A thread every content creator must see.

It doesn't make any difference in identifying copied content or not and that's not the point either.

*After* you've identified that a copy exists you need something that is unique to that copy in order to get rid of it. If the copy uses the exact same texture as the original does then that's no good, neither will the asset UUID do you any good because any change results in a new asset that doesn't end up affected if you delete the other.

By forcing the copier to reupload a new texture the need to hunt down all derived assets (which is virtually impossible to do) becomes a whole lot less pressing since you can simply remove the new texture (you can never do that now since that makes all legitimate copies useless too).

You can still do the asset hunting as well, but whatever you missed (which will be practically all copies if it happens to be scripted) will be an untextured set of prims which isn't of any use to most people or most copiers who are only interested in a finished item.

The same is true for copied skins and clothing.

I'm not sure but I think there's a good chance that that's simply not possible.

A texture in inventory has a creator by virtue of being an inventory item so a texture asset could just be a "blob" containing the texture data and nothing else.

You missed the point.

MOST people DO NOT WANT TO BOTHER with it. They would rather pay the creator, because they are honest, upstanding people. They would rather pay the creator because going out and FINDING the tool, and TRUSTING an unknown and malicious source for it is just as uncomfortable to them as it is to honest people infringing on the creator's rights.

The net result is that it will not significantly increase the proportion of infringed content. Yeah, a few more people who would infringe will do so a bit quicker now. Big deal. AS a content creator, I am not worried about it. What I AM worried about MORE is LL's incompetence in responding to it.



I am not sure what you are referring to. Techniques are not copyrightable. They may be patentable, but otherwise, that doesn't mean someone using the same ones that someone else developed is wrong.



No, the previous copybots were just as capable of ripping clothing layer textures as this one is. The ONLY thing this one does is polish the process with a more intuitive UI. That's it. Most of the people who are going to use such a tool for infringing purposes are already using the plethora of tools already in existence for it. It isn't magically going to entice thousands more people who don't already use such tools thusly.

You can't really believe that.

For one if Rebel Hope ever gave out a full permission prim with her name as the creator then it's trivial to make copies showing her as the creator.

From the technical end a prim's creator and which textures are applied to it are part of the asset's actual data so in order to tell if a random asset has those criteria it needs to be extracted and examined. Doing that for 270 terabytes worth of assets is neither easy or even possible.

But textures don't exist outside inventory - they always have to be applied to something. A prim or a skin or clothes or something. I don't think it's the textures that get investigated by LL, it's the objects that are using them. Since the objects do indeed have a separate UUID, LL can (and does) shoot them via that.

/me seems to be missing something. This still seems like it wouldn't get us much vs the trouble it would cause.

Hell, I occasionally bought Uchi's avatars even when I could have gotten him to give me freebies just by asking.

1. Most of those 270 terabytes (if that's the current figure) consists of bitmaps and other non-metadata that doesn't contain UUIDs.

2. LL traverses the entire asset database on a regular basis, including tracing down UUIDs in scripts and notecards and checking them, AND cross-referencing assets in sims and contents of objects in sims, for the purpose of garbage collection.

3. The blacklist code only needs to run when the object is rezzed, so they don't need to traverse the database to blacklist objects by UUID/creator combinations anyway.

As for the "full perm prim" problem, rippers already have an incentive to look for full perm prims, since it would make their masquerade easier, and they don't bother.

Well, repectfully, it means something different to me, and that something is more in accordance with the common usage of "theft" and "taking what isn't yours" than infringement represents. I agree with the author of that article I posted. When you start accusing people of "theft", or misusing it in that sense, it incenses them, and closes their minds to accepting the intent of what you are saying, regardless of merit. THAT is why it is problematic.



It's not my argument, nor the argument put forward in the article. There is no doubt that you are deprived of something due to copyright infringement of your content, but it is not the content itself. You still have it, you still own it, and you can still sell it as much as you like. "Theft" would have to necessarily deprive you of those rights to be called such and since it doesn't do that, it is NOT "theft".



Those who call it "theft" are playing the more dangerous semantic game, IMO, and one that is important, not only in terms of discussions, but also in terms of making law and policy. There's already enough hyperbole and insipidity in the process to obviate the need to add more.



Maybe, maybe not. There are still plenty of people to whom much of the concept and reality of copyright infringement is still somewhat of a mystery. In our attempt to educate them, if we choose the WRONG, yet highly-charged, words in the process, we're likely going to either confuse them more or, worse, alienate them to the correct point-of-view. Now, if you're good with that, then I don't think there is anything more to discuss.



If they actually "stole" it, then yeah, it is "theft". They deprived me of my property. However, if all they did was something which devalued my property, no, it is NOT "theft", since nothing was actually "taken" from me.



No, that is wholly incorrect. Copyright Law has had criminal provisions incorporated into it for well over 100 years. The fact that criminal provisions were added does not in any way make the "discrepancy" disappear. Murder is also a criminal statute, but you don't call murderers "thieves", even though they deprive people of their very lives. Thus, it is just as silly to call infringers "thieves".



Rights in general are all legal fiction, because humans are social creatures and create rules to govern themselves and each other by, at the cost of universal personal freedom.

The reasons "many websites" claim that "intellectual property" is an inappropriate term is because the word "property" and its associated usage in "property rights" has a long and well-defined legal and social history which is at odds with the nature of the creations of our intellects. They are two wholly separate and distinct things, and trying to mash them together under the same narrow set of concepts that works fine for only one of them is foolish and inappropriate, likely to eventually force one into a lesser restrictive state than it deserves, and the other into a more restrictive state than it deserves, to the detriment of both, and to all of us who will have to live with the fallout of such folly.

THAT is what these "many websites" and people like Russell McOrmond are trying to get across. The problem is that people are too stuck on their paleolithic attitudes and vocabularies, and thus refuse to give proper consideration to the subject, which is leading us down the primrose path to Epic Fail.

The problem is none of that. The problem is a criminal organization that has been conducting criminal activity such as DDOS attacks on a billion dollar business and whose stated purpose is to destroy said billion dollar business is not being reported to Law Enforcement which possibly makes LL guilty of the felony called Misprison. LL needs to report these people to the correct law enforcement agency. Each time LL discovers someone has violated the TOS by using a disallowed client to connect to LL's network LL needs to file criminal unauthorized network access charges against that account. Were LL to deal with this problem as what it is--criminal activity--LL and SL would not be having such a massive problem because once word got out you can really actually go to prison for violating the terms of service by using a disallowed client then the number of people wanting to steal a pair of eshoes and a eskin will drop to near nothing. I mean can you imagine being a guy that is sitting in the day room amongst the huge murderers and rapists and have to explain why your sad butt is there amongst them?

LL needs to stop protecting the PN and, to use the phrase today's media uses in these situations, "throw them under the bus". The rest will take care of itself.

Then we can get to the separate and more serious discussion of IP metadata and intergrid transport licenses.

You're joking, right?



The issue is much larger than the PN or any/all of the griefer groups or individuals together, your misguided attempt at minimalizing/distracting the problem notwithstanding.

You're tying a lot of things together in that screed than need or should be tied together. The PN are not the be-all/do-all of griefing. Violating a ToS should NEVER be considered a criminal act (otherwise, you will end up in jail for things like violating the terms of an apartment lease); civil torts should not ever be conflated with criminal offenses. Further, I think putting someone who "stole"sic) a pair of e-shoes and an e-skin in the same league as rapists and murderers is wholly inappropriate. If you think otherwise, then maybe you also think capital punishment for jaywalking needs to make a comeback.

Yeah, sure, we can have a society where ANY rule violation, no matter how minor, results in the death penalty (there was a ST:TNG episode which dealt with such), but I surely don't have a desire to live in it.



I don't get any impression that LL is "protecting" the PN. They've been dealt with repeatedly and effectively for some time.



We're already there. Thanks for catching up!

I didn't think Pinkin Noops even existed anymore, I thought they hit puberty or were bumming around on a beach somewhere after their parents kicked their juvinille arses out of the basement.

I've got a networked picture frame setup and I'm still poking those scripts. I'm not sure I like the idea of not being able to set texture by uuid. Actually, I'm sure I don't like it.

I guess a lot of networked vendors also don't pass texture assets around but just pass the uuids instead. Seems way more efficient.

/me votes no.

edit: /me also thanks Kitty for trying to come up with ideas to help, even if I don't agree with this one..

Yeah, that whole concept really blows a lot of useful content and systems out of the water.

I think I also would have to vote against such a proposal (or, for JIRA, just not vote for it).

Had LL ever effectively dealt with the real world felonies routinely committed by the PN the PN would have ceased to exist long ago. By not filing charges LL has protected them and in the process most likely committed Misprison.

I am intentionally separating criminal activity from civil issues. LL needs to do the same. The TOS has to be rewritten in a manner that clearly states the language necessary for prosecuting unauthorized network access. Then LL can effectively deal with the problems and most of the issues we are discussing will vanish.

As far as people that are convicted of felonies? Tough. They go to the same jail as anyone else. Don't want to go to prison? Don't be a felon.

As for whether you agree with laws or not? Totally irrelevant. Move to a different country if you don't like the laws where you live. Or get yourself elected and try to introduce legislation that runs contrary to the interests of the oligarchy and get yourself laughed at.

Certainly every networked display I've scripted works that way; I simply don't know a way to give inventory to an object in another sim. I suppose that could be made possible, at least in theory. (I have no clue what the plans for http-texture might do to any of this.)

Just aesthetically, the idea of having to embed texture assets in objects is fairly unpleasant; it's how no-transfer textures work now, and it's not pretty.

ToS violations are not "felonies".

As for misprision, it requires an effort to actively conceal it, not simply fail to report it. Beyond that, the victim(s) must press charges, except in the case of certain classes of felonies (computer system/network trespass isn't one of them), otherwise there is no violation. As such, misprision does not apply to this situation at all.



Hardly. As has been stated elsewhere, nothing that the PN is doing here is new or novel; there are and have been plenty of the same kinds of tools available for a long time. These problems have existed and will continue to exist despite the existence of the PN or any other griefer group.

Governments have been seriously going after Black Hats for decades; there are more Black Hats today than ever, and the effects of their efforts are more prevalent than ever. Even worse, if the PN were located in a country like Russia, or Romania, or even China, what is LL going to do about that? Block entire countries over a basketful of miscreants? They sure as hell aren't going to stop them through criminal proceedings.



Yeah, that's really worked wonders for the War on Drugs, hasn't it? Or, better yet, the original Prohibition.

"You're a criminal! All criminals must go to prison and suffer mightily for their crimes!" Hey, I am all for living in a draconian imperialist state; I'm the Dragon, after all.



Totally irrelevant? I think not. Civil disobedience works wonders. Rosa Parks proved that.

I also remember a quote from a slightly more famous individual regarding such a sentiment:

"First they ignore you, then they ridicule you, then they fight you, then you win."

Just because you wouldn't be able to set it by UUID doesn't necessarily mean that it's not possible to achieve the same end result in a different way.

Right now you right-click a "Copy asset UUID" and copy/paste that, but there's no reason why it has to be the asset UUID. It just has to be *something* that unique identifies a specific texture so you you could as one example for instance wrap the asset UUID in a "virtual UUID" that only anyone with a full permission copy of the texture could obtain.

You'd still be able to use llSetTexture with an identifier that uniquely represent a specific texture as long as you either have the full permission texture or get told the "virtual, script usable UUID", but you wouldn't be able to use it to apply any arbitrary texture.

And yes, it would mean that existing scripts that get recompiled need to be changed to accomodate the new behaviour but if everyone expects any kind of measure to not ever require any kind of effort or change then we might as well simply give up the pretense that content theft is actually a concern when it's secondary to keeping everything exactly the way it is.
(That's not aimed at you, Sindy, or aimed at anyone for that matter . Just the observation that the only valid solution everyone would agree with seems to be the wave of a magic wand )

Um, yeah... I don't think that's it. Are you implying that those of us who have had our creations copied and sold are just hanging with the wrong crowd? Or that those of us with a lot of content developer friends, many of whom have had this happen at one point or another and therefore share stories about the experience, somehow have unsavory connections? Somehow I doubt that's what you mean, but your caustic tone and hypocritical use of emotionally-charged terms makes it somewhat hard to tell out-of-hand.

I don't know why you feel that it's your personal crusade to insult people who have some concern about these issues, but I don't think calling them whiners is as constructive as you'd like it to be.

.

No, I just don't *see* or *hear* about it, from either content producers OR consumers. The Isle has no shortage of talented creators working and vending there. We also have a lot of folks who buy an awful lot of content from all over the grid. I simply do not hear about it happening, and with thousands of residents in our community, I would expect that, if there was this "sharply rising arc", I would hear about it more and more.



*shrug* I dish out what I get dished out to me. People who want to play rough will find I am quite willing to bare fangs and sharpen talons just as much as anyone. Sauce for the goose and all that rot.



It's not a personal crusade any more than your attempt to point such out to me is. In general, those who "whined" often cast the first orbs when I advised calm and reason. In the original copybot hysterics, I got lots of flack for not "toeing the line" when talking about content creators, so I feel more than justified now in pointing out that the entire debacle was little more than a temper tantrum thrown by people who want Nanny State to come take care of all their problems for them. Why? Because, after all the hysterics and boycotts were over, what was the result? Content creation didn't stop. It increased. Sales didn't go down, they went up. More money was had by all who didn't hold their breath, stamp their feet, and close their stores, just as I and others predicted. It was nonsense then, it is nonsense now, and I refuse to cater to the fatalist/defeatist mindset that fosters it.

That doesn't mean content creators should just "shut up and take it". Far from it. But they DO need to focus their efforts on solutions that actually have a chance of 1) being implemented by LL, and 2) actually working and making a significant difference in the problem.

I have concern about these issues, too, BEING A CONTENT CREATOR, and when people want to insult and berate me over it, well I guess that's OK.

I agree completely.

This does not follow.

The proportion of people who might rip is a small fraction, but winds up being a substantial number.

The number of people who would rip today but don't because they're not motivated enough to handle the learning curve. A tool that makes it point-and-click easy, heck, even "fun" (if you think that kind of thing might be fun, which I don't), could dramatically increase the number of people ripping.

IMHO, LL needs to legally attack the makers of this viewer. It's a clear violation of DMCA and is criminal in intent, and the makers should be held criminally liable.

Well, others of us do, from folks like RH and others who posted on his thread. I agree that to this point it hasn't been extreme, but the easier it is, the more it will happen, and LL must take all reasonable measures to prevent it.

I'm really afraid there's some wishful thinking here.

When CopyBot arrived on the scene, nobody was using a third party client as their regular viewer--the source hadn't even been opened yet. Since then, much has changed; on this forum, users of the official LL viewer are probably a minority. Until now, most third party viewers that do easy illicit copying have been malware-infested and/or bore a detectable signature and/or came with a price tag, but it's unwarranted optimism to expect the next one to be that way.

Imagine a free, openly available viewer that has "Take Copy" permanently enabled in the pie menu and otherwise has all the functionality of the LL viewer plus some attractive add-ons from other third party strains, and is undetectable.

Do we *really* think such a viewer wouldn't enjoy widespread adoption, if LL does nothing to prevent its distribution nor to deter its effects?

It's not just that copied content costs the copier nothing, it's also less "friction" than having to find somewhere to buy the content. (Like what you see? It's just a mouseclick away.)

That really could be a big change: it's not just copying for resale any more, and it's not just the big merchants with high volume resellable content who will be targets. At that point it will be totally impractical to find copies--required for any DMCA action--by any non-automated means: they'll be scattered all over the grid in single unshared copies made by individual copiers, each representing micropayment-level damages.

This probably won't be quite that viewer, but it's a glimpse of a future where the old deterrents have no effect at all.

Personally, I'm reasonably hopeful that they'll fix the permissions exploit and maybe get around to finally disabling download of other avatars' unbaked texture layers before it's too late, which would leave just the usual vulnerabilities to textures and prims. But if LL does not take those service-side measures within a week or so, I think it's a pretty clear signal that they just don't care.

Agreed! Been so busy across the street to post here but.....

All anyone has to do is get a CryoLife detector and run around the grid. CryoLife is detectable and LL is banning people using it and yet.......... It is literally everywhere.

With ThugLyfe people will be undetectable and it meets a need honest people have been asking for, a way to back up inventory. Unfortunately once you see you can back up your objects, you next find you can back up objects you do not have full perms on. It is a very slippery slope.

Everything before is like a lockpick, you can break in a house no problem but most are hesitant. This viewer is like giving everyone an invisibility cloak and a magic ring that opens all the doors and the safe.

I preached calm for CopyBot. I have used all the various tools and viewers and this one scares me and that is why I started the thread.

EDIT ADD ON: The other point that can be negated is the safety of downloading/running. It is of course a valid point that you are taking a chance, BUT.............. this is really no different then any 3rd party viewer or even FireFox for example. If there were only 10 people running Greenlife then the perception of danger is much higher then when people know that several thousand other people are running it successfully. The danger is the same but the comfort level is different.

I just find those things say something about the owner. Do they *really* think something so obvious on channel 0 listening to anyone would be used (if a voice command is needed, it would be owner-only and a higher-numbered channel)? Or if it was earlier, that it would not have been fixed by now?

Those things are just a bad usage of the sim's script time and an annoyance to anyone within range of them.

For the most part people who copy anything (be it RL or SL) weren't going to buy what they copied in the first place.

The entire SL economy also relies on just 10% of all active residents who are actually spending any L$, the other 90% just freeloads and whether the latter category copies or doesn't copy or spreads stolen content or not does not impact the economy one bit because none of that 90% contributed to the economy in the first place.

Finally it's currently barely even possible to search for something specific you want that's being sold in a legitimate store, let alone finding the exact same thing copied in a shady store. When you have an XStreetSL clone that makes searching for stolen content as easy as searching for pirated music on the web is now then you have something to worry about.

It's been three years of copybot and in spite of all the loud shouting there's no lack of content creators (quite the opposite), nor lack of consumers will to buy things they're selling. If it was going to impact anything then it would have happened already. There's never been a single day in the past 3 years where if someone really wanted to copy something that they couldn't do it.

Next year someone will be posting the exact same thing about some new copying tool that comes out then pointing out how it's so much better and easier and every copier's wet dream, etc etc. And the year after that, and the year after all. And none of it will ever make a dent.

About the only thing you can count on is that some sellers will chase away more customers with ridiculous content-theft deterring measures than "Copybot 2009" would.
As an example: a few months back one store stopped offering demos because they were supposidly getting copybotted. Needless to say that no more demos meant that I never shopped there again.

The message from the copybot protector is an IM, not chat on a channel. Bots are avatars as far as SL is concerned, they only hear IMs and channel 0 messages, just like avatars.

Your figures are off, Kitty:

http://s3.amazonaws.com/static-secondlife-com/reports/marketplace_stats/2009-09-25/monthly_customer_spending_distribution.xml
http://s3.amazonaws.com/static-secondlife-com/reports/marketplace_stats/2009-09-25/monthly_customer_spending_distribution.xml

"Active Users" (people who logged in more than once in the last 60 days) are around 750,000, so a majority of active users spend money, and almost half spend more than 500L$ a month.