My friend RubyMae, who is active in the Flickr community, pointed me to a discussion thread by another Second Life resident Ordinal Malaprop (who makes the most ingenious steampunk inventions). Apparently Ordinal has been encouraging SL residents to post to a Flickr group screenshots of particular ads being displayed on plots of land in Second Life. This is not just an effort to showcase ugly ad-boxes in SL, of which there are legion. But it is to highlight a particularly nefarious practice that Ordinal calls "ad griefing":
this isn’t a group for just any ugly build. (One could find
endless pictures from SL.) It is just for pictures of builds which are
clearly being used for unwelcome advertising, to bring down land
prices, force people to sell, annoy them enough that they buy the land,
or just by cretinous advertising networks who don’t care how much they
annoy neighbours.
Well, no good deed goes unpunished, so apparently some of Ordinal’s images to Flickr got taken down as a result of a DMCA complaint by the ad sponsor, an outfit called BTE Global apparently represented by a resident named Cytherea Eagle. You can read the whole drama on the SL Forums here.
Clearly, the whole claim of copyright restricting the taking of a screenshot of a logo in a public 3D online space is ludicrous. This is the fairest of fair use there is. Apparently this claim is still enough to force Flickr to take down the image. There’s another Flickr discussion about this going on here.
All of which has inspired me to take this screenshot above, which I believe is the source of all the rukkus. It was taken at the Foxboro sim (click here to teleport) in case you would like a photo souvenir of your own.
I’ve never gotten a DMCA takedown notice, so I will be interested to see if anything arrives. Dear legal counsel for Cyntherea Eagle, I can be reached at rik @ rikomatic.com. Thank you.
Way to be. I hope others use your tactic. Keep those lawyers busy and well-paid by the selfish purveyors of ad-spam uglification.
It’s gonna take creative action to get the attention of LL on this blight that affects all of us. Good job.
Not the first time. Someone actually changed their profile because they were using Disney’s name in vain. Also, Alex Potato *was* using company trademarks and had to change his ad spam because of it.
Good to see you tuning in on this stuff, though.
Glad to see you fighting Ms. Eagle of the American Indian Movement (supposedly) whom I’ve been fighting since October 2007:
http://secondthoughts.typepad.com/second_thoughts/2008/01/protests-agains.html
Good work getting Hamlet to write about a bourgeois land owners’ issue.
This BTE Global is related to another notorious ad farmer, ROBO Marx. There are no real ads. The ads are…for the 16 spaces themselves. That is, it’s not just an extortion racket. It’s a fake company that sells ad space that is merely sold to other extorters in an internal ad space market. No ads are actually ever put on these signs, it’s entirely self-referential and the “business” is mainly about forcing people to buy back the view.
As the de facto administrator of the Security Fix blog, I’ve spent many an hour deleting spammy links left in the comments section –
– comments that usually lead back to the same kinds of Web sites you most commonly see advertised in junk e-mail.