Creating and selling avatars that resemble other residents?!

Date: Monday, September 10, 2007
Violation: Community Standards: Rules of Conduct
Region: Waterhead
Description: Creating and selling avatars that resemble other residents
Action taken: Suspended 3 days.


This is a new one. I have a mask of Phillip Linden, was a freebie from somewhere. Does this mean wearing it opens one up to a AR? Or only if someone duplicates the look of a resident? Or was it a RL picture on a skin instead?

This must be the Clone Bot response.

The clone bot only makes the bot look like someone else, from what I can tell you can't actually package and sell that look though.

If you can copy it - It depends on what the perms are after the copy, right?

If the stuff thats copied is full perms ..

I haven't looked at the libsecondlife sources or anything, but I suppose that the way a bot would clone another avatar's shape is to just record the dimensions that are sent to the client for rendering that other avatar, apply those dimensions to itself, and then save it off as a shape. (That "apply to self" thing is a bit of hand-waving: it's not obvious to me that the way another avatar's dimensions are described to the viewer for rendering should be the same as the way the viewer describes its own avatar's dimensions, e.g., when saving from the Appearance editor. But maybe so.)

Oh, uh... all that mumbo-jumbo was by way of speculating that whatever a bot gets, it gets full-perm.

More accurately, the permissions system is an illusion.

What bots are doing is taking advantage of the fact that, in order for the viewer to display anything, the shapes, prims, textures, colors and sounds have to be sent over. So the bot just takes those and sends orders for suplicates to be rezed (in the case of shapes and prims) of the UUIDs of the textures or sounds to be associated with the new prims/shapes. Just like one does every day - only peroperly - making your own stuff.