Builder Bot - Full sim copy Bot

/me is a big Starax fan. SL got boring after the first few or 6 months. Same-ol' same-ol' club scene and that whole story everybody here has heard a thousand times before. Then I somehow stumbled across some of his work and I was blown away that such things existed in-world. Spent the next couple months roaming the grid, tracking down just about everything he'd made. Took SL from being a now-boring club hop to being much more of a your-world, your-imagination thing.

Anyway, I now feel like a bit of a sap that I spent so much money at rezzable. I think I have just about everything LW made - probably spent close to L$200k. I could have saved allll that money, just downloaded some open source thing and had all the copies I wanted..

Next time I'll know, Rezzable.

So because they want to give you a tool that can be used to backup your own sims and builds as a 100% legit use even though it can be used for non-legit uses as well, your first thought would be to use it for its non-legit use to save you spending some L$? That would make you the copyright infringer, far worse than Rezzable and no better than the people using other non-legit means to copy other people's work today.

Just because you can use it to rip off someones work doesn't mean you should. You could just use it for its legit use and retain your integrity.

I like the idea of having a tool I can back up my builds with in this fashion. I do have concerns that it will promote some copying but LL has been complicit in this kind of action taking place. If there was a good way to ensure the safety and backup of our builds then tools like this would only gain traction amongst those wanting to illegally copy the work of other people.

I think her point is that if Rezzable doesn't care about whether thousands of SL creators have their work ripped off--indeed facilitates doing so--why should she care if Rezzable has their work ripped off?

http://www.lewrockwell.com/blog/

John Barry, the former president and CEO of the WD-40 Company, passed away at age 84. Barry’s marketing expertise grew sales from $2 million in 1970 to $91 million in 1990 (and $317 million in its most recent fiscal year).

But get this: WD-40 was never patented! The company did this to avoid having to disclose the ingredients, yet the lack of patent protection did not translate into a loss of sales by any means–quite the contrary.

Mr. Barry acknowledged in interviews with Forbes magazine in 1980 and 1988 that other companies, including giants like 3M and DuPont, made products that closely resembled WD-40.

“What they don’t have,” he said, “is the name.”

And there you have it, directly from the mouth of a man with experience in the field. You know, WD-40 really is good for everything–even proving that IP laws aren’t needed!

UPDATE: As a few readers have pointed out (and which occurred to me after I posted this), the name “WD-40″ is trademarked, itself an example of intellectual property, albeit one that is somewhat more defensible on the grounds that a consumer who bought a product labeled “WD-40″ that was not, in fact, WD-40, might have standing to sue the company that produced it for fraud. (Kinsella and Tucker, help me out here!) Nevertheless, the fact remains that anyone could have duplicated WD-40 without legal penalty and could probably even have put in big letters on the can “The same formula as WD-40,” yet WD-40 succeeded despite the potential for its duplication.

There's also the fact nobody ever got the formula right. Nothing ever worked or works as good as WD-40. So in truth nobody ever actually copied their product.

But in this situation, people can copy it, down to 6 decimal places. So it's quite different.

Do you know that for a fact? I've NEVER heard of a product that couldn't be copied like that.

The main point stands, though. It's just a name but behind that name is reputation, reliability, all sorts of things. Who would go to a 5 star restaurant named Taco Bell, or buy a Bentley from WalMart, or fly on Microsoft Airlines? "Dude, you got a Dell." Heh, yep, looks like I did...

Apparently some of the responses on the Rezzable blog have hurt RightAsRain Rimbaud's feelings. I have no sympathy.

My response (from: http://rezzable.com/blog/rightasrain-rimbaud/reviewing-builderbot-release#comment-3757 )

RightAsRain Rimbaud wrote: "I think we have seen enough wild accusations and pathetic attempts to slander us."

I find it hard to imagine any slander that could do more harm to your reputation than you have done yourself over the last three days.

RightAsRain Rimbaud wrote: "I think it is best practice not to say anything on the web that you wouldn't say to a person in their face."

If you had told people to their faces, "we are planning on releasing a tool to facilitate easy and quick theft of your creations", I suspect you would have gotten equally hostile responses.

RightAsRain Rimbaud wrote: "I would urge people not to slip into their twisted world of frustration and allow dark thoughts to overwhelm a more balanced, caring approach to people. Stay positive."

You took out your frustration over your company's failure in Second Life by declaring war on the thousands of moderately to hugely successful creators there. Does that sound like be a "positive" "balanced" and "caring" approach.

You've been treated with about as much respect and consideration as you deserve over this issue. That fact that you can't see that is the core of the problem.

Carl to be fair, there have been at least two death threats, which no matter how annoyed people have been over this, have absolutely no place in this debate.

"Company secrets" can be as good or better protection of an invention as a patent.
The formula for Coke comes to mind, to go along with Chris' WD-40 story.

So Chris has a point.

But there is a critical difference for IP. You can't keep intellectual property secret. ("I'll sell you this DVD, but you can't watch it." By their very nature, original works of music, literature, and art can't be protected by a policy of secrecy. Well, you can keep them in a locked file cabinet, but that defeats the purpose of profiting from your creative effort.

And as Argent points out, in the digital realm, exact duplication is easy.

I believe creators deserve compensation for their work. I also believe information should be easily and inexpensively available for all. Not free, but accessible and affordable.

I don't know what the answer is. I'm pretty sure it isn't the free for all that some people favor. Nor is it the iron-fisted, litigious grip of Disney on their property.

I was pointing out that in the physical realm, when it comes to things like the formula for Coke or WD40, I have never heard of a case in recent times (since the development of analytical chemistry to a science) where a company has been able to keep a "big name" product secret. Pepsi, Coke, and Dr Pepper all know all their competitors formulas. Knowing the formula of something like this doesn't do any good, it's the name that really matters.

My father was an auto mechanic, and I used to work with him in his shop. We tried them all, and nothing was as good. It's an opinion of course, but the fact they refused to patent it out of fear of disclosing the ingredients leads one to believe those ingredients were not obvious.

It's not quantifiable, so therefore not provable. But It's my experience.

Whether a prim that is 5 m x 5m x 5m is as good as another prim that is 5m x5 5m x 5m is quantifiable. A copy is exact. It's also not patentable.

So I stand my my statement, these situations are quite different.

Then how come Pepsi still sucks, if they know Coke's superior formula?

Don't you recall the debacle of New Coke (AKA Pepsi by Coke)?

(I failed the Pepsi challenge, I couldn't tell the difference)

Because Coke has managed to convince a few dozen people that it is still superior to Pepsi. Once they've all died off, though, things will settle down.

Death threats are an extreme--and illegal--response. But that was not what Rightasrain was talking about in the post I responded to on the Rezzable forums. He was complaining about slander, frustration, and uncaring replies. My point was that his own actions have made him essentially slander proof; he's damaged his reputation so much that the effect of any real slanderous remarks will be minuscule in comparison.

What th' crack.

Where, over what, and why?

Coke sucks - Pepsi rules

*sighs* I want Crystal Pepsi please... *ducks and runs*

Frankly, the only way I can stand to drink cola is to shake it up and let it settle a few times to get rid of most of the goddamn carbonation.

Jones soda FTW.

There is a huge difference between not caring if others rip off Rezzable's stuff and Sindy expressing the wish that she could have ripped off their stuff to save herself many L$.

Expressing that she thought the release of the tool would result in Rezzable's stuff being ripped off would have been simpler to say and just as simple to say that she thought it would be deserved if it happened. I doubt anyone would have an issue with anyone saying that.

If that is really what Sindy meant then she really expressed this opinion the wrong way and made herself seem to be an advocate of ripping copyrighted material if some company releases a tool that can, as one use of it, be used for such a purpose.

All in all I think you are reading something in Sindy's post that isn't there for some reason. Only Sindy can say what she means if what she wrote isn't representative of what she means.

I think she was expressing the intention of punishing Rezzable.

So she would punish their lawful act by breaking laws to teach them a lesson? Hmmm, not my kind of justice.

Why are you defending her post Argent? I don't see you jumping in to defend people who have expressed far less harmful opinions than this.

If she doesn't mean what she posted then she sure did herself a disservice by *seeming* to be an advocate of ripping the content. Period. I already said this and it is true. Any reasonable reading of what she wrote would come to the same conclusion.

Is she a close friend of you and Carl perhaps? is that why you are willing to ignore the actual words to perceive some other meaning from her post?

I'm not, I'm expressing the opinion that you have mis-characterized it.

If her goal is to attack rezzable, then that's what you need to argue against.