Stopping Copybot

I just had amazing custom skin made, i am afraid it will be botted by some arsehole out there. Is there a way to stop this? I know there is a way to stop inspecting prims but is there something to wear etc that can stop these **** from copying art of others especially skins?

Thanks in advance.

-Bastian

No there isn't, actually.

It's an unfortunate fact that there are no technical measures to prevent it, the best we can hope for is to be able to report it and hope that appropriate action will be taken.

Please take the time to read the previous 100+ threads on this issue. Surely there will be some gems hidden within those thousand posts that will be of interest.


.

Ok, thank you much.

You can make it harder for would-be rippers if you use a third party viewer that disables public component textures. That will limit a ripper to getting the baked version,with clothes covering up part of the skin, instead of a complete skin (unless you hang around naked a lot).

The 1.24 official viewer should finally get this stuff out of the mainstream too. 1.23 no longer uses those textures, but for some reason they decided to leave them there for older viewers (it's not strictly necessary to have those, so it would have been nice if they cut that off right away).

For now, the Greenlife viewer can shut off those unbaked textures. Preferences, Emerald tab, Shields section, keep "Clothing Layer Protection" checked.

Ah, great thank you!

Just a small point of clarification: Copybot is completely unnecessary for ripping textures. It's just one option among many. Anyone who knows their way around a graphics pipeline can capture any texture in view, at any time.

I won't go into detail, of course, (and hopefully no one else will either), but the principle at work is this. If something can be displayed on a screen, then the information for how to draw it is in active memory, and if someone knows how to get at it, they can record it. It's as simple as that. There is absolutely no technical means to stop it. There never has been, and there never will be.

Bottom line, if you want to ensure your textures will never be stolen, don't ever put them online. Beyond that, all you can do, as Robby stated, is be as vigilant as you can about defending your copyrights after the fact. The kind of protection Viktoria mentioned will help a little, in that people won't be able to access your naked skin textures as long as you've got clothing textures layered over them, but there is not and cannot be any technical means to stop anyone from stealing fully composited outfits.

All that said, don't worry about it too much. There's little point in focusing on anything you can't control. If someone want's to steal your stuff, they will. Most people won't, though. When and if you discover someone has stolen from you, you have legal means to pursue the matter if you so choose. Until and unless you make such a discovery, just continue to do business as usual. Enjoy it. That's the whole point.

Stop!!!



































Hammer Time!

Actually, there is. I saw a guy wearing an object, I forget the name of it, it was called something like Stop Inspection. It looked like a bunch of invisible prims that encircled his entire avatar several times and prevented anyone from right clicking his attached prims. It struck me as one if the most vain things I had ever seen. Like this guy was assuming that everyone was looking at him. And he didn't even look that great imo. Why would you even care if people inspected your attached prims? I dunno...

Those inspection stop things are the best scam ever, nothing but transparent prims. They stop newbies from inspecting stuff, but you can cam right through them. A copy routine wouldn't blink. They do make it annoying for other people who want to to click on other objects near the wearer, so I guess that's a plus.

1. That won't do a damn thing to stop someone from downloading his skin.

2. Anyone with minimal camera-jitsu skills will be able to navigate past these prims by focussing past the avatar.

3. Hide Selected.

There are lots of things you can do that make it slightly harder for a few potential attacks, but the majority of these tricks are worthless, they can't even in theory prevent most exploits, and many are actually counterproductive.

I wasn't trying to say it would stop someone from ripping any textures... I was replying to the guy that was saying it is impossible to stop inspection. This thing had about 5 or 6 layers of transparent prims with almost no space between the layers and it was real tight to the avatar, so it would be pretty much impossible to cam through it.

Ah... You mean manually using the viewer to inspect objects, gotcha.

Yeah, that might work fine in that instance, but I guarantee you that it's not going to stop anyone who wants to inspect those objects and knows even a little about the technology behind SL. If I'm logged in via a proxy or a custom client I can inspect any objects/prims you have attached, without exception.

And since the original post was referencing CopyBot, I felt it was worth pointing out that there is no way to stop a CopyBot from inspecting attached prims either


.

Copybot doesn't copy skins. Actually it's a waste of resources to use it for that .

Anyone who would find such a thing impossible to cam through simply needs to spend a little more time practicing his or her camming technique. Whether it's 5 layers or 500 layers, and whether there's almost no space, no space at all, or a mile of space, in between the laayers, absolutely ANYTHING can be cammed through. It's just a question of learning how the controls work, and applying a little good old common sense for where to set the focal point.

In most cases, all you need to do is just focus on something external to the barrier, and then just swing the camera around, so it ends up inside the barrier. That's it.

The only people who would be stopped by such barriers are total noobs. Anyone who actually knows how to use the camera would only be slightly inconvenienced, not at all stopped.

there you go noobs and actually probably 80% of residents of SL, something to practice, evasive camming

Mm hmmmm.

http://wehatewhatyourewearing.blogspot.com/2009/05/inspection-fug-psa.html

Yikes, 67 layers of stacked transparency?! I don't know whether to laugh or cry. Here we have yet another example of how certain among us seem to think SL is fueled by magic, rather than by the same universal principles of graphics processing as every other 3D app in existence. Every transparent layer adds one more level of lag, which means anyone wearing that ridiculous shield (which can't work anyway, since ANYONE can just cam around it) will produce at least 67 times as much lag as they normally would.

When will these people start using their brains? Come on.