My actions wont hurt any designer – I will spend my money with them on Saturday

Thanks

Also, we do not blog resells nor do we support them in our group. We do support original creators.

High quality stuff doesn’t always have to be expensive, just look at Bare Rose.

Also, some stores are selling old fashion or skin lines for a lot of RL money. Using these and selling them the way they are doesn’t make them a content thief either.

I’d say, if you think you discovered something stolen, contact the person you think they have stolen from and give them the LM to said store. They are the ones whose property was stolen, they have the chance to file an AR to LL. Just be careful with calling someone a thief. You can ruin their business if it’s not true…

Sometimes this is very hard because the quality of freebies has increased enormously over the years I have been in SL. But still, I sometimes run across “bargains” that are suspicious.

This isn’t correct. Many designers rely on full perm items sold by other designers to create their products, like bows for their shoes, or little bits of jewelry on a charm bracelet, etc…

There are many totally honest and legal reasons why an object would show many creators.

A house or building might contain “mega-prims” that cannot be created by the average SL user, and thus would show that someone besides the seller had created these parts of the object.

Content theft is when someone, without the original creator’s consent, takes original designs (usually through some sort of copy-bot or cache duplicating mechanism) and then tries to sell these items as their own. Often these sorts of content theft are undetectable by inspecting to see who created the object. In the case of a copy-bot, the entire object would show every prim in the object as being created by the thief.

There are many reseller programs out there as well. The creator uses vendors and a server to distribute their items through resellers who take a small percentage of the profits. Many high-end designers use this method to get their products “out there” and a being a reseller doesn’t mean it’s a bunch of low quality items from a L$1 wholesale business-in-a-box. Reseller vendors will have one person as a creator (usually the original designer) and another person as the seller.

Also, remember that many of your favorite designers use alts for business purposes. Perhaps all of their store vendors are owned by an alt, so they can keep store purchases separate from their personal spending in their transaction histories.

Lets say you love Stiletto Moody boots and you happen to be in some shady-looking dive that is selling some boots that look identical to your favorite Stiletto Moody’s. I’d say that this is a reason to be concerned. The best thing to do in this situation is contact Stiletto Moody herself. She can investigate the potential content theft herself and would also have proof that she was the original creator. The boots may not have actually been stolen, and might just be cheap knock-offs. At that point it would be up to Miss Moody to decide if she would file a DMCA with the person in RL, for theft of design, and not theft of the actual item.

I hope this helps people be more informed.

Designers sometimes use shapes from full perm sculpty sellers, say for a shoe base or pullover collar (legitimate sellers not stolen ones). Those items will list different creator names.

There is also another case of using scripts that have been bought from sellers, once again the item will list this person’s name in an inspection.

You also get cases of alts creating items then passing on the objects to the main avatar for sale (I do this myself so that I can build in solitude away from customer queries).

I’ve known friends also help me with objects, and I’ve also helped them texture some items, which also will have different names as creators in an inspection.

Just because an item has more than one creator listed, or some other avatar listed, doesn’t necessarily mean that it is stolen.