BEWARE: Stolen Textures In Second Life!!!!!

ROFL!

I can actually admire that Wendel... well done. However I think you are stretching it a bit, but well done never the less.

Unfortunately, this idea would be completely unfeasible. The amount of staffing that would be need to prescreen and review uploads would be prohibitive in the first place (hell, they won't even pay more forum mods) and it would completely change the nature of openness of SL and turn it into something like There. Definitely a case where the medicine is worse than the original illness. As much as I dislike this type of theft, I would rather have it be a risk and deal with that than to lock down everyone's creativity for the bad actions of a few.

Crumbs :\

If you mean physically embedding a watermark on the texture it would have to be removed by the client or it will be seen like that ingame. The problem is you'd have to do this before OpenGL deals with them and they are stolen from OpenGL so it wouldn't affect people grabbing them that way.

Detecting identical textures is an idea but probably impractical. Even if you generated a has from the image there are millions of textures and it would add a fair amount of overhead every upload. Plus it's likely you could just photoshop the texture until the algorithm doesn't recognise it as identical.

Regardless it looks very similar to me. Photosourced textures will obviously look alike but the alignment looks extremely close which I understand is 90% of the work involved.

Four words:

Not in the USA...

And yes, I know where the servers are. But sadly, US law doesn't apply to the rest of the world - you know, the majority of the human race?

I'm sorry to see your work has been ripped off and reproduced, Lost. I've both experienced it for myself ( ) and witnessed it happen to other (and some big-name) designers. A few of us got together and compared notes, to figure out how this was being done. We sent our findings to LL, but I'm not sure anything can be done, no. It's so very simple to do, that it can be almost disheartening to be a texture artist in SL.

This is an area that will have to be pseudo-policed by the texture artists. If you find something like this going on, pass the word around, or at least inform the original creators.

*leans on her elbow and sighs*

I think Kris Ritter pointed this out a while back. From what I understand, it's all done in your computer's memory with OpenGL libraries, so there's not much you can do about it... Except file proper copyrights.

I agree with you that most of the "OMG! I've been copied!" drama is much ado about nothing. In this case, however, slightly altering a skin to try to obfuscate the fact that it was a ripped copy, while being sloppy enough to leave distinctive marks in the exact same place does not a derivative work make. This person obviously ripped the texture through one of the multitude of methods that now exist and thought they could make a quick buck off of selling a badly modified version, and was not bright enough to remove the telltale signs. I have seen it before with other skins - it is starting to become a problem because the market is so lucrative, unfortunately. Where there is money to be made, there will always be thieves.

Alas, if that were the only method...it has gotten far easier unfortunately.

Why don't you just be honest with yourself!? You know it is a copy! You know how easy it is done! It amuses me to see someone in denial about something thats so obvious just for the sake of an argument. Are we playing bad guy today?

Easier than the "Goose Lamb Insect Newt Toad Ewe Ram Cat Eel Puma Toad" method?

Which is why I very clearly used the word "suspicion", but maybe it's your eyesight that's all foggled up and missed that?


I dunno, do you feel superior yet? You acted as though you had no idea how this texture theft could happen, yet you turn around and betray your own disingenuity by revealing that you know damned well how it was done. It's not "witless" I'm thinking of, but you're getting warm.

This has always been true and why we've seen threads like this in these forums since 2003.

SOME PEOPLE, who've known how easy this was to do all this time, chose to keep it all very secret rather than demonstrate to people just how important it was for them to secure real world copyright registrations so that they could file legitimate DMCAs with LL rather than just rely on useless abuse reports.

ooooo, we better not talk about how easy it is to copy images from websites either. Somebody might figure out how it's done and start stealing other people's work, shhhhh.

I had no interest in jumping into this conversation, but this statement confuses me.

I pulled the images from the OP and loaded them up into Photoshop. I blew them up, looked at all the details: mole placement, tan lines, ruddyness of the skin, they are exact copies. Not similar, exact.

The *only* difference is the overall shading. One is slightly redder than the other, but not by much.

From what I can see, this skin was ripped off.

While I agree that ripping off textures in this way is unaccepatable, I think that suing somebody for copyright infringement of a photosourced texture would be risking a dismissal on the grounds of unclean hands (unless you took/had permission to use the photo, of course)

Nope! Digital Watermarks, and much else, are easily embeded in a graphics file in such a way that they are invisible. So - not seen ingame. And the graphics files are 'seen' via your graphics card, so when they are grabbed from your graphics memory I really do think you'd be grabbing the watermark too.

While digital watermarks can be degraded by intensive reworking, the effort required and the poor results will make that a highly unprofitable exercise.

I imagine it can only be a matter of time before LL start advising content creators to utilise a form of digital watermarking, if only to sidestep becoming involved in these issues.
Besides, to some extent it really IS the content creator's liability - I mean, I'm sure they all back up their graphics media regularly to avoid the possibility of data loss? Why not digital watermark to avoid the posibility of data theft?

All RL businesses loose some small fraction of their stock to theft, fraud, shop lifting. It's a cost of doing business.

However, I believe that _most_ of us in SL are honest, and would not knowingly buy stolen textures. However, most of us have no way to know if a texture we are thinking about buying is stolen.

I would like to suggest that the honest texture makers in SL form a sort of a guild. Members of this guild would pledge never to sell stolen textures. They would mark their products with a unique guild sign, and to guard against others forging this sign, maintain a website that lists all guild members. The guild would develop procedures for accepting members and for resolving cases that arise when someone claims a guild member is in fact selling stolen textures. The guild could make public the names of texture stealers,
and also devote some effort to a public campaign to educate the Rest of Us about IP rights and the need to support honest craftspeople.

The guild would have to be inclusive. _Any_ honest texture maker should be able to become a member. It should _not_ become a way to stifle competition among the honest texture makers.

If such a guild came into existence, I for one would buy textures only from guild members. I believe a rather large majority of SL residents would do the same. Enough to keep texture makers who provide a good products at reasonable prices in business.

That's true. However, I believe that watermarking systems have trouble with "watermarking attacks" - where you take a watermarked image and apply your own watermark to it, with the same algorithm.

Some watermarks are destroyed when you do this. But in many cases, it's very hard to tell which watermark was there first - you can only tell by "closeness" to the original image and it's very hard for an automated system to judge that.

Thank you Androclese. There apparently is only one provocateur in this thread who chooses not to see it. The rest of us have good eyesight.

I don't know the workings of textures in graphics memory but I am pretty sure they don't have any support for things like watermarks or encryption which only affect the software before they are in the hands of the drivers. So you could still grab the textures from a point where they are uncompressed and unencrypted (Which they'd have to be to make a watermark worth anything) unless the watermark is actually an element of the image and therefore visible.

Also on this topic I found this:
http://secondlife.blogs.com/prompt/2006/02/opengl_copying_.html

[left]The WIPO Copyright Treaty (WCT) and the WIPO Performances and


[/left]


[left]Phonograms Treaty (WPPT) each require member countries to provide protection to[/left]

[left]certain works from other member countries or created by nationals of other member[/left]

[left]countries. That protection must be no less favorable than that accorded to domestic[/left]

[left]works.[/left]


Copyright laws are not just a USA thing

view link for WIPO-Administered Treaties

http://www.wipo.int/treaties/en/

Yep, you make a good point. This skin uses the same reference materials as my SunKissed skin. I nearly crapped myself when I saw Lost's. The hair base is pretty much an exact pixel for pixel match of my skin and I had I not seen it first in the context of Lost accusing someone else of theft I very may well have accused Lost of the same thing.

One thing is for certain, if LL wants this kind of high quality content in SL they'd better do something to help prevent and remedy this kind of theft or it will rapidly become not worth the effort. The market has become too dilluted and the profit margins too small to justify the expense of court battles. LL needs to step up to the plate or it won't be long before designers start saying the hell with it. Then the thieves can just steal the same shit back and forth from each other while everyone wonders why there's so little new high end content in the world.

once again i am offering apologies to lost for unknowingly stealing his texture. I have done everything i can to try and rectify this, sale posts removed, store closed, items not for sale at all now, i really cannot do any more. The person that supplied these to me will be talked to, but i will not give out their name as they are someone I know quite well, and while i know what they did was wrong and has landed me in some considerable bother, thats not how i do things.

Ambyance, while you quote that from me you forget to mention what your part in this was- contantly dropping disruptive prims into my stores and abusive im's. I have been wronged here too, and while I have done everything i can, you continue to harass me.

Once again, Lost i am truely sorry, and once I found out everything was removed, and you know that.

Texture theft is wrong, and i do NOT condone it, which is why i have cooporated in full.

As I understand it, not only is that true, but there is also a way to instantly copy any item you don't own which has certain permissions (I'm not sure which, mod or copy or both).

coco

I am wondering what this would do to my upload times on my slower computer. I really am not in the position to purchase a newer, faster model at this time. Believe me, I am all for creators getting all the protection they deserve, which is far more that they have now on SL, but if this happens, and significantly affects my upload speed, I'd have to stop trying to make textures, and just buy or hire out what I need.
I am totally unfamiliar with how these things work, so maybe my fears are unfounded.Also, I am all for this, even if I need to give up my private attempts at this time.
Sincerely, Chigger.