Twice recently, I’ve been contacted by friends and advertisers who have found other stores selling goods that are suspiciously similar to products that they market themselves. One was Sue Stonebender who, at Serendipity Studios, sells her amazing pianos. The other was kalli and kadri Heart whose store at The Lair contains a wealth of really beautiful furniture, exquisitely finished. Indeed, kalli and kadri Heart, the sisters who own The Lair are our designers of the month for our March issue.
So I was disturbed to get an IM from kadri telling me that one of their customers had warned them that a copy of one of their pieces was being sold in another store. I popped over, and kadri showed me the evidence for myself – this piece here on the left is the original.
How do you know a piece is a copy? Well, a good way is to use the Inspect menu. Right click on an object, and then click More, and then More again. This will give you an option to Inspect, and clicking on this will bring up details about the prims that went into the object.
Quite often, you’ll see that the prims have different dates and time – it can be interesting to trace the history of how the piece was put together from this. And it will suggest that you’re looking at an original piece – each prim should have the creator’s name attached to it. So, if you have a chair designed by Any Designer, and you adore the sitting position, looking at the Inspect menu should should you the scripter/store that supplied that poseball, and you can pay them a visit. You’ll also see the primary prim in the piece that the whole thing links around – it’s very interesting!
Sometimes, the Inspect menu has a single time and date attached – looking as though the whole piece was created in an instant. There’s nothing wrong with this – you’ll see it with pieces on sale from wholly reputable and totally honest designers. It usually means that the piece has been copied from something the designer has in their inventory – perhaps because they’ve copied an existing chair and changed the texture of the seating, for example. However, unless something has gone horribly wrong, the real designer should have the original piece somewhere.
If that instantaneous time shows on a piece you’re concerned about, however, it’s an additional warning, and would certainly justify a friendly chat with the person labelled the creator.
The real check here is that the dates will give the game away. The real designer should be able to show the earliest date – the copied object will have a later date – and the copier won’t be able to show an earlier object.
In the case of The Lair, the copy is not a patch on the original (as you can see here, with the two pieces together – the copy on the left). It uses an all-over texture of wood, whereas the product made by kalli typically has great attention paid to detail in the texturing. There are slight variations in the rear part of the piece, but the overall detailing is just too close to be chance. There’s scripting too in kalli’s piece – the pump operates a lovely delicate particle water effect, while the copy just has a solid stream depicted.
If you want to check this for yourselves – the Heart sisters have both pieces on display at The Lair. The similarities are even more striking when you see them in three dimensions. And you can show your support for their work at the same time.
What, in this situation, can the designer do? They can, of course, complain to Linden Lab. Intellectual Property is a cornerstone of Second Life – if this is undermined so that honest designers have no recourse against theft, Second Life will have major problems retaining creative entrepreneurs.
Another way is to alert supporters and members of their groups to what has happened. This is what Sue Stonebender did recently when she discovered that a piano from her Serendipity Studios, using her textures, was being sold in a store and on SLEX. This isn’t the first time Sue and her partner, Baron Grayson, have faced the problem:
“From time to time Baron & I are made aware of people who have either stolen our textures and are selling them as or on their own work, or who have copied our work prim for prim. Most designers deal with this at some point, & we’ve always been very grateful when our customers give us the heads-up when something like this happens. We always look into it and contact the person selling the copied/stolen item. Most of the time people remove it from their shop. Not always.
“As the population increases, so do the incidents of IP theft. You have to pick your battles and decide if you are going to spend all your time chasing petty crooks, or concentrate on your core business and just keep releasing new things. Sometimes, however, an incident is really hard to look past, and we’ve had to make choices about this on more than one occassion: one seller who is still selling many of our items (and many that she has copied from other designers) as her own on her own sim and on SL Exchange, another who was selling stripped copies of my $50 sheet music for $500 a piece (yes, that garnered me a lot of screaming customers thinking I was the creator and ripping them off). We invest a great deal of time into our creations, and are committed to maintaining 4 sims that are primarily explorations, not retail, so when what we create is stolen it not only hurts our livelihood but our ability to continue bringing new things to do and explore to our region.”
This time Sue decided to act, and informed the Tryst group of what was happening. Politely asking the store owner to remove it was no no avail, but filling the store with people loudly discussing how appalling this was soon had an effect! He apologised, and withdrew the piano from sale.
That episode turned out to be a case of texture theft, which is even more common, sadly. The creator of the disputed piano had purchased the textures from someone she thought was a reputable dealer. Unfortunately, she was mistaken – which meant that all her work was with stolen textures.
As Sue Stonebender said, “It’s disheartening and hard to want to stay in business when you invest so much time in your work only to have it repeatedly stolen and resold for someone else to profit by.”
We are planning to cover textures in more depth in this coming issue of Prom Perfect, and we have a super article on textures coming up soon for the blog!
There are also signs that designers are beginning to unite against texture theft – among other things, Stroker Serpentine, Munchflower Zaius, Delora Starbrook and Lucius Obviate are co-ordinating the Merchant Theft Protection Group, and supplying a web forum. In addition, Chez Nabob is setting up an intellectual property rights awareness campaign which will launch towards the end of this week with a series of about seven ads featuring several of SL’s most well-known content creators. The object is to try to educate as many residents as possible about the issues, costs and consequences of content theft and IP rights violations.
Obvioudly, Prim Perfect will be covering these developments in detail.
Prim Perfect 
Interesting post. Once additional little note — lack of scripts in an apparently copied object (as in your example) is also suspicious, as scripts are one of the few things that cannot be copied locally.
As a designer myself, my concern is that people may blow out of proportion the accusation of stolen/copied work. There are only so many things you can do before eventually people will want to create similar (not identical) versions for themselves or to improve upon what is already out there.
If someone makes something of mine for themselves rather than paying me is that theift? I think we’re always going to be dealing with people who come up with similar creations.
Without solid proof like the two designers in this article had, we should be very careful who we accuse as a thief. Especially people who sincerely had no intention of offending the original creators and just had a similar idea.