Six of Second Life's top brands Eros Designs, RH Designs, Le Cadre Network, Nomine, PixelDolls and DE Designs are filing suit against Thomas Simon (known as avatar Rase Kenzo), and ten other as yet unidentified avatars. The suit was filed in Brooklyn, New York by attorney Frank Taney, a partner with Buchanan Ingersoll & Rooney who is representing Eros Designs against Volkov Catteneo, for similar copyright violation.
As long-time SLI readers are doubtless aware, there is no technological means that exists to guarantee prevention against copyright violation. Indeed, most such measures are usually bypassed or broken before they are even released into the wild. That leaves one forum for copyright violation - the same one that has always been there. The RL courts and the legal system.
Like it or not, real-world law applies to all your actions towards and in relation to other people, whether it is done in person, in the post, by email, instant message, on a web forum or in a virtual world. The law doesn't go away when you turn on your PC, as avatars Rase Kenzo and Volkov Cattaneo are discovering to their detriment. The law may be out-of-step, may be non-sensical in some cases - but it never ceases to apply.
What we have here is a straight up copyright problem. The defendants are basically alleged to have used a simple exploit to make extra copies of items that the system shouldn't let them make extra copies of. When a Second Life simulator crashes, the state of objects in the region cannot be used. Instead, the simulator must work back in time to the last checkpoint, and restore the object state from there.
If you can make a simulator crash this way, you can pull objects you own out of it at the last moment into your inventory. When the simulator crashes it rolls back to the last safe point, and there is a copy of the object, and you have another in your inventory.
One crash. Two objects. Taking it logically, if you were utterly determined, you can double the number every time you pull this trick off successfully. 16 crashes could easily provide you with 65,536 copies. What measures are being taken to combat this, other than making simulators harder to crash, we don't presently know. Plaintiffs claim that Linden Lab did not fulfill their obligations under the DMCA when given due-process notification.
Nevertheless, virtual world or not, this is just an ordinary copyright issue, like the scan of a book or magazine, an MP3 rip of a CD or similar. Was the content subject to copyright? Yes. Was it duplicated without the copyright owner's consent? Yes. Was the intent malicious, greedy, gainful or intended to cause harm? Yes.
Not a tough case to argue. It remains to be seen what, if any, defense is mounted against it. As always, Benjamin Duranske at Virtually Blind has extensive coverage of the story for anyone interested in more information.
1. At least one of these instances of copyright violation almost certainly involves means other than those alleged in the case of Eros v Catteneo, as far as I know; as the work at issue (unless I'm greatly mistaken) wasn't sold with no-copy/transfer permissions (the case being currently at issue in a court of law, I won't say which of the six, but I notified one of the content creators whose brand is listed above that their work had been stolen and was being resold by another avatar under a different name some months ago).
Posted at 9:26PM on Oct 27th 2007 by Vivienne Graves