A thread every content creator must see.

What it boils down to is this:

There are those who think that these "automated infringement" viewers are going to be the death of SL content creation, and there are those who think that they won't have any effect on it at all. I am in neither of those camps, though I tend to be closer to the latter, saying that while there may be an increase in infringement, it will not be significant enough to justify all the alarmist preachings of the former camp, and those closer to it.

I've looked at several of the various viewers being discussed in use, and I don't see how they are so much better and easier to use than previous viewers and copybot. They all have lowered the bar significantly since the days of GLI and cache viewer/extractor programs. Instead of having to learn a few chat commands, you have to learn to click a few different menus and objects. I don't see how that can be considered "lowering the bar significantly", at least to the extent claimed by the analogy of "lockpicks" to "magic rings".

What we are dealing with here is not as simple as new iterations of the same old same old which push the usability envelope for infringement from the 91st percentile to the 92nd. We are dealing with a social and cultural problem, coupled with our service provider's lack of concern and competence to do the minimum necessary, by law, ethics, and morals, to help us as content creators protect our works. No amount of technical or litigious solutions are going to even remotely begin to prevent, or even mitigate it.

In the end, banning clients and chasing developers through the courts is a waste of time and resources BEST SPENT elsewhere on means to combat infringement that actually are effective. That is why focusing on these stupid tools is directing energy in the worst possible direction. LL will NEVER be able to shut them all down. Even if they had NEVER open-sourced the client, the tools would still have matured, and we'd still be here arguing over them today.

What LL needs to focus on INSTEAD is streamline their DMCA process, provide creators with tools and information to identify infringement, making them as simple as possible so that casual consumers can use them, and embark on a social education campaign to inform people on their existence and use. They need to avoid the trap of characterizing casual infringers as criminals, because all this does is embolden people against accepting the social more. The RIAA and the MPAA have been (avoiding) learning this lesson the hard way for years. For those who are caught reselling infringed content, LL needs to be extremely proactive in removing said infringed content and providing content providers who filed DMCA notices as much information as possible to go after the miscreants legally. I am also in support of even more draconian changes to the service, including no-transfer rights on anything without RL identity verification.

The choice is ours what to do about this situation. I, for one, AS A CONTENT CREATOR, am not going to allow FUD to rule my responses, and I am going to do everything I can to keep LL focused on the most effective solutions to the problem.

Wow... L$500 a month... that's one single outfit or one single pair of shoes a month. That's really keeping the SL economy from collapsing .

Then this clearly shows that you have not tried the NeilLife 5.0 viewer, a viewer by the way which is only half functional because he forgot to take out the permissions checks in inventory. This viewer was built using snippets from the ThugLyfe subversion and does not include many features including ban evasion(ala SnoopedLife) and the ability to spoof any viewer.

There is no learning curve AT ALL so go at someone else. I've known quite a few people that could never figure out how to operate CopyBot, when to me even a monkey should be able to do it. Instead of theorizing and saying that there will be no difference, you might want to download it and drop it into a VM and then come back and post. You might also try considering or remembering that I am also one of the ones that was preaching calm about CopyBot and that it would not be the end. ThugLyfe will not be the end of SL, I have never, ever said that. What I have said is "This is a game changer" and that we are about to experience a backlash worse then the CopyBot hysteria and we are about to lose another round of creators. There are too many people on the brink of leaving now after LL's actions and non-actions the last 2 years. Yes, more people will come, but we all have friends that are teetering on the edge and it is not going to take much to push them over.

You might also want to try the suggestion of actually downloading the CryoLife detector and taking a stroll across the grid just to see how bad it is at this very minute keeping in mind that it is only the stupid ones running that viewer as LL is banning accounts.

Try those two suggestion before taking any more potshots, this applies to you, Kitty and Argent who already has the link to the viewer and the skill to drop it in a virtual machine but has decided it is better not to try it. Guess it is better to just keep your heads buried in the sand so you can keep saying that this is just a tiny little problem that it is not about to get significantly worse. Yep, whats the point in learning for yourselves?

Now I will not be back in this thread. I already posted my notice down in Scripting Tips a couple of weeks ago. But I will be back in the thread that I did create. It literally makes me ill dropping in now as every time I come all I can think of is 3 years of helping people is about to be archived and that LL has betrayed and lied to us here.

The problem with your argument is that it contradicts itself.

If you truly believe that this is earthshattering then how much worse are you making it by running around with a megaphone urging everyone to download and try it because it's just so easy!

One person on the 50L Friday group gave a warning about a Cryolife user at one of the sims which sparked half a dozen "What's that?" and "Sorry to sound dumb, but what's copybot?" followed by 15 minutes of various people describing what it will all do and how easy it all is.

According to you there will be have been people in that group who would just jump at the chance of being able go around SL copying everything so guess what? Now they know what to look for.

Covering up the fact that things like that doesn't help anyone, you are right in that but there's a difference between informing people who need to know what's is possible (theoretically and practically) and running around advertising the thing, particularly if you truly believe that wide spread use is going to do significant damage.

You can accuse me of burrying my head in the sand, but at the same time you're out to make a self-fullfilling prophecy by continually stressing just how easy it is and making sure as many people as possible will know.

I've never once come across a copybot store but I've completely lost count of how many times I've seen legitimate sellers advertise one to the world as a warning not to go there.
I didn't know how to get texture keys from the viewer until someone in the forums posted not only that it's possible but how to go about doing it. Or how to grab textures. Or copybot. Or now this new viewer.

Maybe it's just me, but if you *really* believe that it's so dangerous then maybe stop for a moment and reconsider handing out "how to copy on SL" tips to everyone on a silver platter.

Oh, I believe it'll be All That. Remember, I expected someone to start distributing something like this two years ago.

Let's take RL. What killed record stores and is killing video outlets? It's not just that it's free to download or watch online--it's frictionless. Indeed it doesn't have to be free--that's why iTunes works at all--it just can't be absurdly more difficult than the alternative.

And you almost make that case for me:
Right, but understand that nobody has to search for a shady store, they just copy the content they like as it strolls by.

Apple (and Amazon, and even Microsoft) do everything in their power to get a purchase link as close as possible to any experience involving the thing that might be bought. (That's the only reason there's an FM radio in one of the new iPods: to give listeners a way to queue-up an iTunes purchase for what they're listening to at the moment.)

Until we can click on any item and something like "Buy from Xstreet" appears right on the pie menu, in-world merchants are trying to sell vinyl in a digital market served only by piracy.

...and needs to at least seem to be free of risk.

Yes, very true. That's why it's a special threat if pirating viewers are indistinguishable from a standard viewer, and why it's so important that we find other technical means of detecting and proving illicit copying, and that enforcement has some real consequences.

Let's assume that LL does the thing we both think is rather crucial for them to do and stops making everyone's individual layers available to everyone who's around.

What's left to copy for the average person who doesn't own land?

Clothes? They wouldn't be able to
Animations? They could copy dances I guess but dance orbs kind of remove the need to shop and buy dances as it is
Shoes? Guess that would depend on the specific pair but if there's a texture involved on the shoe base then it's hardly click-and-copy
Which just about leaves hair and jewelry that I can think of (the majority of people really don't want full prim avies so there are inherently less at risk) which is bad enough for the wonderful creators who sell this but on the whole it's nothing new or earth shattering.

For people who do own land:

You can copy a house. You won't get a rezzer which is inconvenient in and by itself but still a worry.
While you can copy furniture you still need animations and posescripts to make those work so it's hardly anything the average person who doesn't even know how to make an "Hello avatar" script has much use for.
So the only thing that really works here are static objects that don't rely on animations or scripts but are solely prim-based (trees, landscaping, etc) which is generally at a level where people who buy that kind of thing already spend enough L$ and are invested enough that the risk to copy even if they could is really not worth not paying L$250 for the silly tree.

The worry is about the more determined ones but they hardly needed a new viewer to do it because it's already been possible before and either had the skill to do it, or the determination to put up with the learning curve.

So where's the new and unprecendented danger?

For some things, that's not too, too difficult. Things like animations, prims, avatar shapes - basically low-bandwidth things that don't really suffer from the upload loss/mangeling you get with textures. You could, for example, have code that looks at what an animation does and build a fairly unique signature for it. You could then compare that signature to that of other animations and tell if they're the same. I've actually been thinking for a while (over a year) of doing just that and offering it as a service.

Yes, well, that's the real trick.

I am not one of those people. I prefer modable clothing - in fact, I insist on it. If I see an outfit I like, but notice that it is sold as no-mod, then I move on and find somewhere else to spend my money. I do not trust resizer scripts. They simply do not provide the amount of fine control over each prim that I need to make, say, a prim skirt fit properly. Worse yet, they are laggy. I have seen skirts and hair that contained no fewer than 200-some-odd resizer listeners. If any of them are compiled as mono scripts, then it's little wonder we've been experiencing sim-wide lag spikes and teleportation failures lately!

Sure, I can remove the scripts after I'm done resizing; but then I'm left with an outfit I can no longer wear if I change my shape. Simply put, making an outfit no-mod represents too great an inconvenience to legitimate customers for very little, if any, gain in protection.

I am glad you offer modable versions on request. Most don't, however; and are extremely quick to accuse one of being a copybot and ban the person if someone requests a modable version.

Same thing that killed local booksellers. Borders. Barnes and Noble. Walmart.

I was pushing for a royalty system in SL that would make every customer a salesman, oh, in 2006.

Right-click > Edit > Profile > Picks > Teleport
Or right-click > Edit > Profile > Web > XStreetSL page

If you want more then that I'm sure every land owner won't mind offering reasonable commercial rental prices to allow you to turn their home into a showroom.

Oh, I do all that, but I thought that, given the circumstances, it might be worthwhile to make buying something in SL more convenient than "right click, ripoff" which is what we're dealing with here. So, let's see, what could Linden Lab do to make buying stuff more convenient than that?

So... I was thinking more along the lines of "right-click, buy" with 10% going to the owner and 90% going to the artist (or whatever ratio the creator chose when they selected "[x] Allow resale for [xx]% royalty".

Well, I'd pay a bit extra not to have to deal with XStreet, personally. XSL is kind of "we saw Amazon and threw up a bad parody of it, aint that cool?" I mean, even before it got Lindened.

And you wouldn't believe it but there's actually creators who don't manage to make their stores well organized enough for people to find the right store in their picks. Now I find that a might annoying, but that doesn't mean I think they ought to have their stuff ripped off because it was "inconvenient".

I agree. I do not think any of this will be the death of SL content creation. What *will* be the death of it, however, will be over-the-edge reactionary measures like locking one's creations down so much it becomes a major inconvenience to legitimate customers - who may then resort to feeding the pirates just to get around byzantine and draconian restrictions on fair use.

For example, how many of us still have to put up with lag and spam every time we TP to a store that uses that damned anti-copybot thing, even though it's been proven time and time again those things are completely ineffective?

Sure make the DMCA process more streamlined. It is needed. The blacklisting or "take down" capability is a welcome feature.

But the majority of theft is for personal copies. You are never going to find them. They are not setting up stores. It is doubtful they would be a customer anywhere anyway. The whole RIAA thing orbits around people who participate in torrent seeding. They are looking for distributors not listeners. So the same thing applies here. Most people downloading to listen struggle to get the money for an ipod as it is. What good is an ipod without tunes? So itunes made it fall within the mickey d's cheeseburger range of costs to get music. This is why itunes is a success. But SL has always been in the cheeseburger price range. Yet here they still do not wish to shell out and prefer to feel self entitled to taking a copy.

It still and will forever boil down to a small team of mentally ill people who think they are untouchable with a published purpose of destroying an American corporation are not being aggressively pursued by said American company. Defend yourself using all necessary means or roll over, take it, and close your doors. It really is that black and white of a situation. Surgically remove the source of the cancer and most of the problem will vanish because an example has been made.

So why is it exactly that LL will not do what is necessary to make these "bad guys" go away? That is the question that needs to be answered. Arms races don't work unless you plan to eliminate your opponents. Legally of course.

So basically it looks like it boils down to what this threat can be classified as and does it fall under existing legislation to make it a federal crime so federal resources can be brought in to deal with the threat. Some interesting reading on the topic is here: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/USA_PATRIOT_Act,_Title_VIII

I sure would not want a patriot act violation on my resume.

So again why is Linden Lab not dealing with these people in a manner that will make them decide to cease and desist or be made to "go away" for a period of years over what they think is a video game? That is the question.

Now that said when someone can come up with a way to have instant data pattern recognition and any content that is recognized in an account not licensed to have it results in that content being blacklisted from that account then we are cooking with gas and EVOO and making gourmet food.

In all fairness, the copybot protector shouldn't cause much lag. It IS annoying and spammy, though, and drives customers away. And then there's the "prove you're not a copybot" ones that make you pass a turing test

No they aren't the death of SL, they are simply free automatic nailguns being given out to all to replace the claw hammers, the certainly don't improve SL's chances in the slightest, they only improve the quality of the SL experience for those that have low morals.

How about you just pay rent for the amount of prims it's taking up which is only normal and expected when having vendors rezzed on other people's land?

I already despise things I've bought that turn out to be handing out landmarks to the store when clicked. This would turn *everything* into that. Except of course a copybotted copy so there's another instance where some crazy sellers scheme results in making copies more appealing than the original.

I'm sure I would, I've done plenty of sleuthing in cases where it wasn't even clear that they have a store to begin with (or when they're some alt or a sculpty seller, etc).

The fact that most people *might* give up isn't anyone but their own fault then though. They should just make a pick for their store (which is convenient if only so I can skip over any store with those lovely and inviting "don't IM me! don't notecard me! no support!" or "if there's a delivery problem then tough luck, just buy it again" messages).

Yeah, this is the big thing they could fix, and really, it's the risk that most makes individualized ripping such a big change. Skins and clothes are the markets that this could really ravage, and LL has it in its power to fix that overnight, if they just have the will to do it.

I'm concerned that LL doesn't understand yet how important that measure is, possibly because it doesn't prevent copying of individual purchased items, ripped for resale, which is surely the most common reports of infringement they see.

Flawed avatar-copying viewers have been around for a long time, too, so they may not appreciate the risk of one that's undetectable, openly and freely available, not infested with malware, and doesn't make a mess.

My point in harping about it is that if individual ripping not for resale becomes common for some content by some viewer at some time, DMCA is worthless (each individual not-for-sale copy needing its own takedown notice--if they could be found somehow), as are copyright suits for damage (negligible, per instance). It highlights the need for automated detection of illicit copies, and for LL to enforce beyond its "safe harbor" DMCA role, if it wants to have a virtual economy.

(On the other hand, I can think of a very good reason for LL to leave this particular loophole open... and I don't think I want to post anything more about that.)

To the detailed points, I might quibble with a few of them, mostly about the ease or difficulty of automatically generating a usable container for some classes of ripped content, but you're right that plugging the avatar texture layer hole would remove the largest threat of individual ripping.

I should also be less glib about the "Buy on Xstreet" pie menu choice. For one thing, ubiquitous "Take Copy" would apply to stuff that's never intended for sale--individual custom builds, for example--for which the one-click-buy-button wouldn't make sense. And it would take a lot of changes to make it possible to click on another avatar's pants, specifically, to get purchase information. And, yeah, the suggestion turns the whole damned grid into a showroom, whether the wearer/landowner wants it to be or not, although it already is, in a very clumsy way, with creator profile picks.

And finally, to echo Argent: I too despise XstreetSL; I've even said so publicly on their new f*'d-up forums, populated by XstreetSL merchants and fangrrls. (Just in case anybody thought I was pandering for popularity. )

Say what?

* Problem: PN provides a new client that promises to make it easier for a user to rip off a product than buying their own.

* My suggestion: Linden Labs provides a new client that makes it easier to buy the product.

* Your reaction: Tell users and artists to suck it up and buy more store space.

I honestly have no idea where you're coming from. Really.

What, having the ability to right click and "buy" a product someone's wearing... an option that you only see if you deliberately bring up the pie menu and navigate to that point... is comparable to landmark spam?

*nod-nods*

This is why I wish people would focus less on the actual tool but rather on the underlying method that's being used. It's less productive to insist that LL do something to ban the viewer than it is to focus on a handful of things that are realistically fixable in a relatively short amount of time (the other one would be the exploit Stroker brought up if it hasn't been fixed yet).

Server-side texture baking would be the ideal (since - barring exploits - it cuts out copying things you own as well) but I can't even guess whether that's a realistic expectation or not (they always said that baking needed to happen client-side because it was a "rather expensive" thing to do).

* Your suggestion: I need more exposure but advertising is expensive... oh, I know.. why don't I make each of a my customers a walking billboard and sell it as an anti-theft measure, that'll do the trick

* My reaction: if you're going to use your customers as walking billboards and expect them to rez what amounts to a vendor on their land then compensate them for it just as you'd pay rent to place your vendor anywhere else.

Why should I pay for content and tier just for the privilege of having my land turned into a flea market to generate more sales for you? If you want to do that, great, just pay a procentual part of my monthly tier representing how many of my prims are being used for *your* own commercial benefit.

It's currently not hard to figure out where most things came from by any stretch of the imagination. The times where it does turn out to be difficult are cases where it's the seller's own doing (not having a pick to their store in their profile, or not having the item listed in search so the item name can't be looked up from the "All" search).

If you have ever bought and worn designer "name-brand" clothing in RL, then chances are quite good you have become a "walking billboard" for the designer. You paid for the privilege of advertising their name; they're not paying you a cent.

yea that new ThugLife client makes Cryolife look like a beginners toy.

will be interesting to see if anything happens to Thuglife users but since it spoofs everything it's not gonna get stopped, just when alt gets banned reroll new alt is what they'll do.

A RL designer label is no different than seeing the owner name on an item in SL.

If you really want to stretch the example into RL then the proposal wouldn't be about labels but rather embedding an RFID tag inside everything you buy that can be read by anyone around you and links to the company's webstore with an "Order now".

This isn't about content theft at all but about using it as a shill to get more sales.

---

Practical example from a few minutes ago:
* I was clothing shopping and came across a store with a swing I thought I might find a place for
* Looking at the creator's profile I realize I've been there before and it's an entire sim so it might not be easy to find
* I copy/paste the item name into All search and note the coordinates
* I tp over, walk over to where the swing set is
* I buy it and tp back off to the clothing store I saw it and continue shopping

It took all of *gasp* 2 minutes if that and would have taken even less if the store owner didn't insist on dropping me off at a landing point... What an ordeal indeed .