How we can fight Copybot

Seeing that Linden Lab isnt going to help us in a active way to fight copybot theft we will need to help ourself and do what we can against it.

Something we could do is that all Land and Island owners deny access for No payment Info on file Users. If quite a huge part, or even the majority of the Land owners would do this, using Copybot with free alt accounts would get difficult, and to use Copybot with accounts with Credit Card data stored ( you need 2 accounts logged in simultaneously to use Copybot ) its a lot more risky why you are more trackable if an abuse report against you is filed, so a lot of possible thieves would not even think about it.

There would still be places where the free no CC info accounts could go, but there are so many users of this kind, that all places where they could go would be pretty much crowded enough to rarely let you use Copybot without being seen, and thats another reason to not use Copybot, and would even more decrease the piracy.

In addition to that, all should boycott Land owners that dont join this fight.

Additional positive effects of this could be:
1- Amount of Freeloaders decrease and servers become lesser laggy.
2- Griefing gets down.
3- Support and Life Help are relieved and can work better.
4- Camping becomes more and more obsolete.
5- Linden Labs wakes up and start working on a server-side active way to fight theft.
6- The community shows that they can stay together and fight for the own rights, and its not just a bunch of mixed people that only can fight one against the other.

Possible negative effect:
1- Small amount of sells is lost cause the Freeloaders cant spend the few Lindens they get by camping or similar. Reasonable price for the points above.

Kinda rough? Hard times, hard solutions.

Banning Freeloaders wont help much, because Copybot works sim-wide.

My Comment to your Fight... *points at Signature*

The bot does have to stand somewhere. Anyway, no wonder you think so, you are member of "I Support CopyBot", "~ CoopyBot Legal ~" and "libsecondlife", oh and no paymant info on file.

Casinos won't take part in this because they WANT campers. A lot of traffic to popular places are from unverifieds. I see most people running copy bot in the quiet comfort of their own land. Hmmm. I guess they will follow your suggestion and ban people from their land so that they won't get caught.

Good point.

First off, I fully admit I am subscribed to the libsecondlife mailing lists and have utilized the work of libsl to create programs myself. I support libsl - I do not support the abuse of the tools libsl has produced, the same as I support LSL, but don't support self replicating griefing objects.

While I believe this thread had perhaps the incorrect "issue" (i.e. CopyBot), it does hit upon the REAL issue lately with SL, and where LL has failed it's citizens. It is not LL's support of libsl. It is not LL's software allow griefers to do their thing. It is that LL has completely removed the threat of punishment for abusing things. With no verification of whom is whom, griefers, pirates, etc. have no fear of being caught since there is nothing, perhaps besides the minor inconvenience of making another alt, that LL can do. If they still forced verification of every AV on the grid, Griefing, utilizing copybot and other tools for "evil", would be greatly diminished.

To this point, the solution is not for LL to pull their support for libsl but rather make those whom are abusing things accountable for their action, and the first step to that is removing the layer of ofuscation.

Boycott my islands. I will not join in the effort to ban freebie accounts . My sims are residential, and many have friends and visitors that are also freebie accounts. I dont have any commercial areas, but I detest the libSL people's actions (those responsible for this mess).

I dont think you are going to find this a good grassroots effort, but I applaud your trying. Someday (hopefully really really soon) they will find a way to nail the twerps that did this hard. Would love to see some jail time tossed at them

In fact it seems to me no longer doable what I posted at beginning. Bree Giffen pointed out that people can use Copybots very good in own land, and there is nothing we can do.

Sounds like a bad idea to me. I'm new here, only been here a few days. When I first arrived I wanted to have a good look around to see if I really wanted to stay before parting with any cash, didn't know at the time that I could have the account 'with payment info' on it before paying anything. If I'd been barred from most of the land I wouldn't have stayed more than few minutes, there'd have been nothing to see or do.

As SL grows larger, their ability to enforce the ToS is diminished. This is so much true that in the last Town Hall meeting, Phillip Linden said that they are going to start scaling back what they prosecute as ToS violations - they simply can't handle the casework fast enough to do any good, so instead of adding more agents, they're cutting back on the kinds of violations on which an abuse report will have any affect.

They haven't announced what these changes are, nor when we can expect them to start scaling back the enforcement, but apparently it's going to happen, and we're just sort of left out there dangling in the breeze until somebody comes up with a practical solution.

the main reason LL should pull support from libsl is due to backlash from not only residents but from etrade newspapers who are watchign this closely. LL's support of CB and its subsequent back peddling after the the fat hit the fire, proved that LL has no clue what thier developers are doing, let alone their in house "hacker team"

i do agree with you, however, with LL's lax security and consequences: bad bad ava you spammed a billion hoppin penises on the PG sim and caused it to crash, spanks hand nawty nawty, now go play.

however in yoru own post you state: its is hard to catch these people due to non verification. so again, now what? not only should LL pull its support of libsl, it shoud be banned and every member account closed. as long as they stay "open for buisness" it gives free rein to more griefing, grid issues and hacks.

and just so you know, the CB has been remodified into a hella griefin tool. im waiting for it to be used to hack cc accounts.

point two: if you take somethin that is NOT yours and copy it, is called theft. no matter what spin you put on it. if you take someone elses hard work, and make it your own it is called theft. period

and to complicate matters...

Nearly every mainland region has some percentage of Linden Owned land left in it. I would bet you'd have no chance of getting LL to ban Non-Ver's on their own land.

While the idea has more merit than most anti-copybot ideas I've seen... I think attempting it would make SecondLife into a more hostile seeming place, more "us vs. them"-ish.

If someone hasn't yet made up their mind to play nice or be a griefer... you don't want to give them motivation go grief.

Can we stop using the word "libSL" when we mean "two people associated with libSL and one guy who wasn't even part of libSL?"

At the last count, there were more than 70 users on the forum alone. That makes at least 68 people who are "libSL" who had no knowledge or association with CopyBot.

It's a little like saying that because I live in California, I'm a surfer, or that because I'm white, I'm responsible for slavery.

3 people, not everyone associated with libSL, caused this mess.

i second that

Disabling land access for unverified accounts isn't a viable solution for any business. I've done it for some months and wish I hadn't. The sales will slightly go down and you'll receive tons of upset IM's. It also doesn't stop griefers, there are enough verified ones. On the mainland, they will even drown your shop in prims out of protest that they can't get in, moving in prims from a neighbour parcel. Best way to keep the peace is to give them no reason to fight. And by allowing everyone to buy you also give them no reason to use the CopyBot. Think about it... someone really wants your wares but can't enter your shop; would practically force that person to steal what he can't buy.

Well, you have to understand that the actions of a few can tarnish a whole group. Like the actions of a single politician can show a whole political party in a bad light. People (me included) see the CopyBot as a direct result from reverse engineering. But it's also a direct result of LL's architecture, so I guess it was inevitable.
We could start saying "Baba+Nimrod" instead of LibSL (dunno who number 3 was), but somehow that would even be more personally offensive. As long as one points at a whole group, it doesn't hurt the individual that much.

I see only one thing that can be done IF Linden Lab does not want to implement a system to enforce the own TOS about IP Theft: Removing unverified accounts, going back to the old system of needing a CC check.

The OP is effectively accusing all people with unverified accounts of being thieves, which is completely baseless. It's akin to accusing all Muslims of being terrorists.

Well it's really not that difficult to get round the problem of being unverified, if you really feel it is such a problem of being labelled as such.

Simply verify your account. I'm quite sure that at least 90% of the people who are unverified could easily verify themselves if they had to, to stay in the game.

Lewis

By this line of reasoning then people are justified when they say that all blacks are thugs, that all muslims are terrorists, that unverifieds are griefers. There are bad people everywhere. Just because a middle aged, middle class white male murders someone, somewhere, does not make all white males murderers.

Heck with CC verification... there should be mandatory psych profiling done at the entrance. After all, even a CC verified resident can be a psychotic griefer, or just simply annoying.

Can't let that sort in.

I think any psych evaluation of residents (prospective or current) would reveal they are not suitable for the intarnets at all. In fact, the intarnets would crash if this were required, as we're all a bunch of nutjobs.

The only things that will fix copybot are witchhunts and segregation.

MM

Don't ban unverifieds. The majority of them are good people in real life who either have limited means or funding resources that don't sync up with LL's verification policies.

The music industry has its own copybot. It's called the CD-R drive, and you've probably got one in your computer right now. Last I checked, bands were still releasing new CDs and people were buying them.

To combat the wholesale copying of digital music, the music industry has formed watchdog organizations that seek out pirates/crooks, shut down their operations, and prosecute them. While you can't go exactly that far in SL, you can have the same effect. I know many designers in SL who have effectively and satisfactorily dealt with losers who try to profit by ripping off their original works. I also know of one growing merchant guild who are kind of rip-off vigilantes, who've already shut down two people for selling freebies or stolen works in just the past 2 weeks.

I know your heart's in the right place, but banning unverifieds is bad for business and bad for Second Life.

No ... LibSL let this THEFT device out ... they need to take resposibility for their actions.

BTW.. why not admit you are on a PRO-COPYBOT group ... I saw your name personally when I signed in to find out who was trying to promote theft devices.

JoshBear, do you happen to own a CD-R drive? A tape recorder perhaps? Or maybe... just MAYBE a computer? All are commonly used for theft. You should turn yourself in immediately.