Genus Project Wins DMCA Suit, Reopens Today

By Bixyl Shuftan

Good news for fans of Genus Project. They've won the DMCA suit against them, and will be opening today, Friday September 4. The suit, the second filed against them, was made on July 4, just hours after the store reopened following winning the first.

On the Genus Discord channel, owner Anna Ivanova would explain how the case was made.

"The person who did this thought out his plan very well. ... So what happened exactly? This person, I am sure, is ... an experienced Second Life user. Basically, he copybotted my mesh from the game. And then, having some editing skills, he used Photoshop CS6 to create the ad ... on April 5, 2020 (shortly before filing a fake copyright complaint against me), and uploaded this product to be sold on a third-party site.

"He called himself by my name and said that he had been developing mesh for a very famous game studio for 13 years. ... The ad was ready ... Then they came up with a fake address, fake phone number, fake lawyer from NY, cuz it's not even in the database. They came up with a text about the alleged studio itself, that they have been doing business for 13 years, and a list of claims they have against us. In the end, they ask (us) to remove all Genus content from ALL of the inventories, so that even a trace of mine will not remain in ... SL - no store, no products - nothing."

Unfortunately, while finding out how the culprit pulled off the forgery took only a short time, getting the DMCA shutdown resolved would take time, and help from lawyers, "The most disappointing thing to me in this whole situation is that I and my 5 lawyers were ignored for several months. Nobody wanted to answer me, all my letters were unanswered - no feedback at all. My lawyers received only references to the old letters and a copy of this complaint. And of  course, nobody answered us from those fake addresses and phone numbers. After months of silence,we were finally able to achieve the result. A very famous and strong American lawyer took up the case, for which I am immensely grateful to him. I have received return-on-sale approval for all my items and there is no longer any DMCA against GENUS Project. All charges were dropped. All copyrights for my work are registered. All complaints and DMCA that are sent to me from now on will be invalidated. LL is notified of the registration of rights and trademarks."

Anna would state, "The thought I was a thief caused depression in me ... But I'm not used to giving up. ... I was treated unfairly, and realizing how easy it is to frame the real author of works, it's just insane." Her advice to serious content creators in Second Life, "I ... shout out to everyone who engages in creativity and creates something, you should register the copyright for each of your work(s), so that no one can ever, ever, do the same to you."

She would have a message to the person whom filed the DMCA takedowns, "I assure YOU I will not give up trying to find YOU. ...  And to YOU, I say this. If you hate me and my brand so much, then don't be a coward and tell me about it personally. If you want to compete with me, then learn how to work like me and do it honestly and professionally. Otherwise, you are a nobody for me, not a rival, not an enemy. Just an empty spot - nothing. I am not afraid of weak people. ... The responsibility that you have taken upon yourself is so huge, you could end up in jail."

Her final message was to her customers and other supporters, "I love you all and I am proud that we are ALL a big family. Me, you, everyone who loves Genus. I will reopen the store tomorrow. Until then, let's celebrate this beautiful day."

On Discord, there were numerous well-wishes from fans, "Yay!!!! Welcome back! We've missed you!" "I am so glad that Genus Project is back in action!! This is a happy day." "i am so glad you back and all sorted and i hope you catch whoever is doing this cause i may be being paraniod but i got a feeling they gone after **** too seems strange they are down now i think this is some major lame troll." "I want to personally say, Anna, I am so terribly sorry for (what felt like an eternity to both you and us) the countless months of undeserved stress that you've endured.  I am happy to know you can breath a sigh of relief, even if a little.  As you already know, your supporters, have been in your corner the entire time; having faith you'd persevere.  We are proud of you for, NOT GIVING UP, though...it wasn't easy.  It proves just how good and STRONG you are!  ONLY POSITIVE LIGHT from this point on, Anna.  YOU ARE A TRUELY A SHINING STAR!"

And so after being down for months, Genus Project is back in business, to stay this time. For them, what looks like the end of a long nightmare. For others wanting to be serious content creators in Second Life, a cautionary tale about what can go wrong.

Hat Tip: Ryan Schultz

Bixyl Shuftan

Second Life Store Hit With Two DMCA Shutdowns, Second Hours After Reopening

By Bixyl Shuftan

Since Bento mesh came out, there have been a number of products based on it. Among them are the avatar heads by the Project Bento store, which blogger Ryan Schultz describes as "highly successful." Unfortunately in April, they were hit with a DMCA (Digital Millennium Copyright Act) takedown order.


Recently, we have received a DMCA complaint against us for the first time from another Second Life creator. According to the rules,we need to delete our content before the end of the proceedings. Our lawyer is currently filing a counter-DMCA complaint. It has all our files created for second Life, and we hope the situation will be resolved soon. 

The author of the complaint is unknown, but when we receive the response from Linden Lab, we will send the case to court. 

We ask you to treat this with understanding, these are forced actions that we must take to ensure the security of our intellectual property. Please note that content will not be removed from your inventory, it will only be removed from the Genusproject Resident inventory. During the closing of the store, we will stay in tough in social networks (discord and Facebook) as well as in the world group. Thank you for your attention and understanding. 


So for a time, the store was closed until the issue was resolved. According to Ryan Schultz's article, there were some angry accusations by fans of Genus that one of their competitors was behind the takedown. But several brands stepped forward to deny the claims, and Genus themselves while thanking their fans for their support strongly urged them not to spread rumors. It never was revealed whom filed the DMCA takedown order.


First, I would like to thank everyone for supporting Genus and taking the time to help each other and form a solid community in this group. Second,Genus is temporarily closed until the DMCA claim is reconciled and Third.Sadly i need to make this clear. All will be banned from group & sim if you disrespect Genus Project  or  speak negatively about another creator or mention their products  that do not support Genus Project Brand. In a world where you can be anything. Be Kind.  Be Safe - #Be Strong.


Finally on July 4, the store reopened. But only a few hours passed before Genus was hit with yet again another DMCA takedown order. The staff would announce the news on the Linden forums, and their Discord channel.


While we had hoped the DMCA business was behind us, we have received another notice from Linden Labs that we must remove our inventory and our store.  As we have not been given info regarding who initiated this the first time, we are left to assume it is the same person and that it is someone with no actual claim.

We apologize for any inconvenience this has caused anyone - your patience, support, and loyalty to our brand is not something we take for granted.  It is unfair to ask you to stand by us and stand with us as we fight this, but nothing about this situation has been fair.  Please understand that we cannot provide details we don't know and we ask that you keep rumors and accusations down while we work with our lawyers and with Linden Labs to prevent this from happening again.

And if whomever has filed this is reading?  Please understand that filing these claims does more than hurt us as creators - it prevents us from giving customers the support they deserve.  It stops us from releasing updates and letting customers get redeliveries.  That is who you are hurting the most.


As Schultz would put it, "It would now appear that The Genus Project is now going to be involved in a long and costly court battle before they can sell their products again. A major player has effectively been knocked out of the Bento mesh head market for the foreseeable future, and perhaps permanently. This is going to affect not just the team at The Genus Project, but it is also going to impact all the content creators who created skins and cosmetics for this brand of mesh heads."

As before, it is unknown who filed the takedown order, or why.

Sources: Genus Discord, Ryan Shultz, Linden forums  

Bixyl Shuftan

Massivley, WoW Insider, And Other Joystiq.com Websites To Close

By Bixyl Shuftan

Some sad news for gaming fans. Joystiq.com, the website that's the home of several caomputer gaming and computer websites, such as "Massively" and "WoW Insider," will be closing. Their final day of operations will be February 3, 2015. Joystiq was founded in 2004 as part of Weblogs, which was bought by AOL in 2005. It was AOL's primary gaming website, discussing MMOs and once in a while Second Life. It has been nominated for several awards for blogs of it's category and has been included in listings such as Forbes.com "Best of the Web."

Recode.net gave the reason as "part of an extensive house-cleaning of it's underperforming content properties." Editor in Chief Brianna Royce commented, "I would like to tell you truthfully that this is an equitable and just decision that makes some sort of logical sense, but the reality is that our overlords' decisions have always been unfathomable. ... a year ago ... a VP whose name I don't even know and who never read our site chose to reward our staggering hard-won 40% year-over-year page view growth by ... hacking our budget in half. There's nothing to do in the face of that kind of logic but throw your hands in the air." Royce had worked as the head editor at Massively for almost five years, "I came here as a geeky copyeditor, and am leaving with a fleet of good friends and a much deeper understanding of how and why my favorite genre runs the way it does, and it will forever influence how I play games and whose games I buy."

The closing comes just after hearing about the tragic news of their former editor Andrew Yoon drowning. He was 29.

Joystiq once had it's own Second Life newsletter, "Second Life Insider." Eventually, the staff was absorbed into Massively. Ciaran Laval on her blog stated when some gamers complained, they answered, "Maintaining editorial balance surrounding all of the many, varied games we cover is an ongoing proccess, and we've selected a suite of 'core games' based on many factors including subscriber/member numbers, overallbuzz and mindshare in the industry, and input from a secret algorithm I would love to call 'interestingness' if it weren't already taken. We are proud to offer in-depth Second Life coverage as one of those core current titles." Ciaran commented, "generally gaming magazines look down on Second Life. Massively ... most definitely did not look down on Second Life." The output did slow down over the years, especially after Tateru Nino stopped writing for them, but they never stopped entirely.

It's expected that the years of archived stories will remain online, at least for a while.

Ciaran concluded, "With a resurgence in virtual worlds likely ... having sites that will happily include that content in areas where such content may not be initially popular is important. Getting the concept of virtual worlds to a wider audience is very important. ... Joystiq played an important role in this the first time around. It will be a shame if they aren't playing a role when the new wave hits."

Sources: Redcode, Ciaran Laval, Massively.com, Wikipedia

Bixyl Shuftan

City of Heroes MMO Closes

There was some sad news in the world of Massive Multiplayer Online games. "City of Heroes," the popular superhero MORPG from NCsoft, is no more. At Midnight, Friday night on Nov. 30th, the servers powered down for the last time, disconnecting players from their CoH characters for good.


The decision to close the game was announced on August 31st, the official reasons being "realignment of company focus and publishing support." Following the announcement, players rallied to try to get the company to reverse it's decision, taking part in online demonstrations and even mailing the company capes and masks. But the company refused to change its mind, and on the last day, players gathered at a "final unity rally" at the town hall's city park across all the servers. Players talked about old times, in addition to taking on monsters, aliens, and other bad guys dropping in. One of Massively.com's writers, Beau Hindman, covered the event, until his screen read "Lost Connection" (link to the final hour and a half can be found Here), "It's unfortunate to see an MMO unlike any others shutting down."

"City of Heroes" was launched in 2004. The superhero game was hailed as a "gust of fresh air into an increasingly stale sword and sorcery MMO world," with an extremely flexible character creation system that allowed for a wide variety of appearances, notably the costumes. Despite terms of service forbidding characters that looked like or were named after heroes from the comics, Marvel Comics filed a lawsuit, saying the company was doing nothing to stop it. But the court dismissed some of Marvel's claims. The remainder were settled out of court.

NCsoft has several other games, including Aion and Guild Wars. Some Second Life residents commented to me they had enjoyed the game, and will miss it. Where the fomer CoH will go is anyone's guess. Perhaps many will make their way to superhero RPs in Second Life.

Sources: Massively, Wikipedia

Bixyl Shuftan

A Resident Looks Back at City of Heroes

For fans of the Superhero MMO "City of Heroes," there was some sad news recently. Paragon Studios, the makers of the game, announced their company, NCsoft, had decided to close them down. A short article in Massively stated the reasons were "realignment of company focus and publishing support."

To our Community, Thank you. Thank you for your years of support. You've been with us every step of the way, sharing in our challenges, encouraging us to make City of Heroes better, more than everyone else thought it could be. We couldn't have come this far without you. I implore you all, focus on the good things of CoH and Paragon Studios. Don't dwell on the "how" or the "why", but rather join us in celebrating the legacy of an amazing partnership between the players and the development team. 

Among the players of the game was Second Life resident Alexandra "Lexi" Tymets, also known as "DJ Sexy Lexi." She had a few things to say about her time at Paragon City. Of her characters, "I had a bunch actutally. Over the years I've played both sides, hero and villain. Have maxed out characters on both. ... CoH was really fun. You get to feel heroic as your little super hero,or super villian, (who) beats, blasts, or sends summoned creations after your enemies. It's really fun when you get a group, and you've got an Area of Effect Attack, like my Water Blast/Dark Miasma Corrupter did. She'd drop an AoE Debuff then slam the enemies with AoE attacks. There's nothing like watching a horde of enemies just fall over at once."

Of the gameplay, "Well you of course fought enemies, starting from street thugs, who will come at you with guns and baseball bats, and work your way up the villain chain. There were trainers you would see so you could level up your heroes powers. You chose two sets, which depended on your archtype. Like Corrupters, which was a Villain archtype, got to chose a ranged attack, and a ranged support set. ... As you got higher in levels, you'd face things that could throw nasty powers right back at you."

Describing the quests, "In the early days the quests were pretty repetitve, though they did give you some story to link them to help out. Go here... smack that around. Come talk to me again, typical MMO fare. As the game progressed they created new parts of the city with their own enveloping story. You could stay in one zone... and do the arcs from different contacts there, and it would all be all one continuing story as you worked your way to whatever was menacing that zone. That's really when City of Heroes got it's own flavor, and really started to shine.

"There was a zone called Croatoa. It dealt with Fae and supernatural things. Witches, Redcaps, Werewolves, Ghosts, and Plant monsters with Jack 'o lanterns for heads. It inspired me to make more than one character with roots in magic or connections to the Fae. There was even a Nessie-like monster in the lake called Sally."

"My Storm/Elec Defender ... I remade her as an Ice/Storm Corrupter. She's level 32, and still hasn't gotten her first debt badge. She still exists. When the Servers Close down on Nov 30th, I'll be on her, standing next to Miss Liberty. Probably bawling my little mousie eyes out."

As to why the game was closing, "Rumors run from. 'NCSoft is a bunch of asshats,' to 'They wanted to cut CoH and Paragon before it went into the red,' and 'They couldn't renew the CoH License.' "

"I've been with City of Heroes, on and off admittedly, since Issue 1. They're in Issue 23 right now, and were gearing to Issue 24. I played for 5 years. It was the best Super Hero MMO they ever released, and it pains me to see it go. I've cried twice now, all the friends I made, all the stories I told with my characters, and some that were just beginning to tell their stories. It was an amazing run, and I thank Paragon Studios for the years they put into it. The Love, the devotion, and the time. No other MMO I've ever played had that sense of family."

Lexi wasn't the only resident whom played the game. Ranchen Weidman explained she did too, "CoH was fun, still is. But I doubt I'll be playing any more of it (now) that it's closing."

Top image from cityofheroes.com 

Bixyl Shuftan