Texture theft preventable?

Any way to prevent texture theft??

After spending a whole month and many hours making a skin, I find myself wondering just this.
Is this just something thats just going to happen?

From what I understand, there is no way to prevent it. I have RL artwork that I show in the game, and I take the step of adding a watermark to it, not necessarily to prevent the theft, but to at least act as a deterant as well as a way to prove that it was mine and it was stolen.

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Would it help any if I put up a note not on the mesh, but on the file that says "Texture theft is a crime!!!!"? Doubt it.

The only thing you can really do is to document your creations, and if someone steals them, issue a DMCA take down notice and act against them. There is no technical solution. For the textures to be seen by others, they have to be accessible in ways that can be intercepted. The only real solution is a social one, to demonstrate that theft is unacceptable.

Work from the starting point that the theft itself is not preventable even with your best efforts and maximum IP settings.

The mere fact that your computer has to download a copy in order to render means the data can be copied in its original form.

Then do everything else. Document, file, etc, as Ceera says.

Yes, but it's not so much that, but the fact that anyone can take a screenshot. That will defeat anything you embed in the file that's not visible.

As a clothing Designer in SL I am extremely worried if what Im reading is true. can someone after the update take textures and designs that I worked on for hours for each one and then sell them as their own? I need to do more research but I am very concerned on how to protect my work. I don't do this for the money, seriously I make in a day what I make in an hour in my profession, it's just that my designs are MINE..........Any opinions on this?

It's likely you will find that most skins claimed to be stolen are either A: snapshot mock ups which dont turn out as well or B: Used similar source photos and just resemble yours to a degree. Alot of skin makers use sourcing from photos found on the net and other places that alot of the time are openly available to just about anyone so your going to run into alot of things that are similar in design. I run into the fact you cant really prove it is stolen and not just done to mimic your design like so many other things in SL are gadgets or whatever they be. Its a world where people develop more and more and alot of the theft claims I think you will find dont really hold up when comparitively made with the claim of using source photos.

It's true. It's true by the mere fact that your graphics card needs a copy of the texture in order to render it on screen. That means a copy of the texture has to pass through the computer system. This data stream can always be intercepted.

This has nothing to do with the update. It has always been possible and I think it always will be possible.

The only way to really protect your work? Never release it, never show it to the public. But that's not acceptable right?

Julia, the painful reality is that we are in a time when fully protecting any artistic material iRL is impossible. Movies are copied, music is copied, now even statues can be copied. Art as a medium has not advanced since film. Movies are but images, sounds will always be sounds, books are just text. But images can be copied, as can sounds, and so can text.