retroengeneering and idea stealing

Mr. D

As always, I admire your way of thinking.


It's exactly what rational people have been saying for the longest. Unfortunately, sl's self-described "creators" think they're the originators of each and every item they've put together. And no one but them has any right whatsoever.

Imagine that.

I wonder why they haven't complained of someone else using the same color they've used on items.

Never know, could be next.

No it's not bad. It's a normal way of doing things.

Because they're probably not QUITE as avaricious as Disney.

I am late but feel the need to add to this. A year back or so I created something very unique. Of course I can't claim ownership of the idea. Now a year later all of my competitors(and many others) stock such an item.

I completely understand this is the way a free market works. But that does not stop me from getting frustrated and SLdieing inside each time I see a crappy copy. I know it is fruitless to even let it worry me, it's just a downer watching my signature product be treated so badly.

It's also hard to take the advise of make more, better, faster. As I now have, at least a couple people, watching my progress. Waiting for the next good idea....for their store...

Most of the time I can ignore this kinds stuff, but a nieghbor just hung his latest product near the corner of a mainland plot I happily own. Guess what it is...

I can understand how frustrating and/or disappointing it can be, but it can't really be any other way. Take the company that invented the electrically operated direction indicators for cars, for instance. There is no way that only the owners of that make of car should be allowed them. General ideas have to be open to all. The exact methods can by patented in RL, of course.

I don't know what your signature product is, but in the OP's case, he wasn't the first to make waves in SL (from what I understand from this thread). Apparently he was the first to make the improvements that he made, so the original wavemaker could feel exactly as you do.

Also, it is very beneficial that general ideas are open to all - it's the way that we users are able to continually buy improved versions and developments of ideas, and at costs that go down as the next improvement comes along. If it wasn't that way, we would all be stuck with buying one make of plasma TV at a high price, or not having one at all.

Serious manufacturers assume that their inovative ideas will be emulated by other businesses, so they continually develope them, so they can come out with, and promote, better products, while the others are still selling what have now become inferior products. That's the way they have to compete. Most SL businesses are not treated as seriously as that though, and it's easy to get frustrated, sit back, and give up.

Thanks for responding Phil. I think i even agree with you.*gasp*

You mention patents and seriousness. I say these go hand in hand. In order to patent something one has to be prepared to fend off the lawyers of nearby patent holders. This forces a level of seriousness that most(danger guess) of us have no intentions to bring to SL.

For instance, somewhere there is a patent for the turn indicators(say the "return to off position when done turning" switch) that some manufacture has to play(or pay) around. That protects the time/investment the original inventor/creator spent designing it.

We wont see that sort of protection in SL unless we get the patent lawyers involved. Which honestly, does not sound fun at all.

Personally, I am here as a hobbiest, expanding my interntez skillz for the future revolutions =P.

I do understand and appreciate you advice about continually expanding and developing products to stay ahead, so thank you. =) Ill just have to hide in my sekrit base. =P

A hammock? A porch swing?

I think the only real difference between creating in SL and creating in RL is that in SL times is telescoped. In RL your idea would be copied by others (which is just the way humans have improved things over the centuries) over time; in SL you can put out a wonderful innovation today that you sweated over for six months only to find it in someone else's shop in a week.

LOL

a little more unique than that, at least it was a year ago...

But I get your point...

Don't be surprised - I usually make good sense Have we locked horns in the past? If we have, I don't remember. I rarely remember the names of people who I've had a real ding-dong with.

True. I'm sure that the most serious business people in SL do continue to at least bring out new products frequently, just to keep themselves popular and at the front. I'm thinking of women's clothes at the moment, but others must do the same.

A good example of ideas being open to all, but the methods are patented and are not open to all, is search engines. They hold and apply for any number of patents on methods, even when they have no intention of using them at the time. Google (at least) applies for, and gets, patents on just about every decent-sounding method they can think of. And yet the idea of a search engine - producing lists of relevant results for a search query, and presenting them in pretty much the same way - is open to all.

Interestingly, according to Google, the heart of the Google system is PageRank, which was invented by, and named after, Larry Page, one of the two Google founders, while they were developing the engine as students at Stanford univeristy. But Stanford Uni owns the patent, and not Google or the founders, so Google can only use it with Stanford's permission - whether paid for or not. When Google started to become a huge success, other engines copied Google, including a form of PageRank. They couldn't do it in exactly the same way because of the patent, but they did use the idea of it.

Well PAge rank is used now as base argument to study in databases and internet software , anyway ....
I just discovered three other epople that cloned , copied and retroengeneerized my stuff , and not only waves ... after making a more wide inquisition I discovered that seems I am quite a target now .... and all say Dmca is useless to do..... Nice way to disrupt markets and nice sims ....

The problem is, with the apparent SL feature freeze, the range of implementable functions that anyone cares about is static. Competition for them will continue for a while, then probably fall when open source gets to them.

Well any reason why you can't do the same or better improvements to your product and drop your price under theirs or:
Are they a better creator than you are and responding to market demand?
Are they better at marketing than you are?
Are they using cheap non-union labour perhaps?
Are they getting the raw materials cheaper than you somehow?

Im my time I've brought quite a few products in SL and offered ideas for improvements to some creators , got a few "no sorry, I like it as it is" so then modified the product to my needs for my personal use.

You omit the alternatives that are possible in SL:

- They just want to "win" and don't care about profit
- They don't want to go pro so don't care about profit
- They are working for an MDC and will get paid far more out-world
- They are building a portfolio for recruitment to the above
- They have another in-world business that makes all the money they need and don't care about making profit from this product (eg, Anshe's L$10 furniture)
- They are wilfully taking a loss to kill competition (happens in RL too but is much cheaper in SL)

What freeze? There's been new features added in at least half of the recent server and client updates.

Not scriptable ones, though. The last of those was the touch coordinates functions, and though they can save a few prims, they didn't add much in terms of functions people care about.

The ones that were added 1.21, which is the current version?

Also PRIM_SCULPT_FLAG_MIRROR and PRIM_SCULPT_FLAG_INVERT, also in 1.21, which (again) is the current version.

Right, but what new markets did they create? None. What functions-as-experienced, that people card about, did they add? None.

Why do you expect new features to create new markets? New features may *destroy* markets (for example, if they ever implement llTeleportAgent my teleporters are not going to sell nearly as well), but you create markets by discovering a new unfilled need and filling it. You, the programmer, not Linden Labs. If Linden Labs does it then everyone gets the new feature, and there's NO market.

What new *opportunities* do these functions give? They let you create precise color selectors, detailed map selectors and other 2d selectors that were not even in principle possible no matter how many prims you tried to use... a 256x256 color selector using prims would require 64k prinms in a single object!

That's not true at all. When scripted camera control was added there was a market as many people developed the idea in different ways and with different designs.



So people who already made colour switching items can improve them, but it doesn't create a new category the way that camera control, animations, etc did.

I found your waves too a few weeks back actually and made a note of your name. I thought they were fantastic.

At the end of the day regardless of whom is first with an idea, if the idea is *good* it spreads and many will take inspiration from it.

My personal take is what keeps your business in front of others is your approach. As an example, waves are used a lot in SL. Why not do deals with content creators who stage sims (*cough* e.g. me) who get good traffic and who sell lifestyle products. The Creator puts your waves out for free, you put a vendor box to purchase them, you give the creator a small % in commission.

There are huge residential sims e.g. Costa Rica. Why not offer their residents a deal on waves and market them through the communities like that. Things like that simply make your product more viral and likely to get purchased.

I am sure you cover some of that, but whenever my work is ripped (ripped not inspired from) what I always take comfort from is making a successful business is not just about the idea. It's about the customer service, branding, experience, and all the bolts on that makes your product what it is.

Don't give up the waves, I think they are really great.

Camera control is a pretty limited market. I've got a product in that market and, well, just about every *practical* camera control tool I've seen has basically been something like my Tinycam. Mostly what camera control does is allows vehicles that are already using the old vehicle camera to do a slightly better job of it... beyond that, it's just too limited. I tried building an extension of Tinycam for macro avatars and you just don't have enough ability to change the default focus for it to be useful.

The touch functions allow you to build new kinds of map HUDs, drawing pads (currently the closest things to a drawing pad use mouselook), things that you simply can't do without them.

And waves (going back to the original topic) weren't created from any new feature, they were created by Ante Flan having a cool idea and implementing it. No new features needed to be added.

The lolpole pen is a freebie, though, and its unlikely drawing pads need to be more serious than that. I've had a grid based one developed for almost a year with no interest, anyway.



Sure, but that's beside the point. If the feature set is static then all the applications people care about will be exhausted in finite time. Why do you think there is such an interest IRL in mobile platforms and alternative user experiences? Because on desktop PCs, once you have Office, Explorer and maybe Photoshop Elements, you have all that 90% of users will ever want (other than games).

That's technically true, but effectively meaningless. LSL is Turing-complete. The number of potential products using the existing functionality is larger than the number of atoms in the visible universe... and that's without writing multiple scripts and using link messages.

Which is why I added the caveat, "that people care about". There are near-unlimited potential programs for Windows too, but that doesn't change the fact that most people want to surf the web and write letters. Most of the popular functions in SL are simple and social - that's why still no-one has built a better poseball (although I still sigh when I see one that requires AOs to be turned off, scripting library, people) and even "collars", which are probably the most sophisticated scripted objects in common use (not counting weapons or multifunction gadgets) are still dominated by a brand from 2005 because it does all that community needs.