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Commentary and Opinion: Maria's Worlds

Fri, Nov 30 2012 | 18 Comments

Do you own a grid? Do you allow other users to upload content to your grid? Do you have legal license agreements on file for every script, texture and object on your grid?

If your answers are yes, yes, and no, then get out a checkbook, write a check for $105, and send it to the US Copyright Office.

That one-time fee of $105 will insulate you from copyright infringement lawsuits. This is a no-brainer. These few minutes could save your company.

Don’t believe me? Well, did you know that there are copyright trolls out there? Yes, just like patent trolls, these are companies that threaten to file lawsuits against small companies if they don’t pay up. And it’s not just trolls. There are also folks out there with legitimate grievances who decide they are sick of tired of having their content stolen, so they decide to sue everybody.

Registering with the US Copyright Office offers your grid — and your Website, if you also have an online community — safe harbor against these kinds of suits.

All you have to do is assign someone the responsibility of dealing with complains, and take down infringing content quickly.

I’ve been bringing my OpenSim grids database up to date this week, and noticed that many grids don’t have DMCA or copyright protections links on their home pages, and don’t have registered agents on file.

The bigger grids do. Check out the registration forms for InWorldz, SpotON 3D, Virtual Highway, and Kitely.

Looking for legal free content to stock your freebie stores? Check out LindaKellie.com.

And you don’t have to be a US-based grid to take advantage of this protection. Kitely, for example, is headquartered in Israel.

In general, other countries have rules similar to the US DMCA. But if you have American users, or believe it’s possible that US-based creators may find infringing content on your grid, registering with the US Copyright Office is a good proactive step.

Five easy steps to protecting your grid against lawsuits

1. Write out a check for $105 — plus $30 for up to 10 other website names or company names you’d like to register, fill out this form, and mail it to:

2. Create a page outlining your DMCA or content protection policy and put a link to it in the footer of your website. Also put up a notice in the welcome area of your grid. You can check out this Facebook page as an example of a very thorough policy.

3. In your policy, include instructions for how copyright owners can contact your grid and request a take down. Facebook, for example, in addition to posting that contact information, also has an easy-to-use online form. Another model form you can look at is Kitely’s DMCA submission form.

4. Once a take down request is filed, process is promptly. If there isn’t enough information, send it back for clarification. If there is enough information to identify the infringing content, take it down immediately.

5. If you take down the content and the guy who uploaded it says, “Hey! That was legitimately mine!” then you notify the person who made the original complaint that the other guy is disputing it, and they have 10 days to take legal action. If they don’t, you can put the content back up.

More details here, from Borghese Legal, Ltd. And here’s a column that technology law expert Tre Critelli wrote for Hypergrid Business: Is your grid a safe harbor? Here is the full directory of all the DMCA agents registered with the US Copyright Office. More info about all this from the US Copyright Office.

A few other things to keep in mind:

If someone keeps uploading infringing content, kick them off your grid.
If you personally know about infringing content, you have to take it down — with or without a DMCA notice.
If someone suspects that your grid may have infringing content, you have to allow them the opportunity to come and see for themselves. You can’t lock them out.
Make sure you’re not profiting from having infringing content on your grid.

If you violate any of these requirements, then you lose your safe harbor status. And anybody who feels like it can go and sue you.

About Maria Korolov

Maria Korolov is editor and publisher of Hypergrid Business. She has been a journalist for more than twenty years and has worked for the Chicago Tribune, Reuters, and Computerworld and has reported from over a dozen countries, including Russia and China. Follow Maria on Twitter • Facebook • LinkedIn

View all articles by Maria Korolov

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http://www.hypergridbusiness.com/ Maria Korolov

I’m writing this up for two reasons. First, Vanish’s post about protecting your safe harbor status:

http://tgib.co.uk/2012/11/27/why-you-should-not-trust-the-content-creators-union/

Second, I’ve been updating our database and trying to find the DMCA policies for all the grids.

This is what I’ve got so far:

http://www.hypergridbusiness.com/opensim-grid-info/

If your grid has a DMCA policy that isn’t listed, please let me know.

Also, if your grid isn’t on the list at all.

My email: [email protected]
WhiteStar

This applies to USA and not the EU, Canada or other countries. Verify according to your own countries laws & regulations

http://www.hypergridbusiness.com/ Maria Korolov

Yes, other countries may also have additional requirements.

However, there’s nothing keeping foreign grids from registering a DMCA agent — as Kitely has done.

And remember that Megaupload case? They have a registered DMCA agent on file with the US Copyright Office as well, even though they were based in Hong Kong: http://www.copyright.gov/onlinesp/agents/m/megaup.pdf

The US authorities *still* went after them for copyright infringement, however, claiming that Megaupload knew about infringing content and did nothing about it, and deliberately profited from infringing content.

It’s a good idea to comply with the DMCA even if you’re outside the US because:

* Americans like to sue people
* Americans create a lot of virtual content
* Many foreign grids have American users
* Oh, and Americans like to sue people

Remember that the DMCA isn’t there for the protection of content creators. The DMCA is there to project owners of online communities (like blogs, social networks, and grids) from being constantly sued because of content uploaded by their users.

Nobody is going to force a grid to register a DMCA agent. Registration isn’t an obligation — it’s an insurance policy.

One thing that patent trolls look for is places where users can post content, but the community owners HAVEN’T filed their DMCA agent registration. It’s like having a big flashing bulls eye. The trolls threaten to sue you — and, with fines up to $150,000 per offense, the victims are happy to pay a few thousand to make the troll go away rather than hire lawyers to defend themselves in court. The trolls specifically look for small organizations that don’t have legal teams on standby, prepared just for this kind of thing.

Similarly, a grid can easily bring down a competitor by offering to underwrite the legal expenses of a creator whose content is on the other grid somewhere because, say, some .. umm… random person … uploaded it.

If you have a registered agent on file, you just point the person to the filing, say “thank you for letting us know about this infringement” and take the stuff down. Without the DMCA, you either settle or hire an attorney.

By eliminating even one such case over the life of your grid, you’ll have paid for the registration fee many, many, many times over.

Plus, it makes your grid looks like a solid corporate citizen. You’re in compliance with DMCA. You have your registration on file. People can trust you.

http://www.hypergridbusiness.com/ Maria Korolov

A couple of more caveats:

If your grid pre-screens content — say, for example, not allowing users to upload stuff until a grid managers checks that it’s not infringing — you may lose your “safe harbor” status.

That’s because a copyright owner can claim that you knew all about the infringing content they found on your grid — because you screen everything ahead of time.

Similarly, if you step in and try to mediate copyright disputes between users, then instead of suing each other if they’re unhappy — which would be the case under the DMCA — they could turn around and sue you.

The DMCA specifically states that your actions should be automatic — you automatically take down content once a take-down notice comes in, you automatically put it back up again if there’s a counter-claim and no legal action. If either of the two parties want to take it further, they can take it to the courts — where they go after one another, not you.

If you step in and take one side or another, then you stand to become a party to the dispute. You’re no longer a neutral platform. And you lose your safe harbor.

That doesn’t mean you can’t get proactive, though. The DMCA specifically allows for “technical means” to sniff out infringing content. This means this like watermarks and digital signatures on movies and music, but if someone were to come up with something similar for virtual content and would easily allow copyright holders to discover infringement, then it’s okay to use this technology (and depending on the situation, and if the technology isn’t too much of a burden to you, you might actually have to use this technology to maintain safe harbor)

Araxie

What if you are not some huge business-but a US citizen?
What if you are a grid owner of some tiny hyper-grid linked mini grid?
What if you made the bloody thing some Troll claims?
Is my Aloe plant to be my DMCA agent?
Isn’t Hyperica a standalone / mini grid? If so, what about a Troll that claims copyright on collections of shiny hyper-grid gates?

The flooding OpenSim with free stuff makes sense to me (breaking this parasite of a left-over from SL virtual-economies), So the projects can breathe again free of Trolls and copyright-ambulance chasing. (unless of coarse the Troll its Hak Spew the NPC – he’s ok. ) .

http://www.hypergridbusiness.com/ Maria Korolov

Unfortunately, Hyperica doesn’t qualify for the “safe harbor” protection of the DMCA. We don’t allow outside users to upload content to the grid. Everything on the grid is created by me or by trusted partners. So if someone wants to sue about infringing content, they would have to sue me — and that’s fair, since I’m the one who created or uploaded all this content, anyway.

If I think I’m going to be a potential target of lawsuits, I have two options:

I can incorporate. So people can sue my company, but they can’t sue me directly, and even though I’m the owner of the company, I’m not personally liable (i.e., they can go after company bank accounts, but not my personal ones).

I can buy liability insurance — for either myself or my company, or both. If I was in the business of setting up a lot of grids for people, and had a lot of potential exposure, I might do this.

I also have potential exposure here, on the Hypergrid Business site, since folks can upload pretty much anything they want here in the comments — and since I do have outside users uploading stuff, the HB website is, in fact, qualified for DMCA’s safe harbor protections if I register a DMCA agent.

If we start getting instances of people posting copyright content here — news articles, say, or copyrighted images — then this is something I would definitely have to look into. Not that I want to give anyone any ideas!
Araxie

Yes, it seems that more and more we Americans are going to need that LLC and insurance if we do so much as pet a stray cat these days- much less try to do a wee business or something in cyberspace. Peter’s tip about those anonymous VPSes in Iceland and the Netherlands is looking like a good one.
http://www.hypergridbusiness.com/ Maria Korolov

I wouldn’t go that far. But if you’re running a commercial grid, where you sell land, and accept money for virtual currency, then disputes — of all kinds — are bound to arise eventually. The DMCA registration is a very cheap and easy way to insure yourself against one type of possible lawsuit.

Whether you need other kinds of protection depends on your business model. For example, if you have a virtual-bunny-raising grid (say) and expect to be making a lof of money on them (it’s bound to happen sooner or later), and you think Ozimals or one of those other lawsuit-happy guys might come after you, then incorporating might be a good idea.

If you have a private role playing grid that’s a direct ripoff of some movie studio’s copyrighted content, you might consider those anonymous servers — or you might consider creating some original content, instead. Kind of how the lady writing Twilight fan fiction changed some names and some settings, and is now making big bucks off of Fifty Shades of Gray.

Michael Sietz

The EU has very similar copyright laws and treaties involving DMCA. So as Maria has said, $105 to register a DMCA agent is a no brainer,

http://twitter.com/peterhost Peter C. Host

Wow (interesting). So what we need now is some sort of Tor network for opensim ? So that I can draw a triangle on the ground in a sandbox without having the church of pythagorian monks sue me ? (hopefully not!!)

This legal disposition protects nobody, but sure as hell tries to shut down the internet as we know it. The solution : free as much of your content and creations as possible, a bloody lot of them, (Creative commons 3.0 non transposed), so that nobody can claim he designed that chair with 5 legs first. Cover it with leopard skin, moleskin, your dirty floormat texture, spikes, 8bits pixelated textures,…

Do it the way Stallman & pals did it back in the day. Flood the virtual worlds with genuinely free (as in free speech) content, but license it so that jerks won’t sue you, and won’t sue others because you’ll have plausible proof they don’t own any sort of provable copyright.

Then if they sue you, sue them. They got to have something on their grid that you (big quotes) “created first”. Time to unite on the “free” front ?

(and well, agreed, such a collective would better register a DMCA agent, after all the FSF has its own lawyers to enforce free software)

http://www.hypergridbusiness.com/ Maria Korolov

Peter –

None of the measures you suggest will help protect your grid against being sued. If your users build a triangle on your grid, and some creator somewhere decides that they copybotted their copyrighted triangle and brought it to your grid, and you don’t have a DMCA agent registered, they can sue you.

Or, what is more likely to happen, they will threaten to sue you unless you pay a “licensing fee” (which, in some cases, will be legitimate, and in other cases will simply be extortion). If you don’t have the money to defend yourself in court, you might find it cheaper to settle.

Will the EFF and the FSF take on your case? If you’re one of thousands of victims of such a scam, they might. If it’s just you? Probably not.

Copyright trolls rarely go after the individual uploaders unless there are a large number of them — for example, the record companies and movie companies used to go after teens sharing files (but seem to have scaled back after a wave of negative publicity and pushback in the courts).

If a legitimate content creator goes after an actual infringer, and it’s a one-time, accidental thing, the copyright creator will usually be happy to get an apology and removal of their content.

The courts are usually only involved when there are potentially large sums of money at stake — either a big infringing class, or a big fat corporate target. So if you’re a company with a grid, and you have deep pockets — or someone might think you have deep pockets — DMCA registration is a no-brainer, and very, very very cheap insurance against these lawsuits.

http://twitter.com/Gaga_Gracious Gaga

Something seems odd in all this. I am English so if another person from my country decides to sue me for infringement in a British court I don’t see how registering a DMCA agent on file with the US Copyright Office is going to be recognized in a British court of law, Surly, in these circumstances I need to register with the appropriate authority in my countries jurisdiction?

If that is the case then it seems to me I will have to register in every country to be fully protected and, apart from the cost which I imagine will be substantial, I would create a huge headache keeping track of it all.

Then, what if an American tries to sue me in an American court when I am not an American citizen or resident there?

I think with all this talk of DMCA it will scare off a lot more people setting up their own grid and it really dose invite trolls to have a happy day. US law makes it all possible and Maria seems to think US law is the ultimate authority in this world.

I rather take the view I need only comply with the laws of the country I am both a citizen and resident in and if anyone wants to after me with a law suit then they will have to do it in a British court.

Michael Sietz

Gaga, the EU has treaties with the US regarding just that. Although there are some differences, the EDEC deals with the same issues. I believe that Maria was speaking to the US based grids as most of the larger grids are based here.
http://www.hypergridbusiness.com/ Maria Korolov

The US DMCA isn’t a law you need to comply with or not comply with. Anybody can choose to ignore it and not register a DMCA agent. It will save them $105.

It’s an insurance policy.

If you don’t think you need to be insured against being sued in US courts for copyright infringement, then you can ignore it.

But, as I mentioned in my article, plenty of foreign companies *are* registering — it’s a small fee, and you get a lot of protection.

In particular, if I was investing in a commercial grid with customers and content from all over the world, I’d want them to register, to have that insurance in place.

http://twitter.com/peterhost Peter C. Host

oh come on…. please. You’re not answering @gaga’s comment, just repeating what you already said in your article.

1) What jurisdiction will care about a 5$ (or ecen 500$) worth 3D object not made by Disney, Pixar, Mojang,… ? Do you have evidence ? Cite us one single case.

2) most of opensim users don’t delude themselves in trying to squeeze money out of the so-called virtual economies. If that’s your thing and you think you can be the next SL/Utherverse, go for it, but I sure as hell don’t want to spend time with them in the Opensim regions I roam. Closed gardens & such. Everyone wishes he/she was Steve Jobs. It’s what we call the Startup-News (aka. Hacker-news) phenomenon. If you’re serious about making a living with 3D content, you don’t go with opensim.

3) let the troll file a complaint. It will be discarded except if you’re infringing some serious player in the 3D buisiness. If it’s not, then act like a human being and, don’t buy the next ipad and go gather 1000 USD to kick him/her back with a basic lawyer fee (anyway, this will never reach court).

You might think i’m clueless ? Well, my partner and I (we for example decorated with celtic murals and carpets, a floor of google’s new buildings in Dublin to give you an idea, not boasting, just preventing the “what do *you* know sort of answer) and have been in the european “authors rights” business for almost two decades now. We happen to have been chased by on troll sofar, and the dumb thing eventually took it to court. It has taken him 3 years, and he’s lost 5k euros. We lost 2k, regained them, kicked his ass which alone is worth battling against trolls. Did he make our life miserable ? He just got himself permanently banned from any editor/agent ‘s address book, and we make sure he gets listed on the internet, as when one takes the risk of sueing you, you in return get to have his real identity.

My advice to people operating sims who don’t want to get into troubles with trolls :

1) host it on a VPS. If you don’t know how to do it, go to the osgrid IRC channel (no that’s not hard) and you’ll find plenty of people helping you do just that, or even do it for you if you’re kind enough. If you still can’t manage it, just dont host a sim and ask someone for some room on his and try and build nice things, and give them for free (and make a note of that on your blog)

2) make that VPS be in Netherlands, iceland, Ukraine, whatever non-american-courts-friendly country that’s close enough to where your userbase is, so that your ping is under 100ms.

3) pay with your real but concealed identity made up for the circumstances, because your privacy matters. You VPS provider just wishes to sell you his 10$ boxes, he doesn’t care about you. He’d rather he didn’t even could get to you. If you don’t provide hime too much info, all the better. Most likely he has more serious thing on his mind (debunking that torrent network that just nested in its servers for example) than even answering to a troll requesting he takes down your server because of an alledged 3D object having been copied, which is totally unproveable anyway. And remember that the UE, for the time being is not that friendly to the US patent/copyright laws. Cause the social cost is horrendous and better spent on other federal budgets.

4) if there’s a complaint, the troll will have to go through your hosting company first, and most of them (non american ones) are used to receiving troll claims. At the very worst, they will take your VPS down after due notice. And guess what ? It’s a VPS, just clone it beforehand (FTP + phpmyadmin for a mysql dump) and set it up on another VPS. It literally takes half an hour.

And remember, if there’s no money to be made, you won’t be sued. Cause you **can’t shave an egg** is why.

So, no, Maria, I don’t think spreading this FUD is the right way to address the problem. Yes, there’s room for fighting (possible) trolls and that’s what one should do. And yes, it’s high time people who are interested in Free opensim (as in freedom of speech) unite to serve Free content.

Nough said as far as i’m concerned, nough time lost.

http://www.hypergridbusiness.com/ Maria Korolov

My advice is specifically aimed at commercial grid owners who are looking to make money from OpenSim (which is why we have “Business” in our title).

If you’re a commercial grid owner who’s plan is to remain anonymous, and to move servers if someone complains about infringing content or threatens a lawsuit and attempts to take down the grid that way, then you’ve got a problem with your business model.

I wouldn’t mind attending an event on such a grid, but I’d have doubts about investing a substantial amount of money into that grid’s virtual currency, content, or land. And if I was a content creator, I’d have doubts about having a presence there.

In addition, if you’re running a commercial grid, it takes more than 30 minutes to switch hosting providers. InWorldz recently expected to be out for as much as 24 hours during their move — and I don’t know how much time they spent prepping for the move, ahead of time.

And some grids would have an extremely hard time moving. Kitely, for example, runs on the Amazon cloud. It is possible to migrate Amazon applications to other providers, but the more closely integrated you are with Amazon’s proprietary platform, the harder it will be — it might take them weeks or months to adapt their infrastructure to run on that of another provider.

Kitely and InWorldz are both legal entities, with real people running them, and all contact information available on their websites. Both also have DMCA agents registered.

It doesn’t necessarily mean that Kitely and InWorldz are more reliable than an anonymous guy running a mini-grid on a virtual server — the anonymous guy might well be extremely reliable — but when something goes wrong, there are people who can be held accountable at InWorldz, Kitely, Virtual Highway, and the other big commercial grids.
http://twitter.com/Gaga_Gracious Gaga

I have to agree with Peter C.Host because he is saying what I thought really – not in so many terms but basically the same. Small standalone’s and mini grids run by small people can get taken off line with a complaint to their ISP, whatever, but suing them in any court when the returns are likely to be small if any – and difficult to collect – seems to me flogging a dead horse and not worth the bother. Ten’s of thousands of web sites would be taken off line if we all had to really worry about every last picture on our sites. I agree, for a large company running a rentals grid then perhaps Maria’s advice is sound. The thing is most grids and standalone’s are not land Baron grids. In fact the vast majority are tiny ( a few regions) grids set up for personal use or to run a game like role play as I do, or like the Pro-racer guys do. Chances are some of these grids have content on their grids that perhaps they shouldn’t but I doubt many of them know it for sure.

In any event pretty well anything in virtual worlds can be recreated without copybot. Every script can be written again to do what others are doing, every animation can be repeated and variations on textures abound. I have seen prim clothes almost identical to stuff I’ve made but hell only knows who made it first!

Like Peter said, it’s almost impossible to prove copyright on virtual goods and small guys using a VPS as most of us do can simple move on. And move literally, think of the kid using a laptop and a VPS running from their bedsit?

They can be gone in no time and virtually untraceable. Sure, you probably wont want to pay them to run your region but plenty of people paid NOVA and Legend before but all have gone and no one is chasing them.

I’m not saying people should steal using copybot and anyway if they did it makes more sense to do it in Second Life where there is plenty of buyers. Hell, SL is flooded with copybot stuff but where are the law suits?

I think people should be mindful of the law but not be scared off setting up a small grid for fear of all the legal worries being piled on their heads with Maria’s article. It wont help Opensim grow.

Minethere

“* Oh, and Americans like to sue people” not this American [jus' sayin']

After drilling down inside some of your supplied links, I feel so much better about the fact that I create RAW files and have nothing to do with DMCA or any of that stuff-)) Once my RAW is uploaded the sim owner [and grid owner], de facto, owns it, and I could care less..hehe

People so often seem to disregard the fact that any content on a grid is then in the hands of grid owners, who they seem to think are all of a sudden –decent and good, trustworthy people– simply because they run a grid. An exercise in illusions.

Interesting debate tho, as I do know many content creators for whom this all is very important. Will be interesting to see what happens down the road….

Commentary and Opinion: Maria's Worlds