My friend RubyMae, who is active in the Flickr community, pointed me to a discussion thread by another Second Life resident Ordinal Malaprop (who makes the most ingenious steampunk inventions). Apparently Ordinal has been encouraging SL residents to post to a Flickr group screenshots of particular ads being displayed on plots of land in Second Life. This is not just an effort to showcase ugly ad-boxes in SL, of which there are legion. But it is to highlight a particularly nefarious practice that Ordinal calls "ad griefing":
this isn’t a group for just any ugly build. (One could find endless pictures from SL.) It is just for pictures of builds which are clearly being used for unwelcome advertising, to bring down land prices, force people to sell, annoy them enough that they buy the land, or just by cretinous advertising networks who don’t care how much they annoy neighbours.
Well, no good deed goes unpunished, so apparently some of Ordinal's images to Flickr got taken down as a result of a DMCA complaint by the ad sponsor, an outfit called BTE Global apparently represented by a resident named Cytherea Eagle. You can read the whole drama on the SL Forums here.
Clearly, the whole claim of copyright restricting the taking of a screenshot of a logo in a public 3D online space is ludicrous. This is the fairest of fair use there is. Apparently this claim is still enough to force Flickr to take down the image. There's another Flickr discussion about this going on here.
All of which has inspired me to take this screenshot above, which I believe is the source of all the rukkus. It was taken at the Foxboro sim (click here to teleport) in case you would like a photo souvenir of your own.
I've never gotten a DMCA takedown notice, so I will be interested to see if anything arrives. Dear legal counsel for Cyntherea Eagle, I can be reached at rik @ rikomatic.com. Thank you.
