Philip Linden Teaches People How to Steal Content

You can't punish the peanut gallery. Everyone on here, especially since unverified accounts were instituted, are completely anonymous. You can argue MAC addresses, IP bans, and everything else, it doesn't matter. People are anonymous, therefore you cannot punish them.

Unless you punish everybody equally, which does nothing but hurt law-abiding folks.

This, along with many suggested technical "solutions" to this problem will all be moot when 3rd party clients become commonplace soon.

Not to mention when the server software becomes usable by people on their own servers... Big kettle of fish there!

and where will that leave LL when people aren't willing to pay upload fees just to be ripped off any more?

Enjoy your plywood fragmented virtual server, because thats all it will be.

You forget about all the existing content. That could keep new users stocked for years to come...

Yeah, that 3 cents to upload a texture is just breaking the bank.

Storage isn't free. SL currently takes up terabytes of database space. Some sort of deterrant to prevent people from uploading every jpg on their hard drive is needed.

I notified LL of asset security issues in the client in early '05; there responce was much the same. "Why try to protect something that can easily be hacked?" The client was not designed with security in mind. Freedom and fair use were the design ideals. There is very little that LL can do that would not violate those design ideals.

Continue to go after theifs as you have.

I think that's really the best way to look at it. I wish there was a magic bullet just like everyone else but I don't think there ever will be, and the amount of money any of us are making (even top tier designers) really doesn't justify the expense of lawyers and court cases.

You said it. Even grouping together with other writers was an exercise in futility. The cost was just too high.

say

did the FBI ever help out when people crashed the grid?

maybe they told the laboratory to find their own solutions, thats its not worth their time, they cant police the internet, and that maybe they can come up with their own solutions... its LLs problem, not thiers

Please, keep your cheap sarcasm for yourself, you're not talking with 5 years old kids here.
The fact that Thieves exist is NOT LL's fault, exactly like the fact that thieves exist in real life is not the judges' or the police's fault.
The fact that thieves are not punished in ANY way IS LL's fault. And no, it's not a legal issue. LL doesn't need any legal authority to ban an In-world thief. They just need the will to do it because it's ENTIRELY their right to, as stated by the TOS.
If they CHOSE not to, then they willingly submit themselves to the (well deserved) crossfire of criticism by most content creators, that, while providing LL with content to make their game more alluring to the general public, aren't provided any protection by LL itself.
Choices bring responsibilities, and a few cheap compliments to the girls won't help avoiding them.

I totaly understand Philip and i agree with everything he says. If they get into texture theft, he needs a 50 man team to look into all the complains and in the end with no result.
Second Life is the internet, any graphical designer, artist or 3D developer knows what you upload on the virtual freeway is gone.
There are no tools to protect what you release on the internet. It was there before Second Life and it will always be there. A guy on SLExchange is selling textures i made 6 years ago for Quake, on the net for free, he makes a few cents with them. Do i mind? Not at all, it's up to him to joke his own reputation and talent over a few dollars.
I saw textures of mine in SL i never sold or gave away. Other people IM'ing me about it, upset and causing a little drama about it. Do i mind?
Not at all. I know this happens and it will always happen. It doesnt bother me at all.
There is one thing you have to keep in your mind, all of you who spend time and effort to come up with nice ideas and beautiful creations in SL:

Those copycats can steal your textures, copy your builds and yes maybe make a few dollarcents with them but
THEY CAN NEVER STEAL YOUR TALENT OR FEEL THE SATISFACTION YOU FEEL WHEN AN IDEA THAT GREW IN YOUR HEAD GETS FORM IN RL OR IN A VIRTUAL WORLD

They are too lame and stupid for that (imagine how horribly it must feel to have NO ideas at all and rely on what someone else did?)

Another thing i want to make clear, i make money in Second Life too but it isnt my job, for those of you who say here SL is your rl job i wanna advice to at least try to use your talent in the 'real world'. If you are talented there is so much more money to make then in Second Life

That is not true.
My partner and I have had at least 20 websites removed from the internet over the past 2-3 years because of them stealing artwork or content.

My sarcasm has never been 'cheap'. It comes at a price that you can't afford: Experience.

As to the rest, no. It's not their responsability if they choose not to take it. Get yourself a lawyer and subpoena the records to sue them yourself.

As to if they CAN ban thieves? Sure they can! And all you have to do is talk to the Lindens about paying for the team of people to mediate and deal with such issues! It's this simple:

- File a complaint and faythe research fee for a Linden to sit there and give it all a detailed look.
- Have him advise the other that he has broken the rules and will be banned for 3 days, and must take down the offending material.
- Wait for him to relogin as an alt and re-upload his copies of the textures he had on his hard drive.
- Start from the beginning.

Even if you DO get a lawyer and get the user data, trace back his IP address during a time and date to his ISP and them from their records to the bugger who did it, you are going to have fun prosecuting if he's in another state, let alone in another country from you. The cost alone is more than most residents make out of SL.

THAT'S where my sarcasm comes in. I've BEEN THERE and it's hopeless!

You guys want to have it fixed, build a real world solution to it that WORKS and tell us about it. We all want a solution!

As I pointed out, I've also been there and it isn't hopeless.

Good morning sunshine, give a look at other residents' join date before bragging about your oh so big e-pee... ahem, experience.
This is a good example of pretty decent sarcasm. Maybe you would like to note it down for future reference.



And if they chose not to take responsibility people have all the right of the world to criticize them, like in fact they're doing.
It's the same case with chosing to leave griefing largely unadressed, or to dish out several patches a month giving a serious hit to stability.
Again, with choices come responsibilities. Chose to take an inactive and blissfully ignorant standpoint -> criticism. Action -> reaction.



Who asked for a real world solution? Texture theft in SL needs to be punished in SL, exactly as shooting a gun at someone in SL needs punished in SL, not by sending the police to the perpetrator's house with a murder attempt accusation.

PS: since i noticed the argument used and abused several times, i'd like to point out that content designers don't necessarily design for money. Many take it as an hobby or as a roleplay. I'm fairly sick to continuously see the "OMG U GREEDY!" argument everytime someone tries to defend his "work". Wanting to defend one's work and creations doesn't necessarily mean doing it for the money as well. Most of us don't nearly do enough to even bother anyway. Quite simply, content theft is a form of griefing, quite literally, wether or not it casuses consistent monetary losses (about wich, as some that know me a lil more in depth probably are aware, i couldn't care the less) and as such needs to be punished.

Who said anything about my experience being in SL? Like I said, IP theft is everywhere, and the problem is wider than just SL. My stuff has been floating around the UserNet for ages now, along with filesharing P2P sites. Guess what? I never had a chance due to the nature of those sites being similar to the problem with SL. It's damn hard and expensive to find the person responsable, and even then you only get the owner of the ISP account to get on the network. Getting a guy banned off a P2P network, EVEN WITH A HUB SITE, is next to impossible!



All right, you are now complaining about several things at once. Aye, it frustrating to have the downtime that is involved with this. I know one of my three good build days is normally shot due to the way things are setup, so I can empathize. Some of the updates have cost me even more time.

I also knew it could happen when I read the TOS and am still here. I'm not going to argue the point. You want to gripe about that, do so. I'll also say the same thing I'm saying now. If it ever get's to a point that it makes it impossable for me to function here, I'll do something else.



because it IS a RL issue. If it was only in game, then that would be fine, but they have a copy of the texture on their hard drive as well, and can resell it ANYWHERE for use in SL. Part of the problem SL is having to deal with is probably how to go about it. Either way, the root problem has to be solved. Ban them, and they are back next week with it again.

If you guys want to point and ask "Why is not LL just banning all the people who steal my stuff?", then go to SL answers and post it. Heck, would it make you happier if I did?

And no, I'm not belittling you issues with this situation. I just don't see a functional solution other than LL taxing everyone and putting a full time staff of copyright police on the job. If that happens, I wonder how many of us will scream about THAT as well...

And who are you to assume that another poster's experience about the matter in RL has less value than yours? Or that they "can't afford" the price of it?




You're missing the point. Most of the people griping about content theft in SL wouldn't even dream pf asking LL to issue or support any kind of RL penalty to content thieves. They're just asking for the infringing material and the thief to be removed from SL or at least punished IN SL.



Considering the fact that SL can be (and for many is) the most costly "game" on the internet, assessing personnel needs and assigning employees to the right department to protect their customers' best interests IS one of LL's responsibilities. And since SL DOES live on user created content, i'd say protecting creators and their creations (not only commercial ones) has a more than decent place in the priority scale.

thanx for posting the full transcript on SC Hooch. Prior I had only seen snippets. I like when he says the gals are hawt. I want Phillip to take the PS challenge.

The point you seem to be missing and that Philip was making is that first the texture theft has to be proven beyond any reasonable doubt. There's currently no way to do that no matter how much we might wish there was. I think pentalities for people who are caught red handed doing things like covering vendors with transparent boxes, pretending to be a store manager and selling empty boxes, and things that are obviously fraud should be thrown out on their asses immediately, but proving original authorship of a texture is extremely difficult and 99 times out of a hundred will be just a he said/she said situation. That's the unfortunate truth, and it's why LL doesn't want to waste resources on something that in most cases would be futile and carry a disturbingly high probability of miscarriage of justice.

First, find a way to prove that the content that you uploaded IS yours in the first place.

Protip: PSDs can be created. Any watermark can be hacked.

This is sort of guilty until proven innocent.

We've all uploaded textures that we didn't create.

Secondly, after you find the infringing content, the content creator themselves have to issue a takedown; you can't be a "concerned third party".

There is simply no way for LLab to police infringing content unless they monitor ALL content uploads and have a datalink to the copyright office operating in real time.

It just doesn't work. If you are a content creator, it's your job to enforce it. And prove that the stuff is yours in the first place.

Proof.

Proof.

Proof.

I think its a rediculous accusation to say that Philip Linden TEACHES people how to steal content ... as if he actually ENCOURAGES this type of behavior.

That is beyond insane - and if I were Philip, it would be quite insulting and slanderous (or libelicious - whichever one it is).

You're lucky Philip has taken your innuendo so well.

Wich is, unfortunately, is quite a moot (or i'd better say: artificially made up in a devil's advocate's way to dodge the problem) point.
It's maybe difficult to find a SINGLE proof that shows one's author status compared to a texture. It's a LOT less difficult if one is (as he should be) able to bring a bunch of proving elements:
1: original, high resolution, layered PSD, sure, remaking the PSD and the layers is doable, but to make it well enough to actually compete with the original is a LOT of work and requires a lot of ability in most cases, wich makes it much less time effective for the average thief.
2: Timestamping, if two people claim being the crator of a texture, the one that uploaded it last lies.
3: compression. A texture that was ripped off one already uploaded by someone else underwent compression and possibly resizing. Such Processes are recognizable. If they're recognized on a file that someone claims as original, he's lieing
4: Work in progress uploads. How many of us upload incomplete textures just to see how they look? Such WIP textures and the timestamping of their upload are quite a good step in the direction of proving paternity

All those elements, if taken together, can easily proof one's right over a texture. I'm quite sure the original autor would be more than happy to provide them.
To "make them up" would require lots of time and effort, the lack of wich is exactly what's behind a thief's actions. Make stealing time/effort uneffective and people will stop doing it.

Yes, except that's not really true. They depend entirely on people's workflow. I've been making skins for SL for three years. I generally don't end up with a PSD consisting of dozens of layers because I merge layers as I work to reduce the complexity of the file. Someone who started with ripped textures who then reworked them to cover up the theft could easily end up with files as complex as mine. I don't save dozens of versions along the way either because it's a waste of drive space. My SL folder is already taking up over 3GB of space on my drive. As much as people want to declare that proof of ownership would be easy and foolproof it simply isn't true. I'd rather not falsly accuse someone resulting in them getting thrown out of SL when they haven't actually done anything wrong. My own selfish desire to protect my work and my profits does not outweigh other people's right not to be falsely accused.

That's an entirely personal choice. But in the case LL announced that they would take PSD originals as proof of oiginal work you can be sure people that WANT to be protected would be more than willing to give up a bit of hard disk space in exchange for such protection.
If they don't, it's their choice of course, but they can't complain.
Sure, PSD can be forged. but as i said elsewhere to do it with even a slight chance of not being easily detected requires enough time and effort to make texture theft MUCH less time/effort effective.
If a content thief is willing to spend hours trying to make a psd of my textures that's higher resolution (my originals are more or less always 1024X1024 and i resize to 512X512 just the flattened TGA) and more detailed than mine, he might as well spend that time doing his own and avoiding any problem altogether.