Fantastic post, Sasy! I hate no mod items. Particularly if they are full bright and I cannot turn that off.

I am happy to see a designer who is willing to say yes to selling mod objects. I would like to know your opinion on photographers. I, myself, sell my photography as no-mod/copy/transfer, since my photos could potentially be uploaded if given as full perm and then modified and still presented as my work…. OR as modified to remove my signature and presented as THEIR own!

Thank you so much for this. I HATE resizer scripts. Hate them. They never ever make it possible to fit things as exactly as modify, and if you switch shapes like I sometimes do, then you can’t ever delete the freaking scripts because you have to change the size again and again. Its a headache and its not protecting anything. Please please please stop with the resizers and give us modify back!

Thank you for explaining the techy side of scripts/teleports. I never knew that, but I still instinctively didn’t like resizer scripts. In a moment of weakness, I did use it on one item, but as soon as a customer complained about it, I removed the script and gave them a copy with modify perms. I’ve never heard a complaint about the lack of a resizer script. If someone is going to steal, that script is not likely to deter them.

I think as a photographer it is a little different, as your work can be taken out of world and used in different ways, you also give the ability to make as many copies as the client likes, and transferable as well. Other than your signature the only way to identify the item as yours is through properties, so in your case I would say no mod is the only option, but then Mel may have other opinions I will have to let him answer too :)

It is a really detailed explanation which I think many of us didn’t know. But it explains all those long v’s short teleports we experience daily. Everytime I get stuck in one now I wonder how busy the sim I am going to has been that day etc .

Bonus to removing/not featuring resize scripts, and keeping items mod (besides photos/scripts etc) you help promote a society of people who have to acquire skills to be here, thereby passing on the yearn or die to learn to work with a prim. You could be making a future content creator by doing so. Total WIN.

Definitely, you will either learn to love prim manipulation or hate it lol, but either way you will have some knowledge on another facet of Second Life.

Unfortunately despite the rather extreme length of that article there’s always more to say. The article is specifically about prim merchandise, which is not actually made more vulnerable by checking the “modify” option if the textures or sculpts are in any way a important to the design, which in most products today they certainly are.

In the case of photography, if you are setting the textures themselves to no modify that isn’t a big deal. If you’re putting your photos on a prim and making the prim no modify (which I have seen counteless times), that means customers can’t resize the photo to fit on their wall, or change the frame on it, etc. You can prevent customers from being able to access the texture uuid, by setting any of the permission restriction on the prim, though, since scripts can only access the texture uuid’s on full perms items. Even leaving the UUID of your photos out in the open, though, it would not give them a direct path to saving the texture onto their hard drive with SL’s functions. In the end, though, it’s another case where if someone is resolute on getting a pixel perfect copy of your photo, there are 2 different kinds of external software which can be used to rip the texture directly from SL to the hard drive, other than just using a screen shot.

So your best option is to just respect your customers (as I suspect you do) and choose the permissions which do not interfere with reasonable use of the product, accepting that theft is always a possibility, but one that should not be mitigated in a way that damages the customer experience.

For example, Best Buy gets stolen from regularly. To prevent theft, stores could frisk everyone before they are allowed to leave, manufacturers could put an explosive self destruct mechanisms in every product with a countdown timer that is periodically reset by an in-store radio broadcast every hour but disabled at the checkout, or they could put little stickers that if not disabled will cause sensors by the store exit to beep at them.

One violates constitutional rights, the second is expensive and means the product is permanently rigged with explosives, and the third doesn’t provide 100% security, but at least prevents theft by morons. I guess anti-theft measures are always going to be aimed at preventing theft by morons, because there just plain isn’t a way to prevent theft by smart people when it comes to digital content. Just ask the film and record industries!

There are only a few products I will never offer as moddable – feet and shoes are in that category, and my scripts are being updated so that there is only 1 or 2 per foot. I will honestly and outright say here that I don’t want people to be able to remove the animation, or make the feet fullbright, for example. Those people out in world are wearing my products and aside from fitting and tinting, which I help with if they need it, those products are representative of my brand and I don’t want them to misrepresent the product as I sell it. Would you *really* ask say, Maitreya to offer their shoes moddable?

If someone (designer or not) is dishonest enough to COPYBOT something before going back to the creator to see of the change can be made honestly then they have their own conscience to deal with. I have never, ever in the history of my SL copybotted something so I can make a little change to it. I have however, approached other designers to ask if the change can be made, and offered to pay extra. I have also been asked, and am willing to certain limitations, to do this for my products as well. How is this a bad thing?

Would I really ? yes. If you are willing to make changes that is great, and I agree asking first is a better option, but many will not ask or make changes, and that example was there because it was the one that got me to suggest Mel does this post in the first place. Your label is not defined by only two types of products in my opinion knowing yours, it is how you represent those products, your hair, your shoes, skins and clothing as well as what you do with them, how you represent them all is more to do with it as a whole. But again that’s just my opinion.

Taking the animation out would only mean they use it for something else, which they can do anyway, if they take it out permanently they break their ankle so that is just silly…and if they want it full bright it would distribute tint more evenly, other shoe stores have a second option with full bright already done for them. It is not supposed to be do it or else, it is just some info.

Siddean, I am certain these “dishonest” creators’ consciences are pretty clear. The mere fact that they are bypassing your permissions means they disagree with you on the terms of ownership fairly strongly, enough to override your decision.

I have spoken with a number of creators about design issues with no mod products, and have received a number of custom requests for my own. In general, it goes like this – if the designer just makes things to bring joy to peoples’ lives and doesn’t particularly care about the money, they -might- be willing to make an alteration for an individual customer, but if they value their own time, (or if their time has value) they will have to charge many, many times what the actual product cost in the first place. According to your own profile, you’re asking $40/hr for custom work. I don’t think this is at all unreasonable, but paying $40+ to the designer to make alterations to a $2 pair of shoes you feel you should by all rights be able to do yourself (especially when you have the skills!) is a pretty unrealistic scenario, and if you’re the mistrustful type, seems like a bit of a racket.

Your aversion to having your shoes altered may sound like a good business decision to you, but from the customer’s perspective it ultimately translates to two things:

1. You own and control other peoples’ feet.
2. You think your customers don’t have enough fashion sense not to wear things that look terrible.

That number 2 is a doozy.

Another reason I will add here for why mod rights would be a good idea: when LL made a mess of how prims color looked against clothing, the workaround for many was to tint prim components of an outfit a very slight grey. Many stores tinted their no mod products. After LL fixed the issue, all these items became unwearable (or wearable for those who didn’t mind looking a little funny). No amount of playing with windlight settings can cover up the fact that the two don’t match. For the items left mod, the customers could just fix it themselves by removing the tint, instead of having a fear in their minds that anything they buy from the same store in the future will have the same problem.

I have at least three skirts like that which I cannot wear now, as well as other items.

Great post, couldn’t agree more. Thanks Sasy

\o/ Yay, thank you Froukje, Mel is very passionate about this, and I was glad to be able to find a way for him to spread that.

Minor changes to an existing product is not custom work. I should update my profile. But I must mention something here. The amount of no mod scripts I have in my inventory is unbelievable, to the point that instead of buying a no mod script that I can’t open, learn from and change if my needs change, I have enlisted the time of someone who can simply write the scripts for me and all I need to do is make him coffee and sandwiches. So if designers should offer their products moddable, why not scripters? Or animators or photographers? I can’t simply change an animation because my hand doesn’t sit nicely on my hip, can I? Offering a prim product moddable doesn’t protect it from being copied.

Just because someone disagrees with my choice of permission settings, doesn’t necessarily make either of us right or wrong. If they then go on to copybot my work in order to change it, that makes them wrong.

Just to be clear, my clothing and hairstyles are all moddable. Only the shoes and feet aren’t, and I’ve already stated my reasons. And they aren’t the ones that you have listed :)

It would be pretty convenient if all scripts were modifiable. Unfortunately, in SL it’s a bit unrealistic for those who make a living off of their scripts to ask them to sell them as modifiable. It’d be the equivalent of asking skin designers to include the original .psd’s with any skin they sell, or shoe designers to toss in the .obj files of their sculpts. You’ve got the idea, though. If you want to own the rights to some LSL source code, chances are you’ll have to hire a scripter, and write up a contract. The thing is, making a script no mod does actually protect it from unauthorized use. Making a prim no mod does not protect it from anything except being modified.

While it is somewhat inconvenient for you as a designer to be unable to modify a script, that’s mostly an issue that designers struggle with because they can’t script themselves – if they could, it wouldn’t be an issue (since they wouldn’t be buying scripts). It isn’t anywhere near as frustrating as being stuck with shoes you can’t legitimately wear because you know they’re packed with scripts you can’t delete which will cause a significant degradation of your and others’ experience in SL. The problem is, as things are you don’t know by looking at a poster what kind of scripts are going to be lurking inside those no mod shoes that claim to be resizable… it could be an elegant low lag solution (not quite possible yet until the lindens release the new llSetLinkPrimitiveParamsNoDelay functions), a high lag solution with a self-delete option, or it could just be the nightmare scenario of 5 scripts in each prim with open listens that can’t be deleted.

There are several designers who do just what you do, though, and make their clothes and hair mod, but not their shoes. Your reasoning for this does not seem sound to me, but I suppose people’s justifications for no mod prims never make sense to me. If I understand you correctly, you’re scripting the heck out of your shoes and subjecting people to the annoying and cumbersome resizer debacle just to make sure that some fashion challenged customer doesn’t under any circumstance make them full bright? The animation issue isn’t a valid argument, since it is possible to extract a copy of the animation you put in your shoes even though they aren’t modifiable… or are you concerned with them deleting the animation from the shoe, thereby breaking it? If that is the case, you must believe your customers are infants or it just doesn’t make sense.

“Offering a prim product moddable doesn’t protect it from being copied.” <- I think this must be your real reason. If so, please re-read everything here, because you missed the whole point.

This letter isn't purely for my own benefit. I don't wear shoes any more, so there's that. I admit it would be nice not to have sims lock up so much while I'm logged in. This is just my observations of a market gone mad. Theft hurts, I know. I've seen how affects people firsthand. My point is, taking away the grid's mod rights is not in the slightest bit helping to reduce theft – in that respect it is entirely ineffective. It is, however, definitely causing people to rip items (as I have observed directly too). From that point, for some, at least, I'm sure it's nothing to take those ripped items and pass them around to friends. If you still feel you must protect your prims from the urgent threat of full bright, though, I guess that's between you and your customers.

The laggy script argument will be moot for me anyway as soon as my shoes are rescripted, because there will be vastly fewer scripts per object than there are now.

I’ve already stated my reasons for not selling that particular product moddable, so I will leave that for now. I generally agree that prim products should be moddable, especially if there is no way to resize them otherwise, (eg: jewellery) but it’s not universally applicable for various reasons that don’t relate to “customers are infants with no fashion sense” which you said, not me :)

It’s good to know the ll function changes are coming, I am sure that it will only be of benefit to be able to provide a fully customisable product with as few scripts as possible.

*shakes the sleep away*

Reading what has been written since I logged off, it is a surprise to me how this ended up…you see Mel does sell his scripts mod, it is something I have almost screamed at him about many times – I am very protective of his work , because first hand I have seen it being copied in a round about way – but when he is doing contract work, when a person is paying for his time to make them a particular script he is all for the ability to make changes to it eventually, if he was not to return to Second Life for some time etc.

My problem with that is that I have also seen someone come along and fish his work out of the script and make it their own to the public. Also any changes that someone does make directly impacts on his previous work, and his rep, as with any scripter.

The difference is that if someone buys a script, generally it is for ongoing products, and the scripter gets paid once, but the product they created ads value to the buyers for an indefinite period, many will know first hand that without scripts their items would not be able to be released to the market.

Animations perms are set by LL , the only thing you can do to an animation by making it mod is change the name, you cannot move that hand etc because there is no in world tools for that, not any that would make it a permanent change anyway.

But then neither is theft, and neither is the fact that we now find ourselves in this situation, debating something that 2.5 years ago was the norm.

I would love to see LL give us extra perms options, maybe locking the textures and sculptmap boxes altogether, then allowing the use of all the others…but I don’t see that happening either.

I agree almost completely with this post and really wish that other designers would do the same. I hear countless times of customers complaining about the same thing over and over – their prim is no mod. Honestly, it’s great to know about these resizer script problems… I was never a huge fan, but I feel justified now that i realize what they really do to a sim.

Give the people modify rights. Your stuff is going to get ripped off if people want to rip it off, modify or not. And as far as them modding them to their heart’s delight – it should be out of your hands once you accept money for that sale. I want to be able to do several different things to the things i buy.

But seriously, once again, I always hear people complain about stuff being no mod, so if you don’t think that you’re annoying your customers, you might be disappointed.

I rarely respond to blogs but I had to on this topic, as being able to mod something is near and dear to me. As someone who has been in SL sice 2004, and also being someone who is quite OCD, not being able to mod something is a big deterrent for me. I remember when I got my first belt in SL and after putting it on, I thought it had been made around a bowling ball due to it being a complete circle and not more of an oval. I learned how to edit quickly on my own and was quite annoyed that I couldn’t stretch out the sides and bring in the front and back of the belt so it would look more like a belt and not a hula hoop.

The items I mod the most are hair. I have a taller av and I always have to spend awhile to fit it to my apparently larger than normal head. If I want to move individual pieces or shorten/lengthen them or add a tint to a piece to funk it out a bit, then I should be able to. I did after all buy the object and have no desire to steal anyones hard work. I just want to personalize it a bit. Not everyone is out to steal peoples items and as more and more creators make their stuff no mod, it’s disheartening and annoying to us that just want to do a little modding. The people who are thieves will always find ways to do what they want to do, which is be dishonest, and I’m tired of not being able to mod what I need to because of these asshats in SL. I quit shopping at one of my favorite hair places in the past due to script mod only hair. I have many items that are unwearable due to not being able to mod and not knowing I couldn’t until after the purchase due to non-informative displays. Hell, if I buy a pair of pants, I should be able to shorten them so I can wear some hot boots over them if I want to. Or lengthen them and add a bit of flare to wear with sneaks.

SL is a place for all of us to be and wear what we want and being able to mod is a big factor in personalization. I can understand someone being leery about making things mod for fear of someone stealing their items but I think that thinking can go too far and can punish those who would never do such a thing. For the designers who don’t want their items to be modifiable because they don’t want someone tinting every other hair strand pink or whatever, for example, because that’s not something they would personally do, well the person who bought your item and tinted their hair obviously likes it that way so let them be able to do it. They will be more willing to buy more of your items in the future.

As someone who loves to shop in SL, I can’t count how many times I have seen people when I am out and about say they won’t buy an item or won’t buy from a store again just for the simple fact they couldn’t mod something to fit them better or to tint an item due to no mod or script modding only. I have also stopped buying from certain places due to it. Alot of places are missing out on more sales due to no mod.

I wish those creators who only have mod items by scripts, or no mod in general would take some time and think it over. As someone said before, include a notecard on how to edit if it’s all that. Reiterate that making a copy before editing is best. Editing is not hard, hell if I can do it anyone can. I just know being able to mod is one of my main factors in making a purchase or not. Let people personalize the item they bought from you and they will keep coming back,

There will always be thieves irl and in SL and there will always be new ways of doing it, but lets start thinking about the good people who won’t, the people who buy from you. Lets take the focus off of thievery and give it back to the loyal customers.

Thanks Riq :)

Thank you for taking the time to respond Zsu, I usually say if I can edit anyone can too lol.

Sasyxox

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