FairieGodMother
TL;DR: Gaia ******** up by making Tekton take Tektek down and needs to rescind their cease and desist order against Tektek
Triana Orpheus Venture
This is incorrect. Gaia is well within their rights legally even moreso when Tekton decided to start advertising his own avatar site on there. This, along with the volume of work that he used (all of the items he catalogued) negates any claim to fair use that he had according to Title 17 Section 107. While I do agree that Gaia sorely needs to update their tagging this does not mean that they need to rescind their cease and desist. People are going to recolor.me due to their feelings about Gaia and that's perfectly valid however the fact that it was advertised on a catalog of
Gaia's items is a bad business practice. This is very cut and dry
Agreed that making his own avatar-based site was poor judgement, ethically, it was not really a bad
business practice. He most likely saw that many people who have been on Gaia for both long and short amounts of time were fed up with Gaia's sometimes shady business practices (i.e. mass re-releasing donation items that were promised to
never be re-released and were actually marketed as being "investments" for users), and saw an opportunity ripe for the pickings for a new site for these users to go to. I, for one, am not impressed with the images I saw of his site, and have no interest in it. If people are going there just to spite Gaia, that's their decision... and I wonder if they will actually stay there for very long?
Other avatar sites have advertised on Tektek, and I don't recall Gaia having a problem with it. In fact, I have seen plenty of adverts for IMVU right here on Gaia. So, Gaia knows of and has even taken advertising money from competing avatar sites.
As a side note (which does have relevancy to my point), I used to go on IMVU, and I have to say, back then, it was a much better alternative to Gaia as far as avi building was concerned. I quit after a few short years because their item base became too large to search through to find new items for my avi. It was frustrating and was no longer worth my time. That's how I feel Gaia will become if it no longer has a system in place to easily and quickly search for specific item criteria like the system that Tektek offered.
DYRL
I wonder if most of the people in this know that Gaia did try to reason with Tekkon before the C&D and was basically ignored.
But who cares right? #GaiaRoast2k15
That Gaia has tried to reason with Tekton is actually is news to me. I would very much like to know more about it.
Now that I have calmed down a bit, I would like to know the truth about
both sides of the coin. If Gaia is interested in actual transparency, they should have been more detailed in their Admin announcement than what they posted. I found out about the C&D first when I went to Tektek to try to find the origin of an item (a feature Gaia does not offer when one looks at items in the MP). When I saw the letter Gaia sent Tekton, I was like
emotion_0A0 and later came the Admin announcement stating that Tektek was being told to take down their site due to (basically) copyright infringement. That's it. That's all the info I have seen.
I believe I stated in my original post that I'm not really active in any part of Gaia other than my own avatar Dress Up these days (and have been for years because I just got sick of the "haters" and "White Knights" duking it out in SF, and said fights bleeding over into other forums). I come to Gaia to relax and escape the pressures of Real Life... so the last thing a high-strung person like myself needs is to read a bunch of fighting (because I feel compelled to jump in if it's something about which I feel passionate). I have enough fights in my real life to waste my energy fighting online with a bunch of strangers. I even feel a bit ashamed that I jumped into this one in a forum, but taking down Tektek does impact me directly.
Does anyone have record of where it is posted that Gaia has been trying to reason with Tekton over this before the C&D was sent? Does anyone have verifiable proof that Gaia acknowledged that Tektek was a valued service to the Gaian Userbase and wanted to keep the cataloging process going? I would very much like to see Gaia's side of this now that I've read posts by users that Gaia did due diligence before resorting to a C&D.
I just clicked on an ad for RecolorMe... and it wouldn't even allow me to tour the site unless I registered as a user, which I have no intent to do at this time. However, the images in the advert looked very... meh, at best, to me. I'm really not interested. This isn't the first avatar site to be spawned from a Gaia-based service, though. The Kingdom of Knuffle, an adoptables shop based here on Gaia where you could purchase feedable adoptables with gold, evolved into an avatar site. I joined, and was disappointed. Was there ever any action(s) on the part of Gaia filed against the KofK? Have other avatar sites spawned from Gaia-based mini shops or other user-run services based here on Gaia? Was any action on Gaia's part taken against any other avatar site in the past? I suppose these are the sorts of questions I should have asked before shooting my big mouth off
emotion_facepalm
I do apologize for my outburst, but I stand by what I said about how crappy the search and catalog features on Gaia are for the avatar items. They really need to step up by assigning a staff meme er to be solely in charge of the items database, or hire a contracted outsider (like Tekton), to keep their item database cataloged with not only accurate search features, but also info on the origins of the items.
Gaia should not just take for granted that members are going to do their work for them. There are users who are extremely generous with their time who post threads which not only catalog items from each RIG and new Cash Shop release, but also include direct links to the MP in said threads... but Gaia should not
expect users to do this work for them. Also, these threads are all individually based on specific releases, so there is (to my knowledge) no central database offered on Gaia by either Staff or Users.
Gaia, with as big as the item database is and is growing practically every day, there needs to be a central database that may be used by all members to locate and find information about items with ease. Please let us know what you have planned to replace Tektek.
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