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Short list of ways to reduce content theft

Iron Perth
Registered User
Join date: 9 Mar 2005
Posts: 802
11-16-2006 07:25
I wanted to summarize a short list of ways to reduce content theft that I've heard about

1. Bonded sellers - control who sells and who doesn't and you can avoid any kind of content theft
2. Obfuscate prim data - does prim data have to be transfered around in a form that is so easily reproduced? It's an arms race, but why make things so easy at this point? Almost all the time if you just make it difficult then that's all that is really necessary.
3. Detect similar content in your asset database and let people get lists of other people who have created similar content in order to persue copyright infringement.
4. Shep Korvin's solution to disallow people setting textures when they don't own it is a brilliant one. Texturing is often the most difficult part of modeling.

These are just a few short ideas. There are likely many many more, and if you have the will to protect and respect the rights of the creators of your economy, I am sure you can up with many more and much better ones.

Cheers,

Iron.
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Kelly Linden
Linden Developer
Join date: 29 Mar 2004
Posts: 896
11-16-2006 11:18
1) I do not think I fully understand what you are stating, or how it would block the re-creation of objects in world.

2) Obfuscation only goes so far. The truth is we can not hire as many people to continually think of new ways to obfuscate the data as there are people willing to try to un-obfuscate it. Additionally, the fact is that once the object data gets to the gl layer it can not be obfuscated, and gl listeners exist that make it trivial to get such data out. This makes it trivial to bypass all our obfuscation, no matter how hard we obfuscate it.

3) This is pohibitively expensive computationaly. That isn't to say similar ideas are not being discussed or have not been discussed.

4) This has also been discussed. There are draw backs - scripts currently only require an asset id to set the texture, and we are loath to break old scripts. That is just one of many concerns and issues with this idea.
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- Kelly Linden