I am posting here the complete response from Heather Goodliffe to my previous post ‘Scripters, designers, creators – what right?’. I asked Heather for her comments to my post and she very kindly responded with a clear and balanced comment that I felt should be shared as it is:
‘Excellent post Dumi! Thanks for the invitation to respond as well.
My general perspective is the following:
There are those in the world who bring us novelty with their creativity, testing the boundaries of what’s possible, usually motivated by their passions to do so.
On the other end are people who may lack faith in their own creativity or for whatever reason or another choose not to employ it and instead are perhaps looking for a quick buck by copying the works of others. As it unfortunately turns out, the least principled of these people may even try to verbally diminish the work they’ve been duplicating and attempt to manipulate people’s negative emotions get them to buy their stuff instead.
Most people I’ve found would happily focus on their own novel creations if it paid the bills, however to be honest I’ve occasionally been inclined myself when I see a top seller on SLX to think, “I could totally do that.” (Incidentally people first started copying my work when it first showed up in the most popular items on SLX.) I also know its especially tempting when you’ve left a decent paying job to focus on the work you’ve done in SL and you’re trying to make sure you can get the bills paid.
Principles aside however, I think the real question is, who’s best interest is it for people to support. On the one hand you can support the people who did the initial hard work bringing their years of experience to bear and suffering through much trail and error and jumping through many SL hoops to create something different and new. On the other hand, you can support the people who put more effort into reverse engineer or even directly copy other’s work as best they can and add their own flourishes and call it their own, possibly selling it for cheaper since it didn’t require as much work for them upfront to copy what already exists.
Bottom line, buying copied or reverse engineered items reduces everyone’s incentive to experiment and create new things. (Especially if it’s so bad you can’t pay the bills, creating new things becomes no longer economically viable no matter how passionate the creator is about it.) If you’d like to see more wonderful things in SL and RL, than I believe its important to support original content creators and steer clear of the imitators.
I wholeheartedly agree with Dumi on the point that there’s nothing wrong with competition to create things better than they are now and bring new ideas to the table. In that respect, I think most people already know I’m also happy to work with anyone who has something to contribute to surfing in Second Life rather than trying to duplicate what already exists first.
Unfortunately, my trust in people has been a little bit damaged by certain people who have pretended to want to work with us and then turn around with the knowledge we give them and duplicate the work we’ve done. Lessons learned however, and I’m still open to working with people and making sure that everyone benefits fairly in doing so!
Last but not least, I just want to say I have a tremendous respect and appreciation for the surf community in SL. So many talented people have come together to make it happen including people like Dumi and VW who devote so much of their time and resources to provide awesome places to surf. I’ve been blessed with the time I have been able to dedicate to my passions by being apart of it!
Thanks Again!
~HG~
See you on the waves!’
Dumi's World 