Wading In

I've avoided the whole theft issue til now - partly because I think there's a lot of hypocrisy inherent in the debate. And I think most of the debate about theft is played out about small things at a shrill level and ignores the real issues. This is an example of the type of thing I think the discussion should center on. I have this product and admire its creator - I found this copied on Ordinal Malaprop's Blog :


Sculptypaint has now been discontinued by its author, with the following explanation:

I decided to take down Sculptypaint site for the next few days.
Why?
Well there are a number of reasons. I love to create, and write creation tools, that I offer free to download as well. Love the positive response of the majority of people, but the same time.
- People threatning me in real life, that I filed a DMCA complain against.
- I got serious hate mail, about my software thats free to download for everyone.
- The way Linden act on DMCA and copyright infrigment.Like one person modified my artwork, removed my name and copyright, and have been selling my items for 6 months now.. Using an army of bots to get #1 in the search. I file a DMCA, wait 2 months, Linden removes the vendor boxes. And the next week the person is selling the same stuff again. I filed already 3 times in a row a DMCA takedown to this person, and still this person with ‘Payment info on file’ is running around in SL. Also selling other artist work.Another person has a huge record on selling stolen goods in sl, created by me and other artist. Selling stolen items for the last 12 months now, all the DMCA takedowns he received he calls just a joke. and continues this ‘bussiness’. The person got ‘payment info on file’ and his own sim.
- Yesterday I learned about the ‘mental mentors’ group in Second Life. This group is for mentors in Second Life, who’s goal is to help Newbie`s, educate teach, lead, guide and so on. Great..This group is rather big, about 800+ people/mentors.I found out several of my sculptpacks I sell are offered as freebee`s by the leader(s) of this group. For several months now.A ‘mentor starter pack’ is given out to all mentors, to help the helpless newbees in SL.I released my latest SFT-pack around 14 februari 2008. Only a few days later, this pack I created was repackaged, my copyright notices and TOS removed, (all the sculpties clearly state not for individual resell/repackage). The whole pack was distributed as a freebee pack too about 800+ mentors in SL, to use and to give away ‘to help the newbees’.If this group was called ‘robbers from SL’ I would not care a second, but from a mentor group.. Who`s goal to educate, teach, help and lead in SL?! unbelievable.
You must know, I only can continue developing Sculptypaint and other free creation tools by selling my work in SL.No income - no time - no coding - no tools - simple as that.I’m sick and tired about all this crap that sucks all the creative energy out of me, standing alone in the cold here for such a long time. So decided to put a statement here for the next few days. Hope you understand.
Have a nice day!
Elout de Kok - march 6, 2008SL: Cel Edman

We need to move away from picketing skin thieves (as obnoxious as they might be) and put our energy into developing a process which actually protects those creators like Elout/Cel from the assholes who exploit them and their talents.

Just saying.