If you recall my last blog post about my Titania Fairy Wings being infringed by Bad Katz, known as Katz Republic in Second Life™, there’s now a part 2 because she filed a counter notice with Linden Labs which forced me to sue her in order to defend my IP, and I found MORE evidence she infringed my IP . The full details of the claim aren’t publicly visible yet as of this writing, but the link is https://dockets.ccb.gov/case/detail/26-CCB-0586 and shows the names of the parties involved. It should be fully visible within a couple days. Ironically, she’d asked me to remove her city and state from the screenshot of her Etsy purchase receipt in my previous blog post and now that, and her real life name will become public record as that is what the CCB requires.
If you missed the 1st post you can see it here, and below is a comparison of my original wings and her infringing ones from my Exhibit A file. Ignore the coloring, and look at the veins as well as the outline, which you can see matches almost perfectly to that 2007 real life wings photo of mine.
The SL image of my wings shows the version I had in SL before she released her infringing version.
I found my 2017 Titania 2.0 wings vendor image so I could prove they predated Katz’s infringing use in SL as well. Below is a screenshot of that file with the info from my hard drive, because unfortunately SL’s Marketplace doesn’t show original listing dates. I wish they would.
For the heck of it, this was my oldest Titania Fairy Wings product ever as far as I know, back in July 2007.
Even if she never saw my wings in SL, I can prove that my Titania design was on Etsy months before she released the infringing items, as this sales email shows they were in my shop at least since August 31, 2018.
And, although it might be too late now to edit my claim details, I should be able to add this file, which is a screenshot of my email notice from an SL group that Katz was also in, announcing the release of the Pixie meshes! I literally just found this in the middle of making this blog post. As you can see, the date is Nov. 3 2018 which is months after the confirmed presence of my Titania overlays in my Etsy shop and a year after I re-released them in SL.
Oh and if she tries to argue that the curls on the tips and tails relieve her of an infringement charge, guess what - I’ve made them already with curls myself over a decade ago in 2010 as seen below, and posted them to my Deviant Art gallery here: https://www.deviantart.com/faeryazarelle/art/Titania-Grand-Wings-side-160183242.
There was also the infringement of my Bee Fairy wings overlays, which expressly forbid using in Second Life™ in the Terms of Use, that I had proof of her purchasing from me but the infringing texture I bought from her before she removed listings wasn’t all that obvious.
But then I found this SL image from one of her customers, Mondi Beaumont, that confirmed she used them, shown here under fair use solely for the purposes of news reporting & showing evidence of a legal claim. I darkened that image just slightly and color corrected to bring out the green & cyan to more clearly show those highlights & shadows near the wings’ tips, which perfectly match my Bee Fairy Wings texture - and it’s a texture that came from a combo of my real life wings photo and digital hand painting & editing. I edited the colors in my Bee Fairy Wings to match the image & warped them the same way Katz did, then inserted that into a mask shaped like her wing shape - and it’s nearly a perfect match that’s impossible to be an accident.
This was the only listing I managed to grab a screenshot of before things got removed. It wouldn’t have been quite as bad if she wasn’t selling the texture itself, but this woman has that kind of audacity.
In addition to all of this evidence, I got a message from a disabled SL creator after I posted about the issue in an SL Discord group, who says they had a similar experience with Katz!
They said Katz had used their script but violated the terms, and after making an agreement to pay the scripter a percentage of all sales of the items containing that script, Katz eventually stopped paying. When Lunasea used the DMCA process to have the item(s) removed, Katz sent a counter notice. As this was before the CCB became available, they could not afford to sue her in court, so Katz continued to profit unfairly off their work without paying the agreed upon royalties.
Lunasea also says “I also found that she and her partner frequently obtain meshes from stock model sites for use in SL (often after decimating the model, keeping the UV and primary structure remind the same). I reported this to both Turbo Squid and CG Trader though I doubt anything came of it.”
None of these allegations are surprising to me.
Her over the top reaction to my DMCA, contradictions of her own words, and false accusations against me already led me to believe she was trying to deflect after getting caught. Like a cornered animal, she was lashing out with anything she thought might hurt my reputation.
She even left comments on the previous blog post which you can see, asking me to censor the Paypal receipt even further by also hiding her city and state, and to watermark the screenshot texture of her wings. I found that funny since at least one of the wing textures - she strangely layered mine on top of another texture like a cicada wing and she also displays the whole texture in her Marketplace listings - I went ahead and did those things, all while she continued to insult me and lie about the situation, publishing her comments and mine despite her assumptions that I would keep them hidden.
I have nothing to hide. Now that I’ve had to go through the whole process of putting together a legal claim and evidence & had to actually spend money to do so, I would like monetary compensation for infringement. With her defamatory statements in her group notice and my blog post comments, I can prove the infringement with intent to harm my business, and now I’d like to know just how much money she’s made off of my IP.