Cel Edman (aka Elout de Kok outside of Second Life) has withdrawn his popular, and free displacement map creation tool Sculptypaint for several days citing piracy of the packs of textures that he sells as the root cause, as well as slow and half-hearted response to DMCA notices by Linden Lab.
While Edman doesn't name specific names of those stealing the texture packs that he sells to fund development and distribution of the popular tool, he does finger one specific group for distributing his commercial products, a group called the Mental Mentors.
Second Life Mentors are volunteers who assist both old and new Second Life users, and people being people the group has been a fairly mixed bag. The Mental Mentors was a group started by Jayjay Talamasca back in 2006, and was largely formed in response to the anarchic state of the Second Life mentor group chat rules (essentially there weren't any rules, but there was a lot of angry shouting at anyone who tried to use it).
The Mental Mentors group provided a group chat environment that was considerably more relaxed (if a little spam-prone), however since it's inception the group's laissez-faire approach has attracted more than 800 users and a few bad eggs besides.
Right now, the Mental Mentors are apparently distributing Edman's commercial work both among themselves as a part of a Mentor's "starter pack" which is then distributed to, well... everyone.
"I released my latest SFT-pack around 14 februari 2008," says Edman, "Only a few days later, this pack I created was repackaged, my copyright notices and TOS removed, (all the sculpties clearly state not for individual resell/repackage). The whole pack was distributed as a freebie pack to about 800+ mentors in SL, to use and to give away 'to help the newbies'."
Edman's battling others who are selling his commercial work as well. He says that Linden Lab's most rapid response to DMCA notices raised appears to be 8 weeks, and that the result seems to be minimum-effort. Even multiple, actioned DMCA notices leave the perpetrator selling the stolen product the next day (and apparently profiting well enough on stolen goods to be starting his own island).
So, ultimately Edman's temporarily withdrawn his product, because he feels he has to do something - DMCA notices filed through Linden Lab have been ineffective and only gotten him hate-mail in response from those he's filed them against.
It will be interesting to see what happens next. Edman's tool is the most widely used tool for the creation of sculpt/displacement textures in Second Life, and it would be quite a blow for development to cease.
[Thanks to Ordinal Malaprop for the tip]
