Limiting theft by limiting creation

A lot of people would like to "fix" (or at least minimize) the content theft problem by eliminating basic accounts. I'm pretty sure this is never going to happen, since LL wants everybody to be able to get in quickly for a concert or event without actually being a full-time resident.

Personally, I'm of the school that freebie accounts should be allowed but limited in what they can do (less inventory, fewer login hours, etc.). And the latest content theft thread made me wonder -- would it be possible to minimize it by limiting freebie accounts' ability to "create" content?

We wouldn't want to disable content creation entirely for basic accounts, since that would discourage a lot of potential creators from joining. But is there any way that it could be limited that would do more good than harm? Maybe saying they could only create on certain Linden-owned properties, or only on parcels that allowed it?

I'm not talking about just building/rezzing privs here, since we have parcel-based restrictions on those already, but about creating or copying any kind of content in inventory too. Would that be possible? I suppose if the stolen information was held in the browser's cache (I've no idea how the copying actually works), they could just wait until they were on a parcel with the right privs, but if the default setting was privs-off, would that at least discourage theft by increasing the hassle factor?

Or maybe restricting the copy/transfer perms of items created by unverifieds? Or tagging the items some other way? Or limiting content creation to verified accounts, regardless of whether they're premium or basic?

I'm just thinking there must be some halfway point between "no freebie accounts" and "anyone can steal anything". And I'm wondering why all the discussion I've seen focuses on viewer apps and transfer permissions and not on the ability to bring an item into existence. Is there something about the way the content theft techniques work that I'm blatantly misunderstanding?

heck limit the crap out of NPIOF..look where a lot of the abuse comes from..accounts that don't have to up some sort of info but an email address under the name of bozo the clown or zip wiffle and the eazy 5 sledders..

Honestly i think they should give people a reason to want to be premium and they should give people a reason to want to go basic and get off of NPIOF..don't give them millions of reasons to stay NPIOF

The problem with the proposal I think is that the free accounts are, in a lot of ways, superior to premium accounts. A premium account requires payment for benefits you may not need (stipend, a tier-free plot of mainland), and there is actually a penalty for having a premium account (if you miss a payment, you are denied login; you can even lose your inventory if your premium account goes unpaid for too long).

If the free accounts were truly teaser accounts- used for someone to get a taste of Second Life and then sign up for the full service- then I could see using Premium accounts as a way of regulating other aspects of Second Life. However, the free accounts are not just teaser accounts- they are viable alternatives to premium accounts and, for many serious, dedicated users- far better than premium accounts.

I'm not sure how much content theft would be prevented anyway. It would discourage it at some margin. But if there is money to be made or saved from content theft, I'm not sure that a ten-dollar pricetag is much of a deterrent.

Edit: I make a lot of use of free content. Not stolen; there are a lot of people who actually make quality content and make it available for free to the rest of Second Life, for reasons that are their own. There are many creators who are already giving up time to give us all gifts- do we really want to ask them to pay a fee for the privilige of giving us free content?

Just don't let the NPIOF accounts sell anything.

I like the current system of deal with it when it happens.

IS there really any way to PREVENT theft any more so than in real life?

Think carefully....

(It's kind of like the backlash against immigration when crime goes up. Wrong solution.)

It is not important if an account is basic or premium, but I definately agree it DOES matter whether an account is verified or not.

In other threads I said the same as here: No transfer rights for non-verified accounts. Or only limited transfer rights. Disabling selling is not enough, as many ripped items are spread as freebies anyway. Transfer without payment only between people on friends list?

However, I doubt LL actually reads this stuff. They are starting to understand they need to do something (see the viewer registry) but they are terribly slow. Eventually something will happen, lets hope it is not too late too.

Why does it?

Take away the freedom and you take away the fun. With freedom comes a price, would you rather live in a dictatorship with low crime or a democracy or republic with higher crime. Personally I was raised to think freedom is always better.

/me paints face blue

I fully support limiting creation and outgoing inventory transfer of objects from accounts with no payment info/RL info on file with LL. They should be able to create no transfer objects only, if they can create at all. They can receive anything, but can only send notecards and landmarks.

I have no problem with free accounts, only anonymous ones. If you want to be a full participant in SL, you need to respect your fellow residents enough to verify yourself, so we know you are less likely to be a content thief or a scammer.

No payment info account "copybots" a couch and copy/pastes the xml into a notecard they can stuff into a vendor.

People pay the vendor, receive the notecard and recreate their copied couch (by copy/pasting the xml and using an importer but eventually it would be automated to be no hassle at all).

You now have an additional problem since each copy is going to be completely unique so blacklist items is no longer a possibility.

(Even if you limit transferring notecards then the xml could reside on a web server to be imported by the viewer).

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That doesn't mean it's a bad idea and shouldn't even be considered btw, but it's important to think about how it's going to be evaded beforehand and then figure out whether the end justifies the means.

i have to ask why two types of free accounts??
most things where you don't ave to give a drop of info are trial versions and really now days even those are wanting some sort of info..

the ones being oppressed are not the total free accounts..it's the ones giving up the information in payment info..the creators and the ones willing to invest in the grid..

i'd love to see how Zindra's griefing situation is over there compared to regular mainland..i bets it's way lower in zindra..

No-transfer for unverifieds. If you're not on the hook with some form of RL identification, LL shouldn't be putting themselves at risk by supporting the transfer of "your" stuff. I wouldn't.

I am a web host. I know each and every one of my customers personally. I would never provide web hosting service without some kind of RL tie to someone. In fact, I require RL names, addresses (both snailmail and email), and phone numbers for this very reason.

The whole problem inherent in content creation is "who owns the rights to this?". With anonymous accounts, that legal standing can never be truly established. Copyright covers "anonymous works", too, but it leaves the legal standing unclear as to ownership and infringement. In addition, anonymity has a huge pitfall in that someone could not only infringe, but then go and register said work as their own, as the "original anonymous" author.

As such, I don't see any realistic problem with limiting unverified accounts to no-transfer. Sure, there are plenty of touchy-feely emotional issues, but I don't think they outweigh the ones inherent in the problem of copyright infringement itself, and that doesn't even address the hard, realistic, factual issues of the matter.

Limiting creation will drag the economy down even further, and it won't deter theft. A better approach would be to limit anonymity, and thus encourage accountability. That can be done in several ways, but perhaps the most obvious way is to require IOF (not necessarily PIOF, but significantly more than an email addy). Nothing will be a complete deterent to theft, but under the circumstances it would certainly improve the odds of identifying accounts, and Alt accounts. As it stands now, the virtual street-side fruit stand is completely unattended.

It will be interesting to see how Enterprise SL has an impact on publicly accessible content creation. If it is successful I foresee companies hiring from the top talent that has been nurtured inside SL over the last six years. That kind of secure environment and competitive wage would be extremely enticing to someone who is losing income month after month in a thieves den.

My personal solution is to have two businesses going. One is a service based business. The other is the old standard buy the asset from a box business. I mix the two, so if people want custom content, they need to come directly to me and enter into a contract with RL information and pay me in US$ instead of L$. That has worked without a hitch for the last three years. The customer has a stake in protecting their own unique assets, and in many cases it is of much less value to a thief because of the unique fit to the individual. The standard business supports the custom business, and vice versa.

Except that the companies using the enterprise product will be cut off from the main grid and not have a chance to interact with Second Life creators. They are more likely to bring in graphic designers in their already-existing networks to create for them in Second Life.

I don't think we should remove content creation from basic accounts, but I do think we should remove the privilege of free accounts to sell items for more than L$0 in SL.

Perhaps transfer should be only permitted and perhaps even always allowable between registered alts of premium accounts.

If the graphic designers haven't already been doing so, they will need to be content creators in SL now to stay up with the learning curve. Also, some SL creators are already contracting with these potential companies, and are in their network. It just means they may find a LOT more SL specific work if the company starts using SLE, especially with the limits on bringing in existing content from the main grid.

Is there anyone IN Zindra?

P.S. No one gets the analogy I made before? You are all sounding like a lynch mob for alt or free accounts. Limiting what someone can do in SL is only going to confuse newbies even more and discourage creativity. What if someone doesn't have any money?

Elitism, and misplaced revenge. A few people from countries that won't prosecute this anyway, do something wrong, so punish everyone in SL?

Sounds *just like* "It's all the immigrants...get rid of those and you get rid of the problem."

Free accounts are the 'sans papier' of SL, taking all the blame. Didn't Jumpy's thread show us that having payment or info on file does not equal honesty? That major player in SL who was ripping off skins, remember? Do you also think a thief won't also steal a credit card to forge an account? THINK.

/me sighs

(Any time I see "limit creation" a cold clammy feeling runs down my spine. Just how does limiting original content by limiting its uses, solve theft of other people's stuff? Why not just make all new accounts sit hogtied in the old cornfield?)

Yep just look at the map, or perhaps even go there for a walk around sometime, if anything it's less lonely and botted than the mainland and many islands are.

I guess if you want a game that is based on people making stuff and then giving it away for free then you can't beat infinite free anoymous accounts as a business model.

While we allow people to sell anything for zero investment we devalue everyones stuff to effectively L$0. It is a "no lose" situation for anyone no matter how crappy or stolen their product is, Just create 20 alts selling the same crappy stuff at L$1 and it will sell eventually, it's like spamming 100,000 people with Viagra Emails to anyone with an email whether they be remotely interested or not, its 100% free to do so, any sale is profit.

Sure a couple of theives may create premiums to sell stolen content but everytime they do they are risking US$10 that they make enough sales before their account is shutdown, I doubt many of them would make their money back often.. Currently it's absolutely zero risk, they can create new accounts faster than the DCMA process can close them.

Sure it may sound "Elitist", instead of whining about all those people who can somehow afford high speed internet access but not afford US$10 a month for the priviledge of a licence to sell creations, why don't we complain for those who can't afford dialup internet or a phoneline at all?

What of all those poor people who can't afford US$5 to just play WoW, CoH or other MMO's let alone create content for profit? Why should players in a team have to pull their weight they still get XP for doing nothing anyway.

"Elitist"? I call it "Cheapskatist" and "Parasitiic" myself. There's enough of the "Gimme everything for free" in RL without making it the standard here too.

If there's zero advantage for anyone to pay LL to compete against others paying nothing then eventually everyone will stop paying and no money in equals no money out no matter how rou shake & turn the piggy bank around.

Stop selling anything its the only way to stop fraud!

btw some of the best builders and scripters and texture artists in SL are NON paying customers... the crappy ones that cant sell are just getting a little green with envy lol

I guess they are sooo sucessfull they to couldn't afford to pay US$10 a month and probably welcome the competition drowning the market in crap. It's not like it makes a good product easier to find hidden amounst 1000 crappy ones.

The difference is that one actually gets a product with the high-speed dial-up, and a product that has lots of use beyond Second Life as well. Charging a fee for the privilege of creating is an arbitary cost with no purpose but to provide an artificial barrier to creation.

It's not elitist, it's anti-competitive. Because you have incurred a certain cost to your creation, you want to require everyone else to incur that cost to level the playing field.

If creation permissions were tied to having a Premium account, it should be for a better reason than just creating a garbage cost.

For many people without unlimited disposable income, the $10 a month does make a difference as to whether one may participate or not. By itself it may not be a lot of money, but a lot of those small commitments to various liesure activities add up. A lot of people on free accounts forced to move to premium would be considering what other $10-a-month activity they would have to drop to stay in SL. In such a case, a lot of people will be dropping SL and this world would shrink quickly.

Given LL's somewhat casual attitude towards content theft, I'm not sure exactly how screwing up basic accounts will make any difference at all.

Is anyone in zindra?.last time i looked it had dots all over the place..

it doesn't cost anything to make something in sl..it doesn't cost anything to put up info in sl..
basics are free accounts too..only they are accountable free accounts..
Why stay hidden if they don't have to?
nobody is saying do away with free accounts..
people are just saying come out from behind the tree and be accountable for your actions like the rest of us..the NPIOF are the only ones with the true privacy..
It doesn't cost a penny to be basic..
look at any other online game or virtual world..
Most have free accounts but if you want to do anything at all that is worth doing you end up having to pay a vip fee or some kind of membership..we're not even saying that..just saying at least leave a trail so you can be responsible if you are irresponsible..

nobody is saying all NPIOF are the whole problem.. but there is not a doubt in the world where the majority of traffic bots and copy bots and land bots and people running around with viewers to steal your exact avatar and griefers are hiding..in NPIOF accounts..

You want to make it fair for all?? then how about everyone having to be accountable?
this is not about omg look a newbie i am so much better than them..I never thought that for a second of my SL..
it's more like omg look at 222279haxor Alcott with NPIOF Griefing us again..OK i got the AR on that one now..don't worry though because He will be back tomorrow to start all over with another name because nobody really gives a crap..

Right now a lot of content creators are ready to call it quits because of how the theft is so out of control..if people want to think it is on passive mode go right ahead..it's not..
i can't say i blame them for wanting to bail..
And really i'm tired of being all PC about it.. i don't feel a bit sorry for anyone that comes on this grid to do harm..

you want fair but you don't want it to be fair for everyone..how can it ever be fair if some can walk through this world in godmode and the rest can't??

I doubt it would shrink anywhere as much as you think, I suspect many could afford US$10 and would do so if they wanted to keep making money from SL but don't because they can get away with not paying.

People with limited disposable incomes manage to afford internet and playing other games just fine, many people with limited disposable income also afford to buy stuff in SL too, people with the high speed internet SL requires aren't in the bottom poverty stricken social level.

I don't think the "no-one put a cent inworld" mentality is as profitable for business owners as many seem to think.

The percentage of the population wanting to sell stuff is pretty small compared to those who just socialise and buy stuff, so if half of them did drop back to free accounts not selling anymore I doubt the rest of the population would really notice other than it pushing the value up of items of those really committed to running and improving a business rather than riding for free.

If peoples products are so good, why are they so scared they won't make enough to cover a US$10 licence for the privedge to sell stuff? Perhaps they fear the reduction of competition? If it weren't for Xstreet being free to keep listing stuff, I suspect many creators would have packed up shop completely, as many have dropped their inworld stores because there's so much unsucessfull or stolen competition you can't make enough to cover the tier to rent/own a shop anymore.

I think it's a pretty good analogy. I do think, though, that *something* needs to be done, and while there will always be a few people prepared to steal credit card info to register, requiring payment info or other verification to sell content would cut down on a lot of the problem. Stealing CC info is a serious RL crime, with, in practice, far greater penalties than stealing somebody's inworld creations. This is not to say that stealing content is not serious, just that in practice, the worst that is likely to happen is that one's account is banned.

I am most definitely not in favour of only premium accounts being able to sell, however. I think one of the most marvellous things about SL is that anybody can create and sell stuff. Philip Rosedale once called SL "the ultimate lemonade stand", and it is this freedom of creation, more than anything else, in my opinion, that makes SL unique. There is far less of an "us and them" separation between creators and consumers here than in RL, although shades of it seem to be surfacing lately.

$10/month is a lot to many people, especially in the current climate, when lots of people are looking to make cutbacks in expenditure. It's an expense *on top of* other stuff like hardware and broadband. It may not deter experienced professional content creators but it would most definitely deter those who are learning this stuff for the first time in SL. As it happens, I am currently trying to complete the several half-finished building projects I have in inventory with a view to putting them on sale. I can't imagine I will make back $10/month on them. I won't have a big enough range of products, for one thing (I am slow ). Hobbyist creators add tremendously to SL and I'd hate to see them excluded.

If you don't have any/enough money to buy things people sell in stores does that mean it's alright to call the creator/seller an elitist for denying you their product? And maybe they're all justified in copybotting because well, they're so poor and they can't afford it and it's just so unfair that someone can buy those shoes for L$500 and someone else can't.

I can spend $150/month on movie tickets, evenings out, DVD rentals, something extra to spoil myself, etc, or I can spend it on tier. Once the choice is made to spend it on tier I do not get to barge into a restaurant and throw a fit over how everything there is elitist because they can afford to eat there and I can't anymore because I used it to pay tier.

If someone doesn't think SL is worth $10/month then it obviously doesn't rank that high on their list of important things and they don't get to whine over what they can and can not do. If they truly thought it was all that important then they'd pay, just like they do with everything else they want.