Second Life Mogul Challenges Press Freedom 416
An anonymous reader tipped us to a post on ZDNet about some disturbing freedom of the press issues in Second Life. Content mogul Anshe Chung is filing DMCA complaints with organizations that post screenshots of her content, citing an infringement of copyright. From the article: "The issue has surfaced after the avatar Anshe Chung (real name Ailin Graef) was attacked by animated flying penises during a virtual interview with CNET news, conducted in their Second Life bureau last month. A video of the attack surfaced on YouTube, and was then taken town after Anshe Chung Studios filed a DMCA complaint. The Sydney Morning Herald and the blog BoingBoing have also received similar notices."
What? (Score:4, Insightful)
Nah... The law is never abused.
Limits of jurisdiction (Score:5, Insightful)
Re:Ethically valid (Score:4, Insightful)
What privacy and dignity? Something everyone involved seems to have forgotten - This doesn't really involve her . Just an avatar in a "game". And even if it did, the content doesn't actually belong to her, it belongs to (if anyone) Second Life. So what gives this bink the right to go around issuing takedown notices???
It's unforunate this idea isn't part of law
Except, it does exist as part of (case) law - You only have a reasonable expectation of privacy up until the moment you go out in public. The only way this varies from the norm, she can go "out" in public without leaving her computer room.
Someone played a joke on her in a public forum. Someone else captured that joke for posterity. Nothing to see here, move along please.
(IANALBIRGL)
Re: You mean foolish (Score:5, Insightful)
I have never participated in "Second Life," but understand that it wants to mimic the real thing. In real life, if flying penises attacked someone on camera, I think that any attempt to repress the footage would be a task beyond any force known to man (yes, even Ted Turner).
Re:Ethically valid (Score:5, Insightful)
I could understand your argument if it were a nekkid picture taken by a peeping tom in a persons bathroom, but lets take a step back, eh?
As far as "harm by omission" goes, isn't cumulative public opinion and devloping more's something that a court must take into effect? One might present logs showing a number of viewings vs. complaints lodged as a bit of evidence? Yeah, derivative, but I'm having a hard time finding harm on either side of this!
Re:What? (Score:5, Insightful)
I'd rather the press retain the freedom to document what's happening. Even if their motives aren't altruistic.
Re: You mean foolish (Score:5, Insightful)
Whether publication is justifiable or not is irrelevant to its legality.
Re:What? (Score:3, Insightful)
I think where your argument falls apart is where you imply that "public" and "private" are the same thing. You were on a roll until then, though.
Re:Ethically valid (Score:5, Insightful)
The fact that people are scared that the DMCA gives her this "cyber-power" is just another testiment to its utter malignancy.
"The people who ruin it for the rest of us" (Score:5, Insightful)
End result is likely going to be the IRS (or whatever the country's tax body is) horning its way into every MMO and online game, wanting its cut of the online proceeds.
To boot, if the DMCA is successfully used in this context, this sets a bad precedent -- post a screenshot of your character, go to jail for copyright violation.
I can see it now in WoW... before you can loot a purple item, you have to pay with gold or from your credit card your country's VAT. Screenshots are protected with some type of DRM system that only allows authorized computers to view the files.
I don't know who is worse -- the people selling crap in 2L for real money, or the knuckle draggers buying objects in that game. At least people who buy gold/platinum/adena/pyreals in a MMO like EQ or WoW are usually doing it to save time, rather than mindlessly farm, and that sort of can be understood.
Re:Ethically valid (Score:5, Insightful)
Re: You mean foolish (Score:5, Insightful)
Do you even appreciate the freedoms you have?
Urk (Score:5, Insightful)
She loves being in the news as long as the press is favorable, but one dildo attack gets written about and all of a sudden she brings out the DMCA stick. I will place a bet that we're about to see how mob rule on Second Life works. Attacks against her will most certainly be scaled up now that this news broke.
Re: You mean foolish (Score:2, Insightful)
There is a blogger I've read for a while.
She's very sexually activate and she writes anonymously. Her family have no idea - they're rather straightlaced.
She received an offer to publish her blog as a book. She accepted, on the condition it would be anonymous.
Well, as you can imagine, someone somewhere was bribed and the press got hold of her details - and they had a field day.
The first she knew was when the doorbell rang early one morning. She opened it, and was presented with a bunch of flowers from a flower delivery boy - and a photographer, who was hiding in her front garden, took her photo and ran off.
The newspaper then sent her a letter telling her who she was and what she did, who her parents were, where they lived, and what they did, and told her they were going to publish her identity, and since her photo wasn't very flattering, it would be best for all concerned if she came in for a decent photoshoot.
The papers then published her identity, her family and everyone she knew found out about her and read her blog.
Her life was absolutely and totally devestated.
And for what?
Well, it was done so those papers could sell copies. There was no ethical reason or need for it - and indeed I say there was a bloody good ethical reason asserting that they should NOT publish that material.
So, as I've written in another post already, my point is that the law right now is wrong. People should have an expectation of privacy at all times in all places, UNLESS that privacy would lead to others being harmed.
Re:Ethically valid (Score:2, Insightful)
I'll bet Dick Cheney was mortified when someone told him to to fuck himself during a CNN interview. [dailykos.com] That doesn't mean that Cheney has any right to squelch the footage.
Disturbing? (Score:4, Insightful)
Now we have lawsuits alleging gamers don't play fair? Jeepers...
Re:Ethically valid (Score:5, Insightful)
If that video hadn't been published, I would have been robbed of possibly life-saving laughter. I would have been harmed. Yes, that's kind of sophistic, but the point is that it isn't so easy to define "harm", and frequently, in ethics, the magnitude of any harm (or any gain) isn't widely accepted to be the only issue, or even the most important one.
Let's turn this back on you. Suppose I claim that we should have an expectation of the right to pass on any information we want in any circumstances we want - UNLESS doing so would cause harm to other people. You may even be with me so far.
Now, suppose I further claim that this particular incident does NOT harm whatsername in any way that's important. Here's where you're going to want to fly off the handle. OK, explain to me why this "harm" to her, which has no effect whatsoever on her physical body, takes away none of her property, prevents her from doing nothing she could otherwise have done, and forces her to do nothing she otherwise would not have done, outweighs even the obviously pretty shakey claim of "harm" if I don't get a good laugh.
If you manage to do that, then you can try the really hard part... explaining why this notional harm that takes place in a game outweighs the very real and obvious harm to large numbers of people caused by people having control over all information about their behavior... or even the harm created by the chilling effect, if every time I publish something I have to guess whether some authority is going to agree with me as to whether or not it caused any possible kind of "harm" to somebody... especially if the authority seems to be willing to accept stick-up-the-ass, bluenosed embarassment at a joke in a video game as a legitimate form of harm.
Utilitarianism has sharp edges. Handle with care.
Oh, you're one of those people.
I remember the whole brouhaha when the "X-no-archive" header was created. That was before DejaNews came along, by the way, and DejaNews honored it from day one, so in fact you did have a choice about being archived by them, and you still have that choice, because Google still honors that header, as well as allowing you to rewrite history by removing your posts after the fact. Neither of those is a courtesy that I would extend to you, by the way.
DejaNews most definitely did not whip out some sort of magic time machine and recreate posts from the past. It's true that it got ahold of posts from the past, but it got them from archives made by others... and the existence of those archives simply proves that your expectation that your posts would evaporate was never correct, and was never reasonable. People were archiving Usenet in various forms from day one, and nobody ever had any control over who did it or what they did with the archives.
In fact, the early news readers used to print big warnings before you made your first post, telling you that posting should be treated as comparable to publication. There was never, even at the very earliest days of Usenet, the slightest reasonable expectation th
Re:Ethically valid (Score:2, Insightful)
Re:Limits of jurisdiction (Score:3, Insightful)
The FTA between the US and Australia was supposed to bring Australian copyright law in line with US. The SMH would have been threatened with the equivalent law
Re:She might have deserved it... (Score:2, Insightful)
Re: You mean foolish (Score:3, Insightful)
And for what?
Truth.
If her life could be devastated simply by the revelation of her secrets--that is, without anyone doing anything unethical with those secrets once they're known--then the fault is squarely on her own shoulders. She should not have set her life up around a lie, and if she was not willing to face the simple consequences to her relationships of the revelation, then she shouldn't have done what she did in the first place.
Show me how this is different it she were a porn star who never told her parents until the new neighbor made the connection, and then you'll have a leg to stand on. Until then, the paper was entirely within its ethical rights (and possibly even its ethical obligations) to investigate her identity and publish their findings.
Re:Disturbing? (Score:3, Insightful)
You're here, so I take it means you have nothing better to fill your boring life with.
And, I bet that you're not called "uvajed_ekil" in real life either, so there goes the fake identity bit as well.
Re:Ethically valid (Score:3, Insightful)
I've read your original post and this one, and I think the difficulty is the same: your expectations.
The expectation that what you do in a public forum will remain private or that you somehow can control it an expectation you can have only if you can create or rely on an environment of negative network effects. If there are resource limitations, such as disk drive space to hold Usenet posts or the combination of limited personal connections with limited interest in what you do or say, then you have "privacy" that is created by these limitations.
I can understand not liking the fact that networks and capabilities evolve. However, I do not understand why you don't simply change your expectations rather that propose creating artificial means of maintaining your "privacy" that if you think of all the implications will result in a great deal of harm and will likely not maintain your "privacy" anyway.
Using the DMCA to protect privacy is a bad idea. It is not the purpose of the law. Creating a law specifically for this purpose will have the effect of killing useful resources (or introducing a lot of ridiculous waivers) such as access to Usenet through Google. Technological means such as DRM have many of the same problems as legal means. Etc.
You can control what you say in public forums. You cannot control how other people might relate what you say to others, how this may be aggregated in the future (one day I may be able to just click on your Slashdot Id and find all your Usenet posts), how other people moderate what you say or what have you. Doing things in public means you have to deal with public consequences, such as moderations, that may not always be fair. But then again, life isn't fair. Deal with it.
Salve veritate... (Score:3, Insightful)
Have you ever told a lie? What was it and when and to whom did you tell it? Have you ever digitally stimulated your own anus? Did you enjoy it? How about anal insertion of foreign objects? Which kinds and for how long? Privately or with others present or assisting? Have you ever fantasized about having an underage person perform sexual favors for you? Which favors? By whom? A family member?
Tell us, please, for the sake of truth. What harm could possibly come of it?
Re:Ethically valid (Score:1, Insightful)
Yes, but your constitutional rights wouldn't make you any less of an ass for doing so.
Re:Ethically valid (Score:5, Insightful)
Re:What kind of videos SHOULD be censored? (Score:3, Insightful)
Frankly, I think this woman got off lightly. In a virtual world I'd be assassinating her annoying ass or burning down her holdings just for fun. If I really cared about the press fawning over a glorified real estate developer I could just watch TV in real life.
Re:Ethically valid (Score:2, Insightful)
Re:"The people who ruin it for the rest of us" (Score:2, Insightful)
I don't see the difference. It saves me a lot of time to buy a suit in Second Life for 200 Linden dollars (less than a buck) rather than make the thing myself. And the people who sell things can then use that money for other purchases (saving time, also, I suppose). That's a stupid argument.
As for equating mindless farming in WoW to the creation of items in SL that are protected by IP law: want to explain how that's the same thing? One is just that: mindless. The other is actual creation (or coding, if you will). You're missing the point.
Re:Ethically valid (Score:3, Insightful)
As far as I'm aware, there are no laws protecting you from embarrassment. Nor should there be. Slander and libel laws protect your reputation, that's the closest, but not by a long way do they protect you from embarrassment. As you say "It is not for others to live by your reactions."
Re:Ethically valid (Score:5, Insightful)
Civil Liberties guarantee a certain degree of assdom, because if they didn't, we'd devolve into a fascist police state overnight.
Re:Probably a case of self-defense. (Score:5, Insightful)
Seriously? You think it would be "ideal" if there were laws regarding what kind of polygons people can put on the same screen as other people's polygons? Unless they are exploiting game mechanics, the "griefers" are just as much "playing a game they happen to enjoy" as anyone else. Oh, and it's a "reasonable explanation" for someone being able to use criminal law to avoid "unflattering" attention? Give me a break.
Saying that you are a proponent of free speech in the middle of that nonsense is a huge freaking joke dude.
Re: You mean foolish (Score:2, Insightful)
Reasonable expectation. You have the reasonable expectation that things you do in private are private. You do not have the reasonable expectation that things you do in public are private. That's the difference between public and private you see. Things that happen in public are *drum roll* PUBLIC.
freedom of press and fair use for parody (Score:2, Insightful)
Re:Ethically valid (Score:3, Insightful)
I don't think flying pensises would have been listed on the interview agenda. Even so, I think she's way out of line using DMCA to force take downs:
- There's no way a DMCA take-down notice could work on published video of a public gathering in real life - why should work for Second Life?
- She's the content owner of neither the video itself, nor the avatar and artwork, which were rendered using Second Life's proprietary engine and artwork.
She might have a chance at a general take-down notice for offensive content, but what's "offensive" to one person is hilarious to the rest of us.Re:Ethically valid (Score:2, Insightful)
What you said.
Anshe's not pissed because of the flying weeners. She's pissed because a few weeks ago, she was on the cover of a mainstream business magazine. This isn't a DMCA violation. The DMCA is being used as a real-world club against folks like Peteykins, whose only real crime is Failure To Take Anshe Chung Seriously.
The RL assets of the person playing Anshe Chung aren't worth shit if people figure out that Second Life isn't a place for CNet interviews and Sun Microsystems press releases. Hence, her flailing and legalistic overreaction. She likes the perks that come with being on the cover of real-world business magazines, and Failure To Take Anshe Chung Seriously is the only thing that could stop her gravy train.
Re:Ethically valid (Score:3, Insightful)
Cui bono? (Score:3, Insightful)
Re:Pshaw. (Score:5, Insightful)
Why "rent" a tiny plot from some virtual landlord who thereby controls your server resources? Why are acreage and CPU power linked?
SL is a horribly designed system, imho because Linden Labs wanted to design a cash cow - have people paying maintenance fees on their creations when they total a few K in a database. If Ms Chung didn't exist they'd have invented her - someone to convince everyone else that "land" in the game has value.
Re:Disturbing? (Score:3, Insightful)