About Copybot

I talked about it with a friend programmer he said you can't beat it because the thieves can make a SL client that could steal all your textures and objects.

But he said you could register item when you create them and then once you are suspicious someone made a copy of your work you could have a check and then it could say if the two items are identitical or very close by a percentage. You could also ask for a check of an avatar against the items you registered.

He also said Linden would make us pay for such features though or people would spend their day registering everything they make and checking others and slow SL a lot.

Not to mention the huge resource drain it would be on Linden Labs themselves. Would you rather play Second Life, or log onto a digital rights management database? The difference would be that stark.

please please please for god's sake .. if programmers tell you that there is no reliable way to solve the problem please please believe them ^_^

If it was going to be free yes, but not if there is a fee. And if it's very popular then it would provide good money income to Linden Labs, no ?



Oh I do but it seemed to me they said they could at least tell who had uploaded a texture first or am I wrong? Creators want to protect their contents they pay for it, it doesn't look irrealistic to me.

REALLY?

Then here, knock yourself out: http://www.turbosquid.com

Sorry you aren't interested in virtual reality environments anymore. Enjoy your online DRM database.

In all seriousness, you have no clue at all what you're asking.

I haven't a clue? Now we might talk about money and how many people copy items even without copybot instead of buying them? Let Linden decide if it is feasible or not you are not the one in charge here.

I think the insertion of uproarious laughter would be appropriate here.

It's not a question of who's in charge. It's a question of technical possibility. If you want a DRM-controlled database of resources, I've given you a link to one. If, however, you want to participate in a collaborative virtual reality environment, here's a great one I know of: http://www.secondlife.com. Because of the way MMO's have to work in order to function at all, you're not going to get both in the same online service. There are literally dozens of reasons why this is the case. Even the simple idea of watermarking images won't work:

/13/fd/149509/1.html

Even Phillip Linden cannot change the binary and mathematical operations required to display 3D graphics on the Internet.

No matter what draconian measures you think are appropriate, the fact remains that it still hase to function as a virtual reality system, and unless you want to turn off Second Life completely, there's simply no way of pointing to bytes in the data stream as they come over the Internet to compose an image and say with certainty, "those bytes are mine, whereas these other bytes that are part of this image are not."

Even if workable DRM were possible in SL (which it isn't, because of the basic architectural and technical requirements of all Internet-based 3D environments), you're certainly going to be more interested in Turbosquid than Second Life, for as you must know, Lindens are play money, and are not warranted to be redeemable for cash in any amount by Linden Labs. It says so in the Terms of Service. This one fact is why no one will ever successfully launch a law suit against Linden Labs regarding losses due to theft of SL content, by the way. You can't prosecute for theft of what is predeclared and agreed by all participants as being valueless (and you most certainly have agreed to this, because you use SL in full knowledge that Lindens have no specified redeemable cash value).

On DRM database services, however, it is possible to create content and sell it for real currency, with workable mechanisms in place to prevent the use or misuse of your materials without your permission.

Your turbosquid link is broken and useless to me.

And what you say differs from what Robin Linden says. Though i'm not speaking to you because you are the one who have no clue what I am talking about, I was making a suggestion to Linden Labs not to you.




If someone steals your creation you can already complain to Lindens about it.

Question for Kyrah:

I don't understand why a registry of objects would be impractical. Most objects are probably defined by less than a thousand floating point numbers. LL is already storing all of the billions of object definitions; a registry woudl just organize a small portion of them into an efficient DB.

Although it seems to me that a registry of objects would be easy, I agree that textures are more difficult (I read your earlier post on watermarking). However, I think you overstate the difficulty, even in the case of textures. For instance, you emphasize that images are modified and their formats changed in the process of being uploaded to SL; however, it is onlyl the final image and format that is relevant. The original image on the clients computer would not be registered and protected, only the version of it on LL's servers.

The registry idea has absolutely nothing to do with rendering images on client screens. Your comments in the earlier post about rendering are totally irrelevant to the registry idea.

The way I envision it, each object would be checked against the registry only once, when the object was first saved to a member's inventory. And only objects that content creators choose to protect would be entered into the registry. So, I don't see why an object registry would put an undo load on LL's computing resources. I think one dedicated server would do it.

Why can a copybot transform an object to the object it will copy? This is totaly strange and 100% to find in logs.
There Car. I Human ------> Human2Car BLOB

And this strange transformation cant be found and blocked?

The DRM is the work of progress itself. The creation of an object. This process cant be copied.

How does it do it? It starts with the same number of prims as the object to copy (or creates them as nessessary), looks at Prim#1 and modifies all the values of its prim to Prim#1.
Repeate the process until all prims have been modified.
Link.
Done.

And it does this all VERY fast, so the "transformation" is smooth to our eyes because each change takes less time than 1/30th of a second (1/30th of a second is how long you see each frame of a movie).

The difficulty with this idea is that the prim copying that CopyBot does is simply a highly automated build process, such as would be done by a human - just a lot faster. It uses exactly the same tools as a human would use, and in the same way. When a new prim is created, its creator at that moment is the active account that issued the commands that resulted in the creation of that prim. That it is an exact duplicate of some other prim elsewhere in SL cannot be detected - and even if it were, such duplication is common among legitimate human users anyway. That alone is not proof that illicit copying is taking place.

Since as far as the server knows, each CopyBot construct is a new and unique creation, an object registry would be able only to verify that a certain person's account had created a prim, or uploaded a texture. There is no way to establish with any certainty that that an object being created is a mechanical duplication, nor that the person uploading an image was truly the original creator of that image, due to the technical restrictions I've already outlined elsewhere.

This is, in essence, what we already have - each object carries the name of its original creator as far as it was possible to determine at build time. Each sound and image carries the name of the person who uploaded it, but the actual creator of that content is unknowable due to practical considerations.

No such system as you suggest could be made to work for that reason.

A registry sounds like some sort of SL specific patent office.

Assuming of course that the basic prims themselves can't be 'registered'...
I'd love to be the first to register an object made of 2 linked <0.5,0.5,0.5> wooden cubes.

Side-by-side, or stacked top to bottom?
Perhaps diagonally...

Me, I'd go for two spheres.

Haha. Yes that raises the question what if someone adds an invisible prim to your 2 cubes. For a building it would count against land prim count but not for an item you can attach to an avatar.

Thank you for your post it's nice to see there is someone who actually did read the suggestion .

=) I had actually thought it would be kind of neat to have a Linden Library of Creations, or some such, where we could drop finished creations to... and in the case of copyright infringment they'd be able to verify that they'd received object 'X' on such'n'such a date.

It'd even be kinda cool to be able to browse the archives and see what people had done.... but that opens other challenges.

What I'd love to see is some sort of Smithsonian Institute of SL.

Sounds like something trivially easy to defeat with minor unnoticable changes to the prims, or that would have too many false positives if the process was "fuzzy".

It'd be very easy to induce what the computer would term "fuzzy" that would be identicle to the human eye.

Sphere <0.2, 0.6, 0.8> with rotation <0,0,0>
Looks identicle to:
Sphere <0.2, 0.8, 0.6> with rotation <90,0,0>

(I think, I'm making a guess w/o actualy logging in).

Of course but then it would require some "work". Complex shoes and jewelry can barely be rezzed on a first land, you would have to change every of the 96 prims or more and have the object still look good, sounds challenging to me, personnally I couldn't do that, if I even had the patience to try.

The less prims there are the less likely you can prove someone copied you anyway..

I think maybe you miss the point of my post. If someone copies your pool just by looking at it, then work on it and make a pool that looks same it's one thing, and requires a talented builder anyway.

If someone comes in your shop with a copybot or something like that, and gets a copy of every of your items by pushing a button it's another story and this is what we want to stop.

So you would register your items and that would be a quick way to tell Lindens that someone copied your work identically or close enough to have used copybot. So they would look at it, knowing already there is a strong suspicion of theft.

It's a quick check for quick copy.

It would be completely automated by the "improved" copybot. You wouldn't even know it was happening... as it did the copy it would tweak the parameters slightly until the replacement was "sufficiently different" to pass the test but not so different the typical resident would notice it.

Once there's automated software involved, all issues of "how hard" any process it can perform is become irrelevant.

Especially given my example above of rotating a prim 90 degrees and swapping two size values.

There is on easy way for LL to check if in identicle item to yours was a copybot made duplicate.
currently copybot DOES NOT copy textures it references the original textures by its UUID, so the creators name for the textures remains intact. it isnt that hard for LL to check if the duplicate creator has the rights to use those textures.
you would still need to log a complaint with LL though.

I see the next update is cutting down on the sending of the UUID so the current copybot should only be able to produce plywood copies, until a new texture stealing one is made.

That would turn the textures around too though.

an automated proccess like copybot has all the details of the texture repeats etc. for each side and can just apply the settings to the correct sides with any adjustments needed to look the same without any problem though.

Edit: it could even replace 1 cube with 2 cubes and position & texture them to look exactly like the single cube.