YOUR MOD MAY HAVE BEEN STOLEN.

[DreamBurrow]

Recently, someone had messaged me that a user in Second Life has stolen my re-texture work and is making virtual profit from it. I clicked onto their page and noticed that they not only stole my work, but the work of many other modders. No one should be making profit off of a modders work, especially when it's being freely shared with others. I find it extremely disrespectful and I am more upset that they have stolen from modders I recognize who clearly have put an amazing amount of effort into their clothing and armors.

 

Not only have they taken work from modders, but they have taken work directly from Skyrim and Witcher. I am almost certain that it's not legal to make profit off of a game companies original mesh work, whether virtual or not.

 

Here is a link to the page: (You may not be able to see the file lost of stolen items if you are not a member of Second Life)

 

https://marketplace.secondlife.com/stores/136276

 

 

I have tried to flag as many items as I can, but I'm pretty sure the moderators of Second Life don't care about these issues.

There is a way to report intellectual property infringement, but I would need to fax or snail mail the people at Second Life in order to alert them to the issue, and I believe that is a load of bull.

 

I'm sorry if this is not suppose to be in the general thread.

 

 

Here are screenshots of some of the stolen work.

 

 

 

http://farm4.staticflickr.com/3773/9141071818_62506003f0_h.jpg

 

http://farm4.staticflickr.com/3807/9138934153_21f9937ca4_h.jpg

 

 

 

Edited June 26, 2013 by DreamBurrow

[Oubliette]

Some of those meshes look like Beth's. If Second Life won't take you seriously, they might take Bethesda a bit more so.

[ripple]

Already a thread for this...

 

http://forums.nexusmods.com/index.php?/topic/952451-seems-peoples-mod-work-are-being-stolen-sold/

[DreamBurrow]

Already a thread for this...

 

http://forums.nexusmods.com/index.php?/topic/952451-seems-peoples-mod-work-are-being-stolen-sold/

 

I have never seen this thread before, and its last post was in April. There seems to be other issues with Second Life thieves like threads all over the forums.

[Ygfbv]

There's been a thread about this in the mod author forum for awhile. Seems like a couple people tried to get SL to take stuff down (and harassed Bethesda to get SL to take stuff down) and failed, last I checked.

[DreamBurrow]

How lame.

I guess I should loose out hope than.

[ripple]

Bethesda won't litigate on behalf of modders. Only if the stolen materials contain contents they purchased or produced for one of their games will they be realistically expected to act. Anyways, we're just rehashing everything that's already been repeated for years and years, in countless forum posts scattered across all the modding forums.

[Apethaia]

its not just virtual currency though because secondlife allows the conversion of their currency (lindens) into actual money. So an item costing 800 lindens is roughly 3.22 dollars minus a small fee secondlife makes from processing. Thats per item sold, so if ten people buy this item, whether they know its stolen or not; the person who stole it is making upwards of 30 dollars which he gets to keep unless actual legal action is taken. The bigger problem is it's not just one guy, the marketplace is flooded with similar accounts doing the same thing and doesn't provide much if anything for content creators to do to actually report these people or at least stop the sale of the products.

[prod80]

There is nothing that stops you, as the original author, to either;

 

a) take legal action or;

b) sell the stuff you make off yourself in SL

[rhowington]

I contacted EcthelionOtW recently when I discovered that both he and I had our mods stolen by a Russian site: http://tes-game.ru/load/0-3. There is a high likelihood that a lot of other authors have had their mods stolen by them. However, since I speak some Russian I made an agreement with the thief and got a copy of at least one of my translated mods.