retroengeneering and idea stealing

That's not what the OP was about. It wasn't like the competitor came out with a better product on their own. They stole the original with a third party program designed to steal creative content. It's one thing for me to try to start my own softdrink brand by inventing a wholely new product that I believe is better than Coke or Pepsi. It's another thing for me to hire a hacker, steal the formulas for those softdrinks, and create mine with that information.

The only reason this happens to SL entreprenuers and not Coca Cola or Pepsico, is because those companies have a team of lawyers and scientists ready to fight copywrite and trademark infringement. The private SL scripter or bulder does not. However, just because it happens frequently in SL, it's no more moral, when it happens to the little guy than when it happens to a big, multinational corporation. It drives me nuts when armchair economists excused this on forums because the victim isn't wealthy enough to defend themselves from having their work co-opted.

PS. I wasn't attacking anyone in particular. Isablan Neva posted the message I've quoted, but this was not directed at him/her (don't know which in RL) personally.

Actually, the formula for Coke has been published many times. It's an "open secret" by now.

Here is my take on the whole theft issue in general. If you make something in SL, you need to be prepared that someone is going to come along and steal it, make a better version etc. That should be built into your mindset. When clothing creators go balistic because someone stole a texture or an entire outfit, tbh they need to just move on. It is one item out of the many they make and it is not going to make or break them.

As for folks like Yumi and the OP who have made something wonderful and then someone comes along and with whatever method makes one that is more popular...they also need to move on. Make something else that is better....lower their own price to match....do more promotion...etc. I have never once heard of either person's items until this forum. If i havent heard of it, i cant buy it.

To think that you will make an item and then corner the market on it is just fantasy. Look at crocs shoes and cheaper copies...look at designer dresses and cheaper copies...the RL list goes on and on and on. There is room for everyone in the marketplace. The high end and low end version of things. If there wasnt, then there would be one hammer at home depot, one pair of brown shoes at payless, etc. But if you dont continue to produce new and different items yourself...you will be left in the dust.

Another example...I make curtains and sell a huge amount of them. I have visited my competitors just to see what is out there...they focus mostly on heavily scripted things...different levels of tranparency, movement up down and sideways, etc. I focus on how the curtains look. Mine are not heavily scripted and i wont be chasing down their scripts to make mine that way. There is room for both versions of curtains...however...if i dont constantly look for ways to make mine better and give my customers reasons to come back and see new stuff...I will soon be forgotten. It is a simple concept.

All this squawking and ringing of hands does not change the situation and it drains alot of energy from the folks lamenting. Put all that energy to good use and do something to change your situation.

My basis is simply that I think most of your points are completely wrong. I am not going to going into each point and tell you why. Why not? Argent and others in the past have attempted this and from what I can see nothing has been able to help you. I do not consider myself able to succeed where they have failed and so I will not waste my time or yours. I am not actually convinced you really want help despite what you say.

The OP says that a third party has stolen their content using copybot but in fact when challenged has not addressed the fact that nothing can steal scripts and yet scripts are at least part of why they consider their product is different.



It is not just the scripts but the scripts combined with everything else. Therefore the scripts are part of the secret sauce.

Lets break it down logically:

* The prim is using a sculpty map so there is no magic in the prim.

* There is value in the textures but the textures are going to have to be really special for the OP to think their product is that different to others already in existence. The OP has already said that no one component of the waves is special so lets say the textures are pretty similar to what was already in existence before.

* So the thing that differentiates the product has to be in the scripts or it does not exist. The OP has already stated that the scripts are not rocket science and so we can assume from this that they are just standard texture animating scripts that anyone with lsl skill could come up with.

What does that leave to copybot realistically? Nothing. The magic is in combining the 3 things together according to the OP.

The first of those things does not require anything other than creating a prim of approximately the right size.

The second does not require copybot and could have been grabbed by a texture grabber. The third cannot be copied even if it was necessary to copy them (which by the sounds of it, was not).

The only thing left as special is the idea of combining the items together which is not a protectable thing as whilst it may have seem special to the OP, it is conceivable that others have come up with the same idea also and just created a similar product independently.

The OP has offered no reason why they think that the waves are being copybotted. They are not claiming to have bought a copy of the competition and examined them part by part to come to this conclusion. They are not even claiming their textures are being used.

What is likely, in my opinion, is that the OP does not understand what copybot can and cannot do, has seen some similar waves products to his and assumed they must be being copied because they have overestimated the un-obviousness of the techniques they are using. Then they have jumped on the copybot hysteria bandwagon when looking for something to blame for their revenue being impacted by the other products.

I dont wander anything around , I have seen boots , I just didnt take screeens , I v seen my products with another name on , but I couldnt do anything , and second waves are just one of the severall stuff hacked .... and you are worn on one thing , prices arent cheaper but on countrary are higher , couse my prices are for sets and packs of stuff not for a single wave or item ... take those single itesm make a pack and multiply for their prices and you have at least 2 times more the pricesI do .... also I saw some clearly copying like subsurface ideas and other stuff... so whatever I will make now it will be taken and remade ....and this is just pissing me out and killing inspiration to me to create something different or invent stuff that isnt present in SL .....

So is better as all I read to just sit ... wait some other come out with ideas ,m than focus all my talent and attention into reproducing stuff of other sbyut better may be and cheaper prices so I can gain with no effort , just becouse gain is the only thing important on this approach of things....

If they're actually using your own textures (or reuploaded versions thereof) then you should file a DMCA notice with Linden Labs.

With one breath you talk about your ideas being copied and then in the next you talk about actual products being copied. Which is it?

If your products are being copied, which parts of them are being copied? The textures? The prims? It cannot be the scripts.

If only your ideas are being copied then you need to stop complaining about copybot.

I see a lot of complaining but very little actual information being given about it and that makes me think it is all BS.

I dont want to make here accuses and on ... so I just post this picture as sample for others ... as u can see initials and ending letters arent mine , and this is one of my products ... I guess Copybot is what makes this no?

http://img401.imageshack.us/my.php?image=32900094jp5.jpg

You were originally talking about waves not palm trees.

Sure copybot can copy palm tree prims and the textures can easily be grabbed. However palm trees are also easy to make if you have the right textures. How are you sure they are your textures? Did you take the pictures or source them from another party? If the latter how can you be sure the other trees are not made legally?
If you are that certain there was really copying happening then as Argent says, file a DMCA.

Also why all this talk about stealing your ideas though? Were the waves just an idea that you think someone else stole or do you still think they were copybotted?

Argent and Love haven't attempted it, as I mentioned. Telling me that "others can build" does not in anyway disagree with the point that "I (Yumi) cannot build". To disagree with that you would have to try to prove that "I (Yumi) can build", which would involve helping me do so.

That's the whole point. I offered to follow commands because that's a key part of education (no matter what theorists say) - instruction and obedience enables the teacher to engineer the student to have experiences for themselves that their uneducated freedom might not have chosen. It's used throughout real education ("do this or fail the class".



I'd say, "there's something wrong with SL because of X, and disproving X will include helping me". It's all I've been able to think of. People will, apparantly, put much more effort into defending SL than they will into helping by default.



The problem is the tacit assumption that we can just "make new stuff". That's the point. For artists that's not easy, but for scripters it's nearly impossible. And I'm afraid that Argent really is wrong about constant innovation being available in programming. There might be aleph-1 programs possible, but unfortunately aleph-0 of them are useless instruction sequences which achieve nothing, aleph-0 of them are spyware or trojans, and so on. If it was really true that there were still infinite innovations available in programming, then we would still be seeing Microsoft and OpenOffice, Adobe and JASC, etc, releasing new features like firehoses in hot competition. As it is, the last release of Office was more or less a desperate attempt by MS to mess with the user interface of Office so that people would find adapting to OpenOffice harder. There just aren't any new features it needs, and surveys consistently show that people only use about 30% of the features it already has. If groups of thousands of paid professional engineers can't think of any new applications for desktop machines, how can you expect individuals to do the same in SL?

Well if you dont believe me then I guve Up I am not hhere to enforce my ideas or convince anyone if you are fine with the systems ....
I dont see any further reason to prove i was and am plagiarized and copybotted , one dont exclude the other but one dont include also the other .... they are separate and same time concurrent factors that 's making more and more difficult to be able to payfor sims that I allowed anyone fto enjjoy , thats the difference I suppose between peole that liek to create and enjoy the game and people that are here to make money only ....

It is my opinion that if you come to the forums complaining that your stuff is being copybotted and your ideas are being stolen then you should at least be prepared to give some specific details to back it up.
So far we have half a dozen pages of posts and only your previous one actually showed anything that came close to being very specific.

I can offer you some classical conditioning to help break you out of this rut... I might not succeed, but the positive and negative feedback I could offer would be fun (for me, anyway).

You ability to build or not build is not the majority of what I disagree with in your posts. I am actually willing to beleive you will never be able to build.

One of the main things I disagree with you on in this thread is your stance on the limitations of scripting in SL, and following on from that your opinion of programming as a whole pointing to business software to back up your position.

Positive and negative feedback is operant conditioning. Classical conditioning is learning that bells mean dinner.



Which would, arguably, be a problem with SL (depending on your view of SL's goals).



Again, this is the view taken by Microsoft, Adobe, the UK professional society for Computing, and multiple Universities. Now, yes, OK, business software is only one angle, but games software has its own problems in the real world (usually revolving around being unable to innovate because a mainstream title means risking hundreds of thousands of dollars), and honestly I've never really seen any really popular games in SL that didn't invove gambling in some fashion.

Except that apparently it doesn't. So that trick doesn't work, *and* it pisses people off.

Considering that SL is able to foster many people who build and nothing can be all things to all people I would say the fault does not lie with SL.

I would like to see where this view is being expressed, please post a link to something that backs up what you are asserting is the position of these companies and universities.

I never mentioned games, there are many categories of software, not just business and games.

There are innovations in forensics analysis software, media processing, artificial intelligence, software support for new types of input devices, the list goes on...

Even there you are wrong or have you not heard of Tiny Empires? This SL based game has almost a cult following. I am sure there are some others also.

That I cannot build has not yet been disproven, and thus neither has the statement that some cannot.



Well, I'm sorry if I've annoyed people, but what am I supposed to do? Sit quietly in the corner?

You said yourself that putting the prims together is not really the problem, it is that you don't know where to start, textures or prims and how to lay it out. That is not a building problem, it is a design problem. SL tools deal with building only and not design.
Therefore it cannot be an SL problem.
Design experience is gained either through trying, failing, trying and eventually gaining knowledge of what works and what does not or by gaining some formal education on the principles of design in the area that you are interested in. The latter possibly being overkill for SL prims mostly.

So would I, if it wasn't that I would have appreciated one of those fostering experiences myself, but never got one.



I did actually have a citation, and if I can find it again I will post it.



Ok. But the point is that there are only a finite number of uses that mainstream people have for a computer. To do work; to play games; to produce art of various kinds.



One game, a year old, with a recruitment scheme, does not a trend demonstrate. I mean, I remember going to the Linden's Arcadia event a while back where they showed off several very good scripted games, and all of them were barely ever seen again, except for DarkLife.

Part of the goal of SL was to inspire people to become creative (at least it was at one point), in which case it has failed to do that. Within that, the question is if _anything_ could have been displayed on my screen which would have succeeded, and I believe that it could. If any screen display would have done it, it is to some extent SL's fault. After all, SL doesn't even have to have geography if it doesn't help.



I did actually read a beginners' design book, which was more to do with posters/presentations than prims, but it helped a lot with vendor panels (and my sales went up a bit as a result). But I don't know that anyone's teaching that or writing about it in SL.

failed to inspire creativity?

EVERYTHING you see in SL is user created. even linden textures, trees, railroads, etc are created inworld by LL employees who must be users to create it. what inworld item, texture or animation is not created by a user, spawned by creative ideas? name one thing.

Neither did I and yet I know how to build certain things and I always knew from going places, meeting people and asking questions that if I wanted some help that I should attend a class on it at such places like NCI. Why are you not trying that?

You are narrowing the criteria now and even then is that really true? SL is a very new concept that you could not use your computer for in the past, there will be others.
The majority of people do not know how to get the most from their computers, the majority of people know only how to do the most basic of things with it. That does not mean it is not capable of doing more.

Nevertheless it is one example. Plus those other games you saw that were good, they must disprove your own theory that scripting is very limited otherwise how could they exist? Scripting like all programming is limited by imagination and ingenuity only.

See this is an a statement where I think you are not only off the mark but out of the ball park.
I am amazed you can think this, it has inspired many to create, myself included.