Skins texture theft: How are Lindens going to deal with it?

Hi,

Recently, I was approached a by resident who told me another resident was selling my skins privately. While I admit I have once accused someone of stealing ingredients of my skin, (and wrongly so), this was something very different. It was an exact copy of an Exotica Fusion Skin right down to the two-pixel mole. Strange as it may seem, this wasn’t the first replica of my skins I’ve seen. Another was being sold through a vendor-machine in the middle of a shopping mall.

The process to achieve is this is a relatively simple one, (the methods of which I won't describe here), and has been readily available for some time. Furthermore, deviants can use the described method to take parts of a given texture and simply modify it through color-correction and a few paint strokes, creating something that looks different enough from the original as not to draw attention.

It is bothersome, to say the least, that some residents would have the audacity to steal and sell creations that are clearly not their own. What I find worse, however, is the Linden policies concerning such theft.

I have contacted Lindens several times regarding this matter and the answer is always the same, "Please approach the user and ask them to stop. Forward further issues to the DMA, blah, blah, blah." Naturally, this system is flawed. First, do Lindens seriously expect a thief to come forward and say, "Your right, I stole your skins. Sorry my bad; here's some Lindens for your troubles"? I'd guess no.

Secondly, what good is posting the DMA if it is not properly enforced or policed? Likewise, referring a resident to the DMA does as much good as a pat on the back. While it's comforting, it does not offer any long-term solution to a problem.

Clearly, LL has to take a proactive approach to this issue and figure out a way to prevent this type of theft from happening. Linden Labs knows how it being done and I think the onus should be on them to find a solution. Custom-content, along with real-estate, is the backbone of this Meta-verse. It would be a shame to start seeing it disappear because the 'powers-that-be' did not take the initiative soon enough.

Storma

As someone who owns more skins than I'd care to admit, I would like to know who is doing this so I do not give them my business. Feel free to PM me.

Today I was sent the landmark to a yard sale which was selling my free to copy candles and the free to copy candle and candleholder that was the first thing I made in SL.

I went to the yard sale, and I IMd the stall holder who came to the shop and reverted the items to free to copy. I pointed out to her that she had a number of Linden free to copies set to sell, several free items made by other residents...a vase, some gorean poses.

She was selling pose balls mod/copy/transfer for 50L, and items which must be exploited - a chimera which was also copy/trans. She was selling items from Yadni's freebie yard, and a whole raft of other stuff, NONE of which appeared to be made by her.

Although she was perfectly pleasant to me and agreed to change the setting on my items, she was not pleasant to everyone, and had a friend sending rather agressive IMs to the people who had originally discovered the sale.

This is something that we as a community are going to have to deal with...we have to make it unacceptable to sell mod/copy/transfer items which were made by someone else. Pure and simple. It would avoid selling of freebies, it would avoid selling of copies of another creator's work at a fraction of the market rate and it would avoid people selling items due to exploits.

At present...there is not the will on behalf of the community or the company, as far as I can see. But the economy of SL will fail if people are allowed to do this. There will be no incentive to produce things for other people to buy if the place is awash with pirated goods.
Cali

The Lindens will continue to promote SL as a place where everyone can make real money to attract even more bothersome people

This issue has been discussed (quite hotly) in-depth on the forums before. The unfortunate truth is, there is no way to prevent this sort of thing. Any texture that a person sees in SL exists by necessity in its raw entirety in that person's video card memory, easily capturable given the right tools.

I sympathize with your plight; you have every right to be upset by this (and I'm sure yours is not an isolated case). I wish I could give you some solid advice on what actions to take, but I think I'll have to leave that to folks who have been through this before. Sorry to hear about it.

LL litterally can't do a thing about that method of copying textures. The textures are not being captured directly from the sl client. Their hands are tied as much as yours are. There might be some methods of making it harder, but only slightly so, and it would most likely involve an invasion of privacy (which they can't do) or some slight of hand (which will only be effective for about 5 minutes). I'd love to insert a clever suggestion here but I have none .

As I understand it, the theory is that if you can prove you created the skin you can report it to LL as IP theft and get the offending skin removed (or maybe the culprit banned, or both, not sure).

These is almost no way to prove you created the skin should the above hinted method be used. You could in turn use the same method to grab the illegal copy and compare (dubiously moral) but there is no gaurantee that it's unmodified enough to show as a copy when compared.

"Nim is cool, he'll know what to do." I think that suggestion would work!

Hehe, ironically, my only solution involves negating another part of the tos and letting people beat each other sensless, and to victor go the spoils. At least then you could take your frusteration out on the cuplrit.

I suppose you could email the lindens the original PSD or whatever. There was talk about having an upload date intergrated into the asset server too, if that gets enough support (over 100 votes for initial recognition I believe) I'd expect it's likely they'll impliment it.

But, otherwise, there is no way to stop texture theft and never will be.

I like the idea of adding the date stamp to the original file. Beats having to do it in Photoshop using watermarks, pixel-sized letters, etc. When I worked as a sculptor I used to incorporate my initials in the piece, like in a wave of hair or in the wrinkles of the skin.

Only helpful if you can prove two textures are duplicates or at least that one is based off of the other. The method used to copy the texture wouldn't retain that asset creation record. It creates a completely new asset so the timestamp isn't helpful for directly determining if the texture has been duplicated. The pixel sized letters too small to be seen might possibly make it doable, but the problem there is they have to be bold enough to stick through the conversion to jpeg2000 and as such are easily edited out should it be copied.

Also only helpful if LL are prepared to actually take action over it.

Yes. I can understand that IP policing is probably not something LL is wild about doing - but it needs to be done, and preferably some additional technical features to help with it. Those that do it might wish to look into the penalties for doing so under their locale's copyright law, since many countries have passed a DMCA-equivilent. SL's permissions system, as relatively weak as it is, IS a DRM system. Why should that law just benefit the MPAA?


It's not just a "I need to keep my stuff locked up so I can make the moneys!" problem, so the anti-money segment can pipe down; ultimately, I'd like to have things I've made show that I made it.

DRM is merely assistance, not the be-all end-all. After all, I can photocopy a real, physical book... but the copyright law protects the author just the same.

Maybe some kinda automated system where you enter the two textures, a similarity check is performed and the owner of the newer one gets notified, their account's suspended and they get a grace period of 30 days, or something, to appeal against it before their account is deleted? I think a database of the comparison signatures of common free textures might need to be kept too to keep things as automated as possible.

Not something that I'd expect to get implimented personally, but if there's enough support for it, who knows?

Well, that's applying a technical solution that's probably going to be more trouble than it's worth. The "check earliest upload date", I think, is the simplest and most practical method, as the holes it has (someone uploading previously made work that had not been uploaded to SL) are easily enough checked.

Something just stuck me:

Can we really discuss a suitable solution properly until we know how often texture theft happens?

Something just struck me:

Can we really discuss a suitable solution properly until we know how often texture theft happens?

It happens a lot, and honestly, watermarks could be used, but they would have to survive the resample to 512x512, 1024x1024, etc; and the transition to J2K. I don't know if Digimarc is robust enough for that; it wouldn't solve the problem, but it would be enough basis for a DMCA takedown to be valid.

I don't think DMCA takedowns have ever been successful in SL unless the originator was the holder of a registered corporate trademark.

Case in point, someone copied my avatar recently. The one I wear from day to day. (i.e., in my icon here, and in my profile) I don't wear that anymore, since it's now "out there".

LL said I'd have to prove I made it first... Now, I made it in 2003. But how the hell can I prove that? I mean really prove it.

It's something i dont think LL can ever fix. Textures and sounds are theivable by 3rd party tools (clothes, trees, grass, walls, skins, sound effects, gestures, exc). But prims, scripts, and animations arent. As long as you keep them no transfer you have no worries. I think Yadni's Junkyard needs to get in on this act and mark all freebies as no transfer. I know it keeps you from giving them to your friends but hey... It also stops you from selling them too... It's up to us to fix this. Place up signs! Encourage people to shop at real malls and stores before going to a yard sale, or just stop doing yard sales. :/ Don't matter to me cuz i never go to them anyway.

The purple dwaggie? Aww -.- That was so original too... I try to be original But people don't know what i am half the time. Luskwood wolves look completely different then luskwood foxes but still people call me a fox... im a wolf. female. purple. To steal someone elses av... why not just make their own if they know how to do the prims that well... It was obviuosly a personal attack IMO. But i wasnt their so i duno.

As far as i know, the entire opengl space can be taken out of the running program, not just textures.
This is, indeed quite an issue, and I have no clue how to sort it out, really... the only thing I currently could think of is to introduce code to the client that checks if specific programs run on the client side (namely the ones catching the opengl stuff) and then alert the lindens, or shut the client down or something like that. I know, tho, that a lot of people won't like to have any program "spy" on their other processes.. (Tho that's exactly what WoW does to stop certain client-side exploits).

And michi.. I'm feeling with you about your AV.. tho you can still be your dragonish self.. I doubt this imposter will have too much fun running around with your look, as if he'd ever show up, he'd prolly be boo'd to death ^.^

*meow*
Sheila

It can. I have. It's really really damned easy. I made a picture from it.

'cept someone would change the name of the progs. I don't think there's any way to stop the actual theft, only the reuse of the textures inworld.

Even that's hard to do. Even if you check the uploaded texture binary against every other texture (should be doable if you have a checksum on each texture), that'd fail if you just change one little pixel on that texture before uploading it again. Heck, even loading and saving it again would prolly be enough, as it's jpeg and gets compressed.
Means all you're left with is legal options.. and that'd mean issues of international copyright and the need to register a copyright on everything one does. I don't think we wanna go there, as that'd immediately make a lot of the creativity in SL come to a rather abrupt halt.

So.. basically all that's left is that people who are known to have ripped a texture will be shunned by the community.

*meow*
Sheila.