How to Emasculate CopyBot

Hi Linden Guys,

I spent most of last evening reading with great interest the posts in LL official blog to Cory Linden's announcement of the new policy regarding the CopyBot issue. It occurs to me that there should be a solution to this problem: I wonder what you techie guys think of the following idea:

It is clearly impossible to prevent unauthorized copying of SL content; however, maybe miscreants can be prevented from actually using their illgotten stuff in-world. Would it be possible for LL to provide a registry of objects and textures? Content creators could register their creations together with lists of customers who have purchased their IP. When any member saved an object or texture to his inventory, the registry could be queried to see if the content was registered. If the content was registered and the member was not a listed owner, then his stolen copy could be deleted and disiplinary action could be initiated.

I don't think that complete copies of objects and textures would have to be stored in the registry, just "fingerprints" for textures and some "invariants" for object parameters. Also, the registry should probably catch close matches, so someone couldn't, for example, change one pixel of a texture to prevent a match. Also, only content beyond a certain complexity should be registered (we wouldn't want people registering simple prims and their compounds). Anyway, those are a few of my thoughts.

Comments?

You guys do great work. Keep your chin up.
Craig

Thanks for the good ideas, and the kind words Craig.

I'm moving this post to the technical forum for further discussion.