About Copybot

Exactly, there's another lovely feild called "rotate texture." I'm sure someone could work out the math and program it into a bot.
Hell, there are bots that gold mine Ultima Online*, making one to duplicate stuff is easy.

*heard about it on NPR (PRI? I'm never sure) today in an interveiw with the author of the book "Play Money: How I quit my job and made millions" (there was a small mention of SL and Asache Chung (did I spell that right? I know I can't pronounce it)). There's a guy who wrote a bot for UO and runs 50 of them, when a GM enters the area to interact with the bot, the bot phones the guy who comes running to do the interaction that the bot is unable to perform (namely "what color is this?".

Thats the only way to go. You cant stop replication, period. If you can see it, rotate it, move it, it can be copied. By bot or craftsman. But registering your item at a 'patent office' of some type, where you document yourself as creator of the item using statements and pics, seems to be the way to go in proving your case when the issue comes up. This might only be useful for new items you create, since the person who has already copied your previous item might be able to register it as their own design simply by being quicker than you and filing a claim that they are the originator.
Will the powers that be at LL take the incentive to create such a system, who knows. But it sounds like something to put up for a voting proposal. Id vote for it.

Look, you make a sphere, normal size. now you set Cut Begin and End 0.100 to 0.750. You set Twist Begin and End to 46 and 108 and Dimple Begin and End to 0.10 and 1.00.

Now would you mind explain me again how you rotate it and make textures on it look right please?

You are correct. you cant rotate it and make it look the same .....But see if you can tell which one of These was built to your specifications and which one is made from 2 prims and will fail any duplicate test algrothm

EDITorry to seem so negative, but i can see a system like you are descibing being abused by the thieves to prove thier copies are not copies

I can't see the difference (but I would if I could click on it) , though I wouldn't mind seeing the same example with the american flag texture (the one in library) for example .

That wouldn't be used to prove an item is not a copy. You would have someone at Linden Lab check it manually in the end. It just needs to say that the item is close enough to be a copy.

Say you make an object and you go into a shop and see one that looks very close to yours. Then you make a check against the one you registered and it will tell you how close the two objects are, then you will report abuse to Linden if you think it's close enough to be a copy and they will investigate if they think like you.

It wouldn't be difficult to notice that your 2 spheres are very close to the original I suppose.

Also adding prims is really last resort, most furnitures and buildings take too many prims already.

I think that a better solution would be to have a dedicated trustworthy group in SL that can handle Complaints of copying, supported by LL,
since almost all comparison routines can easilly be fooled and a human visual comparison is going to be required to detemine whether an item is a copy or just a similar product.

I believe thats kind of what Philip Linden was actually trying to say at the Town Hall when he said 'its down to the community' and that LL are working to provide the tools to help with this.

what we as a community need to do is figure out is:
how to make such a soloution
1) easy enough to be used by all creators
2) difficult to be abused
and how to proceed when a complaint is determined to be upheld
(DMCA reporting etc.)

the way I understand the DMCA route (I may be wrong as i find it hard to interpret legal mumbo jumbo ) is:
1)you file a DMCA report form to LL
2)LL removes the offending content and gives the 'accused' the oppotunity to file a counter claim.
3) if no counter claim is recieved the content stays removed
4) if a counter claim is recived then the content is put back and the claim has to go to the DMCA

same Example with american flag texture. if you look at the left one you can just see where the two prims join in the red section

And it's not a resort that's likely to be necessary. Most furniture and buildings contain many many prims that can be significantly changed without making any visual difference. Any algorithm loose enough to detect automated production would get too many false positives to be safe to use.

That wouldn't be a better solution. You could have the two together. How would such a group work? Would they work on photos? Or have a sandbox and get items rezzed so they can check? Would that be enough? Are you ready to spend 3 hours on a sandbox to check 2 castles of 400+ prims because of a complaint? Do you think creators would accept to give a full mod version of their items to let this group check? And what about all the complaints for items that are not even looking close to each other?

It looks to me a way to register and compare your items to others would help greatly this group if you don't want to work on photos only...

There will also be the problem with low prim objects that are real world objects eg. cars and such where the prim layout is to some extent pre-defined
if you check visually with the edit tool, two cars by different creators you will often find they often have the same basic prim arangement and count, but are visually obviously very different vehicles, as often the main difference is in the texturing and scripting of this type of object.
any 'fuzzy' check would detect a false positive on many objects like these.



Meybe, but the comparison check would have to be considered NOT DEFINITIVE proof of a copy and have a further visual inspection by the group, also anything that passes the test should be considered NOT CONCLUSIVE proof that it isn't a copy.

No it would just say what is different and what is similar... Like if you compare a horse and a dog you could first say they have both four legs and a tail, it would say both items have spheres and cubes, or maybe tell you if they are linked identically or twisted the same way.. I don't know... anything you find relevant...

Why not just have some way of listing products? We need one really, and if it's easy enough to search, and you know what keywords are relevant to your product then you can quickly find anyone who is selling a similar (or identical) product.

Say I make goth clothes, I could search for goth clothes in the product search (I'd probably have to narrow it down a little bit), and from there I can look at competitors, firstly to see what their stuff is like so I can decide what's missing, what I can therefore capitalise on, but also so I can see if someone has a product that looks suspiciously like mine and is trying to sell it. Then I can look periodically, sorting by age of product to look for any new goth clothes coming out that are similar to mine.

I think as an object registry comparison this would be too easily used against creators


my concerns about this kind of check against a registry are based on:
Eg1. (low prim RL objects)

AV1 Creates a business building RL cars. all cars are hand built (not copies)

AV2 who has had a buisness building cars in SL for some time, and has registerd thier cars, decides that the competition is too much, and make a copying claim against AV1

when AV1's cars are checked against the registry it reports that all cars are a 90% (same numer of prims, similar orientation etc) match to AV2's registered cars.

AV1 is put out of buisiness for copying without having copied anything.

Eg.2. ( high prim count building)
AV1 builds a castle that covers 4096Msq exactly and registers it.

AV2 copies the entire build, but during the process prims are rotated, added, and the whole thing is scaled so it covers 3600Msq Exactly

When the copy is compared to the registry it comes up with only a 12% similarity

AV2 can then register the COPY as an original build and get away with it.

As an additional tool in the fight against copying, comparison checks may have some uses but as a registry check it will be too easily open to abuse, without at least 90% reliability in the results of the comparison.

I was about to post a feature request and figured I'd come here first. I've read over all the suggestions and arguments in this forum post, and this comes to mind. We should police ourselves as the lindens have put it, but at the same time, the lindens could give us tools to make doing that easier. This feature request is a reflection of that:

I'm proposing a change to the way item creation works at the object level. The following is a method under a hypothetical situation:

1. Create your masterpiece. You want to be the sole creator of this masterpiece to sell, keep, or whatever.
2. Go into the objects menu, there will be one new checkbox and a picturebox next to it.
3. First place in a picture into the box of an image of your product. Then check the box next to it. The asset server timestamps it off to the side, thereby establishing that this object was created at that time. Once this simple step is added, lindenlabs could put in further script commands to compare these values. If the picture ever gets changed, then the system gets a new time stamp for modification. The previous picture gets stored with the creation date, and the modifications get their new pictures. This could map out changes to the object, and even allow us to update our products without fear of losing the ability to contest copywrite issues. All of this info can be stored with the object itself. For the sake of verification, the picture taken should match the object it is representing, so for each change to it, you should change the modification settings.

This is a simple method that mocks reporting that you created this at this time. Something that would be useful in complaints against copied material.

The next step is to incorperate scripting functions for this info. 1. to compare the timestamp dates. 2. to compare owners. 3. a method to scan the two objects for differences. 4. a means to report the findings.

From that point, there are several methods of policing it. Players could make scanners that compare two objects, and files an abuse report with all the info it attains. Another method is to allow objects to have ratings and scanners that can rate objects. if the object comes up to be a copy of another object, it gets a negative rating. At that point land owners can ban objects with negative ratings from entering. There are MANY ways of doing these things, and I'm sure there are plenty of other great ideas out there. My belief though is this. We can't do anything about others copying our content, but what we can do is make it very difficult and almost not worth it to use the copied content. Alot of this is off the top of my head, and I'm still forulating things in my mind for a safe accurate way of enforcement. but again, these things are up to us. We need to figure out what we want to do about it, and if those things are out of our bounds, ask the lindens for the tools to carry it out.

Also consider this. The copybot tool pulls the info off the stream. This tool could very well be the tool that could catch a copybot in action. Why not modify the copybot to compare data between two objects put in front of him. tons of possibilities here, even storing the data to be compared to later, compiling a list of objects out there that ARE copies. (IE. different creator, same object).

Anyway, this post has become very long winded. please comment and suggest alternatives. I plan on posting this into the feature request, but I would like it worded just right to represent the community at large.

Delerium Hannibal

I believe LL are already working on time stamping features, and it looks like they have addied a few comparison functions in todays update like llGetObjectPrimCount(key id)
and I saw on the blog an unconfirmed rumour that they have made some changes that might mean the end of copybot (for now).

As I understand it, they have made some changed to the "language" that the SL server and client use to talk to each other. This means that the currently public version of CopyBot will not be able to build copies of anything, because it's still speaking the old language, which now gets ignored.

I also understand that this does not prevent something like CopyBot from existing, it only breaks the existing one.

Problem is, it's nearly impossible to tell if something is stolen because the textures/prims are the exact same as the real item. Only the creator would know, if they have something that logs every person who's bought something from them -- and even then large shops with a lot of traffic could easily lose track of who bought what.

There's no easy solution to this, and I hate to shoot people's ideas down but many are good in theory and just wouldn't hold up with the community. A database of thieves could easily be sabotaged, and would require constant monitoring by someone, especially if it could be edited by anyone (similar to a wiki). And again, there's the issue of people making alts to steal things, so who knows who their main character is?

I doubt we'll be able to get around this til LL steps in with some sort of detection for these things in-game. It's an unfortunate problem of SL being so free ... when most other MMOs ban any account using third party programs used with the client.

i know thats why i said "for now"
but the changes they have made should slow the development of a new version, since it cant rez textured prims and its going to be harder to get the UUID for the textures anyway.
for it to work again its going to have to actually rip the textures and an account is going to have to pay L$ to upload them.


I know, Ive come up with several ideas i thought were great, but after picking them apart there not so feasable, like you said 'there is no easy soloution'