Texture theft becoming increasingly popular

In the past week or so, I've heard three different converstatios between people over stealing textures in SL by using a special cache program. I know for a fact that their methods work because one of them actually uploaded a custom texture I had on my avatar at that time just to show me they weren't lying. Something that comes up frequently in these conversations is the whole theft/moral issue. Someone always says "As long as you're not selling it, it should be perfectly fine." In other words, as long as people don't make money off of this then it's free game, and redistribution of these textures is ok? Yeah.. right. Even if someone steals a few textures off of an expensive outfit and doesn't resell it, the original maker is still losing money. A number of people who have admitted to using these programs have shown me nothing but a flippant "I don't give a damn.." attitude which is a bit disturbing to me since I'm a custom avatar and clothing creator.

What are your peoples' thoughts on this? Is there something that can be done to stop this abuse besides reporting the guilty parties to the Lindens?

It's sadenning really, but digital theft is a very hard thing to stop.

The Lindens can make it more difficult by encrypting files in your cache, it would however decrease the speed with which cached files are fetched, and would likely decrease performance as it would have to encrypt every texture it downloaded, unless they were cached on the server end (ie you download an encrypted, compressed texture from LL, still not speedy though).

But then the problem remains that if they can get the texture on a flat face then they can just screenshot it and re-upload as they please.

The only thing really is to have the Lindens police it through their abuse-reports I suppose. If you see something copied/ripped off that is being distributed for a cost or even freely (I know I don't want my stuff copied and being given away for free!) then abuse report it, the time-stamps on their files/products will be more recent than yours, meaning you have proof that you made yours first.

I dont think there is anything Linden Labs can do about it. It would come down to a pissing contest between residents. I suppose you should register your textures with the copyright office of the United States first and then use the textures. This way you would enjoy a certain amount of "protection". Linden Labs would have to do something then about it.

You thoughts about encryping the textures is sick. Lag is bad enough without adding another problem maker. A certain amount of these things would crash any sim. Thus I suppose instead of "protecting" your textures the "reward" you would recieve is being banned by Linden Labs.

There are some things that both the creators and Linden Labs can do about it.

- Blame Jarod Godel. He's the guy that started the recent epidemic of copying by posting to the forum about the programs and how to do the texture stealing etc. at a time when almost no one knew about it. He almost single-handedly popularised this process of texture theft.

- Linden Labs is supposedly (if they haven't already done so), adding a tag to each texture that has the date and the creators name on it like "first uploaded by X on date Y." This tag can be used to establish precedence as to who uploaded what first in case of disputes.

- You can (and should), put your logo, your name and your own date and copyright notice on any clothing textures you upload. You can do this by putting it in the invisible areas of the clothing template. These can be removed by any texture thief of course, but if it ever comes to a court of law, the fact that they removed them shows intent to steal and cognizance of guilt.

- You can (and should) keep all your source-files and intermediary files to prove that you were the one who in fact made the texture.

So in short you can't really stop people from stealing if they have no sense of right and wrong to begin with, especially if they are just using the textures for themselves. But you can stop people from stealing your work and re-selling it if you have followed these steps.

You can take them to court, and you will win because you can establish that you made it first, and that the person selling them took them from you with a malicious and criminal intent.

LL could start by adopting a zero tolerance "ban first and ask questions later" policy, starting with this idiot.

I changed my whole business model because of this. I am only doing custom content now. I keep a running file on every single purchase, and if anyone wants customizations to their skin, they have to show up on record as having bought the base skin texture first. That way the remaining HONEST people still have something they can uniquely call theirs, unless they feel like ripping it off and distributing it for free. But, they devalue their own look if they do that.

It will be a LONG, LONG time before I release another male skin. It seems this is a favorite past time of the male crowd in SL. I'm not trying to be sexist, but the statistics I have gathered show this trend. I file DMCA takedown notices when the evidence is there, but it's mostly like battling a locust swarm with a fly swatter.

If you want to find humor in this go to this article and replace the words “Mormon Cricket” with “SL resident” and the words “food”, “protein”, and “salt” with the words “content” and “Linden $”. That pretty much sums the situation up as far as I see it.

Huh? I'm talking about having SL handle the encryption. It's not pretty, but if the decryption is all done client side then it wouldn't be as bad in terms of processing, sims wouldn't care, they just send you the files whether they're encrypted or not. The main downside really would be that you'd have to download the whole texture before it can be displayed (as there wouldn't be enough info to decrypt it until it's all there).
I don't even think it's possible to encrypt textures yourself using LSL, it simply doesn't touch raw data. But there's no way I'd support that, it's bad enough encrypting short strings in LSL, let alone IMAGES.

There is actually very little Linden Labs can do from a technical standpoint. Texture maps can be grabbed directly out of the video cards texture memory. Even if images weren't being cached on the disk at all, this would still be possible. No amount of tagging, encryption or watermarking would prevent this.

The only way the Lindens can prevent texture theft is to ban the use of textures, and nobody wants that.

Peer pressure will have to be enough, because it's really the only effective tool we have.

Do you know you have to have these textures registered with the copyright office before legal action can be taken? Perhaps the thief might copyright your own textures as his first and when you get to court it is you that are fined. Ok your computer puts a date on things. It does not prove a thing, changing the date on your computer is very easy. About Linden Labs putting a date on everthing? Gosh they have enough trouble keeping Second Life working instead of worying about the date of every texture inworld.

My advice is that if you have a great skin or texture, register it with the United States Copyright Office. You have to be proactive and protect yourself and not be dependant on others. It costs money to protect yourself but dosnt everthing? Of course even if you do the above you still might have to go to court to recover damages. I wonder what the backlog of cases is now? Suppose it does not matter, if you do the above and someone steals your texture. You need to follow proper procedure outlined in Torley Lindens post. Then Linden labs would take care of the problem. There would be no question about who owns which texture.

Taking them to court *giggle* You are so funny!

I do the same thing. If I don't have a record of someone buying the skin they can't receive any of the add-on products for it (makeup and such). It's not much of a deterrant, but at least the honest customers get greater benefit. I also watermark my images. There's really not much else anyone can do except hope that the honest people will always outnumber the jackasses.

You don't have to register with the copyright office in order to hold (and defend) a copyright. It's a good idea though since it makes it much easier to prove. If someone ripped the textures from my skins and it was bad enough to warrant legal action it wouldn't be difficult to prove authorship.

I'm afraid Kalel is right here. The only methods available for stopping texture theft are encryption (we have enough lag already), LL policing user's clients for the hacks being used (not going to happen, probably), or the aforementioned texture marking. Each has their problems and workarounds. Bottom line: policing texture theft within the current limits of SL is nearly impossible.

Another issue that I think is relevant is the presence in SL of so many RL rip-offs. I was surfing around the internet and discovered huge libraries of free textures available for download (in high resolution) that are being sold in SL, not to mention endless libraries of Poser clothing that sells cheaply (or free) and easily converts to the SL template. The act of uploading these is just as much theft as intercepting your graphics card.

It's more than just building textures and such, though. It's also ideas and styles. Take a look at Vitamin C, J Crew or Victoria's Secret catalogs some time and tell me what looks familiar. Take a look at the sound files cheaply available with gestures, the music that's streamed in by DJs without permission, and a hundred other related copyright violations. Who are we to talk when so much of the SL commercial landscape is itself in violation of law? We're only safe because nobody sees any dollar value in sicking their lawyers on us yet.

If it's any consolation, my genius hacker contacts in our IT department tell me that the intercept hack being used has a hard time doing much more than capturing single-layer PNG files with no alphas, no transparencies (they use it for creating models in CRPGs and shooters I think). I suppose someone could still use that as a launch pad for their own stuff, skipping steps, but at what point in the process does it start becoming their own (albeit derivative) work? Though they said the hack was pretty easy for them to use, they doubted that most less-savvy computer users would be able to figure out how to sift through the huge amount of digital output it creates.

I'd hate to see this issue slow down future product releases in SL. If anything it puts more pressure on merchants to create quality stuff that outshines the cheap copies, and to continue to expand and rotate their inventory to stay ahead of the thieves. That's something that might ultimately benefit the consumer in an ironic way.

Maybe so but the following is from the Copyright Office. Also being registered would enable Linden Labs to take action against the thief without worrying about having legal action taken against them.

REGISTRATION PROCEDURES

Original Registration

To register a work, send the following three elements in the same envelope or package to:



Library of Congress
Copyright Office
101 Independence Avenue, S.E.
Washington, D.C. 20559-6000

1. A properly completed application form.
   
2. A nonrefundable filing fee of $30 for each application. NOTE: Copyright Office fees are subject to change. For current fees, please check the Copyright Office Website at www.copyright.gov, write the Copyright Office, or call (202) 707-3000.
   
   
   
3. A nonreturnable deposit of the work being registered. The deposit requirements vary in particular situations. The general requirements follow. Also note the information under "Special Deposit Requirements."
   

1. If the work was first published in the United States on or after January 1, 1978, two complete copies or phonorecords of the best edition.
   
   
2. If the work was first published in the United States before January 1, 1978, two complete copies or phonorecords of the work as first published.
   
   
3. If the work was first published outside the United States, one complete copy or phonorecord of the work as first published.
   
   
4. If sending multiple works, all applications, deposits, and fees should be sent in the same package. If possible, applications should be attached to the appropriate deposit. Whenever possible, number each package (e. g., 1 of 3, 2 of 4) to facilitate processing.
   
   

I want to support your idea, and point out some key ideas about encryption that some other posters don't seem aware of.

1) It is only *public key* encryption that is slow. Since the Lindens control both the server and the client code, they should use *private key* crypto which is super fast.

2) In fact with JPEG2000 we *can* do the encryption progressively. JPEG2000 uses wavelets. If you take the wavelets in the correct order (highest energy to lowest) then JPEG2000 is inherently progressive: You can reconstruct a low-res complete image from the first part of the file. As the rest of the file comes in, you fill in details. Working with the guys that wrote the JPEG2000 library, it should be dead easy to add private key crypto and still keep things progressive. In fact, almost all digital TV distributors already use a similar model for distributing their content.

OTOH, I have to agree with the other posters that stealing from the cache is not the only way to get a perfect clean texture. I would not count taking a snapshot: This will always result in some coloring changes and visual artifacts. Dumping the video card memory to disk is probably un-avoidable in today's world.

So...thank goodness for the fact that the computer manufacturers and massive IP cartels are going to force DRM down our throats! The glorious day when it is impossible to grab the texture memory from the video card is coming.

AIUI, textures _are_ already encrypted by SL.

The current fad of texture theft uses a technique that doesn't involve fishing in the cache.

That's an excellent point, Ranma.

What Namssor did is kind of ironic. I'm one of the people who did buy the full male skin. I only became interested in capturing textures because of her reaction to texture copiers. Because she stopped selling the accessories, I wanted to edit my own customs.

BTW, I keep hearing rumors that nobody can capture transparencies. I've seen the common version of this hack (via a friend of a friend, for the record), and it seems to capture alpha channels and make tga files just fine.

I stopped selling the "Advanced" skins primarily because the overhead was eating my time and resources away. The fact that too many people were abusing a very clearly stated license agreement was secondary. I simply got tired of the technical management of distributing them, not to mention the numerous questions that came with a steep learing curve for those not used to a client side skin.

I never did take the accessory vendor down. I just moved it to a very hard place to find. Those serious enough to IM me about the accessories got coordinates for it. I do have the original vendor with all the accessories back in it's original spot as of 2 days ago. I would estimate that 50% of my sales from that vendor come from people with illegal copies of that particular skin anyways, so why not!

None of what Koyla said changes my mind about releasing the Male GX skin, which I will put on the shelf for the time being. TOO MANY hours of my time has already gone into the development of it, so I want to know I have some sort of secure method of protecting my IP, or a good legal avenue to pursue if the security system is flawed. SL has none of the above. As Chip has already mentioned, the ball is in Linden Lab's court!

Just a gentle reminder to please refrain from personal attacks here--there's some awesome discussion, as well as some downright frustrating problems which I'm continuing to better understand myself, as I create more textures.

Dont talk about Vitamin Ci because we're good no we dont copy others work we draw our own work hell including our own collars, I know this because I myself taught Ciera Bergman. So I am now irate that you would accuse us of theft. We can design you under the floor any day of the week with pure ability. Vitamin Ci-Why? Because its good for you TM. Any work of ours thats similar to other's work is purely coincidental and its just because we are great.

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Ah, It would be for important things like skins, etc. Remember you can not get legal action without registering and that includes Linden Action. If it is not registered dont think the Lindens are all that helpful. Also you might be able to register a line of shirts with one report. You will have to ask them.

Well if you dont pay the feds dont get upset if they dont help ok? $30 is really cheap for an American Agency!

You spelled it wrong its Vitamin Ci =). * hugs* and i lubs you too *tickles*

Copyright can only really be enforced if you have lawyers to point at anyone who would infringe on it. Otherwise it's just a scrap of paper. If you have some dream that the FBI is going to break down the door of someone who took your texture because you paid $30, you should wake up.

The cost of getting the copyright is nothing next to the cost of trying to enforce it. On top of that, who is going to take something like this to court? It's just one step up from claiming you are going to sue for slander or libel because of something posted on the forums.

I'm not saying that means infringing is ok, but that the issue is enforcement. The problem may well be that this isn't enforceable. LL doesn't seem to have the resources to commit to policing the system and it isn’t economical for users to seek enforment via the courts.

Also, you are wrong on a point. You have a copyright on your work even if you don’t have that $30 piece of toilet paper. It just makes it easier to sue people for infringement if you do.

I agree completely with all of these statements.