Cel Edman has taken down his SculptyPaint website out of frustration over content theft troubles. Sculpty Paint is a powerful, free tool the Cel has created to allow people to make their own sculpted prims in Second Life. Rather than thank him or support this efforts, some people have decided that they’d rather abuse him, steal his content, and even repackage his commercial goods as freebies to be given away in a popular group of Mentors.
This is a sad and pathetic tale of people taking advantage of a very generous person and violating the DMCA - just to make a quick buck. And Cel is ceratinly not alone. Content theft is running rampant in Second Life. It is just too easy for lazy, ignorant people to take advantage of creative, hard working people. Virtual content creators are supposed to be protected by the DMCA, but it is difficult to enforce - especially considering the global and anonymous nature of SL and the Internet.
What to do? I don’t know. The nature of digital content makes it easy to copy. Anonymous content-stealing asshats don’t listen to reason. The open nature of SL makes it difficult to actively police this sort of theft. I think that for now the best thing to do is to keep this sort of content theft in the news - keep hounding and pursuing these thieves - somehow make content theft less appealing to these bastards.
There has to be some way to offer a bit more protection. It’s time that we get Linden Lab and SL residents together and figure out a way to stop the flood of illegal and stolen content in SL.
