It's official...

You texture artists are probably about to lose all control of how your textures are used. Phoenix just stated that having all properties of an object listed in its contents was a possible future feature of SL.

Your textures may end up a part of someone else's work, just because they can be ripped from the contents.

Have fun!

OMG THE SKY IS FALLING, RUN RUN RUN!

someday, somehow, in some way, a change might be made. This somehow means that everyone and their brother can now steal your work?

Right.

Based on the information you gave, IF it's implimented, they might be able to find out the texture resolution and depth, and god-forbid, the name you gave it. How does this let them steal it?

reading phoenix Linden's post, he said

Italicies added by me for emphasis. So, he's said that if they do move textures (and everything else) into object inventory, they're going to set it so they can't be removed.

Thanks for the concern, Mole, but there's no cause for alarm here. The bulk of Phoenix's message was in regrad to protection for item contents (scripts, for the most part). The part about textures only served to point out that textures are NOT contents, but rather a part of the item, and therefore cannot be removed from an item.

Phoenix then went on to mention that there's no real way to secure a texture in the first place, since a texture is inherently visible for all to see. In other words, anyone can take a screenshot of anything, meaning there's no way to block someone from copying a texture, while there are certainly ways to block the visibility and thus copyability of a script. That's all. Nothing is different at this point than it ever has been.