"7.4 You also grant Linden Lab and other users of Second Life a license to use in snapshots and machinima your Content that is displayed In-World in publicly accessible areas of the Service.
You agree that by uploading, publishing, or submitting any Content to or through the Servers for display In-World in any publicly accessible area of the Service, you hereby grant each user of Second Life and Linden Lab a non-exclusive, worldwide, royalty-free, sublicenseable and transferable license to photograph, capture an image of, film, and record a video of the Content, and to use, reproduce, distribute, prepare derivative works of, display, and perform the resulting photograph, image, film, or video in any current or future media as provided in and subject to the restrictions and requirements of our Snapshot and Machinima Policy. The foregoing license is referred to as the "Snapshot and Machinima Content License."
"Publicly accessible" areas of the Service are those areas that are accessible to other users of Second Life. If you do not wish to grant users of Second Life a Snapshot and Machinima Content License, you agree that it is your obligation to avoid displaying or making available your Content to other users. For example, you may use Virtual Land tools to limit or restrict other users' access to your Virtual Land and thus the Content on your Virtual Land." [I bolded the text].Simple and elegant. This makes sense. Further clarification can be found here.
4 had something to say:
Phew : )
Actually that is the clearest thing I have seen from LL's legal department.
A lot of rubbish has been written on this by people who wanted to stop or control people snapping or filming their stuff. At first the idea of giving a credit seems reasonable and I try to when I can but to insist on it in all cases soon becomes ridiculous, especially in a world where everything has been made by someone.
In RL movies you have product placement deals but in SL everything is a commercial product, the lead actors, their skin, hair, eyes, gestures and even the ground they walk on.
When we were making My Avatar and Me there was some discussion about the legality of us using stuff that content creators had made as props in a film and we had to take a decision.
The bottom line was of course that if we had to commission everything to be made from scratch, then it would be better to make the film in another platform, with better rendering etc. and of course it would be uneconomic to make it like that.
I looked at the ToS for the first time to see if there was hints I could find that it was OK. There was something in heavy legalese... but it seemed to imply that if you made content in SL then you automatically licensed it for "any use" within SL.
Coming as we did from a documentary background we are used to "making do" with what we find, so that's what we did.
The film has a long list of credits at the end where people went out of their way to help us, by building custom stuff or letting us use existing creations in a special way or context. But had we credited everyone who made anything we filmed, then the credits would be longer than the movie.
The law in the UK is that you can film anything if you are on public land, a road or pavement. The police are messing with this principle now in the basis that anyone with a pro camera on a tripod "could be a terrorist" and as a result I have a blond blue-eyed Canadian friend with her name on some terrorist watch list.
Even LL can't really use the terrorism excuse and in this case, they need to make sure THEY can use pictures and films of some of the amazing content to promote "their" world that we built.
Happily, this time LL's interests coincide with ours (for once) and I don't think anyone loses in this.
I'm not very technical but even I managed to set up an opensim grid in less than an hour yesterday which is the ultimate in privacy if you want to build in secret. I suspect most don't, as there seems little point in a virtual building that no one can see.
Actually you still cant do that.. http://wiki.secondlife.com/wiki/Linden_Lab_Official:Snapshot_and_machinima_policy
Infact now its worse.
How is it worse Lucifer? Before Benjamin Duranske was out saying that since everything in SL is created by someone, you could not take a legal snapshot at all, witout getting permission from every single creator:
"This all means that with the exception of limited situations where fair use exceptions apply, I am pretty comfortable concluding that under the law as it stands, selling or otherwise making available derivative works comprising images shot in Second Life of other people’s creations, in most cases, does not qualify for fair use protection and is actionable as copyright infringement."
http://virtuallyblind.com/2008/11/18/virtual-screenshots-copyright/
Lucifer.... if you look at the bottom of that wiki page you listed... it says:
(c) Modification of This Policy.
Linden Lab may modify this Policy as provided in the Second Life Terms of Service.
Which is what they just did. And for once, made it clearer and less dumb.
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