Well, there has been quite the lively discussion over on the official Sansar Discord channels! Busiest I’ve ever seen it on there. Galen explains the reason for the kerfuffle in this post on the General Discussion forums on the Sansar website:
During this morning’s product meetup, there was some discussion of a forthcoming feature allowing users to edit the materials on items they’ve purchased in the Store. This will be limited to items placed in a scene and not include avatar attachments. Moreover, creators still can’t take items they have modified in a scene back into their inventory for reuse. So it’s limited.
Nevertheless, several people were concerned about the idea of their products being altered without their permission.
I honestly don’t see a problem, but I wanted to bring the debate up here in hopes that those who have misgivings about this new feature would explain their concerns.
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I guess my first thought is that it’s not illegal to add stickers to a new laptop or paint your dining table some other color. So why not expect customers to modify things they’ve bought in Sansar? Is that somehow different from the basic fair-use concept that we’re used to with most products we buy?
I think the most obvious objection is one of representation. Someone does a shabby job modifying something they bought from you and now that shabby version of your product represents your brand and could reflect badly.
Some creators are upset about this planned functionality in the next Sansar release (still slated for mid-December). Debi Baskerville weighs in:
First, this should be a right controlled by the creator and not given away by Linden Lab to whoever buys an item.
Second, if a creator wants to grant that permission then a UV map should be provided to the purchaser for which a higher price could and rightfully be charged by the creator for the UV map.
I hear arguments against allowing for personal volume controls .. not allowing people to fly and so forth because it takes away the rights of the creator of an experience. How is this different? The creator of any mesh model should have the right to set the permissions of the items they sell. Period! And until that mechanism is in place doing this is much too premature. We don’t need the cart before the horse!
From a customer viewpoint, I know I regularly tint objects I buy in SL; however, I nearly never retexture anything mesh because there’s much too much work involved. The only reason tinting works in SL is because you can select faces and tint those face independently of other faces on the object. That won’t work in Sansar. So tinting in Sansar is rather useless.
I see no value in being able to retexture or retint any objects in Sansar unless the objects are made specifically with that in mind, such as the building sets that have basic shapes and sizes for component building.
So, what do you think? Sound off, either in the posted link to Galen’s thread (see above), or in the comments to this blogpost!
