July 23, 2008 by Ciaran Laval
Posted in
I should mention here, before I go on, that the word on the street is that there's an awesome land baron in my bloodlines eternal life clan.
I know some people like to read about Jack's office hour, so I'll summarise:
Qie Niangao "Jack's not here Ciaran".
Yes Jack has left on a jet plane, don't know when he'll be back again, well hopefully not long as it's around what, 11 hours from San Fran to England? I wonder if he's coming back with that bag of swag he talked about after the island price cut?
I've been in Textures R Us a lot lately, and keep getting their copyright warning notice, which is a good thing as far as I'm concerned. However what I'd like to see them say is "Hey, these are our textures and if you use them you're ok, but don't misuse them" but I don't quite see that, it stops just short.
Another point about textures, why can't I save the default textures to my hard drive but I can save any other full perms texture to my hard drive? Is it a bug? It seems to me that if you couldn't save textures from others to your hard drive, it would do away with a lot of texture theft.
However enough about textures, it's Wednesday, it's supposed to be Jack meeting, so it's land night. Hands up all those who think they're likely to get ripped off by an estate owner?
Whereas estate land rip offs do go ahead, surely 80% of the landscape wouldn't be estate if this was as widespread as some would have us believe, would it? Thousands of avatars, day in, day out, happily live on estate land because it's not the mess that mainland is.
Now don't get me wrong, I love mainland, I rent out more mainland than I do estate. I have a strong affection for mainland, but mainland is a mess. The biggest problem with mainland is, to state the obvious, that it's not estate. There's no one person saying "no".
However, to some, that's the beauty of mainland, control to do pretty much as you wish within the terms of service without having some overbearing landlord come down on you. The balance is fine but the general issue with mainland, if it's cheap, you're likely to find some git cutting 16M plots on a parcel near you soon. I have some mainland in sims where the price has never been at base level, and the ad plots just aren't there. It really is luck of the draw but because the ad plots haven't moved in, land prices have remained higher and people obviously pay the prices.
I know from talking to people that landlords aren't popular, on the mainland the phrase "Slumlords" is used, and yet some landlords go to great lengths to avoid their area being a slum. They argue vociferously against issues that detract value from mainland and yet, because they are loud, they attract criticism.
The bottom line is that landlords in SL, the vast majority, want to provide a service. They want people to rent from them and they're not looking to rip people off, they're just providing a service, as thousands of people every day will testify.
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Tip - Saving default textures
You CAN save the default (Library) textures to your hard drive, it just takes an extra step :-). First drag the texture from the Library into your My Inventory folders--anywhere in there is fine. Open the texture, then you will get the option to save it under the File menu.
MW
Thanks, Ciaran
Thank you, Ciaran for pointing out the obvious regarding texture perms. Every time that I hear that LL *can't* do anything to prevent IP theft, I boil because of the the obvious point you make so eloquently. I can't go into any other virtual world that I know of and easily rip textures, objects or scripts. FWIW, it isn't just textures either...a very average AV recently, during casual conversation after an event, started duplicating everyone and everything in sight..shapes, skins, clothes, objects. He said he can do it either way...export from SL or import to SL.
If LL's plan is to disregard permission issues in deference to opensource functionality, then there really isn't much incentive to create new content, and I can't think of a single reason why I would pay thousands of dollars for what will quickly become a pure marketing environment. I can get Internet banner ad spam for free.
Worrying
The thing is as I can't download the default textures it's either a bug or there is some sort of extra permission available so I'm not sure what the issue is there.
Content theft is going to be very concerning as these worlds grow and will undermine a lot of business if something isn't worked out early in the expansion.
I understand that it's not easy to prevent theft, but it should be a little more difficult.
Tru copyrights?
I would rather not see Textures R Us smack me in the face with a ton of messages warning me not to steal their stuff in light of the fact that they have taken countless textures from the net and stolen them for profit themselves.
http://www.slnn.com/article/when-rightful-ip/
Yikes
That's the sort of thing I fear. If you had those textures deleted from your objects you'd be a bit miffed, well I would be, but nothing in their warning card gives you the 100% guarantee that would help alleviate the worry.