Copyright issues
I'm having a hard time getting my head around the whole DMCA issue within Second Life, namely with regard to clothing design but I guess it covers all areas.
RL clothing companies have a hard time proving copyright infringement, so it's going to be even tougher for digital creations to prove infringement. In the UK you generally have 15 years of protection before anyone can copy your design, in Europe it's less, which causes a quandry and in the USA, well I can't find anywhere that says you can claim infringement on RL designs, although clothing designers want such protections.
The conflict stems from the simple fact that if designs can be copyrighted, then the first person to create a T-shirt could stop anyone else from selling a T-Shirt, which would be silly. So then we dig a bit deeper, it's the same colour, same wrinkles, same shading, same item but different creator.
How do you prove it was your design? How do you prove you've been ripped off? Forget for a moment the moral argument and think about the proof argument. Knowing you'been ripped off is going to hurt, proving it is going to be hard.
Then there's the issue of photo sourcing, if you download a photo, import it into Second Life, do you have a leg to stand on in an IP case in the first place?
There have been some previous cases, the Eros case springs to mind but no legal precedent was set there. I believe Stroker was right in this case, but he was in the position of having the clout to be able to pursue the issue, how many other residents are in that position?
There was also a furniture maker whose name escapes me, RL furniture maker whose products were being sold in Second Life, but I can't recall whether that was a copyright issue over the designs or a trademark issue over people using their name.
Trademark issues are more clear cut. If someone is selling Coca Cola in Second Life, then Coca Cola can obviously claim infringement. The name, the logo, they belong to Coca Cola.
Trademarks bring me to a side issue, but not unrelated point. Why don't clothing designers incorporate their logos into their designs? Is this unfashionable? Problematic? Unpopular? Say for example you want an item from Armidi, surely if people can tell right away it's an Armidi then some sort of peer pressure will discourage others from buying or wearing Armidi rip offs?
Long term, with new grids appearing this issue is only going to get worse and when grids appear that aren't American based, then there are going to be all sorts of other issues. What can content creators do to try and protect their IP rights?
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I think it boils down to
I think it boils down to principles.
LL laid out a broad form of the law, and empowered us to take action into our own hands if we feel ripped off.
I think there are 2 issues here.
1 is the petty competative spirit of the SL fasion industry. This is when unscrupulous content creators attack others by suggesting their clothing was so-n-so's idea first.... there is a reason, none of these cases have reached courts.
2 is the bigger issue. When someone exploits SL to make copyable versions of someone else's creations and then sells em. This is the issue, the big issue, the important issue.
... any fashion designers bickering over similar patterns and styles is just a waste of time.
More Info
I posted on this a while back (and actually, the comments that followed ended up being far more illuminating than my original article). Here's a link:
http://virtuallyblind.com/2007/10/02/copyright-clothing-second-life/
The first step in
The first step in understanding this is looking at it correctly. You can not compare RL clothing sales to virtual texture sales. I've noticed that many people screaming infringement seem to think that they are one and the same. Just because someones computer texture looks similar to a famous designers RL design, does not mean there is infringement. They are no where close to the same thing.
Now, if someone image searched a design and pulled a runway photo to make their texture, they have a big problem. Not due to design theft though, its due to copyright theft of the photo itself. At that point your lawsuit is going to be with the photographer, not the designer of the clothes (unless the designer purchased the right to the photography).
Same thing is true with prim creations. You can't compare 3D compositions of set prim shapes to RL wood and fabric. The dimensions wouldn't line up, even if you made the best sculpty prims. They are not the same thing and never will be. If real world companies want to protect their designs then they need to get a virtual store going to do so. Even if the end result sucks and no one shops there, they have proven that they protected their copyright/trademark through it's use in the proper format.
In the USA, particularly,
In the USA, particularly, you can't copyright clothing items. That's exactly why RL clothing designs incorporate distinctive trademarks (a different area of law from copyrights)