After one year... any effect at all?

A year ago this week, a new work entered the Second Life dictionary: copybot.

At the time, the expectation was that this would be the end of SL, or at least SL businesses. A lot of businesses closed, protests were held, an a lotta people were really, really upset. Eventually, LL banned the use of Copybot, an botted a couple folks, an things were seemingly all over but the shouting !quit objects.

So I'm curious: did copybot turn out to be a flash in the pan, or did it change SL? Has it changed how you view the world, how you build, or how you shop -- or did it turn out to be much ado about nuttin'?

Mari

I think that if it wasn't banned, there would be much more ado. It's a thing designed specifically for theft, and if LL let it go on, that would be a Bad Thing. In terms of creation, there isn't much in the way of change - not much you can do to protect your designs other than make them no mod and no copy.

What I recognize we got out of the ordeal is a 3 lined spam that tells me the area is occupied by a copybot detector and its low spam...

copybot was just one of many "the sky is falling" events.

"voice" is a more recent one.

in every case ... doomsday was predicted for sl.

i've been here since april 2006, i haven't seen doomsday yet.

unless there is a sim by that name.

Good idea. I might create an alt named Doomsday.

Copybot was the beginning of the wake-up call concerning IP in SL. The outcry about having content "stolen" and replicated never really died down...and got people to start paying more attention to the problems inherent in SL as a platform for business.
The recent lawsuits concerning trademark and copyright violations are simply the next step in this continuing problem.
The copybot issue was merely the very beginning of what will turn out to be, most likely, the single most serious issue that LL and all its customers will have to deal with in the coming months. Aside from the technical instability of SL as a platform, the legal ramifications of what it means to have a "business" in-world are now issues a LOT of people are paying are watching very closely, indeed.

everybody's gonna try to save themselves seconds on their 'work', no matter the definition. :\

I remember getting a bunch of people to shout "!quit" at Governor Linden (yes, she exists) at the Christmas Linden v Residents snowball fight

The problem with the whole copybot ordeal was that it was mostly rumour and very little actual fact and spun even more out of control as people tried to make sense and were told doomsday scenarios.

Also, copybot was never banned, the use of copybot to infringe on someone else's IP was simply deemed an AR'able offense rather than to go through a DMCA.

What good did come out of it is that some people realized that the only person who can and should protect their IP is themselves, LL simply is the wrong entity to turn to for IP protection other than the permissions system (which they do take very seriously).

The main reason I was upset over the whole copybot thing wasn't really about copybot itself. It was Linden Labs initial attitude towards it of, "No, we're not going to do anything at all about it. Doesn't matter if they are stealing your stuff, we don't care." That's not the attitude that a company trying to encourage user created content should take on the subject. When they finally changed their tune to basically, "Well, we can't DO anything about copybot code-wise, but if you find one that's being abused, abuse report it," I was cool enough with that.

Frankly, I do think there is something they could do about copybots, but I think anything that they did to 'fix' it would majorly break something.

:\ some things cannot be at all controlled, or predictavely pre-deterimined to be an offense... if someone uses ((unnamed program)) to rob a texture, it's technically 'off-line'. that's why some remind people that using that, or any other program to erroneously access grid assets offline is against TOS (and instantly account-suspendible).

You should reread the blog posts now that you've had a year to calm down .

Nothing Robin said in her first blog post was wrong or indifferent, it was just taken to mean things that weren't there because people were angry and upset and not thinking straight.

They just communicated poorly and needed a second post to get the message across, but that was and is nothing new.

Well and now there is this prim copy device. I have only seen one case so far where some one used it to copy a boot and is selling it as there own. But still i doubt any of this stuff will ever have an impact on the whole. Just some unlucky individuals.

Well then you remeber if not 6/6/2006 when the signup was made so simple with multi avies and the the game was never the same. Some call it the death of second life. It was the start of alt hell, and griefts had the lagh laugh.

Very true on all counts. I read them about 3 months afterwards and they didn't mean to sound like they didn't care. It just came out that way and then already flayed tempers snapped.

They really need a good PR person and to listen to them. Someone who can say, "Sweetie, this sounds like an apathetic admin ape... and the customers don't like apathetic admin apes. Can we please act at least like a phone weasel? Phone weasels are all the rage this year!"

I think it was more that, at the time, they realized that they would be releasing the viewer source code in a few months and that would make things like copybot pretty useless. It wasn't really that they didn't care, it was that the recognised that there wasn't much they could do about it, unless they shot the whole open source project...

I still walk into areas and get idiot "copybot protection with low spam:!quit" messages.... guess these people don't realize that only worked on the early versions... the "protection" racketeers sure make a killing though

I was actually on hiatus when the whole thing hit here, so I sometimes refer to the "prim-mirroring" scripts as copybots, which is ANCIENT news (sorry Matteo, that thing's been around for ages, and the reason you just can't find decent +mod prims shoes, or even hair most times)

(welll, as 'smiley' as something like this could be listen back a year ago or so into 'secondcast' to hear some of the discussion ongoing then... http://www.secondcast.com/

:\ sadly they have suspended for now, ala mst3k but maybe the same way hopefully, they will have a resurgence/reunion to continue on...

oh, p.s. ... yah intrinsically, overall i don't think 'copybot's had a huge effect, but i can't speak for all individual sellers and their investigations into it... i think my own 'thieving' probs have been akin to the 'sexgen' cases in the actual mechanism used...

yes i do ... and that was 17 months ago.

i also remember all the screaming about the END of sl. and i also remember the influx of young avies the summer of 2006 ... tho i attribute that to a summer of bored kids.

however, sl is still here. "the end" did not come. sl moves on. maybe it's changed, but that IS the nature of sl.

Do attitudes and tunes get quotation marks?