Questionable, or not?

One thing that causes some controversy among Second Life content creators is the issue of freebie resellers; people who take items that were released with full permissions, sell them, and profit from someone else's work. This is almost universally frowned upon; but there's another issue--what of someone who takes part of a full-perms item, and incorporates it into a work of their own?

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.

Personally, I see no problem with incorporating full-perms items into something one creates for oneself...but it seems to me that when one incorporates them into something intended for resale, it skirts the line of questionable ethics...if it doesn't step right over it.

CSI and SL business

The current CSI story arc and Second Life tie-in, featuring themed orientation areas and an in-world game, is generating a lot of hype in the SL blogosphere. So far, it remains to be seen whether the impact will be as great as the anticipated 1 million new signups; so far, over Wendesday and Thursday, new user signups are at a total of close to 120,000 (versus a 'usual' recent figure of between 30-50k for a comparable period).

Anecdotally, the new users led into SL by the CSI promotion DO seem to be taking part in the SL economy; I personally observed many newbies spending money on avatar appearance accessories in the CSI tie-in Fashion Avenue sim, and explaining to other newbies that they'd bought L$ from the Lindex. So, this is potentially a good thing for content creators...or some content creators, anyway; those selected for vendor spaces in the Fashion Avenue sim will likely be the first to benefit, as the new users going through the CSI orientation on the OnRez viewer have in their inventories landmarks directing them to Fashion Avenue for shopping.

This rankles with some people, who seem to feel that the vendor selection process should have been more open, in order to give more content creators a chance at a share of the revenues generated by the new users; a certain SL designer showed up in the Fashion Avenue sim on Thursday, wearing a group tag that said 'Pissed Off', and started questioning Roslin Petion of Tete à Pied regarding the criteria for selection, and suggesting that the Electric Sheep Company should have had an open bid selection process (a sentiment also expressed by Prokofy Neva). This would, perhaps, have been more "fair", but with a development deadline, one can't reasonably expect ESC to have been able to sort through the mountain of submissions that would inevitably have followed; so it seems quite reasonable that many of the content creators represented (Barnesworth Anubis, Torrid Midnight, Kin Keiko, Portia Sin, and others) were also contracted by Electric Sheep for development of the CSI build and the CSI-specific newbie avatar skins, clothing, and prim accessories. This may seem unfair, to some...but then, ESC is a business, with content creators already contracted; the expectation that they might open the vendor selection process, and thus potentially damage existing business relationships, seems rather unreasonable. And in any case, assuming a fair retention rate for the new residents, this will, eventually, be a good thing for SL's content creation community in general, as the new users move into the world beyond the limits of the CSI orientation areas.