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Palace News: Tears of a Clone

Posted by: Superscoop on Thursday, November 22, 2001 - 10:10 AM

Tears of a Clone I make my own avatars and so when I get cloned (which I do!) I take it rather personally. This then leads to me getting annoyed, tracking the IP address, searching all the Palaces for the offender, finding them, befriending them under a false name, stalking them long enough to get their home address, then going round to their house and setting about them with a pair of pliers and a blow torch.

This, I admit, is a bad thing to do, no matter how satisfying it is in the short term. I know this, because the voices told me.

So in the interests of staying out of prison, for a short time at least, I decided to try and see the other person's point of view. I did this by venturing into the land of Squigglynames and asking cloners what it was all about. Why do you clone when there are thousands of avatars available? Why has no-one ever shown you how to make your own? And where do you live exactly? That sort of thing

The end result was both enlightening and a little depressing. From my extensive survey, conducted from a broad sample of two, I found out the following:-

Cloning someone's avatar is done for two reasons. The first is the most obvious. People clone avatars because they like them, they want that avatar you are wearing and just because you don't want to give it away, well that's just tough. In a way it is a form of flattery, because they want your creation so much they will go to the bother of stealing it.

Reason two, has nothing to do with the actual cloning process and is more to do with being young at heart (i.e. a jerk) and gaining a great deal of entertainment from making people very mad and then running away. The fact that someone may have spent several hours making the avatar, just increases the fun. And the fact that someone can get so upset over what is just a bunch of pixels, just adds to the hilarity. It is in fact, a perfect way to annoy or bully someone for pleasure. In fact, after my extensive survey, I have come to the conclusion that cloning has very little to do with wanting an avatar and everything to do with psychological warfare.

So what is the SuperScoop conclusion to this whole business?

Well, I now understand the process a lot better. I know that when someone steals my avatar it is supposed to annoy me. So I don't let it anymore. If they want my avatar that badly they can have it. I mean, what are they going to do with it after all? They'll either wear it or erase it. It's not like they can sell it on the street or anything.

Yes, I'm a lot calmer about the whole thing now. But if I ever catch that little bastard who cloned me yesterday I'm going to beat the living……

END

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Re: Tears of a Clone

(Score: 1)
by Ankh (-) on Dec 18, 2001 - 12:27 PM
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*S*
Interesting. I agree cloning is a not-nice thing to do. As a palacian landowner and artist I have some thoughts on the whole *palace art* thing.

First, consider where the art comes from. As I learned (the hard way) the ORIGINAL is the parent of all the children, forever. If I want to say *this piece is original* then every aspect of it must come directly from sources owned directly by me. If I take a piece of web-art and right click it, or a desktop (even one available for free distribution) and rework it DRAMATICALLY in Photoshop, it is STILL not mine. I may post it in my Palace, but I have to know it's *stolen* unless I got all the official okie-dokies to use it SPECIFICLY as Palace art for the SPECIFIC purpose of creating a SPECIFIC thing (such as a chat area or an avatar).

Most Palace Art (especially avatars) is nothing but stolen web art, reworked in Photoshop or Paint Shop Pro. I can whip up a Photoshop avatar in about 20 minutes. Resize, sharpen, do a bit of color optimization and wham, import. I have done this for people while chatting with them many times. The final editing can take another 30 minutes or so, I suppose. Colorization can take a while, but even that can be done in an hour on something as trivial as an avatar.

For this reason, I have almost entirely stopped using web art and scanned art in my palace, instead using Bryce to create the rooms. I don't make avatars much, since they are SO available.

Now, in the case of Avatars, as I see it, there are not many ways to have an *original* avatar. One is to join an Art Site with a lot of pics you pay for (and have explicit permission to use however you wish). Second, I could go out and take pics myself and use them, as long as I had the permission of the models involved. I can always contact the webmaster of a site and ask for permssion, but I will rarely get it. A lot of sites don't even allow right clicks anymore for that very reason. Lastly, I can invest in a program like Poser and make them myself from scratch.

As much as I love reworking web-art and using bits and pieces gathered from here and there, in the long run, I have to realize that I am violating SOMEONE'S copyright doing it.

It takes me, often, 3 or 4 hours to compose and then 8 or 10 hours to render a Bryce picture. The post-production in Photoshop can take another 3 or 4 hours. Imagine how I feel when I see one of my Bryces posted at someone's GATE, with my signature removed (often in a quite shabby way).

I once was accused of *stealing* a room. I didn't, at least not from the person who was accusing me of stealing it. I found a desktop, reworked it and used it as a chat area. *sigh*. This is the problem with *stolen* art, it becomes impssible to know for sure where it originally came from.

Once you put something on the web it's pretty much public property, and inforcing any rules is extremely difficult (the recent RIAA woes over Napster proved this, Napster closed and Morpheus became the MP3 trader of choice).

I have decided that SOME of my art is too personal for the web, for one reason or another, and if you want it you must get it from me directly. But for the most part, once I hit the web with it, I consider it public domain, and hope the hell people will at least credit me with the work I put into it. I believe that the web should be this type of format, the last great common for an ever fenced off world.

Just my 2 cents.