Texture Protection

If I sell an object with a texture on it (doesn't much matter what it is -- car, house, box) can someone use that texture for something else?

Can you get at the original texture? What about taking in-game pictures of the texture and saving them?

Is there any way to prevent a picture from being taken in a particular area? Is there anyway to prevent the camera point from being in a particular area? (I know you can block the avatar, but I haven't noticed any blocking of the camera -- other than by having land large enough that its limited-range can't get there)

Thanks!

-Zax

If the texture inside is set no-modify, you should not be able to doubleclick it to bring up the texture picker. if it *is* moddable, and the item itself is also moddable, someone can doubleclick the texture, open the texture picker, and then stretch the pick window large enough to copy the texture...
These are both set no-mod by default, so you may just want to make sure it is set before you let the item loose.

As for preventing the camera from entering an area... I don't think this is possible now, other than your aforementioned "having a huge land piece". I'd love to be able to make my little home "spy camera proof" but this just isn't feasible right now.

Thank you; that's what I was looking for.

So, in theory, someone could still move their camera close to the item with the texture and snap a picture -- getting a facsimile of sorts of the texture in question? (At a cost of L$10, of course, but still...)

They could, but if the texture is on a non-flat object, they'll have a hell of a time straightening it back out again. It would also not be quite at the same quality of the original.

I've previously concerned myself with such texture questions and even did a little test to "steal" one of my own textures. As I create classic-gaming themed objects/terrain, I'm often using what appear to be low-res textures (blocky, pixelly, retro stuff). However, even with those low-detail textures, stealing them was far more trouble than it was worth.

Certainly, arranging the camera is possible, but centering it perfectly and including the whole texture area on a flat visual angle is a bitch. Add to that the fact that any repeatable texture will require tedious shaving of edges to make the repeat work right.

Also, my retro textures are actually much larger than they seem (320x320, for instance), even though they appear as, say, an 8-pixel by 8-pixel super mario block. This results in a less "blurred" image when I had to inevitably tile and enlarge them.

All of this is to say that it is definitely possible for someone to steal a texture. As Psyra stated, it's not so easy to steal textures from curved surfaces... My attempt to do that to one of my own designs resulted in a nightmare. Suffice it to say that anyone who is so talented as to properly rip and unskew your image has spent far, far more time than it would have taken to buy or otherwise acquire the damned thing.

It's interesting that you mention your texture is 320x320. Using a tip from another thread I started about textures, I put the client into debug mode and brought up the texture panel. When selecting various items, their textures then show up in yellow in the panel.

Personally, I only got edges of a size at a power of 2. That is, only 1024, 512, 256, 128 and such. How and when it decided to clip off edges or resize I hadn't yet figured out fully (it was all adding up in L$).

It would be nice if all of this sort of thing was documented better by Linden Labs so some of us can work on optimizing and maximizing our building and texturing.

Stealing is definitely not going to bring in a perfect result. However, it's not much more different than a photocopy. It loses quality, but it's usable.

This raises an interesting question, though. I'm using content that is copyright protected in the real world. To preserve this copyright, I'm labelling everything appropriately in SL (after all, SL is in the RW and so this is still necessary for RW protection). Is there any SL means of enforcing copyrights? Certainly, I could be a PITA (pain-in-the-you-know-what) and raise RW legal trouble for in world copyright infringement. And technically, to keep copyrights strong, they need to be continually enforced. Now, I'd rather not be a PITA, but at the same time I don't want to weaken or lose RW intellectual property values, either.

Has any one had to deal with this sort of thing in a serious way?

Thanks,

-Zax