A step to far in protecting designs?So what was it all about?
Yesterday I got an IM and a notecard from a good friend Eymerich Lane, now Eymerich is not one to get upset over nothing and when I saw the images he sent me I could understand it.
He had been shopping it seemed at Armidi - Eymerich is one avatar that takes his dress seriously - He had bought the {Gisaci} Cambridge Cuffed Shirt, a lovely design with rolled prim
sleeves and prim collar open neck and available in many colours, when he put it on he got the result you see on the left; there were copyright notices all over his hands and legs! The same happened when his wife also tried the same shirt in a different colour.So I did what any good reporter would do, I went and bought the same shirt and tried it on to see if the result was the same.
While there I bumped into Eymerich and his wife Roselinda with Joppa Linden trying to solve the mystery - now I didn't have the same problem when I tried the shirt on and no more did Joppa, although both Eymerich and Rose could see the notices on Eymerich we could not, although the place was incredibly laggy! When he tried another suit in the Classic style we immediately saw the problem especially on the pants layer - yet on me it looked fine?
Trying on another suit I made the discovery of the actual texture: It was covered in copyright notices - but only in the places where it could not be seen. My guess would be that Armidi have had instances of their textures being stolen and tried this method of preventing it.
The sliders that set the sleeve length and the pants length (the bottom of the shirt) that Eymerich and Rose had bought were set to 100 so that the copyright notices were visible and once reset - which took a while in the lag - the copyright notices disappeared; Problem solved?
In a way yes but none of this explains how the copyright notice came to be on Eymerichs' hands as even set to 100 length a shirt sleeve does not include gloves which would need to be worn to cover the hands, no-one could explain this mystery including Joppa. It will have to remain a mystery and there may have been several factors involved including lag, graphics card, Macbook pro or just a glitch.My main concern was actually the attitude of Armidi in all this - of course the note Eymerich sent to me he also sent to the Armidi representative who replied that the fault lay with him and that he should clear his cache etc...... basically they were not helpful and there is no doubt that the item was not set right, although MODIFIABLE so you could yourself fix the problem IF you were aware of what was causing it, at the end of the day this was a mixture of causes but you would have thought that a company with the reputation of Armidi in Secondlife would have taken the trouble as we did and Joppa Linden did to try to get to the bottom of it.
That Armidi was at fault here is undeniable - that they are trying to protect their textures is also, sadly, understandable - but shoddy workmanship is not acceptable and if it happens then apologies at the very least should have been forthcoming instead of basically bad advice.
Conclusion: Texture theft is a sad fact in Secondlife and the extremes some designers are going to to try and protect their hard work is understandable but there is never an excuse for bad consumer care - if a mistake has been made own up to it and apologise, you will not lose respect for making a mistake only for ignoring one and trying to pass the buck!
UPDATE:
There appears to have been a JIRA relevant to this and it is suspected that it is a problem with NVIDIA drivers and can sometimes be fixed by either upgrading or downgrading drivers for your graphics cards - the JIRA can be found HERE
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