Jennifer Boyle

One thing the others didn't mention is that you get access to chat support, which can be valuable. For example, you can get a region restarted when it needs it. If you pay by the year, net of the stipend premium membership is essentially free.

Innula Zenovka wrote: The really bad problem with invisiprims is the number of default outfits that use them https://jira.secondlife.com/browse/VWR-29335 (unless it's been fixed recently -- I've not made an alt lately). Now that the viewer will turn on deferred rendering for you automatically, assuming your graphics card can handle it, I'm wondering how many people create accounts for the first time, log in using one of these default outfits, take one look at their deformed feet, and give up. That's really exasperating. How hard would it be to add alpha masks to those outfits?

Toysoldier Thor wrote: I agree that it could be accident that someone could BUY content from a merchant on MP or inworld not realizing the content was stolen / copybotted by the seller (i.e. the unethical merchant selling the copybotted content did a good job re-packaging it to make it look like he/she is the rightful IP owner). But it become sfar less accidental when someone makes the decision to BUY content with the intent to RESELL the same content. By doing this, you would have to be ignoring some clear red flags or are honestly not too wise in not seeing them. The first red flag would be, "why would a creator / merchant allow you to buy his/her content and resell the same content whereby he/she loses all the revenue from your sale of his/her content?" The most likely reason is because he / she is not the rightful owner of the IP in the first place and doesnt really care. Second, the practice / theory of buying content simply to resell the same derivative of the content is already a questionable practice. So if you are consciously persuing this practice you should be more careful than ever to make sure that the content you want to resell is from the rightful owner and that you have contacted him and asked for explicit written permission allowing your intended reselling action. Third, whenever you are selling anything whereby you are including content from others - it would be wise to make sure you 100% fully understand the EULA of each component coming from other creators. If you have any doubts at all, contact the creator and even have him/her confirm your concerns questions in writing as backup. So... I would say as Pamela said... there is VERY LITTLE AREA of accidentally reselling of other peoples content that might have been copybotted. Anyone that is reselling another creator's content is going into this eyes wide shut. First, I think you are looking at this through the eyes of a longtime resident with a deep understanding of SL permissions, commerce, and IP rights issues. What is obvious to you is probably not to a person who regards SL as a game or social platform, approaches it casually, doesn't read blogs or forums, and just wants to have some fun. I think it probably took me a couple of years or longer to become aware that there were even issues in SL about content theft. I learned all I know about it here, but the majority of residents don't come here. Another thing to consider when discussing IP rights issues is that there are only two people who actually know who owns what rights to a piece of IP at any particular time: the current rightsholder and the previous rightsholder. No one else can know other than being told by one of them, who could be lying. For example, I could be violating someone else's rights by selling something I created. I could have sold all rights to someone else, or I could have created it to order, having agreed that the person who paid me to make it would own all rights. Likewise, I could have bought the rights to someone else's creation and be selling it legitimately, or I might have even bought them from someone who didn't own them. You could not know whether I was doing anything wrong or not, because the only information available to you is what the creator and I tell you, and one or both of us could be lying. Even the creator might not know who currently owns the rights to her creation; they could have been resold. This is why LL won't, and can't, make decisions about who is violating IP rights. They rightly leave that to the courts. I think that I see wholesale violation of RL companies' copyright and trademark rights in SL, but I can't be certain because I can't know for sure that the material is being used without permission. I'm pretty sure most of it is. Finally, you ask, "why would a creator / merchant allow you to buy his/her content and resell the same content whereby he/she loses all the revenue from your sale of his/her content?" Monetary profit is not the only motivation for creating content. As in RL, some do it because they enjoy doing it.

Just a some thoughts. You can get a DMCA subpoena without filing suit and without hiring a lawyer. I didn't look it up now, but there are step-by-step instructions, with templates, for it on the Web. With that, you can get the RL contact information. You should be able to file suit without a lawyer. You can drop it at any time for any reason, I believe. There is a good chance that the defendant won't respond to the suit, in which case you'll get a default judgment. There are court fees for these things, but they should be nowhere near what lawyer's fees would be,

I think that LL's failure to communicate with it's customers is both exasperating and very misguided. When they communicate about new features and bugs, usually either detail is lacking or the information is posted in some obscure place where average residents won't see it. As a result, residents waste a lot of time and effort and experience a lot of frustration that could be avoided if LL just shared a little information. Several times, I have spent hours trying to figure out why something had stopped working properly, thinking the problem was caused by something wrong with my viewer or computer environment, only to eventually find out that it was due to a known problem with SL. Think about it. They broke invisiprims without telling us in a way that would reach most people, so many of us, when we first encountered the problem, thought there was something wrong with our setup or system, and spent a lot of time figuring it out. Many residents still don't know about that. Just last night, I encountered a very well-dressed woman, whose avatar was several years old, whose ugly, deformed feet were sticking through her shoes. We discussed it in IM. She doesn't run with lights and shadows on, so her feet looked fine to her, and she was unaware of the problem. She said the shoes came with an alpha mask, but she never wore it because it made no difference in their appearance. She donned it and then, as expected, looked fine. How many others are there like her? How many avatars struggle with other known, but poorly-publicized problems, like the bug that causes avatars not to rez if they are wearing multiple tattoo layers. Etc.

Report him to the RL police. Extortion is a felony.

Thanks!

Thank all of you for your useful answers. I am going to try Rolig's script first. If I change it so that it just sends the list to IM or chat, I think it will serve my purpose well.

I keep trying to find better solutions for the problems we have keeping backups of inventory and storing inventory items that we want to keep but are not currently using. One thing that would help make storage prims easier to use would be a script that would, when the prim was touched, list its contents in chat or in an IM to the owner. Is it possible to write such a script? Does one already exist?

http://www.pocketmetaverse.com/

Dilbert Dilweg wrote: It may not be for me, nor do I like to be around it. That's how I felt until I met a couple of really cute-looking and cute-acting little girls. They made me want a little girl avatar.

Peggy, can you help me understand better? I have been reading for years that the reason that SL required much more graphics power than other games was that all of the the content was dynamic, whereas in most games it wasn't. The thing that puzzles me is that, while all of it is potentially dynamic, most of it is, in reality, pretty static. For example, in the sim where my house is there are structures, fixtures, furniture, and landscaping that almost none of which have changed in weeks which must account for at least 89 percent of the prims on the sim. There are usually five to 15 avatars there. It seems to me that it would not be necessary for the server to check for changes to locked prims more often than once every minute or so, that most prims on sims such as mine are locked, and that, therefore, the fact that they could be changed should not necessarily result in much load on the server. Can you explain why this isn't so? Thanks!

FWIW, I have a 2nd generation Core i7, GTX 580, and 32 GB RAM, and, most of the time, have little or no lag. I don't really know what I'm talking about, but I suspect that most if not all of the lag I have is due to data not getting to my computer fast enough, either because the server is slow or the network is slow.

Amethyst Jetaime wrote: It would be the subjective call of the Linden handling it. However if the avatar looks enough like the celebrity that someone would know who it is without being told, I'd say its in violation of the policy. It seems to me that avatars an human beings are inherently different enough in appearance that an avatar that was designed to look like a celebrity would only be recognisable as such if the celbrity had some unusual feature, such as an amputation or deformity or tattoo. Thinking about this makes me wonder how many significantly different face shapes there can be in SL, since there is only a limited number of sliders with 100 positions each.

Drake1 Nightfire wrote: Jennifer Boyle wrote: There used to be a company in SL that offered the service of making a skin from a photo of a person's face. I don't remember the name and don't know if they are still in business or how well they did it. I think you would be fine copyright and trademark-wise as long as you didn't use a celebrity's name. According to the LL TOS.. "celebrities have a "right of publicity", which means that they have a right to control commercial uses of their name, image, likeness, and other aspects of their identity. Although you may be a fan, you risk infringing celebrity rights if you use a celebrity name or likeness in connection with in-world objects you trade, and you don't have the celebrity's permission." So, no you cant use their likeness without permission. Can you provide a definition of likeness that would allow one to determine if a particular avatar infringed a celebrity's rights?

Happy Holidays to all, but, especially, to the Linden Labs employees who are working Christmas Eve and Christmas Day so that our game can continue uninterrupted. Thank you, and especially, your families.

Drake1 Nightfire wrote: Jennifer Boyle wrote: There used to be a company in SL that offered the service of making a skin from a photo of a person's face. I don't remember the name and don't know if they are still in business or how well they did it. I think you would be fine copyright and trademark-wise as long as you didn't use a celebrity's name. According to the LL TOS.. "celebrities have a "right of publicity", which means that they have a right to control commercial uses of their name, image, likeness, and other aspects of their identity. Although you may be a fan, you risk infringing celebrity rights if you use a celebrity name or likeness in connection with in-world objects you trade, and you don't have the celebrity's permission." So, no you cant use their likeness without permission. Can you please define as "likeness" for this purpose?

I am a rank amateur. Nevertheless, you might want to look at paint.net, which can be downloaded free from here. It has layers and transparency and a whole lot more. I don't have the talent to make clothing, but use it to make alpha mask textures and other textures to use on objects.

SG Fashion has nice clothing, especially coats and jackets. Everything is L$10. It is at http://maps.secondlife.com/secondlife/DuoLife/114/211/22.

I mostly do, except when I'm intentionally going commando. If my outer garments are conservative, I will always be wearing underwear, which I want to be pretty even though no one will see it. The only times I go without are when I'm being slutty on purpose.

There used to be a company in SL that offered the service of making a skin from a photo of a person's face. I don't remember the name and don't know if they are still in business or how well they did it. I think you would be fine copyright and trademark-wise as long as you didn't use a celebrity's name.

My shape was sold with the explicit claim that it looked like a particular movie star and came with a recommendation to wear a particular skin to make the resemblance as close as possible. I bought it almost six years ago. The creator closed his store about a year ago, but he is still in SL.

Often, I find an article of mesh clothing that I love that has an alpha mask that needs to be altered to work perfectly with my avatar. More often than not, the creator does not include the alpha mask texture, so that I must start from scratch making my own alpha mask, when it would be much quicker and easier to make a small change in the one the creator used. Creators, it doesn't cost you anything to include the texture, and it makes life easier for people who are particular about their appearance, which is probably most people who buy mesh clothing, so please do it

Thanks. I have a couple of pair of Mon Tissu mesh shorts, and they are very nice, but I didn't see any denim ones there. I'll check the other places you suggest. I'm still working out how to mix and match mesh. I think the best shorts might have mesh legs and texture upper part. The reason I am looking for mesh ones is I want cuffs and prim cuffs just don't work well if I am moving a lot.

Anybody know where I can find nice ones?