Images and Copyright

Ever since the first days of AltAway's Demo World, I've had people asking for particular heads, object, etc.. This means using a specific image for that item.  One of the earliest pages on the wiki therefore sets out the policy on image use. The tl;dr is: if it is an old Fujitsu image, it's safe to use, because we know that they don't care.  If it was added after Avaterra and VZones took over, then it's possible that the rights to the image were purchased by them, and may possibly now be owned by the current incarnation of VZones, and thus we do not allow use of that image.  The exception is if artists contribute or give permission for their work to be used.

As we've grown and developed, I added a facility for artists to directly upload art to AltAway, into the builders world.  Provided they gave permission, it could then be used in the main world.  All such art was tagged with the artist's initials.

It has been brought to my attention this week that art has appeared in Avagoria that appears to be direct copies of relatively recent art that is present in VZones. I have checked the reported items, and found this to be correct.   I have also run an automated scan of all art by the same artist that is present in Avagoria, and found several further examples.   Unfortunately, my scan is not foolproof, so I might still have missed some.

These are mainly items that were created in builders world for selling in the main world, and whilst a manual review was undertaken before they were copied over, it's simply not possible to know every one of the several thousand possible forbidden images ..

The artist in question, Magnus, was warned in 2023 about this practice - uploading art that is not their own - and promised not to do so again.  At the time this only affected the build world, so was not public. Sadly this is not the case this time.

Because this has happened after a warning, the artist in question has immediately had upload privileges withdrawn.  I will not be accepting any more art supposedly authored by him.  All art already uploaded to the builders world has been removed.

All objects in Avagora that use the identified artwork will by now have been replaced with placeholder images with a QR code, Tell Me About, and URL, that leads to this blog post.  The offending image files have been removed from Avagoria.

If you have purchased an affected item from Magnus, Lucille, or Lucille's shop, then please contact them and request a refund of your payment. If you get no response, please contact myself, and I will refund you myself, and deduct it from their funds!

I am not happy.  AltAway and Avagoria are run on trust.  Trust that people will follow the rules. Trust that they will respect other people. Trust that everybody is working together to make the worlds a better place.  That trust has been violated, and in such a way that could have caused me serious legal issues.

If anybody spots any further items that should not be present in Avagoria, please alert myself or Clyde immediately, preferably with the name or imageURL of the item in question.  If you know the same from vzones, this would be helpful.