Second Life Mogul Challenges Press Freedom

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."

Pshaw.

[lysdexia (897)]

http://video.google.com/videoplay?docid=5387867190 768022577&q=Anshe+Chung [google.com]

I'm still here you bastards!

Re:Pshaw.

[Vo0k (760020)]

Now that's something that won't happen to you in the First Life!

Heh

[Xenographic (557057)]

If it wasn't for this stupid DMCA notice, I doubt I'd have ever known or cared about this video. Now everyone knows about it and millions of people will make copies of this just out of spite. Hasn't anyone learned this by now?

This level of 'brillance' is worthy of Paula.

Re:Pshaw.

[sethstorm (512897)]

I'm here [youtube.com] too.
(yes, it's Youtube, but feel free to wget this with a modified user agent to mirror.) [google.com]

Limits of jurisdiction

[candiman (629910)]

Hate to be the one that mentions it but the "Sydney Morning Herald" is an Australian newspaper owned by an Australian company. There isn't much a US law can do to them.

this might be

[gelfling (6534)]

The most retarded thing I have ever seen or heard of in my life.

Re:this might be

[truthsearch (249536)]

And that's saying a lot considering you have a 4 digit slashdot id.

Re:this might be

[jb.hl.com (782137)]

I'd say the same, even after seeing actual retards.

The shape of things to come

[suv4x4 (956391)]

...The issue has surfaced after the avatar Anshe Chung (real name Ailin Graef) was attacked by animated flying penises...

In hundred years from now as virtual reality will be everywhere and has become a core part of our lives.

I'm sure old folks will bring back aging memories from real life ... "when I was young, at least you couldn't be attacked by a flock of animated flying penises"...

"The people who ruin it for the rest of us"

[by Anonymous Coward]

The people who make Second Life remind me of the people who in school caused new and Draconian rules to be created by the administration which made life miserable for the rest of the students. The morons giving real life money for virtual real estate, the knuckle draggers who are doing basically MOO/MUSH objects then selling them for real money, and now the attempted use of the DMCA hammer on anything in their way.

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.

Stupid.

[Runefox (905204)]

This is something that SL users have been bitching about for a while - That their stuff shouldn't be screenshotted for the sole reason that it's their intellectual property, even if it's not being claimed to be otherwise. An example is SomethingAwful's Second Life Safari, where one such SL user went ape shit over the posting of "intellectual property" (read: Screen shot).

No. If your shit can be seen simply by logging into SL (which is free to roam around in), it can be posted anywhere. It's like clipping a Slashdotter's post and popping it on a site as a quote.

Now, I couldn't actually figure out what TFA was talking about, whether it was the SL staff involved, or SL users, but all the same, if it's the SL staff, people have no right to complain; It's their servers, and if they don't want you doing something, they have every right in the world to take you off, especially if you're one of those "free" users. People don't seem to realize that freedom of speech is restricted to political views and religion, and are rescinded while in private property. Censorship is wholly allowed in private.

Such a horrible "game" with a terribly whiny community, and this Anshe Chung person has had more press coverage than should be allowed.

Urk

[retro128 (318602)]

I'm getting just a little tired of hearing about this woman. "Oh look at me I own a million dollars of virtual real estate located on servers subject to regular DoS attacks. And neither insurance companies or the law offer any recourse if it all gets wiped out." Please.

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:Urk

[Improv (2467)]

She's also harmful to Second Life's culture. At one time, I "rented" land in a nice little forest with a bunch of other folk. She eventually came in, bought up most of the land, established some wild west thing, and made it very unpleasant to be there. At the same time, she did her best to get the rest of us to leave. I think the community would be better off without her. She ruins everything she touches.

Can't take a joke department?

[Petey_Alchemist (711672)]

If you think THAT'S bad, check out what happened when a Linden Labs employee tried to get me to take down photos [somethingawful.com] of his "mate's" babyfur child porn.

Or maybe every instance that Prokofy Neva has called me a virtual Leninist griefing scum terrorist or whatever else has been on her litany of overreactions.

Re: You mean foolish

[Badmovies (182275)]

This is trolling, correct? "If not showing the event is not harmful, then it is right and proper for it not to be shown - because it is embarrassing to her." Wow.

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: You mean foolish

[dreddnott (555950)]

Go home. You're worse than Prokofy Neva.

Whether publication is justifiable or not is irrelevant to its legality.

Re: You mean foolish

[truthsearch (249536)]

Ok, so let's supress freedom of the press and freedom of speech. Let's hope the oversight committee which decides what's humiliating always agrees with you. We'll let the government decide what to censor. Every speech in which President Bush humiliates the country and himself will now be undocumented.

Do you even appreciate the freedoms you have?

Re:Ethically valid

[lysdexia (897)]

I disagree. How much expectation of privacy can one have when one is "representing" as a software avatar in a forum? True, the forum is privately owned and the avatar is considered IP (I think TFA made an excellent analogy to a piece of haute coture), but if someone beaned Ted Kennedy with a rubber phallus at a private Democratic Party fundraiser and someone caught a picture of it, would that not fall under fair use for it to be distributed for no cost, regardless of whether Mr. K was wearing a bespoke suit by Jaques Penne?

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:Ethically valid

[iroll (717924)]

Guess what? If you were attacked by flying penises in a public place in real life, I could publish pictures of it and there's not a damned thing you could do about it, no matter how embarrassing or mortifying this might be to you. I could even (gasp) make money off these pictures.

The fact that people are scared that the DMCA gives her this "cyber-power" is just another testiment to its utter malignancy.

Re:Ethically valid

[ScrewMaster (602015)]

The very idea of a flying penis scares the hell out of me.

Re:Ethically valid

[ameoba (173803)]

Did you even look at the video? She was _on_stage_ with CNet and an audience at a press conference/interview. There's no reasonable grounds for her to expect any sort of privacy in this context.

Re:Ethically valid

[dcam (615646)]

Actually I believe she wasn't on stage. She was sitting in front of a computer. Her character/avatar was on stage.

Re:Ethically valid

[by Anonymous Coward]

I think that we should have an expectation of privacy at all times, where-ever we are - UNLESS keep that privacy intact would cause harm to other people, by action or by inaction.

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.

For example, when I used to post to Usenet back in the mid 90s, I knew that although the whole world could read the post, in reality, the readership of the group would read it, and the lurkers, and then after a week or so it would be gone forever.

With that particular privacy limit in mind, I posted as I did.

After a while, DejaNews came along and unilaterially changed the level of privacy available, by storing the posts forever.

I didn't agree to that - I didn't ask for it, or expect it, or want it. I don't like the fact my posts are now archived.

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:What?

[truthsearch (249536)]

So let's say she was walking down the street and tripped. She feels humiliated. The press took a photo and published it. She should be able to supress the press photo because she felt humiliated? That's absurd.

I'd rather the press retain the freedom to document what's happening. Even if their motives aren't altruistic.

Re:The Google Video Version, and Something Awful

[Petey_Alchemist (711672)]

Documented it? That is the source of all the images. Steve Hutcheon of the SMH asked me if he could use my graphics to make a composite image. I gave him permission, and all the other news companies just decided to use his.

I don't really care. It's funny one way or the other.