Madeliefste Oh

What are you going to do when the deadline is reached? Cancel your account?

I have had no sales that were stuck in "Being Delivered", last week. Actually I had just one failed delivery in past week, and in that case the customer bought the item again a few hours later. So in that case it might be that he had not enough money on his account to buy all stuff he had in his shoppingcard, or such... Hmm, paid by Paypal, that is well possible, Argus. But anyway, I don't like it that my items are delivered before I get paid for them. I prefer a system we have inworld, the item only reaches the customer after the payment is received.

This is ridiculous An item of me was delivered 5 days ago. Today I received the notice and the payment for it. I object to the whole model where items are delivered before the merchant gets paid. It should be the other way around, the item must in NO case be delivered before the merchant is paid.

Rya Nitely wrote: Here are the reasons I support folders - Because they make life easier. I don't like rezzing a box and copying items to inventory and then not knowing what to do with that box, to take it or to delete it - too much thinking. Boxes clutter up my inventory. When I rez a copy item there is always another copy in inventory. i never have to make a backup. But if I do edit clothing then it's always good practice to make a back up because many inworld vendors sell items as 'Buy Contents'. You never know where you made that purchase. Not all items are boxed. Non-copy items leave you with an empty box that you need to delete anyway, unless you want multiple copies of the LM or notecard. New Contents Tab - Unboxed items have contents and perms displayed in listing now. When deciding to purchase an item you can see the contents and permissions of your purchase under the Contents tab. This is a very useful new feature that you won't get with boxed items. Merchants will find listing new items easier. All you have to do is drag your new creation into the Outbox and add a notecard and LM and send. No need to pack and name a box and make sure that it looks pretty etc. Most Inworld vendors are set to 'Buy Contents' which go straight to a folder. Now the Marketplace is doing the same thing. And I prefer this. Customers who purchase from 'Buy Contents' vendors have probably never fretted about not receiving the box. What I hate are vendors that are set to 'Buy Copy' and ending up getting the vendor sign with the items in it. Why would you want it? This! I hardly buy anything on the marketplace, I use MP to search and then when I find something I like I go the the in world shop to buy the item, at least 99% of the time. I have several reasons for this, but one of them is that in world you can often look in the box to see what the box exactly contains and see the permissions per article. This is really valuable information that was not available on the MP till now. Since 80% of my customers have different shopping habits them me, they don't come in world to buy, but buy from the marketplace, I want to make this information availble to them on the marketplace. So mainly for this reason I unboxed almost all my merchandise. Like it or not, my stuff comes in folders now.

Getting rid of those magic boxes and make everything 'direct', was not so much work, it was done in one hour. But then when I discovered that customers can actually see what they buy in 'contents', when you put your items in a folder in stead of a box I found it worth the time investment of unboxing almost all my merchandise. Some items I left in boxes, but that is not more then 10% of my merchandise. I have always liked when I shop inworld that often you can look in the box, see all items and their permissions (when there are no vendors used). For me as a shopper it is essential information, and it is one of the reasons I use the marketplace to search but I buy inworld. I guess I will still buy in world, even when this information becomes available on the MP, because I still have other reasons to buy in world. But the extra information that 'looking into the folder' ads to an article is certainly of value to me. I also like to receive the items in a folder in stead of a box, specially when you buy 'fat packs', they often come in a box that contains (for example) 20 seperate boxes, and all must be unpacked and you end up with 20 landmarks and 20 the same notecards that must be cleaned from your inventory. I could have saved me some time, by unboxing first, before putting all once again on marketplace. But thanks to Darrius' instructions, it still was doable. The bad thing is that I discovered that a lot of my older items still are not fully repared from the xstreet immigration. In xstreet I had all of them translated in all languages. I knew I gave up after I had worked more then 120 hours on my listings after the immigration, and that some still would need attention in the future, but I never look at them again, since the products were at least available on the marketplace. But now I have seen there is still a lot to do, not only in putting up translations, but also in improving keywords. I think I won't be producing very much coming weeks but in stead getting some dust off some shelves.

What I like is the possibility for customers to see what content they are actually buying, when the content is in a folder in stead of a box.

Thank you very much, Darrius :matte-motes-inlove:

What we had was simple: just update your box, delete the old box from your magic box and put in the new one. No need to change the name of your product, no hassle with the marketplace listing. I was willing to update some of my older products,and then also put them in folders in stead of boxes. But since there is no easy method to do so, I will leave them as they are.

Once you have your item on the marketplace, and you want to replace a texture for example... how you do get in your own folder, to replace delete the older texture and put in the new one? Anybody an idea?

You should have a look at the forum guidelines: Spamming, Solicitation and Advertising: Spamming is not allowed. This includes aggressive self-promotion. No advertising or promotion of specific Second Life merchants, Marketplace listings, products, or services, unless the forum area is specifically for the buying or selling of Second Life products or services, for example, a “for sale” or “wanted” forum. Do not reference other websites offering any product or service.Note: It is OK to have a signature line with a link to your Second Life profile or information about your Second Life business.

Toysoldier Thor wrote: The full perm creators - no matter how big or small / rich or poor will always be exposed by those that want to take advantage of them. Since they are full perm to allow other creator / merchants to use their content .... they do not have any technical tools to limit improper use of their content. They have to simply trust that most of their customers are honest fair-playing customers. They know this is not always the case and Loophole Leveraging customers as well as theives will always be a part of doing business. Yes, that is the consequense of operation on the market we chose for, an offering the kind of product we do. But actually I don't have the idea that the people who take part in this discussion are after finding loopholes to take advantage of them. I think in general that you don't have much to fear from people who take part in discussions like this one. They are in general well aware of the rights of a creator and act respectfully to them. I think your content will more often be abused by people who are not aware of any copyrights issues, people who never read notecards, people who simply forget that they are not allowed to share your content when someone in a group for example askes 'does anybody have a full perms sculpted fence to share?', or people who think 'full perms is full perms, the SL system goes above a creators license, so I don't have to stick to those'. There is no such thing as a common user lisence, that every SL creator uses and that has loopholes. Everybody allows different use of his products. What this creator allows, is a no-go for another creator. For example the license that comes with my products limits the use of the product to SL. People are not allowed to take my content to another grid, without my permission. But there are enough full perm sellers who don't limit the use to SL. Maybe their intent is to limit the use to SL or maybe they are perfectly fine with their content moving to another grid then SL. People who care about copyright and think it is important for their business to have this arranged properly, will often ask for permission, though the license itself does not forbit it. People who think it is my full perms pack, I paid for it so I can do what I want with it,will probably just upload their content to another grid, without contacting the creator. I know there are a quiet some full perms creators who make their sculpty maps 'no mod', because they don't want people to download the map to their computer. I for example have no problem at all when people upload my sculpt map to their computer. Some people work in 3D with Photoshop Extended. When they are not able to download my sculpt map, it cuts off this possibility for them. Now there might also be creators who don't sell their maps 'no mod', but still don't want people to download the sculpt map to their computer. Then the eula is the perfect place to make this clear to the customer. When the creator does not make clear in his eula that he doesn't allow saving the file to the buyers computer, and someone buys the product and save the sculpt map to his computer, then he did not find a loop hole to abuse the creators rights. The creator has simply not made full use of its rights, and forget to exclude as kind of use he does not want to allow. So this creator must make up his mind how importent it is to him to prevend that people can not download this content. Importent enough to rewrite his eula? Or is he going to make all his maps 'no mod', or will he leave it like it is and allow it after all? It are the rights of the creator, he is the one who must make up his mind about what kind of use he allows. And tell the customer, and the best place for telling is... in the license.

Toysoldier Thor wrote: In most of these cases it was requests if the Buyer could take my content to other virtual worlds (4 times to Inworldz, 2 to some educational virtual world, and one to a world I dont remember). In these "other worlds" requests I refused to allow them to transfer the content BUT I actually set up a new store in Inworldz where the customer agreed to buy the same content there. For the educational world I created an account and logged in and handed this user my content that they specially paid me for in SL. And I refused the request for the world that I never heard of. For other virtual worlds we have a whole different model. We sell additional licenses for use of our products in other worlds (for a reasonable price). When we are asked permission for a grid we do not know yet, we go there, investigate it and read that part about copyrights in the TOS of that grid, and then decide yes or no. The worlds that we do sell licenses for so far are InWorldz, AviNation and SpotON3D. We don't have shops in those grids, we don't want another world to take care of advertising, customer service, hanging new products in the shop and so on, let alone sóme other worlds. These worlds are all small, they might be a nice market for people who sell to the end user, but the for a B2B kind of business like ours, I think they are still too small to make the possible sales worth the time investment. I rather spend my time on a new product then on running a shop in whatever third party grid. But we do have a growing number of customers who are active as a merchant in one of these worlds. We started with selling those licenses merely as an additional service to our existing customers in SL who want to expand their business to other worlds. In het mean time we have sold over 100 licenses for the several grids. Other then in SL, people on those grids get a personalised license for use in that grid. It is a bit of work to make them, and it is a bit of work to keep a license administration, but still not much work compared to running a shop.

That is the best you can do, Innula, just ask. And save the chat, notecard, email or whatever you used to communicate with the merchant about permission.

Toysoldier Thor wrote: Let me turn this around on you Made... how many SL customer of your Full Perms sculpties that use it to make new selling creations went to a lawyer to confirm what they are and are not entitlted to when interpreting their business arrangement with you and your content? Since you keep bring up this question / challenge - how many times have you gone to your lawyer about your SL business? I have no idea how many how many of my customers have contacted a lawyer to have a look at my user license. I guess none, since I never had a conflict with a costumer about the interpretation of my terms of use. (There have been violations a few times and filing DMCA's helped to stop the abuse, I don't see those as conflicts about interpretation). I myself have consulted a laywer once about my user license. I also asked him if it is possible to transfer my IP rights to my avatar. (Since the beginning of my full perms business I mark my designs with © Madeliefste Oh, and at a certain moment I thought that maybe I was cutting in my own meat by putting the copyright notice on my avatar name, in stead of my RL name). The answer was: No, an avatar can not be the holder of your IP rights. Actually the copyright notice has no legal meaning anymore (since 1979). You as the creator are automated the copyright holder whether you sign your designs with a notice or not. (Still a copyright notice is not a complete waist, it's a sign to show you care about your IP rights.) But he did not see a problem with the notice '© Madeliefste Oh', because of two reasons: your avatar can been seen as a pseudonym, the pseudonym you are known by within Second Life. Since my RL identity is known by LL, it is legal for me to sell a license under pseudonym. Apart from that you can see 'Madeliefste Oh' as a trade name. (You can have several trade names, and they don't have to be the same as your official business name). It is legally correct to use your trade name when doing business. Toysoldier Thor wrote: If the way I am protecting my content in SL is wrong - then wow - there is a whollleeeeee lot of SL Creator/Merchants that are doing it wrong and can be take advantage of by those in SL that are looking for loopholes to violate our rights. I don't know how you protect your content exactly, so I cannot say if it is right or wrong. In your marketplace listings you speak about a license, that people can ask you to give a copy of, prior to buying the product. When you state cleary in this license that the permissions you grand to your customer may only be used by the purchasing avatar, I guess you are all safe. You have the full right to limited the use of your products to one single avatar. The question of the OP was actually 'why do people in some cases limited the use to one single avatar? ' What comes up in this thread is not so much about creators rights, those are clear in this case. The question is how consumers rights must be interpreted in the case a license does not limited the use of a product to only the avatar that brought the product. As much as an avatar cannot be the copyright holder, because an avatar is no juristic person, an avatar can neither be the owner of a license, because also a license can only be held by a juristic person. (A license is not a virtual product). Like I said in an earlier post, at the time I made my user licenses I thought I was doing business from avatar to avatar. So in my idea my avatar sold the license to somebody elses avatar. Later it became clear to me that this construction has no legal ground. My understanding of what I'm doing when I sell a license is that I grand a RL person (or business, or foundation or whatever other juristic identity) certain rights that occur out of my IP rights. When I want to limit the use of my products to just one single avatar or one single SL account, I must change my user license. It will be valid for the products I'm going to sell with my new user licenses, but not with the ones I have already sold. For me the few extra sales to alts are not worth the trouble of going to change all my product listings on the marketplace, change all user licenses in boxes, hang the new conditions in my shop and so on, apart from the trouble of dealing with two sort of user licenses. I simply think: I have to do with one person. The system SL uses for commerce has its limitations, and can be right in the way for merchants. The limitation to one single shop per avatar on the marketplace is such an example, working with alts is a work around to be able to put your merchandise in different shops. But in the end it is the same single person who makea a profit from selling derivative products based on my creations, whether he sells it under avatar name A or avatar name B. It is the same creator. Why should I let this person pay twice, while other creators who have just one shop only pay once? I did not find an argument for it, that seems reasonable or fair to me. Toysoldier Thor wrote: Not all us SL Creators are running an SL business to the extent that you must be doing where you can have a lawyer on retainer. LOL so I will follow your exposed practices on protecting your IP (as well as countless other content creators in SL) who do have the $ and lawyers on call. Oooops... I am already doing that. At the end of the day, unless you are full time dedicated IP content creator in SL and your main income is from the content you create and sell on SL (which is sounds like you are), the truth is - and most of us know this - most SL full perm content creators are 99% vunerable to even the slightest risks and attacks from copybotters, customers that think like Gavin, LL's weak levels of protection of our content, etc. It can happen that you run into a lawyer specialised in IP rights on the internet that is willing to give advise for free. Make use of that, when it happens And: No, I'm not a full time SL creator, I have a RL job as well (for as long as it lasts, which is not very long anymore).

Toysoldier Thor wrote: You did not buy my product... your avatar bought a license to use MY content of which I - the human behind my avatar told you explicitly you cannot share with your other avatars. I don't care what you think about your interpretation of the law. If you copied my content to your other alts... YOU - the human - are violating MY license to use. Did you check this with a lawyer?

Gavin Hird wrote: You in the TOS text refers to YOU the REAL LIFE PERSON reading this. So when YOU purchase something by proxy of your avatar, YOU have the right to use it. Any other construct will not hold water in any jurisdictial system. Ofcourse 'You' in the TOS text refers to the real person. You have to agree to the TOS prior to your first login.So basicly the avatar does not even exist, until you have agreed to the TOS.

I don't study each and everyone's EULA or user license, but so far I have never seen one that explicite states that the license is for use of one single avatar. Most eulas en terms of use speak about YOU, without specifying who this you is, you the avatar or you the rl person. As long as the sold items is a virtual good sold to the end user, you ar not transfering any rl rights to someone. The legal aspects of these kind of sales are taken care of by the TOS. "(a) the term "Sell" means "to grant a User Content License in exchange for Linden dollars or other consideration in accordance with the Terms of Service," (b) the term "Buy" or "Purchase" means "to receive a User Content License in exchange for Linden dollars or other consideration in accordance with the Terms of Service," and © the terms "Buyer," "Seller," "Sale" and "Purchaser" and similar terms have corresponding meanings to their root terms. This includes User Content that may be Bought or Sold on the Second Life Marketplace web site." But when you sell full perms items, that comes with a user license or agreement, that is something different then selling virtual goods to the end user. You are not only selling the virtual item, you also allow people to make use of aspects of your IP rights. By allowing them to redistribute your work with limited permission or by allowing them to make derivative works. The whole point is now, who is this YOU that is named in almost every eula or user license? Though the actual sale takes place in a virtual world, what you are selling (apart from a virtual item on its own) is a RL right. You can sells this only to a RL person or other juristic person, but not to an avatar. Ofcourse you can make your eula so that it grands rights for use for just one single avatar. You can compare this with software licenses that allow you to install the software only on one single computer. But since most eula's / licenses didn't arrange anything of this kind, I think it is correct to see this YOU as you, the rl person. Quiet some eula's / licenses forbid the transfer of the full perms item to a third party. But must an alt be interpreted as a third party? I don't think so, it is just like the main avatar a pseudonym of the RL person, who has bought the right to resell your merchandise with limited permissions. Of couse, as a seller of full perms items it would be more profitable for me to sell my items to every alt of the buyer. But since it is not the avatar that I sold the user license but the RL person, who often puts a lot of his own creativity in the end product he offers, I'm not going to force my customers to buy a new license for every alt. I just doesn't seem fair to me. I might loose some sales from people who use alts for a second or third merchant, but on the other hand people might appreciate that I try to do business in a way that seems fair to me, and stay or become returning customers for this reason.

I guess this is the inheritance of M. Linden. Before he arrived the customer support was a lot better. When you contacted live chat and the first person could not solve the issue for you, he brought you in contact with a Linden, who had a look at the problem and in most cases could solve it as well. But then he arrived and outsourced the support. That was a complete disaster. I had tickets that took 8 months to get answered. Since then, for whatever issue I contacted live chat, they have never been able to help me, and in many cases you have to educate the support person first, before they even understand the nature of your problem. So live chat became a complete superfluous layer in support. Maybe they are able to answer newbie questions, but for the advanced resident they are of no help at all. So now we only have tickets as possible problem solver. And it is really bad, when this service is devaluating as well. I have always understood that the jira is not for individual cases, but for general issues that have impact on the grid or on the user experience. To me is seems my issue is an individual case, since I have not found any other people who experience the same issue.

Since some months I post pictures of my new releases in my profile feed. I worked nice for a while.. till it my profile got broke, almost two weeks ago. I just uploaded a new shapshot, and then checked my profile and I got this error message: 'We're sorry, but something went wrong Please try again in a few minutes. If you continue to receive this message please use the options under the viewer's "Help" menu or visit Second Life Support.' I did as asked I contacted support. First live chat, ofcourse they could not help. They have never helped my so far, every single time I contacted live chat for a problem they told my to file a ticket. It was not different this time. I tried to solve it myself, by cleaning my cash, installing the latest version, but it did not help. I waited for a week or so, to see if my profile spontanious came back, but that did not happen either. Few days ago I send in a ticket about it. The support person who answered my ticket gave me the next advise: uninstall all viewers you have on your computer, including LL's viewer. Clear all appdata. Restart and download the latest SL viewer. After unstalling five viewers and a fresh start with the latest v3 version, the problem was not solved, but still there. Then this support person asked my permission to log in to SL on my account, what I found really strange, but I wanted to have the problem sold so I did give him permission. This did not solve anything either, except that he could tell me he was able to reproduce the problem. His conclusion was that it is a bug, and that I need to file a jira to get my problem solved. A jira! We all know how long it can take before there is something done with a jira. Anyway, here it is: https://jira.secondlife.com/browse/WEB-4537 Webprofiles can function as a new marking tool, but don't rely on it too much, because one day your profile can just dissappear. There is no explination for it, and it's not an easy to solve issue for support.

When I would expect that once again I would have to repair all my listings on the marketplace, I would feel as desperate as you. You may never know what is going to happen until it finally happens, but the commerce team promised that listings will stay intact. I will be a matter of dragging items from your magic box into your DD out folder. That is to say, when all goes well.... Strange and perhaps unfairly, but I do have hope, that all goes well.

For the law an avatar has no rights at all. An avatar simply doesn't exist as a legal entity, it is not a juristic person. IP rights are rl rights. You as a creator can provide a license to use your products, you can do so because you as a private person are a juristic person. Your avatar is only a representation of you and your rl rights. But your avatar doesn not hold the copyrights. Your avatar can also represent a business in stead of a person. A business is also a juristic person. The same what counts for you as a creator, counts for the buyer. An avatar cannot agree on terms of use or a user license, only the juristic person behind the avatar can do so. I have nothing stated in my user licenses about alts. Because at the time I made them I did think it was for a deal between avatar and avatar. But now, some years laters, after reading a lot about copyrights and a talk with a lawyer, I think different about it. Point for me as a creator, is that I don't know the rl names of my buyers. (Though there are some rare exceptions, I do have customers who ask me to put the licenses on their rl name). I also don't know who the alts of my customers are. But when people contact me personally with the main avatar that they have bought our items with, and explain their situation and the need for transfering my products to an alt, I think it is realistic to allow them do so. Because it is the rl person behind the avatar that agreed to our user licenses. And since we did not state in our user licenses that the license is limited to use of just óne avatar that represents the rl person, I don't see a need or justification to force them to buy a new copy of my merchandise. But I do want to know the name of the main avatar as well as the names of the alt(s) that use our products.

Rene Erlanger wrote: but if both grids were part of Second Life....there must be a way to make accessible the same Inventory to be used in both parts. The only reason for splitting the Grid into 2 , is to decrease loads and thereby allowing to scale upwards......otherwise SL would forever have a ceiling of 80-90k peak logins before it falls over. As long as all inventories stays in SL there is no problem with IP right issues indeed. But still I don't see it happening, those two grids. We had two grids for a long time, one was for minors. They joined both grids, as I remember well for cost reasons.

Rene Erlanger wrote: Second Life could scale upwards, but they would have to make changes to their architecture and adopt a totally different approach. For instance they could decrease the loads by splitting the Main grid into different logins e.g all Mainland sims on one networked Grid and all Estate Sims on another..so effectively 2 different login screens. They already have that now with agni and aditi (Beta Grid)....and could use or develop Interoperability Grid technology to travel from one Grid to another without having to log out....and with Inventory transferred (or waiting) for you. This was something Phillip & his team were working with OS Grid developers a few years back.....in typical LL fashion it became another aborted and canned project.....but this is actually the future for Open Sim grids. LL cannot do that, LL is not the copyright holder of the items stored in inventories.

Rene Erlanger wrote: I could not believe how quickly MP sales could match her in-world sales ( my own personal experience, that was never the case with any of the previous shopping sites). For cYo there has not much changed compared to previous shopping sites. Builders and creators were always heavy 'website buyers', also in the old days when xstreet was still slexchange. 80% of my sales came from there. Nowadays it is about the same number, maybe 85% now, but still about the same quantity. My other two brands aim for the more general customer. For both sales shifted a bit more to marketplace then before. In the past is was about 5% on website and 95 in world. Now it is more like 25% on marketplace and 75% in world.