I am sure everyone with even a vague awareness of what is happening in Second Life™ has seen the Flufee Missions, or at least knows of them. I’ve featured several of them. The videos are made by the creative Draxtor Despres (RL: Bernard Drax).
A problem has come up with Flufee. The problem has to do with intellectual property rights. While Drax has made the videos, he did not create Flufee and that has become a problem. So, no more Flufee videos by Drax and associates.
The Flufee avatar is made by an avatar named Dirty Lynx or may be more accurately the Bytegang peeps. You can see the full body mesh avatar in world at Bytegang (URL). There is no doubt it is a cute and creative. And there are various types of these full body avatars.
So, there is the creativity needed to create and model a mesh avatar like Flufee. Dirty Lynx having exercised that talent created Flufee and his cousins and thus in a free market world owns the rights to his creative work.
How Drax can use Flufee in a video, especially if income is involved or if the videos affect Dirty Lynx’s income, depends on several aspects of intellectual property right laws. If Dirty feels something Drax does hurts his sales or the perception of Flufee, then he is within his rights to file suit and stop the damage.
If one wants to use Flufee in videos, they have to get the cooperation of the owner of the rights to Flufee. Just as we have to get the rights to use images of Halle Berry or any other media personality.
It seems Drax and Dirty have different agendas for Flufee… or maybe that is just different levels of commitment to getting the videos out. Whatever, Drax and crew have decided things are not working for them and will discontinue making them. Specifically the Bytegang peeps are not responsive enough for Drax to collaborate with them.
What is Next?
Drax is not suddenly going to stop being creative. He is still into narrative machinima and looking to popularize it outside Second Life. You can see his DraxtorDespres YouTube page for more of what he is doing. There are currently 4,235 subscribers. You can subscribe to follow his work. It is not all SL related.
In addition there is Draxtor.com. Check it out more of his previous work and new releases.
Drax has his SL feed that many follow. Look at the Snapshots. Feeds are very popular with some users. I tend to forget about mine. 🙁 But, Drator’s is reasonably active.
I think it would do both these guys good to work out an agreement.
I’m not sure why you think that has not been tried…
I’m not sure why I got such a nasty response to a positive suggestion . Nothing in your post mentioned attempts at an agreement. It seems a natural suggestion for anyone of good will to make.
Why you think trying to reach an agreement hasn’t been tried and why you think my response is ‘nasty’ are both things I find curious.
This should be a non-issue. The Second Life Terms of Service cover this.
“7.3 You grant certain Content licenses to users of Second Life by submitting your Content to publicly accessible areas of the Service.
You agree that by uploading, publishing, or submitting any Content to any publicly accessible areas of the Service, you hereby grant each user of Second Life a non-exclusive license to access the User Content through the Service, and to use, reproduce, distribute, prepare derivative works of, display, and perform the Content In-World or otherwise on the Service solely as permitted by you through your interactions with the Service under these Terms of Service. This license is referred to as the “User Content License,” and the Content being licensed is referred to as “User Content.”
Good point. I think once an item starts to be used outside of SL it gets a bit greyer. The terms of service do not prevent lawsuits being filed that have to be defended.
Also, the ToS keeps using the terms ‘on the Service’ and ‘with the Service’ in relation to granting use rights. Creating something with the service and using it on YouTube or for profit gets fuzzy because of that use.
While you make a good point and may be right, its all opinion until it gets to court.
Yeah you are right. “The Service” is basically SL. Which means that using a mesh model to make movies, get proffit or similar outside of SL is not allowed. We can also use the common sense on this. Is obvious that you shouldnt get proffit from anyone else works.
Anyway, I would feel glad if someone use any of my products for something like this (asking previously of course). Not that I need that person to share benefits but there are others ways like some adds on his video, some credits, etc. At the very end, I dont think those videos ever damaged the image of Flufee, more likely made it quite popular. But I guess, the creator may have his/her reassons for this.