Grid Expectations

It was bound to happen: following the release of Eloh Eliot’s .psd files for her Another skin lines, a number of people took her up on her offer to modify the skins and redistribute them as they saw fit.

This is an awesome development for a number of reasons. Consumers are now presented with yet even more skin choices in an already huge market, because people who might never have ventured into creating skins are now delving into it since Eloh’s done most of the difficult work involved in skin-making. Another group of people who have benefited are those who have always wanted the luxury of a customized skin (or even an entire line of skins) but haven’t been willing to pay someone else an astronomical amount of lindens to do it for them.

Of course, there was the inevitable bit of initial confusion and concern as our more entrepreneurially-minded residents began to release their modifications in-world at a price, which is why Eloh’s posted an informative clarification on her blog. If you’ve any interest in this matter and/or are planning on selling your own mods, then it’d behoove you to take a look at what she says: legalese/licensing: moar clarification and explanation

If you’re too lazy to click on that link and read up (seriously, just go read it, it’s not that long), then here are what I felt were the most important points:

1. Leave the original copyright and license notice with your redistributions. Honestly, there’s no excuse for this… if you’ve downloaded the .psd files, then you’ve seen the text file for this.

2. Get Eloh’s permission first before including her name in any promotional activities regarding your redistributions.

3. If you decide to ignore the stipulation to include the copyright/license, she will not go on a vengeful manhunt seeking your blood.

So yes, if you decide to sell your mods at a price that is considerably higher than what Eloh had been selling her skins for, that is well within your right (although you should probably prepare yourself for a few raised eyebrows and maybe even a negative blog posting or two, since pretty much everyone in the SL fashion community knows exactly how much of the work you didn’t do). But for crying out loud, don’t try to pass off the work as completely your own and leave out the copyright and license. You WILL be much maligned for it.

P.s. Eloh’s made a male skin .psd available.

P.p.s. The Another Fundraiser event is fast approaching! You still have a few hours left to get your submissions in.

P.p.p.s. Show off your mods on flickr! Post them at the Another Skin Mod Club group.

My friend Vivienne Graves just directed me to an interesting posting on her blog, Second Impressions.

Apparently she and another friend happened across a store that engages in some rather questionable business practices. This particular shop sells hats, and some pretty cool-looking ones at that. Upon closer inspection of these hats, however, one makes some unexpected discoveries:

My friend Morrigan Repine alerted me to a shop owned by one Chigadee London, called ‘Couture Chapeau’, which seems to be…well, I don’t want to say ‘ripping off’, so let’s say ‘inspired by’ Megg Demina’s justly praised Chapeau Tres Mignon. Ms London has a variety of hats for sale here, some that are rather striking…but if you do what we did and inspect the objects on display, you’ll see that most of the striking detail work is not Ms London’s, but was sourced from full-perms items by other content creators. For instance, the feather detail on the ‘Faerie Feathers’ hat, priced at L$400, turns out, on closer inspection, to be the work of Mistress Midnight, from her ‘Lace Wings’.

Inspecting the prims of the other hats on display (you’ll have to be quick, as they’re all on a temp-rez cycle) reveals that the butterfly on the ‘Secret Garden’ hat is the work of Saajuk Bogomil; the feather on the ‘Petite Caponita’ hat is by Natalia Zelmanov; the tassels on the shoes on sale in the shop are by Siggy Romulus; part of the detail on the ‘Callas Chapeau’ is the work of Billie Sunchaser; and the rose on the ‘Black Rose Chapeau’ is by Logan Bauer.

~ Vivienne Graves on Second Impressions

After reading Vivienne’s post, I decided to take a look for myself to confirm what she’d written. The right-click > inspect function does not lie :p Here are a couple of screenshots I took that will back up what she’s stated (clicking them will take you to flickr where there are larger versions of these images):

I take a very similar stance to Vivienne when it comes to modifying items in SL. I feel that if you’ve paid for something and it comes with Modify permissions, then you are free to unlink, relink, and alter the hell out of that item if you so desire, even to the point of Frankenstein-ing it with other items… you paid for it, mod perms have been granted, and *it’s yours* to do with as you see fit.

What, however, about this turning around and reselling products that contain parts cannibalized from other content creators’ works? It is true that we see creative collaborations all the time in SL (i.e., talented animator and celebrated fashion designer get together and put out a new purse that comes with a purse-carrying AO; knowledgeable scripter and innovative builder create a revolutionary product that forever alters the manner in which people photograph themselves in SL). In these cases, arrangements between the parties involved were obviously made and agreed upon before the items were ever entered into the market.

Does the granting of mod perms on an item for sale automatically imply this kind of agreement? Can I take that hairstyle in my inventory with the mod perms, unlink it to my heart’s content (pun not intended there), re-link selected prims from that hairstyle with other prims I’ve either collected from yet other hairstyles or created on my own, and then turn around and sell my newly modified project? By granting me mod permissions on that hairstyle, did the original hairstyle’s designer grant me permission to take individual prims out of her work to place in another object for resale?

I honestly believe that common sense would answer to this is a resounding, emphatic “NO”.