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Second Life Mogul Challenges Press Freedom
Posted by
Zonk
on Sat Jan 06, 2007 06:07 PM
from the can't-take-a-joke dept.
from the can't-take-a-joke dept.
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."
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News: Are DMCA Abuses a Temporary or Permanent Problem? 163 comments
Regular Slashdot contributor Bennett Haselton wrote in with a story about the DMCA. He starts "On January 16, a man named Guntram Graef who invoked the Digital Millennium
Copyright Act to ask YouTube to remove a video of giant penises attacking
his wife's avatar/character in the virtual community "Second Life", retracted
the claim and stated that he now believes the video was not a copyright
violation. (He had sent similar notices to BoingBoing and the Sydney Morning Herald just for posting screen
shots of the video.) His statements
in a C-Net interview suggest that he didn't mean to alienate the
anti-censorship community and was probably angry over what he saw as a
sexually explicit attack on his wife. But the event sparked renewed debate
over the DMCA and what constitutes abuse of it. I sympathize with Graef
and I admire him for admitting an error, but I still think the incident
shows why the DMCA is a bad law." Hit that link below to read the rest of his story.
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Pshaw. (Score:5, Informative)
I'm still here you bastards!
Re:Pshaw. (Score:5, Funny)
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Heh (Score:5, Informative)
This level of 'brillance' is worthy of Paula.
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Re:Pshaw. (Score:5, Informative)
(yes, it's Youtube, but feel free to wget this with a modified user agent to mirror.) [google.com]
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Limits of jurisdiction (Score:5, Insightful)
this might be (Score:5, Funny)
Re:this might be (Score:5, Funny)
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Re:this might be (Score:5, Funny)
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The shape of things to come (Score:5, Funny)
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
"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.
Stupid. (Score:5, Interesting)
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 (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:Urk (Score:5, Interesting)
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Can't take a joke department? (Score:5, Informative)
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 (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).
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Re: You mean foolish (Score:5, Insightful)
Whether publication is justifiable or not is irrelevant to its legality.
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Re: You mean foolish (Score:5, Insightful)
Do you even appreciate the freedoms you have?
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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!
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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.
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Re:Ethically valid (Score:5, Funny)
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Re:Ethically valid (Score:5, Insightful)
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Re:Ethically valid (Score:5, Insightful)
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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
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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.
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Re:The Google Video Version, and Something Awful (Score:5, Informative)
I don't really care. It's funny one way or the other.
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