Second Life content creation is my job. No, it does not pay terribly well. No, there are no health benefits. But I get to work at this part time and spend more time with my kid than I might be able to otherwise. AND I get to create things and make things, which I LOVE. I always have about 400 million more ideas than I have time to do. (Which doesn't even count the projects I've started and never finished.)
Content theft hurts content creators. Not only the lost sales revenue, but the time it takes to deal with the theft and file the DCMA and open tickets with LL and then sometimes they still have to do that ALL over again to get the stuff finally wiped.
There are TWO groups today who have boycotts in SL. One is the Step Up. They are asking for NO uploads. The other is Artist's Voice. They are asking for boycotts of all L transaction/Land store and to have shops close up their stores completely and to not shop.
I don't think that the boycott of stores/shopping/transactions is the answer. This penalizes the two groups who are hurt the most by content theft - legit shop owners who spend countless hours creating and the loyal customers who spend the Linden to support those countless hours of creation.
I know people want to do something. And I do appreciate people who aren't all content creators bringing new ideas and new forms of protest to the table. Content creators have been talking to Linden Labs about theft since 2006 (or maybe 2005). While we were able to get LL to act on some of the copybot issues, we still can't get them to go any further. So to see people form groups and say, hey let's do something, well, I really appreciate that. But I don't agree with the form the Artist's Voice protest took, so I am not participating this time. (Tho I am going to refrain from uploading files, that I can do, I hope. It is NOT going to be easy.)
Elysium had a wonderful idea that we should swamp LL's email servers with emails of protest. THAT is something that wouldn't hurt content creators and might even get LL's attention. Maybe. I hope to see both of these groups come up with new forms of protest.
I'm speaking on this so my loyal customers know my reasons for not closing my store.
Other voices:
Achariya is doing
an excellent series of blog posts with designers speaking on content theft.
And I also really liked
what Allegory had to say on this subject.
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