More words on the piracy issue from Viktoria Dovgal

Here’s the words from a notecard giver, conveniently posted across from the pirate skin shop, Neo Body Fashion.  Viktoria Dovgal is credited as the author:

* What do you mean, stolen skins?
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- This store has taken other people’s skins, captured the images, then illegally loaded them back up to Second Life under another name.

*Why should I care?
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- The real creators of these skins are already thinking about not making any more. It takes talent plus hours and hours of tedious work to create skins that look good. Second Life isn’t free for them, they need to pay for their land and people to help them run their shops. If you get stolen skin, it’s harder for the creators to pay their bills, *and* the fun is being taken out of it for them. If it’s no fun any more, there isn’t much point in making new stuff for Second Life, is there?

- Stolen skins are lower quality than the originals. Second Life uses lossy compression on uploaded images, so the stolen ones have been compressed twice!  JPEG removes details and distorts things to get its compression, and if you buy here you’ll get that effect doubled or worse.

- If you buy here, you’re getting stolen stuff.  Why pay for stolen stuff? They didn’t.

* So where are the genuine articles seen in this store?
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Here are some landmarks!

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* Is there anything that can be done about this?
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- Along with buying only original content, help to convince Linden Lab to do something about content theft. See this article for how!
http://fabfree.wordpress.com/2008/02/02/serious-business-stolen-goods/

Thanks for reading.