Holy Infringing Poseballs!

OK. Not holy. And if you say that SexGen beds in SecondLife don't use poseballs, well - they do. But the word is out: SexGen is suing John Doe. That John Doe gets around a lot, one would think, but it is a valid way to sue when it comes to the internet. 'Pirated sex beds'.

What will they think of next?

What I find interesting about this is that no one is apparently sure how the bed was allegedly copied¹. For the lay people out there², a sex bed is a pretty complex piece of work. The prims that make up the bed are pretty easy, or are as complicated as you want detail. The scripts are pretty complex in that they have to take into account sexual positions which incorporate 2 or more avatars of varying gender. Then there are the animations involved, and the positions of the pose balls so that everything lines up, and customizable for users. How do I know so much? There's an [w:open source] script for this out there which I've been playing with off and on - for technical reasons only, of course. Sex beds are big business. Getting a slice of that cherry pie is tempting.

Try explaining this all to your mother, she'll have a field day. Worry if your mother can explain it to you.

The legal filing (7.5 megabytes, PDF) has some interesting stuff in there. For example, this is a real company behind SexGen (I wonder which came first - the bed or the business?).

Another example is that on June 11th, 2007, Eros filed an application to obtain a federal trademark registration (Serial Number 77202601) - which could indicate that this case has been building for at least a month - or the federal trademark just conveniently coincided with the case. I think it was necessary, and is probably important. On June 25th, copyright applications were sent in - which really demonstrates the timeline of the case. It shouldn't dilute the case at all, it's a matter of plugging the holes before taking the ship to sea. [w:Copyright] is implicit, and technically speaking copyright exists within Linden Lab servers.

All of the case building seems to be apparent in that the filing indicates the alleged infringement began 'no later than in or about April, 2007', and used the Mark - but the Mark itself referencing the trademark, which was filed after the alleged infringement began. I'm no lawyer, but - I think the trademark infringement case may be a bit of flim flam.

The 'loss of revenue', or 'damages', are always questionable in these cases. There are so many variables, it would be difficult to say whether the damages are significant or not - did sales figures drop? That is not demonstrated in the filing. And how the item was allegedly copied is... not there. How do we know that these are the same scripts, animations, etc.? So I thought to look for the items in question - but Volkov Cattaneo no longer shows up in search.

Gee. I wonder what happened? Banned? Or is search not working? I go with banned. The second the filing hit the web, I'm pretty sure Volkov Cattaneo walked his plank, joining all the junk at 0,0,0 of the metaverse. In the Reuters article, Volkov Cattaneo doesn't seem to be too awfully worried about the whole thing.

Maybe he just took his poseballs and ran - to show up as another avatar, doing the same thing. Whack-A-Mole.

But what I really want to know is - how was the thing copied? Don't start shouting 'Copybot' - that doesn't fit the data. Was this an exploit? Or was this a bug? And if it was a bug, what happens then?

While I think the Trademark issue is a bit of 'shotgunning', the copyright issue - if in fact it is the same stuff - is a real issue that the greater community will need to know about. The whole Copybot scandal created more rumors than truth (and lightning rods which were clueless) - are we on the brink of something similar?

Could be. And over what? One handed typing? It's serious business, but if you don't do a double take on the whole situation, you have been in Second Life way too long.

I tossed the whole thing at a few lawyers... maybe something will come back worth discussing.

¹The trick to all of this is that it's all alleged, and you have to tell people that so that they don't go running around and accusing instead of alleging.
²No pun intended, but enjoy it anyway.