sharing someone else’s personal information—of any kind—is not allowed. Disclosing another Resident’s real-world identity, contact information, or the text of interpersonal communications (chat, email, IM) is not allowed. "

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Oh, also just curious...are you and Jumpy a team here?  You know like  good cop/bad cop?  Cause you two seem to have it worked out pretty well so lots of laundry gets aired.   I've noticed that Jumpy usually has a foil that he plays off. (in a literary sense)

*laughing* 

[Jumpman Lane]

sadly loads of people stand on the wrong side of truth but ive never minded the role of hairshirt hehehe.

 

i say if corsi didn't give that gal permission to share her chat with all and sundry in second life then it violates the tos by posting here. this is not a third party site and linden lab most certainly regulates this forum

[WolfBaginski Bearsfoot]

You raise a point and I am not sure of the answer.

If you make a copy of an object and change the permissions, is it stored as a different object in the inventory system?

A quick check suggests that the reference key does change if the permissions have changed. So those of us with a paid-for sex-bed containg animations supplied without full permissions, should be OK.

But I am not a Linden. I don't know what goes on "under the hood".

I have, a couple of times, had AOs broken when one of the animations has been hit with a DMCA. So if the dodgy stuff can be identified clearly enough, it seems it can be removed.

It would be damn stupid, with that possibilty, to use this system for anything to be passed on to other people. 

[Lear Cale]

Wow.

First, it boggles my mind that after raising so much cain about protecting his intellectual property rights (IPR), SS would just go and trash those of others.  It paints a rather unflattering picture.

Second, it sounds like LL has yet again shot their foot by overreacting to SS.  The last time, SS complained about someone who'd released his anims full-perms into the wild, so SS deleted all inworld content with creator as that person.  The trouble was, I had originally gotten interested in MLP because of a freebie full-perm bed I found and started fiddling with.  I quickly realized that the anims weren't intended to be free, so I set them aside, but kept fiddling with the scripts, and used them to create MLPV2.  Um (blushing) ... without creating blank scripts created by me.  So one morning everyone wakes up and their MLPV2-powered furniture has the scripts and notecards deleted!  Fortunately LL quickly learned it was a mistake, and to SS's credit, he offered a Sexgen bed to anyone who claimed they'd lost a legitimate bed in the process.

And now they do it again ... heavy sigh!

BTW, changing perms on an item does not change its key.  What you may have seen is that when you drag a copiable item out of inventory into world, it creates a new copy and that new copy gets a unique key.  That's for objects.  Things like animations, which can't exist by themselves inworld (but must be in the inventory of an object or an avatar) follow different rules: the copies all have the same key, and changing the permissions does not change the key.

Anyway, the good news here is that now there will be a free set of sex bed animations that fledgling furniture makers can use.  It will impact the business of us animators, but there will still be a market for new, good anims.  SexGen anims were good for their day but that was quite a while ago.

But it's shameful if SS did indeed release the property of others.

In any case, I bet SS's lawyers had a good laugh or two in the country club locker room, discussing the subject of the case!

[Medhue Simoni]

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Lear Cale wrote:

Second, it sounds like LL has yet again shot their foot by overreacting to SS.  The last time, SS complained about someone who'd released his anims full-perms into the wild, so SS deleted all inworld content with creator as that person.  The trouble was, I had originally gotten interested in MLP because of a freebie full-perm bed I found and started fiddling with.  I quickly realized that the anims weren't intended to be free, so I set them aside, but kept fiddling with the scripts, and used them to create MLPV2.  Um (blushing) ... without creating blank scripts created by me.  So one morning everyone wakes up and their MLPV2-powered furniture has the scripts and notecards deleted!  Fortunately LL quickly learned it was a mistake, and to SS's credit, he offered a Sexgen bed to anyone who claimed they'd lost a legitimate bed in the process.

And now they do it again ... heavy sigh!

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Personally, I don't quite understand why deleting all the original content is a problem. Any good merchant keeps records of sales. If all my customers lost all their purchases, I'd only need to get a list of all the purchasers from my records and send them all updated versions. So, I would not fault LL for a merchant failing to keep proper records. Being that he filed the DMCA, he should have known what would happen next and been ready to respond in a professional way, not bitching at LL for doing exactly what he knew they would do.

What boggles my mind is, why does some1 who shows off a mocap suit in every interview he gives, needs to have other people create animations for him?

 

[Innula Zenovka]

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Medhue Simoni wrote:

What boggles my mind is, why does some1 who shows off a mocap suit in every interview he gives, needs to have other people create animations for him?

 

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I may be mistaken (I often am) but I thought the success of the original sexgen product preceded the purchase of the mocap suit, rather than the other way round.

[Lear Cale]

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Medhue Simoni wrote:

Personally, I don't quite understand why deleting all the original content is a problem. Any good merchant keeps records of sales. If all my customers lost all their purchases, I'd only need to get a list of all the purchasers from my records and send them all updated versions. So, I would not fault LL for a merchant failing to keep proper records. Being that he filed the DMCA, he should have known what would happen next and been ready to respond in a professional way, not bitching at LL for doing exactly what he knew they would do.

 

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There are a number of wrong things.  First LL didn't simply remove the specific content that violated the DCMA (in the incident I mentioned) -- they deleted all content with a 'created by' matching a given avatar.  That doesn't just delete products, it deletes anything people have made from the prims created by that avatar.  Someone could lose any amount of hours of work that way.

Second, you don't think it's a problem for thousands of residents to have to contact countless merchants to restore their land, due to no fault of theirs or their suppliers or merchants?  You think it's perfectly OK for LL to make a habit of deleting content that's perfectly legal, just because it shares some arbitrary criteria with illegal content?  I don't.

Third: The actual illegal content didn't get deleted!  That's the really funny part.  Anyone with those illegal anims who'd rezzed a copiable version of the freebie bed in question would still have it in their inventory, complete with all the illegally distributed animations.

Fourth: I try to keep records of all sales, but due to mishaps, there are gaps.  That's not LL's fault -- unless LL goes and deletes my products regardless of the fact that they're 100% legal and 100% original content.  Then I have a problem, due to my own mistakes, but made horrible due to LL's mistake.

Fifth: you may not mind redlivering your products.  Others do.

I could go on.  I'm surprised you don't see any problem with what LL did here.  However, it's a mistake, and we all make mistakes, and in the first incident, I give LL credit for recognizing the mistake and doing their best to correct it ASAP.  I do not think LL are evil or incompetent.  As we all know, institutional memory is limited, and this kind of thing is bound to happen.   It's just unfortunate, and a little bit humorous, though not so much to those it adversely affects.

 

[Lear Cale]

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Innula Zenovka wrote:

I may be mistaken (I often am) but I thought the success of the original sexgen product preceded the purchase of the mocap suit, rather than the other way round.

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That's my understanding, too, based on rumor, unnuendo, and old forum posts (in decreasing order of reliability ;-).  I think it was before I joined.

[Medhue Simoni]

Lear Cale, I appreciate the thoughtout reply. I've only read about DMCA take downs. I've not actually filed 1.

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Lear Cale wrote:

There are a number of wrong things.  First LL didn't simply remove the specific content that violated the DCMA (in the incident I mentioned) -- they deleted all content with a 'created by' matching a given avatar.  That doesn't just delete products, it deletes anything people have made from the prims created by that avatar.  Someone could lose any amount of hours of work that way.

 

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Why would they delete everything from the creator? Why would they not just delete the product and items inside that were infringed?

 

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Lear Cale wrote:

Second, you don't think it's a problem for thousands of residents to have to contact countless merchants to restore their land, due to no fault of theirs or their suppliers or merchants?  You think it's perfectly OK for LL to make a habit of deleting content that's perfectly legal, just because it shares some arbitrary criteria with illegal content?  I don't.

 

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While I agree that this is not ideal, but I can't see how LL is going to do things any other way.

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Lear Cale wrote:

Third: The actual illegal content didn't get deleted!  That's the really funny part.  Anyone with those illegal anims who'd rezzed a copiable version of the freebie bed in question would still have it in their inventory, complete with all the illegally distributed animations.

 

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Forgive me for not understanding the intrique details.

 

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Lear Cale wrote:

Fourth: I try to keep records of all sales, but due to mishaps, there are gaps.  That's not LL's fault -- unless LL goes and deletes my products regardless of the fact that they're 100% legal and 100% original content.  Then I have a problem, due to my own mistakes, but made horrible due to LL's mistake.

 

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Of course, we are all human. I actually had to go find the old Xstreet website and redownload all my past sales, just last week. I thought I had done this before, but when I tried to send out a recent update, the file was nowhere to be found. Thank god I did this now and the site was still there.

 

[Lear Cale]

 

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Medhue Simoni wrote:

Lear Cale, I appreciate the thoughtout reply. I've only read about DMCA take downs. I've not actually filed 1.

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Lear Cale wrote:

There are a number of wrong things.  First LL didn't simply remove the specific content that violated the DCMA (in the incident I mentioned) -- they deleted all content with a 'created by' matching a given avatar.  That doesn't just delete products, it deletes anything people have made from the prims created by that avatar.  Someone could lose any amount of hours of work that way.

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Why would they delete everything from the creator? Why would they not just delete the product and items inside that were infringed? 

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Good question.  It's what they did, in the Eva Capalini incident (finally remembered the av name).

Normally, DCMA is more straightforward.  Someone gets around copy protection to copy content, and the new content appears created by them.  LL's reaction is simple: delete the offending copies by asset ID, which is different from the originals.

This wasn't a DCMA takedown -- at least, not a legitmate one.  It wasn't a DCMA violation; it was a license agreement violation, which LL shouldn't even get involved in (perhaps, though that raises a number of debatable issues).  EC  bought full-perms animations from SS and others, with the agreement not to distribute full-perms.  EC distributed full-perms, by selling a "business in a box".  Someone bought the BIAB and distributed it for free.  Result, a number of animators' wares being available full-perm.  The creator of the OBJECT (not the anims) happened to be EC, so SS talks LL into deleting content created by EC.  Unfortunately, that hit perfectly legit folks who happened to (foolishly, as I learned!) used EC's object in their own creations, while deleting the illegal content.  That was me, using it to create MLPV2, used by a lot of perfectly legit furniture makers.  Fortunately it was early in the MLPV2 life cycle, and I changed the object owner and also made it no-trans so that anyone using it would be forced to use their own object in their products.

It sounds like LL did something very similar in this case, but I don't know the details as well as the EC case (where my nose was rubbed in the details!)

In any case, there is a simple way for LL to avoid the vast majority of content theft, which is to require identification for all new avatars.  Then anyone found violating the rules could be banned.  As it is now, they simply ban the avatar, and the offender opens a new account.  LL has their reasons for wanting to allow complete anonymity, and we all face the consequences of that.  That's (second) life!

[Jumpman Lane]

Corsi told me once, but I've forgotten and will have to hunt up the notes. The mocap suit was timelined as being purchased after the sale of the Amsterdam sim on eBay for $40,000 usd. After which Stroker was supposed to create some anims and then turn the suit over to Briggi who would create some anims. Stroker was also supposed to divvy up some of the profits of the sim's sale. That was the oral agreement. Here's what happened.

 

1. Stroker didn't give Briggi a cold penny of the proceeds of the sale of Amsterdam. Which is odd as Briggi is Dutch and was instrumental in the creation of that build.

 

2. Stroker made few if any mocap anims for his "creations". The bulk of the anims in the sex gen sex base belong to someone else Briggi or Corsi. He never let Briggi or anyone else use his mocap suit before or after his partnership with. Briggi & Corsi dissolved. He even refused Corsi use of the mo-cap suit after releasing sex gen full perm and Corsi begged him in order to save Mousehold's business

[Maura Sahara]

 Oh My Gosh!

     I have just been informed of this thread.  So now it begins. I am not sure how this happens. I do not know all of the people involved and do not know what agreements were made with regards to this engine. I do know that I do not want or need my name linked to anything resembling creator content stealing! My respectability is much more important then any amount of money that can be made by stealing here in second life. 

  I think that because people  feel somewhat anonymous here that it becomes easier to do things here that you would never even think of doing in RL. Well this is RL. My dignity is real, and I offer my most humble apologies to anyone that has had content stolen. I truly had no idea, and have already begun to rectify the situation with my own customers.