BEWARE: Stolen Textures not just limited to skins!!!!!

GIS for "baked boob"

How about using randomly placed 'watermarks' on textures for custom projects and skins, etc..? So randomly placed and barely visible that only the creator and an anal retentive person would be able to find them. While this won't prevent people from stealing textures, it may be a way to more readily prove that your textures have been stolen and could aid in any 'legal action' taken. Just a thought.

PS - I own and LOVE the Dominus, best vehicle in SL hands down! Also I agree that the other umm, thing that whoever stole and used your textures on looks like a four year old got behind the mouse...no wait, a four year old could do better...heh

gl capture doesn't preserve alpha? I thought it did.

It seemed to, the one time I tried it out. I didnt spend much time with it, though.

It does.

Hmm. Makes me think you should have some nice text in the fully transparent area of the texture that says "DON'T STEAL MY TEXTURE YOU BASTARD" ;)

But Aimee, shouldn't me make allowances for people that improve on the original product?

*runs for the hills*

I saw a car very close to this, which was very well done, in one of the racing sims. It was a private island with arace track around it, but it was so close that I had to rez the dominus, and had to look at the reflections on the car to tell the difference. I don't think this is the case here though, it does look like yours. Sorry to hear about this, hope things work out for your Francis.

Whoa.
They did a crap job of the car but they reproduced you almost PERFECTLY! Except I think your copy in the fauxmobile looks smaller....
I'd watch out... :>

Bahahahaha, that's the saddest looking car. On a technical note, GL capture programs can and do preserve alpha. The one cited most commonly in the forums can dump straight to PNG or TGA format. It's possible it can dump to a format that doesn't support alpha channels, but in general it will preserve alpha perfectly, as will digging through the SL cache. It's possible this thief used a different program though that dumped to JPG or BMP or something, who knows. In any case, I don't think there's any danger of people mistaking it for the Shadow.

I guess I don't read the boards here as thoroughly as I should.

From Rebang regarding texture theft:

Haha, that was about my reaction exactly It's really hard to get too mad about this one particular case.



That's not a bad idea, but here's the thing. With SL's new account registration policy, (an infinite supply of free alts) this doesn't work so well.

Maybe a policy change is in order? What if you could *only* sell stuff in SL if you had a registered credit card on file? So if you only had an anonymous account, you wouldn't be allowed to sell things unless LL had some personal identification from you.




Definately possible to transfer cache information between grids by using a cache ripping tool. This tool exists, and I've tried it.

Textures: Encoded in the cache in Jpeg2k format. It's a trivial operation to transform opaque files it into a regular TGA and re-upload it. Alpha textures might be a bit harder - Photoshop treated alpha'd JPEG2k textures as CMYK encoded - although I'm sure it wouldn't be too hard to transform the data correctly. I wasn't able to figure it out in the 30 seconds I devoted to the problem. Textures are the most vulnerable to cache ripping.

Object/Animations: Stored in some proprietary SL format. I'm sure it's possible to rip those objects back into prim parameters/BVH's, but it'd take a bit of effort. I don't know if anyone's gone to the lengths of making such a tool.

Scripts: As far as I can tell, it only caches scripts you already have mod access for. So ripping scripts out of your cache doesn't buy you anything. As I understand it, scripts are secure, as long as there's no implementation flaw in SL (like the big exploit we had last year)



LOL!!!! You rule Aimee



An interesting idea - but I think the problem is getting LL to do anything about it, not proving the content was created by you.

As a comment to the GL ripping tool - I guess it can preserve alpha transparencies. (Someone told me whatever tool they were using didn't) It never really made sense that it couldn't - alpha information is loaded into your graphics card to render. I've never tried it myself, but I'll take it on faith that GL rippers can preserve alphas.

As for my case, I sent the guy an IM, asking him to stop redistributing my textures, no answer so far. I think I'll file an abuse report when I get in-world.

PS. Thanks Vincent for letting me know and Torley for helping me track this one down

thats probably the most pitiful knockoff effort i've ever witnessed. amazing.
this sucks, fran. best of luck in getting it resolved. :|

OH NOES!!! I been Counterfeited... AND Graffitied! XD

nice!

Thereby proving that no matter how crappy the car is, you can ALWAYS improve it by bolting a three-foot high spoiler to the back...

It sucks that someone would even try such a blatant ripoff. And worse, try it by simply slapping your textures onto a box and adding a few extra prims.

In the Shadow versus Not-Shadow game, I really don't think you have much to worry about. I doubt they will be selling that many copies.

haha... that ride just got P.I.M.P.E.D.

HOTNESS ;0 If it were not being sold I would say that's obviously a joke ;0 Funny one at that! ;0

LOL Okay, this story just keeps getting more unbelievable, but hand on heart, I am not making any of this stuff up.

I tried to contact this guy. (No luck) So then I filed an abuse report. (Over two weeks later, nothing)

So I was talking to Torley today, and I was explaining to her that this counterfeiter's store was on Governor Linden's land (!) Long story short, the whole store got return-to-sender, thanks Torley

Okay, this is where the really truly unbelievable part starts. I didn't realize this until today. As some of you might know, I actually sign some of my works in SL. If you look on the underside of a Dominus Shadow, you'll actually see my RL signature I did with a calligraphy pen.

As it turns out, the texture thief preserved that part of of the Dominus Shadow too! If you turn over this counterfeit shadow, you actually see this: (but mirrored)



Herzog talked about digital watermarks and signatures earlier as proof of ownership. I'm not sure you can get any more obvious that this


... and just for fun, Torley unlinked one and set it physical

Which is exactly why they won't.

And yes, the original is a great vehicle, I'm expect the knock-off drives like my "Boat of Endless Nausea".

Shameless plug: I'm giving away my wonderful boat for L$0!!!! to those who promise never to try to ride it.

Well, you technically do hold copyright over the textures wich enables you to file a DMCA claim. If a claim is filed, LL will penalize the culprit as they're required pretty much by law to do something. You really don't even have to go through with a law suit, just filing a claim and notifying LL should do the trick as LL refuses to bend that part of their ToS (just look at the police blotter and see how many copyright violations are up there).

I would definitly agree with Hiro that all creations (within reason) should have some sort of watermark on them. Most of my items say "Steinbeck & Company" either in text or on a logo, on the texture. I realise that this can be edited out, but it would look like complete crap afterwords (oh, wait...)

However, I have never used the "digital watermark" software for Photoshop. I have often wondered exactly what it does. My guess is that it embeds an unseen watermark into the image's raw data, but I really don't know about that (that being why I ask). And then, my question after that would be, if a texture ripping program were used, would it pull out the digital watermark as well?

And finially, a question for Francis.. Please tell me they arent selling this for the same price as the original? But, more importantly, does it have a horn that plays dixie?

I will say this much, if it were me, I would be pissed. But, then again, that thing is too damn funny to stay mad for very long.

What a horrid knock-off, that's really sad. I can only feel bad for anyone who might have bought that car, or worse yet..... have driven it in public.

The Dominus was the first car I bought here..... and having tried quite a few vehicles since, the Dominus is the *only* vehicle which has been worth the price I paid for it. I can't count the number of times we piled several people into the Dominus (more than even the seats can hold, people sitting on the hood, etc) and curiously explored the Second Life landscape and seeing what mischief we could get into.

The only thing the Dominus lacks is, of course, "backseat" animations!

Isn't your Dominus just a nice rip off of the Mustang? Should Ford come in and harass you for stealing their shape?

What if one were to rip a skin texture off a client made by a prominent creator and provide tattoo work to the actual skin texture, and a person paid for these services. Is this wrong? In my opinion you're not stealing the work of someone else. Just merely improving the canvas they have provided. Agreed i think the Car is a poor excuse for a vehicle. But there are benefits to using GL intercept. Send opinions please!!