Some Thoughts on Texture Ripping and Theft

I have been reading with great interest some of the threads surrounding the theft of users' intellectual property, namely clothing, made possible by various and sundry texture ripping methods.

I have a lot of empathy for those whose designs are getting ripped off; certainly you feel as if you put a lot of hard work into your product and to see someone selling same for their own profit is frustrating.

However, please don't expect this practice to stop.

For the forseeable future, the ability to rip textures at the system graphics level will not be going away. This is completely beyond the control of Linden Lab and although I'm sure they are disappointed at the effect it has on the economy of SL they are powerless to stop it.

That said, I'd like to open a dialogue here for how the creative community can come to terms with the theft that occurs on a daily basis.

Other industries have had to deal with infringement upon their rights as creators. Indeed, the real life fashion industry is no stranger to counterfeiting. However, they still have a fairly simple time maintaining profitability because society has adjusted to the situation. There are enough people who want to know they have the 'real thing' that they'll only buy in the stores, not on a streetcorner somewhere. The industry may lose a few sales, but by and large most of those wouldn't have purchased the product at full price anyway.

Second Life "yard sales" are our equivalent of a street corner. With time, as these incidents become publicized, people will begin to react in the same way as real life. Yes, you may continue to lose a few sales but again most of those probably would not have purchased your product at full price anyway.

Putting this in another context: I'm sure many people here have illegally obtained music somewhere on their computer. How many of those tracks would you have honestly purchased anyway? Very few, I'm sure. Additionally, how many of you have gone and purchased a CD or legal download because you want to support a cherished artist? A lot of you, probably.

So one of the ways that the SL fashion industry can help combat their losses due to counterfeiting is to grow and strengthen their true customer bases. The more loyal your customers are, the less likely they will be to buy a knock-off. There are a lot of ways to do this. One is to simply be more visible as designers. People are less likely to take money from those they feel they know, even if it's a token level of rapport. In-world events where people can meet designers, chat, and mingle at an informal level might be a way to accomplish this, and I'm sure there are others.

Another strategy that can be of great benefit is to provide value-add components to your product. Pack in things like prim belts, et cetera that *aren't* copyable. Position these as free 'gifts' and you'll go even further toward establishing customer loyalty to your brand. The more customers feel they're getting by purchasing the genuine product over the counterfeit, the more likely they'll be to come into your stores.

I would also caution those who choose to be vocal about counterfeiting to take care in how you couch your comments. Anything that sounds like whining could create backlash (see the recording industries for examples of this), and is ineffective where the counterfeiters are concerned anyway. Do continue to publicize the counterfeiting problem, but do so in a way that seeks to educate. It's important to warn customers of the potential that yardsales and other 3rd-party outlets can be outlets for counterfeits. A buy-the-real-thing sort of campaign may be of use as well.

I think it's important to divide this problem into two pieces - the part you can control and the part you can't. You can't control that people can rip textures and use them to resell a designer's goods. Focus on the areas you can control, not those you can't, and your time will be much better spent. An hour writing a flaming forum post about a single incident of counterfeiting won't net you nearly the L$ that spending it designing a new dress will

Anyway, these are just a few off-the-cuff thoughts I had on the matter. I hope that they can be built upon.

Far as I can tell, no one's ripped off my stuff yet. I almost feel insulted.

I'm too small-time to have been ripped off yet.

I think.

I hope everyone will pardon a naive question, but I'm not a technically minded person... why exactly is this beyond their control? I know there are programs that can be used to rip textures, although I don't know how precisely they work... couldn't something be done to prevent programs like that from being used?

Personally, I pretty much buy just from established designers, because I want to be sure I'm getting quality. I doubt I'd buy anything from a yardsale, no matter how cheap. I agree that reputation is one of the strongest weapons designers have against theft.

It's really disgusting to see how many designers are getting hurt by this. Too many people are having to take time away from being creative and producing new content in order to combat theft. Content creation is promoted as being the driving force that makes SL unique and cutting-edge; surely there's *something* that LL can be doing to protect the creative people who make this world what it is?

I'd be interested to hear updates, thoughts, etc. from LL on this matter. In the meantime, I'd direct everyone's attention to Prop. 1602...

you can copy prim linkages/constructions easily, too.

I went to a club once and the owner had some chairs there that were exact duplicates of ones I created, he didn't even bother to change what they were called. The really sad thing is that they only cost 50 linden, so it was more trouble to copy them than to just buy them! LOL

The club was done in a Satanic theme though, so maybe stealing those chairs was a religious thing?

There isn't any way to really to prevent things from intercepting textures. SL has to load the textures into memmory. Once its in the computers memmory, it is out of control of SLs permission system.

Read above...in reality, the impact to designers is probably somewhat small. The people buying counterfeit items probably would not have spent full-price on the real thing anyway.

And actually there's another effect that I didn't mention before, and that's that counterfeits do have a silver lining in that they increase brand-awareness (so long as they're being sold under the original brand).

I think you may be mistaken there. It's not really so comparable to RL knock-offs. Most of the time in SL I think people are buying these things unawares, either they havent seen the original, and it's being passed off as someone else's work, or they've been duped into thinking they're buying the real thing. My impression is that it's not a buying a fake Gucci bag in Hong Kong cos it's cheap, knowing it's a fake type scenario so often.

Worse, the eyedropper tool allows you to make lower grade (but quite passable) copies of others' textures as long as it's on an object (either free standing or attachment). I tried it just now and was surprised by the results.

The entrance fee to a counterfeiting career just went down.

Sounds like the 'Eye Dropper' Tool Feature needs to go on the chopping block, eh?

Not really the chopping block, but perhaps it needs to be restrained to textures that already exist in your inventory.

Here is a cropped fragment from a rip I made of the front of the Dominus Shadow just to show the quality. I picked the Shadow because it's a high quality texture that most people have already seen.


http://img.photobucket.com/albums/v322/Qinvagh/DominusCapture.jpg

As you can see the quality is not bad.

Linden Lab ... you have your hands full on this one. Better shut down the eyedropper for the moment or you're going to have a stampede of IP complaints.


P.S. Skins and non-prim clothesmakers have no problem.

It definitely needs to be limited to textures you have in your inventory. It turns a usefool tool into a creator's bane.

I just tested it in world and it seems to only apply to textures with the following perms:

Modify/Copy/No Transfer and Full Permissions

Im relieved whereas I stopped making my textures modifiable for this very reason

Can anyone point me to a texture, preferably on a building or other non-moving object, that has no permissions granted? I want to see how bad it gets. Will check it out later.

I rezzed a prim on my land for you.

Thanks. On my way.

EDIT: Met with Fade. Issue serious. Contacting Torley

Yikes... ty for researching and discovering this.

Check the quality of this rip.

http://img.photobucket.com/albums/v322/Qinvagh/ArcherhouseStoneWall.jpg

All this was spotted by accident while I was trying to find a workaround for the texture picker not pulling the name from inventory.

The rip is not high quality, but can be made of good enough quality to fool most buyers.

EDIT: Contated Torley by "Answers" subforum. Waiting for reply.

I don't know what else to say to that.

So they broke the legitimate ways of working with textures and made stealing them even easier?

I'm usually not one to bitch about LL and bugs, but jesus hefner christ, you'd think no one tested this version out at all before release.

Would encrypting textures keep a hold of this issue? Sure, encryption can be broken but it takes a lot more effort to break it than to simply download an interception program. The updates (seeing how often they are released) could generate random encryption seeds every release.

Also, what about watermarking?

It's serious, too bad to post details. I suggested Torley, cos I thought she'd know which Linden's face to wave it in front of, but if anyone has a more direct route for Aodhan to send the test results too, more direct than bug reports, maybe let him know. Cos it needs a solution.

A lot {most} of the counterfeits cost *more* than the originals. Among them?

A freebie BDSM Bench for L$230. All the Freebies being sold for L1$. Assorted stuff like that.

I tried it myself. Figured out two ways, one gets a decent rip and the other gets a really decent rip, decent enough to resell with almost no one noticing the difference.

Yay.