Originally Posted by Bitchy Tenshi

I spent most of last night feeling entirely melancholy about Second Life. After all of this copybot crap coming back up, between viperous fashionistas and even worse - Linden Lab - I'm just irritated, I don't see much point in creating new content just yet, I don't want to log in... but I can't not log in, if I want any sort of a fun conversation, logging into Second Life is the solution. Many of my friends are there.

Copybot is nothing new, these intercepts and ways to worm into SL are nothing new; the problem comes in under the fact that Linden Lab has known about these "Hacks", if you will, for a good long time and they've had time to develop viewer updates and put a bit of a slapdown on it. Have they? No.

When I emailed Robin Linden last week bringing her up to speed on all the new rash of content thefts, I wasn't even granted a reply email. She commented at the Herald piece I wrote, and that was it. I will assume at this point that Linden Lab has no plan of attack or solution in place and are just going to let things ride out.

Ordinal Malaprop: Copybot

There is a way around this, and that is as stated previously: the owners of the world, the blessed Laboratory, must enforce rules far more strictly. It is not a perfect solution, as clearly there are far more places than can be checked, but without it nothing will happen. Not just “DMCA” nonsense, which is just a mechanism for covering one’s bottom in the face of future legal action, but actively removing duplicated content.

There are all sorts of ways that this can be made easier - registers of content being uploaded, watermarks and so on - but in the end it is the will that is important, and that means governance, active enforcement of rules. Attack content-thieving accounts; delete them and their alts. Enforce DMCA takedowns properly, as rubbish as they might be.

Without that? Oh well, nothing terribly serious. Content creators will be discouraged from ever entering SL. Nobody will bother to learn the obscure, undocumented, ever-changing details of how the tools work - unless they already have a out-world patron, in which case they will rarely be putting anything on the open grid. Second Life will become less and less interesting. And the “Second Life Protocol” will become less and less relevant, and less and less likely to become the dominant virtual world protocol, and then it will be 2009 and we will all be speaking about SL as certain old-timers do about ActiveWorlds.

You know, nothing that anybody might care about.

Prokofy Neva: Copybot

8. User-Generated Content. This is portable if it was always in Photoshop all along. But what if there isn't a set of permissions to protect it? Fallingwater Cellardoor might not wish to move to OpenSim if nobody is going to bother to prevent the copying of her exquisite flowers. Will I want to live in a world that doesn't have Fallingwater and only has cheap knock-offs? No. That's why the most urgent, the most paramount thing the Lindens have to do, more important than ANYTHING else they are doing because events are unfolding so rapidly, is to concentrate on securing their top content creators' loyalty to their platform. Let me say this about it: I'm going to look the other way and not watch how they do this, because it won't be pretty, and I won't like it. But do it, they must.

I mean, jesus christ... content is ART. Art theft is not awesome, not funny, and grabbing it and reselling it for profit isn't cool. (To those of you who absolutely photosource but cry about content theft: STFU. The hand-drawn creations are the ones who have a right to be concerned here.)

You can't watermark textures very well - usually, watermarking detracts from the piece.

When the game developers leave us without anything to defend ourselves... what are we to do? This is a text based world, a binary world. We can't grab the thieves and tie them up. Well, we could, but Abuse Reports are so fucking useless. Hell, even DCMA's are useless because Linden Lab refuses to hold up their end of the bargain.

/me kicks a cupcake.

Linden Lab fucking owes us. They wanted us to create our world, which turned into THEIR world, which made Philip fucking Rosedale god knows how much money. They fucking owe us something to work with, and they're not coming forward with it.

More evidence of Linden Lab screwing people - and their creations - over:

SLUniverse

From Cristiano Midnight:

Quote:
Originally Posted by FlipperPA Peregrine View Post
In addition, Cristiano, wasn't it Linden Lab who prodded you into starting Snapzilla as a third party service? You think they'd remember.

Yes, once I demonstrated it to Philip and Reuben, the next thing I knew I was getting the hard press from LL to have it ready so they could announce it on a certain date in a really short time frame (ie like three days). I did get it finished, and Snapzilla did have the rare distinction of being on the SL home page, sign in message, inworld announcement and community site all at the same time.

Initially, LL was very supportive of it. Things soured between us when they started intercepting images being sent to my site and funneling them through the home page of Secondlife.com, with no credit to my site, totally unannounced to me.

I got all kinds of flack for it (...) and I didn't even have any control over it. After going ballistic, they did put "Powered by Snapzilla" briefly, but then it disappeared. Ultimately, the feature disappeared altogether on their home page, and now they promote Flickr.

So... Linden Lab screws over Cristiano, Cristiano gets the blame (???) and Linden Lab does their preferred "bandaid" on the issue by briefly linking to Cris' site and then, once again, takes all the credit.

What the fuck, folks?

Originally Posted by Anna Gulaev

If you want to understand the Linden position on bots and hackers you need to read Snow Crash. It's a pretty crappy piece of fiction, but it seems to be the Linden corporate bible. Code is cool. People are only relevant according to the code they can create. Destructive code is better than no code. Your information wants to be my free information.

Posted by: Anna Gulaev | March 03, 2008 at 01:11 PM

Originally Posted by Ten

Copybot is nothing new, these intercepts and ways to worm into SL are nothing new; the problem comes in under the fact that Linden Lab has known about these "Hacks", if you will, for a good long time and they've had time to develop viewer updates and put a bit of a slapdown on it. Have they? No.

Originally Posted by Adam Zaius

LL's legally required to respond to a DMCA take down within 7 days, if they dont do that, they are themselves legally liable. That's the method LL should be improving and working on.

Originally Posted by Adam Zaius

The reason they haven't is because they cant.

Let me make this ultra clear - there is NO technical solution to this. The data has to be displayed by the viewer, ergo you need to send it to the graphics card completely unobstructed.

The solution is not technical, it's legal and social. LL's legally required to respond to a DMCA take down within 7 days, if they dont do that, they are themselves legally liable. That's the method LL should be improving and working on.

Originally Posted by mcgeeb Gupte

This is where they fail miserably.

Originally Posted by Lordfly Digeridoo

But how many mp3s do we all have on our hard drives?

Originally Posted by Ingrid

Tenshi you should just make an alt. That's what everyone does when they hate their second lives.

Originally Posted by Joshua Nightshade

STOP HITTING ON ME.

Originally Posted by Lordfly Digeridoo

But how many mp3s do we all have on our hard drives?

Originally Posted by Joshua Nightshade

STOP HITTING ON ME.