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

And there is our smoking gun ladies and gentleman

waaaaaa? i dunno some guy in tijuana told me for 1 carton of smokes i could get a pic of Lost Therians tounge! true story! *moves mouth*

so what other parts of your skins are yours? lmao, sorry lost I HAD to say it!

GL interception is not the only method of content theft that is happening, unfortunately, it is only one of many attack points on the client. The simplest and most effective method does not use any GL interception at all. Detecting and blocking GL interception has been suggested to LL, as have methods for stopping the other methods as well. Personally, I would love to see them take a much more aggressive stand against this, but their response has mostly been not on prevention, but on punishment after the fact.

Waaah! That's beautiful, the tounge I mean, now that IS a distinctive 'watermark'

Well done!

As I said elsewhere, looking at your pics it certainly looked similar, but not a perfect copy. But the tounge definitely clinches it I think. Sorry, I'm laughing so much I have tears in my eyes!

Oh well, it's certainly a bummer for you, unless you can prevent any further distribution of that texture. As I understand it the situation is 'difficult' to say the least.
I'm planning on running a Digimarked texture through the GL grabber myself to see if it works after grabbing, if it does I'll let you know. It's about $80 a year subscription, but it might pay you as it is a positive third party confirmed identification system which proves inarguably that the image in question is YOURS.
Probably more useful than relying on LL taking any interest in the situation.
Armed with that you should be able to file a DMCA violation with LL which they can't argue with and they might just have to take action. I can't see them doing much otherwise - your toungeprint notwithstanding!

Agreed.
So, I dunno where Lost is located, say the US.
Now she has to employ a US lawyer to prepare the paperwork... Now, I do have experience of US legal practices, and costs... admitedly in the field of patents, but in California, I expect charges are much the same all over.
It isn't cheap. She isn't going to get awarded costs unless she goes to court, and if LL obey the 'cease and desist' it isn't going to court.

Now, weigh the costs up against the lifetime income from that one skin - get the picture?

Say Lost is a European resident. Now she has to find a US lawyer. I was lucky, I got mine while I was resident in California. I dread to think of the cost/pitfall situation of finding a decent lawyer at a distance. All the same constraints apply.

It's all very well to talk about going to law, but in a case like this I doubt the cost effectiveness makes it a worthwhile proposition.

Unless of course there is a personal element involved - which there could be I suppose.

Lost is a man btw and in the US if I remember correctly.

plus you do not need a lawyer to send a Cease and Desist letter just need to keep a formal copy best to do that on real paper keeping the signed and mailing the carbon copy but Emails work too.

and if someone can SUE McDonalds for spilling their HOT coffee on themselves or sue for millions because they shortchanged them for a nickle, lmao sad but all true btw, Linden Lab can be sued too for not removing copyright infringements when pointed out. Now I know LL rather just remove it then waste time in court if the evidence is solid.

Gotta Love the USA where ya can go to Jail for spitting on the ground!

I worked for years in another 3D community like this, smaller more drama less to do, and could not just upload freely when ever ya wanted it had to pass the mall (1 Mall).
LL has alot of work cut out for them allowing people to freely upload what ever they want, I do feel for them.

In the end it the abusers are to blame, but LL is responsible.

Just FYI, Lost, I have had the same skin in SL for almost the entire year I've belonged. It's been a Nomine skin, med. tan, all that time. I've bought half a dozen or more other skins, but none really matched my Nomine. Then one day I stumbled on your new photo-real skins. I was blown away. All that hard work shows in the quality, and I'm proud of my new ND "beach brat" skin Thank you for such a great product.


Which begs the question, have you copyrighted your tongue?

while Chip is right, heh, it's not always easy to turn a friend in. In anycase, not only should you not tell us, the general SL population, but it would be a TOS violation. You should turn in your friend to the Lindens, but I don't know if I personally could. I'd love to take the high ground and say that I wouldnt' be friends with people who pirates textures... or anything else, but that's so completely untrue I'd never get it out through the laughing. I do not have all that many scruples actually. The only thing that prevents me from being an uber pirate is I almost always think I can do it better on my own . As Francis puts it, I have an extreme "not made here" complex. Bottom line, start putting yourself in the shoes of different people involved and then decide what you need to do. Heh, and in the future, know your sources .

*cough*new products forum*cough*

They work in a similar way, by sticking detours on the OpenGL library.



You're confusing GL interception the technique and GL Intercept an implementation of that technique ((or rather, I'm being sloppy with the way I talk about it).

And WoW doesn't care about messing with the GL because the things it's defending against are bots not wallhacks ....

Actually, "Beach Brat" was created by Ambyance , we run the store together, so a common mistake ...And it is an amazing skin

Yes, right now it's really undefended and I do think there needs to be a balance (restricting screenshots doesn't really make sense for instance).

That said, the only thing LL needs to care about is whether there are generic, easy to use tools that make it possible. Your average clothes designer isn't going to be reversing the protocol anytime soon, but if somebody else does and makes a simple texture dumper that sucks them straight off the wire then there's a problem.

Kinda like a game of whack-the-mole, as the canned hacks spring up they can be whacked on the head. No need to try and fix them all in advance.



Yeah, that's a shame. They're sending such mixed messages right now. If they didn't advertise SL as a place for content creators to make money they could just throw out the permissions system and "solve" the problem. But right now they're saying people should rely on permissions, and then they aren't taking steps to enforce it. Big shame.

Sadly, this is exactly what does exist.

Hey! Careful there, you want to edit that? I thought disclosing RL info was a no-no? Or is it common knowlege which I'm not privy to?



Yes, then LL's leagle man looks at it, says 'no dice, look, you didn't dot the 'i's and cross the 't's right'... 'Oh and btw, this letter/email/fax just cost you $100'

Nope, if you go to law it has to be right, otherwise you are walking into a swamp...

Lost, my sympathy goes out to you. Expect very little support from LL. They can only respond to very specific and detailed DMCA takedown notices, and only as a neutral party. I spent hours and hours dealing with LL, detailing items I had claims against. I got results with two. I won't mention how many I have filed. In some cases I just filed the DMCA takedown notices just to have them on record, knowing full well that nothing would be done about them. I know that LL has a policy built into the TOS that takes into consideration repeat offenders, so any claim filed has at least that going for it.

KEEP SELLING YOUR WARES LOST!!! I can't stress that enough. Keep selling the same exact thing that others have ripped from you. No one can match your name, branding, or customer support if you keep it in the public eye. It works for me, and I have had every single skin I have ever sold in SL ripped at some point. Thievery dosn't stop me from selling skins or developing new ones, but it does stop me from selling completely new skins every month or two. I always wait until I feel I have met my quota in sales before I release new stuff. I'd much rather support the hell out of what I'm currently selling than sell new stuff for people to immediately rip off.

Watermarking...

is a lot trickier than some would like to believe. For one thing, delicate (or least significant bit) watermarking is next to impossible to preserve through lossy image conversion (like J2K). This type of watermarking is extremely useful for determining subtle image tampering as is the case with the images that Lost has posted. Strong watermarking is the only type that SL will support well. Most strong watermarking will be able to preserve a small bit of information (creator, logo, date) carefully dispersed throughout the texture. An SL skin requires extra care and a custom "strong" watermark that takes into account the template seems. It can be done, but what are the benefits? Why not call the skin it's self (Lost's tongue) a unique watermark, or signature? As long as the person selling the skin can produce original sources and the steps they used to create it in high resolution (anything above 512x512 in multiple layers), that should be proof enough. No need to implement a costly database to cross reference textures and watermarks.

And according to article on the subject (http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Cheating_in_Counter-Strike) this particular sort of hacks is about the nastiest in terms of detection...

"Driver manipulations are especially nasty to detect, as basically every file on the computer could be part of a legitimate driver or a cheat. Therefore it is essentially impossible for both a Lan-Party admin or an anti-cheat tool to detect such a cheat, even when being freely available to search the suspected cheater’s computer."

I know this isnt going to go very well... but what I am wondering is how can someone charge $4000+ for something they copy and pasted? not one bit of art or blending or brushing... ummm Sorry but seems both parties are ripping people off one way or another.

Lost was clear that she copied/pasted the original photos from the source site but then spent months painting and texturing over that to create the finished product. That included digitizing her own tongue to put into the template.

That's hardly the same as ripping people off. She did great work.

Sorry but I have seen all the resources.. I agree it takes a bit to make a skin fit the template but... oh nm, I said what I needed to... Sensual... Out!

A huge amount of work goes into creating a seamless lifelike skin from photographs and maintaining the photographic quality throughout the process. In terms of technique it's actually more difficult that just painting one. My skins use on average 20 different photographs that are projected onto the avatar mesh with custom UVW mapping which are then rendered out to SL's UVW mapping. These renders are then layered and blended, lighting is even out, blemishes removed, seam errors corrected and overpainted, etc, etc. The end result is usually a PSD file with as many as 30-40 layers. The whole process can takes a minimum of 12 and as many as 40 hours of work. I'd hardly call that copied and pasted Sensual. Why don't you go to 3d.sk, pay for a license, then try and make a flawless skin from their photographs. Then come back and tell us how easy it is. We'll wait. Copying and pasting should only take you a few minutes, right?

Can you make me a photorealistic skin by tonight on the cheap then? I've 25L to spend on it!

Honestly it is time consuming, difficult and sometimes frustrating work! When you smudge, clone and blend real skin you lose the flaws that make it 'real' so I rate the people who get it right. I wish I could!

Umm I hand draw my skins and I know exactly what it takes to do so.. I also make clothing by hand, I have also made clothing by photosourcing and as they both take effort, photosourcing is substantially less work and not something I can accuse someone of stealing if they so happen to come across it and make the same thing... I most certainly wouldn't charge $20+ USD for photosourcing... I am sorry... I know there are some people, like yourself Chip that DO add alot of thier own work to a photosourced skin, but Losts skin, I can't say the same, I am sorry if you are offended by this statement but it is how I feel.

Sensual, now is the time for legitimate honest skinmakers to stand up and support each other, not try to tear each other down.

lol, Sens, you should change your forum title to "Lightning Rod".

One point. I haven't done it so much in SL, but there have been times when I photosourced something and spent hours and days working on it and made a million tiny changes/optimizations/adjustments (sometimes a pixel at a time, I'm that crazy) that a third party would not consciously be aware of. It's sort of that "Looks better than the original but I don't know why" effect. Not really sure how that effects your point. It's a lot of work, but it really isn't a massive change in shear pixels. Depends on how you quantify change.

As for losts skins, I like lost stuff in general but I haven't examined the skins in enough detail to agree or dissagree on how much Lost changes from the photosource. A helpful comparison lost might do is post some sections of the skin such as the shots taken before showing mole and belly button posititions, but this time along side both the alleged pirate skin, Lost's skin, and the corrisponding section of the photosource.

Oh my bad...