During December, thanks to a comment of AM Radio in his recent interview in Arthole Radio (you can listen it here), there was a really interesting debate about IP rights in SLphotography, not about the IP rights over the image, was about IP rights over what you can see in the image.

He was talking about some photographers that were selling pictures taken in one of his creations (i think he was talking about The Wheatfield). Those photographies were edited and then sold in a well known SLart gallery for quite expensive prices (around 5000 L$ the SLcopy, also there were the possibility of buying copies in the “flesh life” or “real life”). And the point is he commented he thinks is not right he didn’t received any compensations for those sales, being him the IP rights owner of the place being photographed.

First, i’d like to say something i think it must be clear, legally the concept “Public Space” is not existing in Second Life. In the flesh world the sun, the atmosphere, the nature itself, even most of the things you can see when you are walking around have not IP rights, because are natural, or are in public space, so they can’t be protected. In Second Life absolutely everything has IP rights, even the virtual sky, becuase is not natural, is created by somebody, and this is an issue that may affect photography.

In some cases, like the platform itself, Windlight, etc., the owner of the rights (in this case Linden Lab) permits the use of their rights in what we can call “fair use”. Although that, as a compensation, they have the right to use your creations using the platform for marketing and promotions purposes (find this information in the TOS). In the case of resident creations that is quite different, because that agreement with Linden Lab affects exclusively the rights owned by Linden Lab.

About stuff you can buy, like skins, hair, clothing, shapes… well, this is a grey area too, because is not clear if once you buy them you have rights over them, but well, i think it must be included (at least ethically inside what we can call “fair use” not including copying and reselling of the product itself, of course). Actually some skin makers include a license about this issue. But AM Radio was not talking about this.

I’m not a lawyer, and possibly some of you have a clearer legal vision about this, but let’s consider the building of a sim like a painting, with the difference you can go virtually inside it. If you take a picture of a painting, edit it more or less and then sell it, is not that affecting the IP rights of the painter? That’s what happened here under my point of view.

AM Radio remarks something in the interview, he likes to see people taking photographs in his creations and publishing them in Flickr, Koinup or other pages, the big point is the commerce with those images. The photographer and the art gallery had earnings with his work, or with a “manipulation” of his work. I have to agree with him about this issue, that’s not “fair use”. Specially when the works of AM Radio are free to visit, and the donations go, in some cases, to charities.

I’m not the one who will say how can we fix this issue, but i’d only like here to point at it. Maybe we can be more careful about it and try to keep the “fair use”, and the debate about this is really important, for all of us. As a reflexion about all this i’d like to say sometimes we all (or at least, most of us) can be a bit hypocritical about IP rights. We all get really upset if somebody takes a pic from DeviantArt, edit it and publish it in Flickr as if was his/her creation (that happened more than once), but, at the same time, some of the upset ones may be listening music illegaly downloaded, or using “cracked” software. IP rights are still full of grey areas…

Image by Kean Kelly published under a Creative Commons license.