Fear?!

Since Copybot involves textures I believe that this belongs here. If I am wrong, please move it. I also am posting it because of the 'Female dog' fest on the blog is counterproductive. I feel that this entire mess is fear running wild. And it is beginning to really piss me off. I don't want to rant so I am keeping this civil by sticking to the facts.
a: I understand that people make a living off this. It is one of the reasons I am using what little free time I have on this.
b:I disagree with the Lindens on this but feel their pain. and I feel sorry for Phillip. Armor is definately advised.
C:This is a computer progarm folks and we have seemed to forgotten that. This is the root of my anger.
I love to design stuff. I love the potential of SL But what I am seeing the same thing that got me to quit the last time. The childish, fearful bleating of immature people who have forgotten what this is. That happen in sims, so I quit just after writing a scathing letter with an statement from EA on Copyright.
I see the same thing happening here.
I respect those who closed up. I respect your talent. I feel your pain. But if I could teleport, I would personally give each of your a verbal tongue lashing for your fear.
Yes, the libsl didn't think it through. Yes, LL moved too slowly. They Can't scale because they are small and didn't expect to be flooded with the response they got. That is Phillips fault and it too late now. But the fools who used it for theft are the evil people.

They is one question I need to ask: does anyone who owns CS2 understand the concept of watermarking? The ways to defeat this are as easy as it is to copy it. Damn, you can create gorgeous clothes but can't protect them yourselves?
I have worked in the underbelly of the net since 97. Nothing put up here is 50% safe nor do I believe it ever can be because it is all pixels and code that can be manipulated to any extent. Everyone should accept this or go.
That's hard, I know. You need to watermark, and sign your stuff (like robins template or the example for shadowing.) I plan on a tag and watermark on everything. This is your responsiblity as creators.
Yes, LL dropped the ball on their end. But so did you. So everyone closes up. Honestly, if I had a shop, I would anounce that while I am protecting my stuff I am open.
If someoen steals from me here, trust me I will find out eventually. And they are only hurting themselves.
As for gimp and PSP users, http://www.watermarker.com/watermark-protector/
$30
I played Ultima for years too. And it was the same thing, about the pvp.
So for the sake of everyone, this is a game. It is not real. It is made of Pixels. LL in a business to make money. this is their first priority. They are small and closely held so they don't make good decisions all the time. Bitching about only makes you angry and makes them wish they never reactived the forums. they want to make moeny and have a unique thing going so they want to help you. So I am thanking everyone who posts here regularly for Not joining the 'femeale dog' fest or the fear '. If you loose something to copybot, I am sorry but welcome to the internet. Microsoft looses thousands daily to chinese pirates. Most of china and indochina have a belief abot Intelletual property that is similar to that of the native americans views on land.

Ok, now for solutions. Don't run.
Be proactive. keep Backups of everything you made in storage, signed and watermarked. Be vigilant.
If this is your RL job, then You are going to have to hire someone to watch the store. If this isn't then realize that it is supposed to be entertainment. Have fun with it.
I turn off entertainment I don't like. example: I watched the first 5 episodes of Jerico. I liked the concpet and it was good until the EMP ruined what they were doing in my opinion. So I don't watch it.
Utimately, the best thing to do is leave or relax. Copybot will be dealt with. If SL dies as a result then LL is to blame as are all of us. But I doubt this will happen. because LL wants to make moeny. And to do that they need us. And alot of people need them too or they wouldn't be screaming .

I love the idea of SL, I love the people in SL and those who work at LL. I love everyones passion and talent. But I am human as are us and when I see childish behavior, it angers me so I had to let this out or it would have cut me out of this.
We are all on the edge of a steep cliff building a rope bridge to cross to the other side. Things will happen. You must choose whether to continue the build no matter what. That choice with shape the bridge. OK?

This stream of consciousness is done now, thanks for reading. If you are now pissed at me, email me at [email=Thunderclap@gmail.com]Thunderclap@gmail.com[/email] and scream at me there. I am sorry if you are offended. But this had to be said. Thanks.

Alter the nature of your businesses to suit the environment.

hmm ok nevermind that, I scrolled down and found my answers

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I don't know much about watermarks. The info I have found on it so far is not exactly crystal clear

Do images retain their watermarks after they've been uploaded into SL and converted into JPG2000 ?

Is a watermark visible ? If it is, how is it different than just painting my name in a corner of the texture ?

Thanks

Note that a copybot who steals your clothing, with a watermark on it, will get an image that also contains the watermark. You can prove its YOURS, but the act of theft itself is not prevented.

To see examples of watermarks, go here:

from a commercial watermark maker:
http://www.watermarkfactory.com/
and scroll to the bottom of the page...Look at the pics. You'll see the word, "Preview" written across the images.

from a commercial supplier of photography and imagery:
http://creative.gettyimages.com/
click on the random image that shows up on their home page. You'll get a bigger image with the phrase "gettyImages" watermarked on the picture.


These examples are quite strong watermarks...easy to see. They can be subtler, depending on your software. The whole idea, is to slightly change the image (usually by lightening it) in a way so that words are apparent...IF you are looking for them. To remove the watermark, you'd have to paint individual pixels, scattered all over the image. The watermark makes yer image readily identifiable-permanently.

There are other ways that are NOT visible, but the concept is the same. And the invisible watermarks are good when you get to court, but they're not so good at finding perpetrators.

i really hope it doesnt come to that. having to put a watermark on every texture you make. I can't imagine it would be very attractive, no matter how subtle it is.
Some form of digital watermark might be nice. many digital photographers do that. the data is kind of embedded into the file so that if someone claims they created it, you can pull that information. so if linden plans to come up with a way to protect copywrites, i think this should be the way to go.

Non visible watermarks survive the conversion as well as minor altering of the image. An example would be Digimarc. If you have Photoshop, there is a demo of it in one of the image filters. Apply it onto any image and upload it into SL. Then save it back again onto your computer and check with Photoshop to see if its still there.

How would you be planning to enforce any rights via watermarking if LL isn't offering copy protection.

First you'll need to spend a lot of time flying around looking at textures (once they rez), and then what? LL's position seems to be that once you've found a ripped off version, you are completely free to take an anonymous person who lives in another country to some court over a matter of less than USD 100.

Great set of options.

Here's an idea...
All you rich clothing and skins vendors, who are most concerned about copybot, chuck a bunch of L$ in a pot and offer a big reward for any evidence leading to conviction (expulsion) of a copbotter by LindenLabs. Post WANTED! posters around stores. That will have rip-off artists looking over shoulder for any L$-hungry noob that wants to play gumshoe.

LMAO Oh I LIKE this idea.

In my experience, loyal customers are as good as paid newbie gumshoes any day of the week; and probably better. (They don't have as many "false positives."

Of all the stuff that's mine that had been knocking around without my knowledge or permission in SL, I only found two of the items myself (both times completely by accident.) And one of those I'd been alerted to previously, but had been too sick to take immediate action, and then forgot about.

People who like your work will recognize it when they see it. This is true even if you're not a Big Name Creator, assuming that you have your own style, and aren't just grabbing things off the web. (And if you are, what in the world are you worried about? If you see the stuff you sell out there, the chances are excellent that someone else used the same search engine, and found the same stuff independently.)

The Lindens announced that there have been about 50 people caught using the CopyBot. Out of (about) 1.5 million who have accounts, or (roughly) 600,000 who have been in-world recently. People, that's 0.003% of total accounts, or 0.008% of the people who've logged in during the last 2 months.

Even if you assume that only one in 100 is getting caught, that's still less than one half of one percent of the total residents, and less than a single percent even if you only count those who are "active".

Think about that for a moment, and then think about this; of those who copy things, most of them will probably never sell or give away a single copy. They are copying in the first place because they want the thing, and don't think that they can afford it. They rationalize it by saying that they aren't hurting anyone, not taking any income from the creator, because they weren't going to buy the thing any way.

Plus, textures and prims could already be copied! They could even be copied automatically, using software, not just by manually going through and examining every prim.

And people are closing their business over this, and ensuring that they won't make any money? Because less than one percent of residents may have picked up a tool that will make what they could already do slightly easier?

I don't get it.

Care to elaborate on that, or is that you just talking out of your ass. Bigot much?

Hi Nynthan. I can't speak for Thunderclap, but I believe that he was referring to the fact that a number of Asian countries, including Vietnam and Cambodia, were not signatories to the Berne Convention until fairly recently.

Very briefly stated, the Berne convention is one of several documents that make copyright international. Before it was implemented, in December of 1887, copyright was determined country by country. So, for instance, if something was copyrighted in the US, it was protected here, but was considered Public Domain in the UK unless it was also copyrighted there.

Since parts of Indochina had not signed, it was perfectly legal for people in those countries to copy and sell anything that was not also copyrighted in their country to anyone on the planet. This, understandably, gave them a very bad name internationally as "rip-off artists" even though what they were doing was legal.

This, in turn, put considerable pressure on the governments of those countries to join the rest of the world in signing the Berne Convention. Vietnam did so in 2004, and it's no longer legal for businesses there to freely copy and sell works that are copyrighted in their countries of origin. Cambodia has not yet signed, as far as I know, although it is a signatory to two other international copyright treaties. (UCC Geneva, and TRIPS, which it signed in 2004.) So....

It's not necessarily bigoted to mention that different countries have laws which allow their citizens to do things which we disapprove of, although Thunderclap might have phrased his statement more neutrally. It's a simple fact.

If you would like to see which countries have signed which conventions, you can find that information here.

Hope this helps!

Watermarks will NOT help here.

1: Clothing is easy enough to watermark, if you do it in an area of the texture file that is NOT VISIBLE on the finished clothes. But CopyBot doesn't steal clothing textures. At least not in a form that is useful. There are other things that can, but they are harder for a lazy thief to use.

2: Building textures, on the other hand, simply CAN NOT use a watermark in a usable form. Here's an example:



Every pixel of that texture needs to be visible. Would YOU but a window texture that has the maker's name visible on it like that? I don't know anyone who would, myself. And if it isn't visible, what good does it do?

Even assuming that a method existed that would allow visibly unnoticable, perfect verification that a texture or a set of prims was created by one person, and that any copies are just that, copies of that other person's work, it means nothing at all if LL is not willing to come down hard on any thieves that we catch. If all they do is suspend the offender for a period of time, they STILL have the stolen merchandise and any profits that they have made from their thievery.

I temporarily closed two of my stores for a few days, as a protest, to get Philip and the rest of LL's attention. Induvidually, I an certain that I was un-noticable. Just two little retail locations. But that week there were HUNDREDS of content providers who were closed in protest. And we DID get at least some concession from LL - a clear statement that using CopyBot to steal would be treated as a banable offense.

Robin may be correct in some cases, that a CopyBot thief just wants a copy for themselves, that they would otherwise not be willing to pay for. But if a product like a house, that is mostly just prims and textures, gets into the public domain stripped of all permissions restrictions and stripped of the content creator's name, that product becomes worthless. Just ask Celestial Studios about their Passport skin that is now a L$1 freebie, because a copy that was created by a system glitch became publicly available. They had to stop selling it.

For myself, I have decided to treat CopyBot thievery as I would any other case of shoplifting. If there is a blatant case, or I happen to catch someone in the act, I'll report them and try to get the thief banned for life. If one of my products commercial value is destroyed by some free, unrestricted copies being released by a thief, I'll drop that from my product line and replace it with something new, and most lilely better. In short, I am hoping that the number of serious cases affecting me will be low enough that I can survive the damage. I think that with LL officially saying that stealing with CopyBot is a banable offense, it shouldn't be a major problem.

Thanks, Robin. At times I come across as a bit harsh but by no means am I a racist or a bigot. However I do have strong opinions on Copybot and the stupidity around it. Nynthan, you can ask to clarifiy without being rude. The example was graphic for a reason. To show a real world example of piracy which is what copybot is. In beijing and Baghdad you can movies just released in the US for a few dollars. That was that point.
I share Phillips belief they we should be responsible for our own Copyright. Theft will happen, and as business people we have be prepared and take appropiate action. he and the rest of LL didn't leave us out to dry, quite the opposite. Otherwise, you could a EA style eula or a blizzard where we have no rights.
As for watermarking Ceera, have you considered an invisible one? Or signing your work with a logo. This is why logos exist.
I truly think that LL sees only two type of people here: those here to work and those here to play. And he views Content creators as here to work and expects us to understand copyright law and trademarking and how RL business works.
Most I would say, have no clue.
Closing your shop for a day to protest is one thing. Closing because you are ignorant(lacking info) and having a knee jerk reaction is quite another.

As I suspected, those who closed for the second reason are either going to stay closed for good (although they think it is until Cpoybot goes away, which it never will anymore than filesharing or DRM breaking or Open GL ripping or viruses will) or reopened once they realized that it was costing them more to stay closed.
That was my point.

Hi Thunderclap,

Every 'invisible' watermarking method that I know of will not survive the SL upload process, which converts a .tga file to JPEG2000 for internal storage.

If the texture file is 'invisibly watermarked', and you don't own the suspected ilegal item or have mod rights on it, how can you determine that the invisible watermark is there?

Watermarks can not be added retroactively to the hundreds of textures that I created which are already in the SL system's asset servers. At best, I can only add them to new textures that I produce. The same can be said for any method of 'signing' prim products. Once they have been sold, they are beyond my abilities to track or modify. But a copybot thief could still go to a parcel where a customer of mine has set up a properly purchased home that I built, and that thief could steal it with no way for me to observe him.

I sell texture bundles to other builders. Windows, walls, etc. . My store-owning partner in my texture sales also sells many of my textures individually, under a license agreement where she paid me a large amount of L$ for that distribution right. There is no way that I can tell the difference between one of my textures that was legitimately purchased from me in a bundle; versus a single texture legitimately purchased from Lillybeth; versus a texture bought from one of us and illegitimately re-sold, in violation of our sales TOS, by a texture store owner who buys one copy and sells hundreds; versus someone who used CopyBot to steal an entire build made with my textures, by myself or any of the above people with legal or illegal access to the textures. Sure, I may be able to prove that I made the texture. But I would have quite a time proving whether the suspected thief using it on a prim product was using legally purchased copies or not. The only thing that I fairly easily CAN pursue on the textures themselves is stores and yard sales that are reselling copies of my textures as-is, which is a clear violation of our purchase agreement.

For new prim and texture builds, I could, possibly, include a logo or other detection method on one or more prim surfaces that are normally not visible. I could even disguise that fact by adding the 'signature' texture, but coloring the prim face black. But if I don't have mod rights on the suspected stolen build, how can I. or anyone else, examine it and prove that the hidden signature is there?

As for placing a "logo" on clothes, I do that, in some cases. My line of tropical Sarongs have the word "Ceera's" built into the batik print pattern. But it's difficult to do that on a house. Most people are NOT going to want the builder's signature visible on every prim, or even on a nameplate on the cornerstone of the foundation. And if it's in a visible location and not part of every texture, there is nothing at all to keep a copybot thief from replacing that texture, to remove the signature, since copybot gives them a full-perms copy.

In the long run, it isn't technical protections that will help. No lock or signature is good enough. The only real protection comes from enforcement by LL when someone is caught. DMCA and other RL court situations tend to be far too expensive to pursue, compared to the sacle of the loss. There is nothing that we, as individual content creators, can do that isn't likely to cost us far more than just shrugging and writing off the loss.

It's like a RL example that happened once in my workplace.

Someone was stealing memory cards out of computers in the office, back when memory upgrades were still pretty expensive. It only took a minute or two to turn off a computer, open the case, yank 3/4 of the memory cards out, and seal it back up again. Didn't even require any tools, beyond maybe a pocket screwdriver or two. The thief probably then walked out with the cards in a static-safe bag in their shirt pocket, and often the user of that office computer might not notice for days, or even weeks, that their system was actually short on real memory chips.

We considered installing security locks on all the computer cases, so that the case was locked shut, and the computer locked to the table. The cost of doing that for 500+ systems was FAR more expensive than the few hundred RL dollars we lost to the thief. 10 x to 100x more expensive. Not worth it.

The same can be said for a lot of the content theft in SL. If we, as content creators, have to pursue the losses in the courts, it is not cost-effective, unless we catch a really big-time thief. On the other hand, it costs LL almost NOTHING to issue a lifetime ban when someone is caught stealing content.