Vendredi 8 février 2008
Virtual retailers decry Second Life crime wave
Repris à partir de l’agence Reuters
Marco Eckert montrait sa dernière collection de tenues et peaux, une occasion qui tourna à la catastrophe quand un avatar commença à dire dans un mauvais anglais à ses clients, où
ils pouvaient acheter des copies exactes des créations de Marco pour 50% du prix.
Marco banni l'avatar, mais quelques minutes plus tard un nouvel avatar, créé le jour même, revint et réessaya de vendre les copies. Le copieur avait décidé de ne point cesser. " En
ce moment nous bannissons 30 personnes par jour" nous dit Marco, qui dirige Redgrave Fashion sous le nom de Dean Ashby.
Pour Marco il ne s'agit pas d'un jeu. Faire tourner ce magasin est un job à plein temps pour cet Allemand natif de Nuremberg, et il tire des profits confortables de ce
business.
" Nos ventes ont diminué des 75% en une semaine ", dit-il .
Cet a peu près 1.4 millions de dollars qui circulent quotidiennement sur SL. Mais il n'y a pas de police ou de lois pour contrecarrer le crime.
Virtual retailers decry Second Life crime wave
SECOND LIFE, Feb 7 (Reuters) - Marco Eckert was showing off the newest line of clothes and custom skins in his Second Life store, an occasion ruined when an avatar started telling
his customers in broken English where they could buy exact copies of Eckert’s designs for 50 percent off.
Eckert quickly banned the avatar, but minutes later a new avatar, created that day, came in and again tried to sell his customers copies of his goods in his own store. The person
who stole his designs wouldn’t give up. “At one point, we were banning 30 people a day,” said Eckert, who runs Redgrave Fashion under the Second Life name Dean Ashby.
For Eckert, this isn’t a game. Running a successful Second Life store is a full-time career for the Nuremberg, Germany native, and he makes a comfortable living doing it. “Our
sales dropped 75 percent in a week,” he said of his battle against content pirates.
About US$1.4 million dollars circulates through Second Life every day, but there are no police to investigate crimes or laws for them to enforce. While theft of Second Life content
isn’t new, the sense that Linden Lab’s virtual world is a consequence-free environment has led pirates to become increasingly brazen in their activities.
“They’re setting up networks to distribute pirated content grid-wide,” said Kevin Alderman (Second Life: Stroker Serpentine), who initiated two high-profile copyright lawsuits
against avatars Volkov Catteneo and Rase Kenzo last year. “We stopped Kenzo before he could do that, but people have picked up his mantle and taken it to the nth degree.”
There are at least four widely-known methods of copying Second Life content nominally tagged as “no-copy” by Linden’s servers. Victims of piracy have little recourse. Linden Lab
investigates DMCA filings but otherwise largely avoids disputes between avatars.
In both of Alderman’s cases, all parties involved — Linden Lab, the Internet Service Providers, the merchants, the alleged pirates — were based in the United States. Cases like
Eckert’s, a German citizen who suspects he’s being copied by a national of neither the U.S. nor the E.U., become exponentially harder to pursue, said Sean Kane, co-chair of the American Bar
Association’s committee on Virtual Worlds and Multiuser Online Games.
“Generally in Second Life you’re talking about thousands of dollars, and you can easily spend more than that in litigation,” Kane said.
Nicky Ree, a Netherlands-based costume designer dealing with theft, said she’s only had limited luck with DMCA filings. “If the thief has ten stores and you only know of five, you
DMCA the five stores,” she said. “Only the five listed will be taken down.”
“So they took down the ones you found, but it did little to nothing,” she said.
In the absence of police, some are taking justice into their own hands. Store owners said vigilante bands of hackers have been offering their services to beleaguered merchants,
promising to take steps such as crashing the sims of pirate outlets.
Such actions violate Linden’s terms of service.
Such actions violate Linden’s terms of service.
Second Life’s merchants remain unsure how to proceed. Marco Bosco (Second Life: Maruko Sakigake), based in Brescia, Italy, recalled how one thief offered him a teleport to a store
selling Bosco’s designs. When Bosco asked him to stop, the thief laughed and told him there was nothing he could do.
As an added insult, the thief invited Bosco to join his Second Life group. The group’s name: “Robber From Hell.”
