Why we stopped reporting on piracy and copyright infringements

Some customers who have discovered stores in-world that were ripping off and selling several of textures have asked why we don't report them on our blog anymore. We decided not to make any more posts on content theft, mainly because those happen now with quite alarming frequency of at least every couple of months, and we don't want to clutter the blog with frequent posts on content theft.

However, stay assured that when we receive your reports, we investigate thoroughly and proceed with all the necessary measures to solve the issue. Please continue to report any infringements, including as much information as possible. We really appreciate and we are very thankful of your efforts to reduce the copyright infringements within Second Life.

Never-ending story. Our products are stolen and resold again

This is getting funny but probably it will get even more frequent as the Second Life user base increases. Another SL resident, ripped off and was selling our products. Not only that, his was selling them with a double price tag than our originals! And to add insult to injury, he has also made a Classified advertisement where he used one of our products on his classified photo!

Hopefully the issue was settled after talking with him. He claimed that he had no idea that ripping off textures is not allowed (!?!) and surprisingly, we believe that he was telling the truth. Not like the other resident who was insisting that he found the original textures through P2P.

Our products are stolen and resold –again!

A customer sent us an IM today that he discovered a shop that was selling chest hair that was looking “very similar” to the body hair we sell. Upon teleporting at the shop, we saw that they were not only “very similar” to ours but they are actually exact rip-offs of our body hair textures.

The annoyingly funny thing is that the resident in question, writes in his SL profile that he hates people who steal and resell products and that he will ban everyone doing so! He has also added prim screens in front of his products to purportedly prevent stealing!

We have contacted him and fortunately the issue is resolved without filling out a DMCA claim. The annoying thing is that he was claiming that he didn't know that the textures are ours and copyrighted by us because he found it through P2P sharing. That was most obviously a lie and all the evidence supports that. What evidence? Checking on our transaction logs, we saw that he had purchased from us all of the 15 items he was selling!

PS. Can you guess his nationality? It's not very difficult given that most of the latest content theft incidents originate from those nationals. And before someone screams "racism", we have nothing to do with it. It's just an interesting observation.

Attention! Our products are stolen and resold

It was a matter of time to happen to vdbv.designs as well. Probably, this is the price you have to pay for being the first to have a new and innovative product in Second Life. Keep in mind that the previous phrase is not egoistical at all. We don't say we are the best, we just state the fact that we were the first and still the only SL merchants that sell body hair products.

Anyway, in brief, we discovered that a resident had illegally ripped off and was reselling almost half of our products (actually all the best selling ones). It's really sad but unfortunately it happens.

What makes the current incident unprecedented in our view, is that he was also selling stolen skins and clothing textures of many well known SL designers. And on a funny note regarding our own products, he was even reselling them at a higher price that the one we sell!

You can read more of the issue at the SL official forums here.