Anti-Copybots

How do you protect your prim work and textures from copybotters? Whats the current method in combatting this problem?

There is no defence. If anyone can see your work in SL, a copy-bot can reproduce it. All you can do is keep a vigilant eye and file DMCA take-down notices against folks who appear to be copying your work.

There are those who will say that even the DMCA is a waste of time, and I've no compelling argument to refute that.

You can get one of those completely worthless devices that spam the surroundings with !quit and an announcement about how spam-free it is.

It won't actually do anything to protect you, but you can feel safer knowing you're irritating the @$%# out of everyone who walks by.

Hmm, and Linden is not doing anything about this? no implementations within the code to prevent this?Not even a way to detect who is using the copybot scripts?

No, it can't be reliably detected because a script isn't necessary to do this, and all that information has to be sent to the viewer in order for it to display the object.

The only real way to stop this would be for the final 2D scene to be generated in real time on the server and streamed to each viewer like a movie, and if you think lag is bad now...

Is it true that the copybots don't do a good job of copying? The copied result is way ugly lower quality than the real thing and at the end its easy to see its not an original?

I also noticed some people just taking PrintScreen grabs of textures and opening them in an image editor to make adjustments then re-upload to SL. However, the end result is so crappy low quality blurred pirated texture.

Prim copies can be perfect. Texture copies will suffer from some degradation because SL transmits everything in JPEG format, and re-uploading will throw on a second generation of lossy compression. How bad the deterioration will be is going to vary of course. (and if they snag your textures by UUID then they will be your textures and thus identical)

People that actually have to use a bot to copy stuff probably aren't the ones to worry about. They're just script-kiddies using some hack that somebody wrote up 18 months ago.

unlink your items.

A linkset has 1 uuid for the whole item, making it easy to copy, unlink it and the copybot would have to get the uuid for each prim and then reassemble it, a real hard thing to do.

so to prevent theft, unlink your stuff!

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/CopyBot

Very good tip!

Yeah no doubt! awesome tip!

I have to disagree on that one, because advice like that encourages people to make objects that are severely crippled while doing nothing to stop people determined to do this kind of thing on a commercial scale. That particular program Copybot is not the end-all and be-all of what is possible, it's actually a pretty crude implementation of the principle. Distribute stuff unlinked, and now all a counterfeiter has to do is sell a linked version of your product to have something more desirable, that doesn't fall apart when you take it into inventory

Things that can work aren't necessarily technical. Really distinctive items will be easier for casual observers to spot and recognize as yours, increasing the chances that someone will notice and tell you about it (and distinctiveness strengthens your copyright claim). Related to that, branding matters. Maintaining a good relationship with customers will also help, they'll be more inclined to help you if they like or respect you.

Well you can spend the rest of your life chasing twelve year olds kids around the internet, but I got me some stuff to make.. UNLINKED!!

If it can be SEEN... it can be COPIED.

Your options are:

1) Give up. Don't display or sell anything you don't want seen.

or

2) Learn to cope with what the retail industry refers to as "shrinkage". Some people will steal whatever they can, and some won't. In between those extremes are the people that will buy content from "questionable" sources, and those that won't.

So:

Watermark your textures, keep original copies of your creations pristine and untouched in a folder for creation date comparisons.

If your content is popular you may be targetted. But have hope, fans of your work will, quite often, let you know when they find bootleg copies for sale.


And... don't be fooled by anti-copy-bot scripts. When I get IM'd a "!quit" message or some such by a shop-keeper's anti-copybot 'security' script, what that means to me is that the owner is paranoid, superstitious and ignorant. I'm all too happy to !quit looking at their stuff and !quit considering buying any of their stuff.

!quit is the modern equivalent of putting huge magnets around every door and window of your store... because you want to protect yourself from thieves wearing medieval-style full-plate armor. It works, doesn't it? You have't been robbed by an evil knight yet, right?



--
Imitation is the sincerest form of flattery.
That doesn't necessarily make it welcome though.

Another great tip!

Some anti-bot scripts are good, for example if you make a script that sends you a mail if creator has changed then you will now the new creator and the object's location.

Although I don't know if new copy-bots can copy scripts.

Jed: "So.. what'd you do last night Ned?"

Ned: "Hyuk hyuk, well, me a Joe-Bob went out to the strip mall with a big magnet from "Commercial Offense Weapons" and then... "

Jed: (facepalms) "Ned, you know knight tipping with COWs is gonna get you arrested some day... "

Absolutely not. Scripts are server-side only and are not sent to the client.

As Jopsy said: if you can see it, you can copy it. For scripts, the source is never sent to the viewer so it's never seen.

Scripts are, I think, the only thing safe from being copied. (ignoring stuff like permission bugs/exploits)

Yeah. That'll work just awesome for my swords.

/end sarcasm

You could always deviate slightly. How about swiss army knives instead?

They could be Ronco Salad Spitters for all the difference it would make.

You still only get one object on an attach point.