[Serious Changes to ToS & the Fallout]

Bree: "I don't see LL ever attempting to infringe in any unseemly manner as the user backlash could potentially put them out of business."

 Ordinarily Bree I would agree with you.  However in this particular case... this is Linden Lab.  They've done insane things before that cost both them and their customers millions of dollars.

This is an interesting post that is good for keeping one up at night:

Ulterior Motives? http://inworldz.com/forums/viewtopic.php?p=140046#p140046

[Serious Changes to ToS & the Fallout]

[DAZ Studio and mesh]

"The license agreement for Daz Models (at least the one I have) is very explicit on what can and cannot be done with them. And I'm sure that Daz'll be watching SL like a hawk... lol."

 

I'm not sure Daz or any other company (including Second Life, if anyone should challenge it in court) has the legal right to state what is done with intellectual property created using their program.  They do have the legal right to specify what is done with their program, their code, or proprietary data resulting therefrom.  But any efforts to limit the right of a creator to use his creations as he sees fit... might backfire with far more damage than any imagined damage from the act itself.

I think LL can consider itself very lucky some user-with-guts hasn't decided to take them to court over their backup-restriction policies.  If they did, LL might find itself backpeddaling very quickly.  Some companies put things in their licenses hoping such will never be challenged in court.  Others think they have legal basis for such restrictions-- but find out the hard way that isn't the case.  When it comes to copyright law-- companies have to be very careful what they try to restrict, lest they find themselves on the receiving end of a major lawsuit.

 

 

[Wrong to be bothered by this?]

I have to agree with Nalates in this.  While I am the last person in the world to defend Linden Lab-- and am very aware they have repeatedly crossed the copyright line in the past as well as other lines of legality (I won't bore with details)-- in this case they are merely pulling in a convenient complicated mesh for testing. They're not distributing it, they're not selling it, they're not massively reproducing it and giving it away.

 

It is being used as a limited test subject on a non-commercial beta grid.  It's not the main grid.  As such, I'm not aware of any copyright law they're breaking.  They are not selling the item for profit.  They are not distributing.  They are not depriving the author of expected gain.  

 

About the only thing they MIGHT be guilty of is using an item for purpose not intended by the owner... but that's a very gray area.   So myself, I don't really see the harm or impropriety in this particular thing.

 

Now bait-and-switch pricing... stomping on user copyrights and preventing us backing up our own work... palagiaraizing customer documents and items for their own use without even asking the author-- and hiding behind their TOS while committing outright copyright fraud... that's a whole nother matter and people certainly have a right to complain there.  But this particular thing... no harm done to the creator that I can see... thus no copyright breach as far as I can see.

 

However I will say that for a company that is so stickly about supposed copyrights that they won't let us back up our own creations because they contain full perm, public domain textures... yeah... that's a little two-faced.