Content Theft just getting easier?

After 5 years of Second Life, with all the stupid problems, the long overdue errors that don't get fixed, inventory disappearing, promised updates that never come, and god knows how many other things, I have stuck with SL for the longest time. This morning I watched something that made my heart sink lower than it ever has, and I'm not even sure what I feel right now.

I run a wrestling federation in Second Life and we've been going strong for 2 years. I've spent hundreds of hours working on the animations for our system to provide the most realism possible. I make no money from the fed, and do it simply for the enjoyment that I and the wrestlers get from it. However, just a few hours ago, I witnessed a new account coming in, watch a match between two people, and shortly afterwards got inside our ring and was animating themselves with every animation in our system. Furthermore, as a slap in the face before he left, I was sent a copy with an IM "thanking me" for the animations.

I did some research and came to find that there are ways of simply standing in a sim and being able to copy every animation, every sound, and more...just by the press of a button. I had a business of mine hit (and hit hard) when CopyBot first hit the stands and I was glad it seemed to only affect objects and not what's inside. Now I'm finding it's possible with just about anything, and even have seen a copy of the entire Bloodlines script, cracked for anyone to download.

So that brings me to my point...is it just getting easier for people to steal whatever they want? With the Burning Life "theftbox" being a decent showing of this lately, it makes me question why things like this are so simple. I even tried using Cryolife and Neillife on my own objects and animations and was floored by the simplicity of it. It seems that literally no content is safe. It's even to a point that LL is being sued and their response is "we're not responsible".

I'm considering calling it quits and putting my effort elsewhere, but I wanted to post this to see what people say and see if there is any light at the end of this really sickening tunnel here.

sigh.

Submit an AR and a DMCA takedown notice against the thief. Maybe Stroker will let you join in his lawsuit against LL, if you ask nice and bring a checkbook to help pay the legal fees.

Yes, it's getting worse, and it's nearly to the point that making content with the idea of profiting from its sale is futile. But moaning about it here won't help a thing.

Well, part of this was because I wanted to just state what happened, show people exactly how easy it's gotten. I know that tons of people are getting blindsided by content theft, and some don't even realize how. I also wanted to see if anyone has heard ANYTHING about LL doing something to fix this, or if they're going the "it's not our problem, it's your content not ours" route.

Somebody started a thread here yesterday about one of those viewers, including links to demo videos. The thread got removed but I watched them before that happened. I agree that it's really disheartening, even for those of us who none of it has affected (at least not to our knowledge).

Even apart from that type of thing, like you, I've seen many things from LL that I've found disheartening, even though many of them don't affect me, to the extent that I'd completely lost interest in SL, and didn't log in for quite a while except to deal with customer things. I still don't have much interest and I'm still of the frame in mind that I just don't care if I stay or go.

In your case, although it's very disheartening for you, you weren't selling the animations so it's only aggravating and shouldn't stop you from continuing as normal - AFTER you've ARed the person who stole the animations, and included the IM text with the AR - *and* asked for an IP ban on the person, as it's the only thing that has any chance of stopping him coming back and doing it again anywhere and everywhere that he fancies stealing stuff.

IMHO, you are witnessing the death throes of the SL economy. If you have been here for five years, then you understand the trend. This thread...

/327/d5/348572/1.html


... as well as the Burning Life one you just mentioned clearly show how far things have devolved. You have very little recourse other than to file an AR and present your evidence as has already been suggested.

On the brighter side, you don't have to worry about monetary losses due to this theft. Keep doing what you are doing, and enjoy the ride while it lasts.

Keep an eye out for your animations on the market, and make sure to file a DMCA notice if you find them for sale some place.

Oh, didn't you hear? There's something called SLFreedom that lets you go around IP banning. I also found out that this was the SECOND time it happened this morning, as someone else came in while I was offline and did the same shit.

Content creators, do your research. It seems nothing is safe anymore. I'm reading on how easy it is to hack an item and make it full perm, how to bypass bannings, how to crack scripts to make them modifiable...and it's not even that hard to do. This is below script kiddies level. Again, if you have any content in SL, read up on this before you get hit like I did.

Well, you named a couple of the things people can google so this thread will be deleted soon ...

Yes, it has become stupid easy to copy anything at all.

If they delete it, they can delete my account with it. Those that want to know how to do this stuff already know how or where to find it. That would just be the end to all this if I'm the one getting slapped for saying that it exists. Content creators have the right to know what's out there.

I hadn't heard of SLFreedom but I did a search on it and I have now. It's all very grim indeed.

I think that LL needs to do away with open source viewer code and only allow logins with the LL 'official' viewer. It'd sort most of the bots out too - including mine

Eric - file a DMCA Report. LL _are_ acting promptly on them. Don't let them get away with this!

You may have trouble with this, actually..

The truth is, that "copying" animations in this way was ALWAYS possible with just the bare Linden client. Advanced > Character > Animation Info gives you the UUIDs of all the animations an avatar is running. The tricky bit is actually getting that UUID back into the world, because LSL scripts (and the regular interface) won't let you run an animation by UUID - but it seems that the third-party clients will, and also that they have some way of creating inventory items via UUID (I don't know how that would work.. maybe I need to go and read some diffs..)

I don't know if it's DMCA-able, but I'd take care. If the "copied" objects have the same UUID as yours, then if they're taken down, your copies will go too!

My issue isn't that someone could sell it. That's just frosting on this shit cake. The cake itself is that someone came in, just STOOD INFRONT OF ME, and walked out with copies of every animation I had just uploaded and played. If it's that easy, DMCA against a single person won't fix the problem. If it's that easy, I'm looking more at LL for the fact that it's that simple to do.

Seriously, I haven't felt this sick in a long time, just watching someone stand there and walk out with about 20+ hours of work without any effort at all.

This was clearly someone doing it for "fun" rather than someone stealing content in order to resell it. They were simply flaunting the ability to copy.
They would probably expect that avatar to be ARed and nuked in the circumstances.
If their "fun" extended to redistribution, then something in such a niche market should be readily detectable.

There is a marketing term called "Critical Mass" where your marketing efforts go down significantly compared to public awareness of what you are marketing. People have been marketing content theft long enough in SL that it's critical mass awareness was reached a long time ago. Consider this - Content creators are probably the most highly motivated people in this market when it comes to figuring out how to steal their own livelihood. We know. We've known for quite a while. There is no need to shout from the mountain tops. Just deal with the situation at hand, and if you get lucky enough to deal this one person a death blow, then shout your victory from the mountain tops. That's the kind of marketing this economy needs.

I still find it *very* hard to think of any reason why LL accept connections from open proxy servers.

Any decent email server will refuse connections for open relays in order to reduce spam. The same should apply for LL in the case of proxies.

Honestly, myself and a few others I talked to had no idea that content theft had spread this far. Some of these guys have been in SL as long as I have, so I figured there's a good chance that other content creators don't know just how easy it is. There's little to no protection or prevention either, especially if you don't see who took it. Now with the ability to modify an object creator's name/UUID, it's just showing even more how many sharks there are in the water.

As well, regardless of if it was to show off or if there may be future distribution, it's the fact that it's so simple right now, and apparently has been for some time. That's why the point of this was how easy it's gotten, not what I can do to stop the person that stole them from using it.

I think LL needs to step up and not only do something about it but they also need to announce what they are doing both as assurances to content creators and as a warning to those who steal things. All these stories I've been reading about are really affecting my perception of SL right now. I don't think I'll be creating anything soon.

So let me get this straight:

I can download one of those viewers, made from the code LL made available to anyone.

I can then walk up to any AV and copy the skin, the clothes they are wearing and the animations from that AV.

Huh?

And this is happening right now? And LL hasn't pulled a plug on any of this?

And most of the SL population has no idea this is happening?

Yes.

Yes.

Yes.

Yes.

Yes.

*bump*

They probably didn't actually copy anything. Just like you can apply a texture to a prim by UUID alone you can play an animation by UUID alone. In neither case do you actually have (or need) a copy in inventory.

That said, it's probably entirely possible to just copy animations by downloading the animation and then reuploading, but given the description this was probably the analogy of people who thought it was funny to use the old copybot to "clone" someone nearby just to creep them out (which included playing the same animations as the original avie back in 2006 so this is nothing new).

Linden Lab has done something about it.

A few weeks ago (I don't have the link, sorry), they blogged that they were going to have some sort of upcoming "policy" regarding third party viewers.

They announced an intent to create a policy. What more do you want?

1. Yep

2. Yep. Though Emerald is trying something called "Clothing Layer Protection," that only sends the compiled image of the layers you've got on, so there is less chance of it happening. This is a supposedly, because I don't know if it works.

3. Yep. Welcome to LL's idea of SL.

4. Actually, it's been happening since around the time I started, probably before. So.. yeah. At first, LL refused to get into an arms-race to keep it from happening.. then they open sourced the viewer.

5. Pretty much. Most of the population aren't content creators, don't read the forums/third-party blogs and/or drink rather heavily from LL's koolaid.

Right now, it's starting to bite LL in the ass, because any attempt to seriously court the big companies is going to be met with defeat due to the fact that the big companies are rabid about their own IPs. And while the whole "behind the firewall" crap might get them for meetings, it won't net them any sort of advertising benefit, like being on the regular grid, dealing with the regular residents would. And they won't like having their stuff ripped any more than we do. I'm just waiting until one of them decides to take LL's head off because of it.

And worse, this has been happening before LL made the viewer code afailable, the original copybot could clone an avatar without a single line of code from LL.

Copyright infringement of digital content is nothing new. SL isn't some magical place where it can be prevented any more than it can be prevented by other digital content creators (like musicians/moviemakers/etc).

LL can be more proactive about dealing with it, but we also need tools to help us detect it better and sooner. Ultimately, the only recourse is the law, with which ALL content creators have to deal.

What we are seeing is the natural progression of better and more sophisticated tools which CAN be used for infringing purposes, though they are not always intended for such.

I honestly don't see a big company really care much one way or the other since if they're so concerned about copyright then they wouldn't have a website where all you have to do to "steal" something is File / Save As.

They will care about misuse of their trademark(s) but that happens whether they're in SL or not.

If anything those companies would likely be more annoyed with regular residents than content thieves since it's not the content thieves who are infringing on their trademarks or copyrights (ie all the halloween outfits that were named after or modelled on or "inspired by" copyrighted/trademarked material).