How to Emasculate CopyBot

(I am copying this post from the Linden Answers forum, since this seems to be a more appropriate place to post it).

I spent most of last evening reading with great interest the posts in LL official blog to Cory Linden's announcement of the new policy regarding the CopyBot issue. It occurs to me that there should be a solution to this problem: I wonder what you techie guys think of the following idea:

It is clearly impossible to prevent unauthorized copying of SL content; however, maybe miscreants can be prevented from actually using their illgotten stuff in-world. Would it be possible for LL to provide a registry of objects and textures? Content creators could register their creations together with lists of customers who have purchased their IP. When any member saved an object or texture to his inventory, the registry could be queried to see if the content was registered. If the content was registered and the member was not a listed owner, then his stolen copy could be deleted and disiplinary action could be initiated.

I don't think that complete copies of objects and textures would have to be stored in the registry, just "fingerprints" for textures and some "invariants" for object parameters. Also, the registry should probably catch close matches, so someone couldn't, for example, change one pixel of a texture to prevent a match. Also, only content beyond a certain complexity should be registered (we wouldn't want people registering simple prims and their compounds). Anyway, those are a few of my thoughts.

Craig

It wouldn't work. How would the system verify that a copybotted object that is requesting registration ISN'T the same as one that's already been registered? What if it's changed slightly to be nearly identicle, but indistinguishable by the human eye?

We don't even need this system, it should be obvious to anybody if an object is a suspicious copy of your own work, in which case you report it to LL and they can check which one was created first and decide if the similarities are enough to warrant a copy infringement.
Registering would just be adding a coded tool that works worse than your eyes and common-sense

Reply to Haravikk:

I don't think content developers want to be constantly scouring the world looking for copies of their own work; the point of my idea is to suggest a possible mechanism whereby illegal copies could be automatically identified without any human interaction.

Reply to Draco:

Exact copies of objects are easy to identify algorithmically; after all, objects are defined by relatively few parameters (textures require more thought). As you point out, a harder problem would be to identify nearly identical copies. One idea is to put tolerances around parameters and look for matches within those tolerances. I'll leave it to the experts to think of other ways to find trivially modified copies. By the way, I have noticed that if the parameters of exquisitely fitted prims are only slightly modified, the thing is likely to look "off".

You do realise that SL contain several billions of objects?

And i am sorry but as a content creator it is my job to make sure my IP is respected, in RL its up to the IP owner to fill a complain.