When Gospel Voom was approached by a client to recreate a highly detailed, three-dimensional section of the famed French Quarter in New Orleans for use in the virtual online community of Second Life, I'm sure the last thing on his mind was that he would end up fighting a battle to protect his intellectual property rights.
Voom (his chosen Second Life name), is a London-based industrial designer in real life with over 14 years of professional experience, who has developed, among other things, a variety of projects for universities and businesses in Second Life. So it was as a real-life businessman that he was careful to communicate the terms of his commission with his client, on more than one occasion, to ensure he would retain and protect his creative rights and credit.
And yet, despite working for six months and following all the by-the-book contract negotiation assurances, after Voom completed and turned over the final "Orleans Blues" product, along with a backup copy, to his client, only a few weeks passed before he signed on to Second Life one day to find his message system filled to capacity with friends and fans asking where the Orleans Blues project went to. Then he noticed his original work was returned to his Lost and Found folder -- all in pieces.
Voom investigated and found that the original work had been deleted and the location it resided at sold. He contacted the client, who said she deleted it when it was losing money. Not long after, Voom learned from friends that an identical version of his work under the name "nawlins" was seen outside of Second Life on another community site called OpenLife, but that the work did not carry his credit as a creator.
Asked how nawlins was made, one of the owners said the majority of the work was created in OpenLife, with a few parts brought in from Second Life. Considering the above events and the timeline involved, the owner's explanation seems dubious at best. More likely, a CopyBot program to collect and move Voom’s project in its entirety was used.
Voom attempted to reach Sakai OpenLife, the site’s founder, to inquire about nawlins, but was unsuccessful in getting a response. Additional efforts from another source revealed Sakai felt the matter was a private dispute between Voom and the Second Life client who had sold the work.
When informed that Voom intended to file a DMCA (Digital Millennium Copyright Act) grievance against his former client, Sakai responded that it would look badly for Voom to do so. Others disagree and have rallied around Voom for justice in what appears to be a blatant violation of his contract and creative rights.
On a broader scale, protecting intellectual content even in Second Life has become an issue. For products created in Second Life, pixels may be the unique means by which the product is visually assimilated and stored as code, but the basic creations are protected by legal measures such as the DMCA in America and the European Union Copyright Directive (EUCD). The degree to which these rights are successfully enforceable is another matter, but it is important and reassuring to have these measures in place, because wherever the creativity meets commerce, you just know there will to be a dispute to follow.
Hundreds of major universities, school systems, charities, and corporations are venturing into virtual worlds for networking, educational purposes, conferences, product development, marketing, and branding efforts. You'll see the likes of Cisco, Dell, Disney, IBM, Reuters, Sun Microsystems, and Telecom Italia advancing their names and products in Second Life. Even Northrop Grumman uses it for training and prototyping.
It's a safe bet that many of these major players wouldn't have come to Second Life if they felt their assets were at risk. You can bet, too, that they will be watching with keen interest as Voom's not-so-virtual odyssey continues to unfold.
— Scot Sterling has worked as a graphic designer and art director for more than 20 years in both staff and freelance capacities in New York City, Dallas, Houston, Singapore, and Bangkok.
We at Akashgarud delivering standard technology trends to our clients in the terms of wqeb designing graphic designing animation and modelling and application development.
Thanks for keeping the light on this subject. I seem to remember there was a similar discussion during the early days of what was to become Creative Commons.
Certainly these are lessons not only for designers, but for artists in general doing work on the Web.
This might also be a good discussion topic for Philip Rosedale, founder, Second Life.
He'll be joining us live on Internet Evolution Radio on Tue Oct 6th at 1 p.m. Eastern.
Intellectual property rights in general are getting more and more difficult to protect with the vastness of the internet. On top of that is the attitude of the majority of internet users who have the general who seem to think that anything and everything available on the internet is "free" for any and all purposes they want.
I am an avid photographer, I keep an online portfolio of both my good photos and some of my bad photos on Flickr. I keep a good mix of both artful photos as well as photos which just document my life experiences. I am happy to share my photos with people, and I use a Creative Commons license on all my photos in an effort to make people aware of how they can use my photos with my permission if they want to share them in some way.
There is nothing more annoying than discovering someone using my photo against the license. Either without crediting me, or not reading the license and putting it on a webpage for commercial purposes, usually on a page with advertising.
While I don't actively look for them, once in awhile they just pop up or are brought to my attention by someone I know. I often wonder, every time I accidentally find one of my images being used, how many am I not discovering? One? Two? 10? 50?
While I am just an amateur who in no way makes any kind of living off my work, if I have my rights violated so often, the burden this must put on a person who relies on this as their livlihood must be so stressful and damaging fighting these violations.
Not only that, it troubles me to think of how many people either do or could stop generating works due to the violaiton of, and the hassles of enforcing their IP and copyright rights.
Sorry, I thought I posted this last week. Probably old news now.
When I first started working at the job I am at now, my boss would always say, "just grab that picture off the Internet" or wherever it resided. I got one of those nice thick Law guide books about intellectual property law and the Internet and I found the lovely passage that said we'd be in a big heap of trouble for each infringement, so after that, I never had any real trouble about that subject.
In fine art, we were taught that it was OK to appropriate images from whatever sources we found them (and depending upon the medium we were using) as long as they were changed a certain percentage. In my Video Art days, I appropriated snippets of movies that I filmed off the TV or projected directly on to objects. (I was young, I needed the work.)
One of my first serious digital still image compositions I created in the early 90's came from elements I created digitally from elements I grabbed from a movie with a capture card in 1987. The 3 images from one movie and 1 from another are changed and taken from their context, that I still came under the change rule we were taught. But....I didn't like that I took something I had no hand in originally creating. Though I did create something new and totally unrecognizable from the original images and composited with my own images, and making a work from it, I don't feel 100% about it anymore. I did win a little judges award with it, but I have never attempted to sell copies of it. I just didn't feel right about that. Since then, everything I create is from elements I created. I won't even use legally purchased or borrowed Stock images like is done on Deviant Art.
The other thing we were taught about was the "Work for Hire" rule. Unless specified, the person that hired you owns EVERYTHING that you did and they don't have to give you any credit or any more money. Luckily Voom is very experienced in this and, according to your blog, he laid out a lot of conditions in his contract that gives him all the legal rights about the things that he is complaining about. Like homesteadtraders said in his post, he didn't want money, he wanted the well deserved credit. HST probably got that reaction of denial from the charity that appropriated his drawing because a higher up presented the artwork as their own (this happened to my wife) and phased it out to prevent them embarrassment.
Vooms' reaction from Sakai just shows how much operators of companies don't know the legalities of some of the things they are doing. Maybe they are think the "Work for Hire" rule applies here and want nothing to do with it. Since Voom can produce documentation, Sakai's response should have been to contact nawlins to add Voom's credit or have the structure removed. Simple as that. But the other aspects that the site couldn't be modified except by himself, that I don't know how he wants to pursue that, he could still sue.
"Sadly, there will always be people who are bent on taking advantage of other people and getting away with things they have no right to"
It is indeed very unfair that Gospel Voom could not win the battle and would not be given any credits for his work. But apart from the legal issue at stake, I think that the real problem has to do with the morality of those who are involved. If you take somebody else work without his/her approval this is stealing/cheating and I beleive that one day you will have to pay for that. Unfortunately in this business people forget about this aspect and as long as they can use the law to their advantage or hide their mischief, they are fine; but most of the time they don't have peace of mind.
It is good to rely on legal measures such as DMCA and EUCD to settle copyright disputes; but when these institutions fail you, just forget about it and continue your way.
Absolutely, homesteaders. The internet is simply the medium used for a criminal activity that has already been taking place in another form outside of the internet before its conception. Where the crime takes place is, in fact, at the location where the internet terminal used is located. So all of the crimes taking place within the internet are actually regarded as crimes at the geographic location of the terminal where the offense originated (New York, Paris, Hong Kong, for example). The laws from that location, such as the DMCA in America or the EUCD in Europe are then applied accordingly.
You're 100% correct that virtual is an extension of real world. However, I find that people tend to think that none of this ever happened before the internet.
While I do think that the internet has made the probability of being hit with identity theft, for example, or even what this person is going through, much higher, people need to realize that most all "internet crimes" were out there before the internet.
Absolutely, homesteadtraders. We have to start thinking and remembering that the virtual world is only an extension of the real world. Real life courtesies and rights don't just disappear because someone moves their activity into the virtual environment. The time and effort spent doing the work is real, the agreed reimbursement for that work, whether in fees, trade or barter, is real, and the system protecting that work is real...no matter where it all takes place. Thanks for sharing your story too.
Unfortunatly, I had some artwork stolen about 15 years ago, by a non profit group who used it for their advertising. I did confront them about it, and even though I had the original piece in my posession (I was selling prints), they swore up and down it was done by one of their own people. However, even though they swore the work was theirs, I notice they did pull the drawing within the year, and I've never seen it used again.
The sad thing was, the piece was being used for a cause I did support, and I told the orginization that I did not want money or to cause problems. I just wanted credit for the art work and they could continue to use the piece free of charge.
So, this happens in the real world, as well as the virtual.
I didn't realize that the person wasn't getting credit. That's just plain wrong.
Thanks for offering your thoughts on Second Life as well. As I'm sure you know, us IT security types aren't well-known for being early adopters of anything digital. Too scary.
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M2M: Rise of the Machines? Not Yet David Weldon In the 1970 science fiction thriller Colossus: The Forbin Project, two giant supercomputers from the United States and Soviet Union secretly join forces to take control of the collective nuclear might of the two countries. In the film, the two machines discover each other's existence, communicate back-and-forth, share their collective data, and cut their human creators out of the process. It is the ultimate example of machine-to-machine communications, or M2M. CLICK FOR MORE
M2M: Rise of the Machines? Not Yet David Weldon In the 1970 science fiction thriller Colossus: The Forbin Project, two giant supercomputers from the United States and Soviet Union secretly join forces to take control of the collective nuclear might of the two countries. In the film, the two machines discover each other's existence, communicate back-and-forth, share their collective data, and cut their human creators out of the process. It is the ultimate example of machine-to-machine communications, or M2M. CLICK FOR MORE
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