Dear Xstreet SL Merchant,
We’re writing you because your Xstreet SL marketplace listings include the following branded item(s), brand name(s), or other item(s) containing intellectual property:
MARILYN MONROE
Yesterday, Miko Omegamu of Icing found her account seized by Linden Lab in their ongoing attempt to clean up copyright abuse. The above dress, “The Marilyn”, was taken from her XStreet listings and then deleted in-world because Miko mistakenly left a particular description on the vendor: “The skirt is scripted to blow up in the wind, like Marilyn Monroe in ‘The Seven Year Itch‘.” They didn’t stop there, though – no, the Linden in her inventory also deleted everything else that said “Marilyn”, including some Ingenue hair, several textures, and a pair of sunglasses.
Miko, obviously annoyed, emailed Linden Lab.
Hello, I’m writing to investigate a series of events that happened on my account. I got an email from LL saying they were performing tests on my account and then that my listings of my “Marilyn” dress was removed. I had forgotten that long ago I had described that the skirt “blows up like Marilyn Monroe’s.” For the record, the dress is not a copy of anything she had worn, it simply made a reference to one of her roles, before the policy change.
When I logged in, everything that had the name ‘Marilyn’ in it was deleted from my account and I got a ton of “Listings Linden has accepted your inventory offer in Second Life.” notices. Things that I had bought, things that were completely unrelated to the offending dress were removed, including sunglasses that I created that were not listed and not bearing the name “monroe.”
Someone was apparently careless in their removals. I would appreciate it if the objects that had nothing to do with the original complaint were returned.
Additionally, to clarify, is one not even allowed to use the name “Marilyn”? My in-world objects never made reference to “Marilyn Monroe”, just Marilyn. Was it necessary to remove all my textures and objects?
Linden Lab failed, however, to delete Miko’s “Marilyn” dress out of the vendors at her store, so copies are still available. I must also point out that Miko’s “Marilyn” dress doesn’t violate the “Marilyn Monroe” copyright by name or image, only by a descriptive sentence. Miko acknowledges that she was in the wrong for not eliminating that particular portion of the descriptive sentence.
But hey, LL, let’s talk about all those Gucci and Louis Vuitton issues y’all got going on on XStreet and this particular Marilyn Monroe-esque listing first before you start nitpicking so much. Cripes. I’m all for kicking content theft and copyright violation in the nads, but LL swung their leg and missed.
Absolutely fuckin’ useless the Lab are. Every month they manage to outdo themselves with incompetance. Not a lick of common sense between them. It’ll only get worse too, they no longer have the bond with the ‘common’ folk, as much as they try and make themselves look good thru Torley.
The problem seems to be that some rather literal-minded flunkeys have been set loose on issues like this. I’m no attorney, but certainly to suggest that one has created a skirt that moves in a fashion similar to one worn by a famous movie star is hardly a violation of property rights and is carrying things a bit too far. When those without imagination and a big picture sensibility are given the reigns, the entire community will suffer. The bean-counters are in charge. And creativity be damned. Your world, your imagination is seeming less and less the case. I’m sure sorry this has happened to Miko. There are others out there much closer to this edge, and I don’t think even they should be taken out over what they’ve created.
Are you serious? Someone over at LL needs a quick kick to the nads. This is ridiculous.
WOW. All that’s wrong with Second Life and they attack one of the best and most original designer.
I think they are just fucking with us now.
I think someone dipped into the New Year’s Eve champers a wee bit early. Absolutely ridiculous behavior by LL, what ever happened to contacting someone with a polite takedown request and giving them 24 hours (or whatever) to comply. Miko did not deserve this treatment. Shameful.
Same thing happened to me but it was a freebie skin called Marilyn and its ad. It was in my trash. Have her check there.
Oh, nothing on it says Marilyn Monroe in any way but it was still deleted from my inventory.
Hi Teagan! Unfortunately I did a search of the entire inventory, trash included, and EVERYTHING that said “Marilyn” in the name was transferred off to Listings Linden and deleted from my account.
They apparently just did a search of the word “Marilyn” in my inventory and deleted everything willy nilly, which included a LOT of stuff that wasn’t even related to the dress. Nothing said “Monroe” in my inventory either. =\
Wow, that is terrible. I guess when they got to me they were becoming careless because everything they removed was in my trash folder.
When did LL sieze your account, Teagan?
I was sent a message that said they were looking to fix a bug and my account would not be available for a short period of time. It was during that time that I apparently gave Listings Linden items. I had no idea what was done with my account.
One Linden was kind enough to look into it for me but could find nothing out that would relate to me. Hello Kitty was brought up but I don’t sell anything Hello Kitty.
It wasn’t until I read this blog that I did an inventory search for Marilyn which I had an dress called that. I forgot about the skin named Marilyn because it was from back before Laynie and I merged brands. There was the old skin and the ad in my trash. It was used for our old camping chairs.
As with Miko….nothing said Marilyn Monroe….only the first name Marilyn was used.
This is just corporate bureaucracy run amok on LL’s part. I have this dress in my inventory – it’s a favorite – Will they be removing it from there too?
Do we have any recourse against actions like this? Is the name Marilyn off limits in and of itself? That makes no sense at all. The Lindens appear to be griefing designers.
It makes no sense for this matter to be handled in this matter. A friend of mine who is not a content creator received an email a couple months ago requesting he remove some dances that apparently were copybotted. He was given 24 hours to delete them and if he didn’t comply his account would be suspended. Could they not have extended Miko this courtesy as well? Yes its their right to do this but it’s just not good customer service at all.
And by the way . . . the original dress is cream color and the Icing dress animation doesn’t copy cat the movie:
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=6yX4IjBg-XM
Would it make sense for designers who are wrongfully accused to have some compensation from LL?
This is ridioulous.
I translated this for my german blog. Please let me know if you have anything against it.
Greets from germany and a happy new year to all of you.
Momo
Unfortunately this is why I have canceled my premium account and stopped purchasing lindens. Who knows how long it will be before all the good designers in sl just get fed up and move on. I know I wouldn’t be putting up with this. It pains me to say it but I truly believe sl is on it’s way out.
I’m with you. I sold my land and shut off my premium account. They want to have an “economy” but we don’t have the ability to vote on their changes. I can’t continue to sink my RL dollars into this sinking ship.
So, will the Lindens be deleting all the Stiletto Moody ‘Bare’ shoes that actually ARE named after famous Hollywood movie actresses? They also used the surnames in their recent competition, and I have a lot of these shoes – are they gonna be disappeared from my inventory too?
Not only did the Moody’s feature the names of famous Hollywood actresses, but the red soles on her shoes are actually the trademark of Christian Louboutin’s rl shoe line. Be interesting to see how that one plays out. I’m thinking she will fare better than poor Miko did.
They held my account hostage for 2 days for some old HUD gag items from years back or atleast that’s the only thing I’ve noticed missing. I have 30,000 items in my inventory so no telling what they took out.
Another fail from LL.
Wow, this makes me wonder if the item I created and named “Cosmos” – which is now nowhere to be found in my inventory, and was not for sale anywhere – fell victim to this. Trust me, I did NOT delete it on my own…I put too much time into it to do something like that.
If so, that is just beyond stupid. I named it for what it looked like, not after the TV show. Oh, and as I was searching my inventory for it, a plant in the Library called “White Cosmos Flower” popped up.
So they’ll delete my stuff, but not their own?
Oh, and if it *was* LL, I didn’t even get a courtesy letter. I guess I’ll never know.
This is ridiculous. You can’t trademark a first name as far as I know. I have a great aunt Marilyn who wore this same style for as far back as I can remember. How do they know who I named that hair after. I’m really sorry you’re having to deal with this Miko. Look for some new hair coming your way.
Shocked and not exactly sure why because we are talking about LL. They have yet to fix the little remove button in the favorites section on xstreetsl. It’s been five damn months. This is the topper though. LL obviously does not care about it’s residents which is sad because I have spent hundreds here since I first started. We are the ones putting money into their greedy pockets, not the big RL companies. Dammit LL get it through your heads that SL will never be attractive to big RL businesses. They will never make your economy prosper. It’s us, the regular people who pay your bills sheesh. I hate to hurt the designers pockets but I’m at my wits end on this one. LL I WILL NOT UPLOAD ANOTHER LINDEN TO MY ACCOUNT UNTIL YOU DUMBASSES GET IT!!!!
Rodents…sinking ships…etc
Makes me both miss Phillip…and wonder what he knew that we don’t
My partner Tomoyuki Batra had something similar happen to him the day before yesterday as well.
He was asleep, and I saw his account log on (not by his doing). I had a heart attack thinking someone had hacked his account. I woke him up, he tried to sign on only to find his password had been changed. Live chat, and a phone call later we found it it was a Linden that had logged onto his account. Tomo of Little Boy Blue had created a ring called ‘Breathless’ (not marilyn, not monroe), that he made as a dedication to Marilyn Monroe. The Linden deleted every copy of the ‘Breathless’ ring from his inventory and his xstreet boxes. It turns out they sent an email to him 10 minutes before they seized his account.
LL has no sense in doing any of this, it is absolutely asinine they way they are treating creators recently. I am all for copyright protection, but they need to actually look at the things they are taking. They need to go after actual copy bot problems and whatnot, not punish honest business owners.
To all the shop owners that have been hit by this, my heart goes out to you.
So which one of Torley’s wife’s alts was she “competing with” or “insulted” anyway? When LL does this sort of thing there is always a Linden owned/controlled/benefiting business involved somewhere. And with a gob of campers and gambling machines most likely.
Do a search on xstreet for MARILYN MONROE and see what all comes up. Why is LL going after a non infringing designer while they allow actual infringements to remain in place?
This unpredictable, unrelieable behavior by LL is scary. They roll over everything like a tank in reverse gear. People that call their stuff ‘Gucci’ should be scared, maybe even people who call their stuff ‘Esprit,’ but not EVERYBODY. McDonalds trademarked their “I’m lovin’ it” DON’T USE ANY OF THERE WORDS EVER AGAIN IN SL !!!!
So if I named a product “Tom Jones so-and-so” it might be deleted for intellectual property infringement — although it would be meant to be like William Fielding’s victorian novel Tom Jones — which is public domain– and not the singer, who by the way copied the name from the novel.
LL seems to handle things like a crazy uncle who got into the liquor cabinet
I’ve been reading ‘the sky is falling’ posts about SL for a couple of years now, but this is the first time I really think the sky IS falling. LL are making incompetence an art form, and I am downgrading to a free account, giving up on creating, and wandering off to do something more fun for the next 6 months or so. I’ve had enough of supporting the monkeys who hit things with sticks.
Tom Jones’ real name is Thomas Jones Woodward, so he didn’t exactly ‘copy it from the novel’ – he just happened to be called it! (but I digress…)
I don’t believe there was any malice on LL’s part here. I think the problem is that removals and other relatively repetitive tasks are likely outsourced to poorly-trained vendors companies, whose workers have a tenuous grasp of the English language and limited reading comprehension.
Such workers are usually paid a pittance and will follow instructions to the letter with nothing resembling common sense- they are not paid to think, they are paid to do a keyword search and then enter your inventory with a machete.
I understand the need to control costs for large scale tasks like this, however, when you put the power to kill off people’s work with a few clicks, you need to have a little more finesse. The appropriate thing to do in this case would just be to send an email warning telling me to alter the Xstreet description within 24 hours. Nothing about the actual DRESS is infringing- the dress is not a copy and the name “Marilyn” is not trademarked.
I guess that would require the ill-trained workers to make two passes- one two find the issue, the second to make sure it was cleaned up as requested, which increases the cost of a single removal. When you’re talking about willy nilly deleting content I spent days working on though, maybe you could extend the courtesy. =\
Makes you wonder why they let us pick from a list of (often) celebrity last names when we first get accounts. I have seen Monroe as a last name for avatars, and tons more. Their have to be at least 100 avatars with variations of the name Marilyn and the last name Monroe. I know, I made one!
They seem to hold themselves to a different standard. Not only that, they need to get their (pardon my french) asses in gear and change that damn lie of a form letter they send out about a “bug report in your account” or whatever it is. It is a pure and simple lie almost 100% of the time. They are not running a check on your account, it almost always has to do with a DMCA or Infringement Issue, or a complaint they received that they have decided to keep to themselves and play judge and jury.
I am really getting so sick of LL and their g-d awful treatment of it’s citizens. It was clearly never our world, our imagination. It has always been their world, our playground, and their right to impose their will as they see fit, when they see fit, and by what means they see fit.
~ Ketsy
I was just saying this very thing to Tomoyuki Batra this morning. I remember attending an event with both Brittany Spears and Paris Hilton in attendance.
I agree with Miko … and I also think we are seeing an across-the-board attempt both to drive down Lab costs and to maximise revenue in a number of ways – the business of XStreet charges managing to do both at the same time.
What they are not factoring in is the human cost, because it doesn’t show (at least at first) on the balance sheet.
The optimistic view is that we are moving to a point when virtual worlds are going to be hungry for content, in order to attract people to their environments. And this might be in the form of content for immersionist worlds (Blue Mars are using Caledonia, for example, to show that existing SL designers can function in a different environment very nicely thankyouverymuch), or it might be in the form of developing apps within existing frameworks, whether it is a social networking system like Facebook, or the iPhone.
If this is the case, then the Lab will need to prioritise the needs of the content creators more. I think that we are seeing a slow move towards this, in the Content Management Road Map etc. BUT if the cost reduction imperative continues unhindered and unchallenged, Second Life might end up the losers here.
“If we see something that can be linked to Kevin Bacon within 7 steps, we’ll log into your account and hack out chunks of your inventory. Sorry, that’s just how we roll.”
They did the same with one of my wifes products as she used the word “Converse” as in “to speak with someone” in her listing yet search xstreet for brand names and their are loads listed.
http://foo.secondlifeherald.com/slh/2009/11/ll-slaps-xstreet-competition-with-selective-copyright-enforcement.html
It will be great when eventually the lindens all work from the same song sheet.
Lord Sullivan- did they also delete those items from her inventory? I’m looking at the Xstreet listing guidelines, and while they do say they will remove the listing, they make NO mention of deleting your inworld content. I wonder how recently they instituted this.
I’m not going to pardon Linden Lab one bit because they ‘poorly outsource’ anything. It’s their company name on it regardless if they outsource it or not.
Saying something is ‘like in a movie’ is not trademark infringement or copyright infringement in any way.
This is just one more glaring example of how Linden Lab has NO concept about how to handle the DMCA or infringing objects.
If it’s a real infringing item they just go ahead and shoot off an email to the infringer and say “oh hay, yah you have 3 days to remove it, k thx bai”. (there are exceptions they also do this for users who unknowingly have infringing content – I’m not referring to those)
but if it’s a case like this they just shoot from the hips and hope they hit something.
Instead they just drive off another original creator.
WAY TO GO.
just wow. i was at a new mall yesterday with a huge LOUIS VUITTON display.
to remove everything with marilyn was either a big mistake OR sadly, just more stupid moves by LL.
and miko, according to what i’ve been told, there is NOTHING wrong or illegal with saying “it blows in the wind like marilyn’s dress did in 7 year itch”… i could be wrong but from what i know that is a descriptive sentence about what the dress does NOT “the MM blow in the wind dress”… now perhaps because the dress was called marilyn and it did that there is something illegal.
ugh… next time, put a funny caption over her face and go the “law of parody” route and you’ll be ok… but THEY sadly may not know about that law….
ugh…
i’m going back to my blog diet.
The same thing happened to me Because i referenced the word “Elvis”. Yet i check in SLX and find there is 7 pages with the word Elvis in it…
I don’t know, i think Linden Labs is TRYING to push the creators away. They keep firing the old good staff that was for the community and replacing them with Idiots.
Any follow-up? Were the items ever returned? Did LL respond?
Afraid not. Never got so much as a response to my email.
Does this mean that every Sci-Fi site is going to go? Star Trek, Star Wars? Halo? There are tons of them. Is LL trying to drive everyone out?