A thread every content creator must see.

I believe they already disallow the viewers we are concerned with making it a TOS violation to connect to the LL Network with those viewers making it unauthorized network access which is covered in these writings: http://www.internetlibrary.com/statuteitem.cfm?Num=12

So LL can go after each case of copybotted content and file charges to put people in jail or they can cooperate with law enforcement and go after the source who have a consistent track record of unauthorized network access that LL has not been reporting all along.

Doing nothing and allowing your customers to incur monetary losses looks really bad IMHO.

Encryption is only intended to keep anyone who happens to be in between A and B from snooping on what's being said, it doesn't keep A or B from knowing what the message says.

Since the viewer needs to be able to decrypt whatever is sent to it it wouldn't do any bit of good in the long run.

That's pretty damn funny, Ann. Tell me another one.

I'm against infringement more than you and all the others here arguing combined. The difference is that I seek REAL, EFFECTIVE means to address it, rather than playing the stupid reactionary games of FUD based on hysteria.

If that makes me known by some arbitrary label to people who can't debate their way out of a wet paper bag (and thus have to resort to such labels), so be it.



Sure, and if the Gestapo ran the world, there would be lots less "crime", too.

I bet you didn't know that Interpol and member police organizations are CONSTANTLY busting hard-core pirate rings around the world ALL THE TIME. Just look at the papers sometime. Has it even remotely put a dent in piracy around the world?

Now, I am not saying that the police should stop busting hard-core pirates if and when they are caught, but the problem is FAR FAR larger than that, and will never be mitigated significantly simply through police action. There are only so many police, and an endless supply of people willing to pirate. At the end of the day, the police have to choose where to put their limited resources; would you rather have them stop REAL thieves and murderers, breaking into people's homes and businesses, stealing their REAL property and their very LIVES, or chase down some kids who are "disturbing the peace", "doing it for the lulz".

At some point, people have to take responsibility for their own protection and safety, and that of their "property", both real and intellectual. Expecting Nanny State to come wipe their bum for them every time something scares the feces out of them just isn't realistic at all.



There's a vanishingly small chance of that ever happening, for any number of reasons; thus, I am not worried. I know that I will be around for a while, at least.

Wasn't talking about whether or not WoWGlider was "fun" or "useful". Was using it as an example, based on the last bit of the previous post of it getting stomped on hard by Blizzard not having any real impact on the amount of botting in WoW. A simple google search for "WoW bots" turns up pages of them which are still quite active. In fact, it appears that WoWGlider is still available and being supported by the underground in the wild.

Hence, as Blizzard was probably painfully aware, the suit to stop them was an experiment in futility. The only net plus is that they stopped someone from making money on it.

Except IT WON'T, for several reasons I have already given, and more. Yeah, sure, if the law was PERFECT, enforcement was IMMEDIATE and EVERYWHERE, and did not make MISTAKES in the process of enforcement, sure, it may act as a deterrent. When it comes to law enforcement (you know, the kind of enforcement backed up by PEOPLE WITH GUNS), it HAS to be the MOST "perfect" solution possible. Mistakes lead to loss of confidence in and public support of law enforcement solutions. If LL screws up, the damage is minimal and localized. When legislation and law enforcement screw up, the damage is significant and far-reaching.



Now, see, that's a more reasonable approach that I can get behind, because it actually has a chance of not only getting implemented, but working.



Max Hardcore is probably about the worst example you could cite to support your position. That is one of the kinds of convictions which chill me to the bone. I don't care for that kind of work, but neither should someone be jailed for making it. It is nothing more than censorship of the worst kind, as part of Bush's "War on Porn". Just more politically-motivated Nanny State-ism.

Wielding the law as a cudgel will eventually come back to haunt those who promote its use in that fashion.

Won't work because it violates the first principle of client-server security: "The client is in the hands of the infidels".

Servers, in general, do not have GPUs to perform this function. It would have to be performed with slower CPU code, inline with all other simulation code. Also, LL doesn't use custom server hardware for simulator servers. Likely, they use standard blade servers to maintain density and keep costs down. Custom hardware would not be an attractive option because of cost-vs-benefit considerations.



"Baking" is pretty much the equivalent of "flattening" a layered image in photoshop or GIMP. Once baked, there is no easy way to un-bake layers, unless the layers do not have overlaid visible sections. IE, if you had a female avatar with a bikini top layer and a necklace layer baked together, you could probably separate the two with minimal difficulty using selection copy/paste, since the necklace's visible pixels probably do not overlay the bikini top's visible pixels. Same with tattoos.

One of the problems is that someone can rip even a "baked" image and just wear it as one of the associated layers. The layer would essentially be an "all or nothing" look, though, since they couldn't take off just part of it.



I would tend to think that any remapping of textures on the avatar would result in blurring all the time for all clothing, even legit ones. Still, if it is any consolation, ripping a baked clothing texture and having to re-upload it will introduce standard compression losses which should be detectable.

Just so happens there is technology that can be licensed for the texture side of the pattern recognition equation. The build geometry is an interesting potential discussion. The metadata and registered license holder aspects are pretty standard IT requirements and data structure chores.

I'd love to see this idea get into the right Linden's head so if you know that Linden by all means cram it in and nail the door shut. Or should we throw it into the tomb of despair at the temple of pjira?

just two thoughts from someone who makes mostly buildings:

firstly I think maybe I'll take away the sale boxes that contain the rezzers. One prims too easy to nick. Perhaps sell from a vendor.

secondly, if I unlink the display buildings, will the copier just end up with a pile of prims, even if he or she's had time to grab them all individually?

It might make it a bit more difficult for the current versions of the tools out there, but it wouldn't take much coding to save not only the appearance, but the relative position/rotation of "all selected prims", so that they can be re-rezzed in the same positions relative to any one of them later.

I also build buildings (mainly houses), and I recognize the relative ease with which one could make a verbatim copy of one of my houses. As long as anyone has the ability to rez prims in SL and highlight a build not belonging to them, we are at risk of having our builds copied.

I don't welcome this sort of thing, to be sure; however, I have to accept the reality that there is little I can do to actually stop someone so inclined from doing so. Our best defense, as builders, is to make it not worth the trouble of copying our builds, particularly for the purpose of reselling them. I try to set prices for my houses that allows me to make a reasonable amount of money for my work, but yet keep it low enough that there isn't much of a point in trying to replicate it.

Bit late to the conversation, and havn't read the whole thread... but this idea here, while it sounds good in theory, would break a lot of content on the grid... any sign with changable lettering is just scripts calling textures based on UUID, only one person in the game has the original textures..... and that's just one small example of how BAD this idea could be.

nope... he's not. And his business is not affected by this new client either, so no point bringing him into this, animations cannot be copied by copybot (they can be copied... just not this way.) and that's what his whole business model is... animations

I've seen many stores that were selling copybotted stuff @ 10 linden each (not stereotyping) they were generally owned by brazillians based on the profile... they are usually 400-500m in the air, and setup for quick removal from the world if they get noticed to quickly...

Freebies are also a good place to look for stolen material, not many people realize it... but a lot of the freebie beds, or couches etc are using stolen animations...

tho my best one so far was when i was at Cake to get a new hair, some random person tossed me a box with every hair from cake full perm... which I promptly sent to the owner along with the AV's name.

Oh, so it's ok if they sell copies of his beds using their own animations or no animations?

Ok now that is just fear mongering.... I have Thuglyfe... I compiled it from SVN. It is just emerald, with some small changes to block bans, and copybot / glintercept added in....

the client can do NOTHING that people can't already do if they wish.

his beds look like shit... why would anyone want them besides for the 2 year outdated animations.

In reading the sister thread at another popular sl forum, the impression I got was that even his business would be effected by the new client, at least until LL fix a permissions bug (I think).

Wrong on most counts. Stroker has been on the trail of this client for several months now as every animation he releases is being sold by other people now within a day of him releasing it. Scripts, animations and contents can be set full perms in inventory, packaged up and distributed. Once they are rezzed in world they revert back to their original perms. It is an extremely serious bug that LL has been unable/or refuses to fix.

This client was the main push behind the lawsuit.

ok now i've read the full thread... and this is my thoughts on it...

we had GLi .... we had copybot... we've had the people selling bots on the grid that are just modifications of copybot (i always laugh when i see screenshots of the software).

Content creation has survived, Content creation will survive, all this fear mongering is just that.... SL does not need to jump just because anyone is trying to say so. When Copybot first came to the grid, many shop owners moaned, complained, closed up shop because something *might* happen .... and now here we are 2 years later, most shop owners have not been hurt, and if they have, they never noticed...

Freebie markets and grid hunts are growing at an ever expanding rate. They grow because there are a lot of people who have no wish, and no desire to ever buy anything. I know people 2-3 years old in the game who have never spent a single linden, nor will they because it's just a game and they don't support micro-payments in games.

If someone wants to copy your stuff, they'll do so, they wouldn't of bought it in the first place so you didn't loose anything. You created and uploaded an item, you sold hundreds of *copies* of that item, you made back your money for the upload, and the time you took to make it most likely.... and then you want to sit an moan and complain because you might of lost another 50 cents from a sale?

This is just another evolution in the growth of the game, just like when web browsers added right click image, save as and poof no content on the web was ever safe again.

Just relax, sit back, have a drink, and enjoy the game.... nothing at all coming is going to 'vastly' change the world as we know it, nor is there ANY cause for fear.

I would love to see a screenshot of a known script or animation being full perm... I know you have the client just as I do, and I have never been able to do this in my testing so far.

Neither of us have the client as it is in closed alpha testing using trusted insiders. What we have is a badly crippled client created from just snippets of code gleaned off of their subversion. PN specifically bitches about Neal on their blog.

when Neal was stealing the code for his client they just closed off anonymous. The SVN is still there if you have a login for it, and is still updated with the real alpha.

The part you quoted was talking about changing what the viewer can do, which is separate of what a script is able to do.

It wouldn't have to break existing content anyway... you can make existing compiled scripts work one way and make newly compiled scripts works another way (as long as you take care that uploaded non-Mono scripts don't try and use the old call anyway).

Nor would it necessarily preclude being able to set a specific texture in new scripts by using llSetTexture/llSetPrimitiveParams without having the texture be part of the prim's inventory. It doesn't really matter whether you're passing the asset UUID directly, or a "pass-through" UUID that redirects to the asset UUID.

From the videos I saw of Neil demonstrating his "private" viewer, it takes advantage of the notecard bug (or did; I think LL closed that hole already). I don't know if there is another permissions-related bug.