The long-running dispute between Gala Phoenix, proprietor of Curio Skins and Hush Darkrose / Verikai Vargas, proprietor of Hush Skins, has reached an out-of-court settlement, it has been announced.
The dispute, in which each party accuses the other of IP infringements, first hit the headlines early in 2012, and was, through part of the year a major topic of conversation and heated debate.
The joint statement relating to the settlement reads in full:
Wednesday, January 2nd, 2013
Hush Darkrose /Verikai Vargas, owner and operator of Hush Skins, and Gala Phoenix,
owner and operator of Curio Skins, announce a mutually amicable settlement to the
dispute between them regarding the ownership of their skins.
In March 2012, Gala Phoenix filed a DMCA takedown notice against Hush Darkrose for
alleged infringement of her Curio skins. In May 2012, Hush Darkrose responded by filing
a DMCA takedown notice with Linden Research, Inc. and filed a Notice of Civil Claim
against Gala Phoenix for alleged infringement of her Hush skins.
Hush Darkrose would like to clarify that she did not “obtain” an injunction against Gala
Phoenix, but rather only sought an injunction against Gala Phoenix in a Notice of Civil
Claim, which was then filed with Linden Research, Inc. and resulted in the takedown of
certain Curio skins.
Since that time, Hush Darkrose and Gala Phoenix have been in legal discussions regarding the skins in question. The parties have agreed that each store was created separately and individually.
Wishing to avoid the expense of litigation, Hush Darkrose and Gala Phoenix have
reached a private and amicable agreement, and are content with the results. Neither Hush Darkrose nor Gala Phoenix admits liability, and both parties wish to put the dispute behind them and move forward.
Both Hush Darkrose and Gala Phoenix would like to thank the public for their support
and patience during this time, and hope that the public will continue to offer their support
to both designers and the incredible and unique skins that they each offer.
Thank you,
Hush Darkrose, Hush Skins
and
Gala Phoenix, Curio Skins.
—-
With thanks to Venus Petrov.
Inara Pey: Living in a Modemworld 
I am at least glad that money was raised to defray some of Gala’s expenses.
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Reading up on this matter, i am astonished and shocked by:
(a) The boldness of Hush Darkrose to go and falsely claim that she had won an injunction against Gala Phoenix,
(b) The shamelessness with which Hush Darkrose claimed that she was selling these skins in SL even before she had even created an account (how could she have been selling these skins in 2008, when she created her account in 2010? Did she make a time machine like the one Baldrick put together in “Blackadder: Back & Forth”?),
(c) The complete lack of any virtue among LL’s staff; all it took for these apes to take down Gala Phoenix’s business was a civil complaint by a thief who even used false claims to have her way. Seriously now, didn’t these morons have the intelligence to investigate the matter just to see if it all added up? And i’m not saying they should play the role of a court of law; i’m saying that they should have at least have done some super-basic research on whether some claims were true (look for UUIDs, texture upload dates, avatar creation dates, that sort of thing – all the tell-tale signs that can give the game away and LL has the tools to find).
Now, i understand full well why The Register filed SL as a failure. It is a failure, Mistress, because it has failed to inspire its users to trust the company behind it. The Curio/Hush case was, to a huge degree, a fiasco on the part of LL; they showed they can be goaded into punishing an honest creator, in favour of a content thief. They showed they cannot be trusted by their userbase – creators and consumers alike. If this sort of thing (LL taking the side of the thief and punishing the victim of theft simply because its staff is too stupid, lazy, incompetent and just plain retarded to investigate the validity of the claimant’s complaint) can happen to a well-known and established creator like Gala Phoenix, it can happen to anyone. How can a content creator trust that LL will act like an ISP worth its salt?
In three blog posts of mine, i’ve railed (and stand by every statement and remark i’ve made there) against content creators’ paranoia that led them to purchase and deploy scamware/spyware like the RedZone and the Gemini CDS Ban Relay (and both of these systems have been created by persons of dubious reliability and moral fibre – zFire Xue is a convicted fraudster and Skills Hak was involved in the Emerald Viewer fiasco).
What would have been the proper course of action then, Mistress?
(a) Investigate – content creation dates etc.
(b) Ask both sides to show the goods in question and have them properly examined.
(c) Decide accordingly.
Had LL taken this course, Hush Darkrose would have been permabanned for abusing the abuse report system, wasting LL’s time and trying to game the system.
They didn’t. And then, to cover their own backside for failing to protect the victim of content theft, they turned (and continue to turn) a blind eye to creators of spyware/scamware like the RedZone and the Gemini CDS Ban Relay, and they turn a blind eye to vigilantes and little Hitlers like the “Justice League Unlimited” whose actions resemble Greek neo-nazi gang “Golden Dawn” (and, basically, the JLU is nothing but a bunch of griefers whose actions should be considered as defamatory against the superheroes they have based their appearances on).
So, LL has failed to protect content creators and it keeps on failing to protect users’ privacy and peace from the antics of the JLU griefer gang. If it continues like that, the annual region loss will start approaching figures like 20% and 30%. You see, i think it’s not only the tier price that drives users away from SL; it’s also LL’s continued failure to build a relationship characterized by mutual trust with its users. And here’s another failure on behalf of LL; it has historically failed to see its users as customers.
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Get off the fence, Slutrix, and tell us what you *really* think!
Pep (is full of admiration.)
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While there is good reason to be annoyed with the process, you’ll have to take that up with US law and the insanely lopsided DMCA system; not with LL.
That said, given the circumstances and the fundraiser, I think many people were looking for a more decisive outcome.
…But I guess that since the official result is that it was all a misunderstanding and nobody is to blame, it would be fair if Gala at least shared the fundraised legal fund with Hush to cover the mutual expenses they incurred by apparently falsely accusing each other.:-S
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Still Slutrix hit the nail, who is going to trust LL in anty matter now?
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