Socially|Mundane

Interesting snippet of a blog entry by Cyndy Aleo-Carreira at Industry Standard, where she touches on DMCA issues and what happens in virtual worlds like Second Life.

Enforcing a DMCA take-down is very easy in a virtual world: simply delete (or otherwise make unavailable to everyone) all copies of the allegedly infringing "item". The problem is unlike the real world, where each item is it's own object, in the virtual world an object is really a copy of a 'master' object. It's just a computer file.

So, in Second Life, if I create a chair, and then sell that chair to 1000 other people, those people aren't really buying the chair. They are buying a copy of the chair. And in many cases, such as with a texture or picture, it's not even really a copy. Rather, it's an alias of the texture (there is only one texture file, all the others simply point to the original.)

The problem is with a take-down, all copies are removed from the system. This means all those people who purchased this item suddenly find it is now missing. And they never knew that what they had purchased was allegedly stolen.

And what if it really wasn't? Or worse, if the wrong item is taken down?

This happened in Second Life over last weekend. When an open sourced script was removed from thousands, if not millions of items throughout the virtual world, all because it had the name of an infringing account attached, when that account was accused of infringing other items.

So, thousands upon thousands of products instantly became broken. And, when an attempt to undo the process, everything was already hosed. So... DMCA can be a rather dangerous thing.

It's a short, good read:

"With a virtual world like Second Life, DMCA take-downs can have a relatively simple solution: simply delete all copies of the offending item. As the blog post notes (along with several commenters), the process is flawed and isn't completely transparent. Some users who lost items may not have been aware that the items they had in their inventory were copied illegally."

Second Life roiled by by Linden Lab's DMCA policies