It is interesting about the piracy rings, in that regard they seem to function a great deal like spam blogs. Setting up shop quickly.opening thousands of sites, building rank fast and then getting shut down and banned. It's a devious operation on both accounts.

Thank you again for all of your input, it is very enlightening!

“However, for the most part, they have been successful. Though copying is still rampant and some designers left the service due to these issues, most have stuck around and continue to sell goods, with at least some success.”

… I was frowning and saying to myself, “well, copying is NOT *that* rampant, since SL still has about a hundred thousand VERY successful content creators”. And then you explain why: it's because they have jumped over lesson #1 (there is little they can do about it), not worried overmuch about #2 (sure, they continue to protest loudly and make people aware, as much as possible, that Linden Lab's enforcement of DMCA is less than stellar), but mostly focused on #3, #4 and #5 — very aggressively so.

Content has never been so good in SL, it seems to improve from week to week, and it is being released at an astonishing rate. There is little fear that “copycats are able to fool others in being genuine”: they act in “rings”, knowing fully well that they have to use a large base of accounts, set up a shop quickly, sell as much as possible, get banned after a few days, and start from scratch. This means that to make real money out of stolen intellectual property, you have to act very fast, have a huge organisation (with thousands of ready avatars), and be constantly out there looking for new content to copy and putting it quickly on your shops and attracting customers. This surely pays off for them — or they wouldn't bother! — but overall, it's a *huge* effort to keep the operation afloat. In fact, most of those “piracy rings” would be *far* better off if they simply paid content creators a fee to release cheap content and get some added value by reselling it through their network…

Although those piracy rings definitely exist (and I have seen them in action; they're really well organised, and even copy content from industry giants, real life companies that set up shop in SL, and *get away with it*, mostly by apologising and removing the offending content — and starting from scratch somewhere else), I'd say that *most* pirated content is quite “casual”: people using tools to copy content for free for themselves and their friends. Sure, sometimes whole *communities* get free (or cheap) stolen content that way, and we'd be talking about thousands of users, but not millions. And many delude the public by selling them “business box packages” — an alleged 'licensing agreement' to redistribute content that was actually often stolen. That is actually a way safer way: these “business box packages” are very expensive, and they only need to sell a few before getting their account shut down and start from scratch with a new account. In the mean time, a lot of innocent residents are happily selling the stolen content from those “packs” without having a clue of what they're doing — and get flagged, and banned, often without really understanding *why*.

How big is this “black market economy”? I really cannot say. I just believe that the “market stagnation” does not come either from the world-wide recession, nor from the copied content, not even from people's unwillingness to buy as much as before, but truly because there is too much supply for the current size of the market, and content creators have not been used to be aggressive promoters of their own content (I wrote about it a few months ago, http://gwynethllewelyn.net/2008/10/13/the-hard-...). Your rules 3, 4 and 5 would definitely explain why most of the content creators following those rules are still around, still making a good turnaround, and in general happy about their sales. It's mostly a fringe group that is not used to a saturated market (one where supply exceeds the ability of the market to absorb all that content) and never thought about content creation in SL to be an “aggressive business” that are suffering most; and they tend to put the blame everywhere but on their own inability to deal with the problem.

After all, *most* content creators in SL are not business managers. They're artists.

It is interesting about the piracy rings, in that regard they seem to function a great deal like spam blogs. Setting up shop quickly.opening thousands of sites, building rank fast and then getting shut down and banned. It's a devious operation on both accounts.

Thank you again for all of your input, it is very enlightening!

It is interesting about the piracy rings, in that regard they seem to function a great deal like spam blogs. Setting up shop quickly.opening thousands of sites, building rank fast and then getting shut down and banned. It's a devious operation on both accounts.

Thank you again for all of your input, it is very enlightening!

“However, for the most part, they have been successful. Though copying is still rampant and some designers left the service due to these issues, most have stuck around and continue to sell goods, with at least some success.”

… I was frowning and saying to myself, “well, copying is NOT *that* rampant, since SL still has about a hundred thousand VERY successful content creators”. And then you explain why: it's because they have jumped over lesson #1 (there is little they can do about it), not worried overmuch about #2 (sure, they continue to protest loudly and make people aware, as much as possible, that Linden Lab's enforcement of DMCA is less than stellar), but mostly focused on #3, #4 and #5 — very aggressively so.

Content has never been so good in SL, it seems to improve from week to week, and it is being released at an astonishing rate. There is little fear that “copycats are able to fool others in being genuine”: they act in “rings”, knowing fully well that they have to use a large base of accounts, set up a shop quickly, sell as much as possible, get banned after a few days, and start from scratch. This means that to make real money out of stolen intellectual property, you have to act very fast, have a huge organisation (with thousands of ready avatars), and be constantly out there looking for new content to copy and putting it quickly on your shops and attracting customers. This surely pays off for them — or they wouldn't bother! — but overall, it's a *huge* effort to keep the operation afloat. In fact, most of those “piracy rings” would be *far* better off if they simply paid content creators a fee to release cheap content and get some added value by reselling it through their network…

Although those piracy rings definitely exist (and I have seen them in action; they're really well organised, and even copy content from industry giants, real life companies that set up shop in SL, and *get away with it*, mostly by apologising and removing the offending content — and starting from scratch somewhere else), I'd say that *most* pirated content is quite “casual”: people using tools to copy content for free for themselves and their friends. Sure, sometimes whole *communities* get free (or cheap) stolen content that way, and we'd be talking about thousands of users, but not millions. And many delude the public by selling them “business box packages” — an alleged 'licensing agreement' to redistribute content that was actually often stolen. That is actually a way safer way: these “business box packages” are very expensive, and they only need to sell a few before getting their account shut down and start from scratch with a new account. In the mean time, a lot of innocent residents are happily selling the stolen content from those “packs” without having a clue of what they're doing — and get flagged, and banned, often without really understanding *why*.

How big is this “black market economy”? I really cannot say. I just believe that the “market stagnation” does not come either from the world-wide recession, nor from the copied content, not even from people's unwillingness to buy as much as before, but truly because there is too much supply for the current size of the market, and content creators have not been used to be aggressive promoters of their own content (I wrote about it a few months ago, http://gwynethllewelyn.net/2008/10/13/the-hard-...). Your rules 3, 4 and 5 would definitely explain why most of the content creators following those rules are still around, still making a good turnaround, and in general happy about their sales. It's mostly a fringe group that is not used to a saturated market (one where supply exceeds the ability of the market to absorb all that content) and never thought about content creation in SL to be an “aggressive business” that are suffering most; and they tend to put the blame everywhere but on their own inability to deal with the problem.

After all, *most* content creators in SL are not business managers. They're artists.

Thank you for letting me know about both the privacy issues and the inventory ones, I will have to research both of these items further when things calm down.