Congrats to all the content creators...

*ignores most of the rants here to add her own form of it*

Please do not congratulate me for keeping my shop open. Congratulate instead my husband. He and I had a long discussion about why I was in SL in the first place.

I am here to simply improve my graphics skills and have fun doing it. I will probably never become 'big' enough to rip and well, for me, this will remain a game. Simply, entirely, a game. A possibly self-supporting hobby, but beyond that? *shrug*

My anger was properly redirected, when the problem behind it was figured out. I wasn't angry about the Copy Bot. Those are inevitable, actually. No, it was the way the first Linden post put it as being a completely 'okay' thing, leaving the content creators with the only tool of a DMCA to protect their IP. This is what I think had a lot of content creators cheesed off and can you blame us? Treat it like what it is, or give us the tools to do it ourselves! Don't say it's "Sometimes okay to copy..." just treat it like, "It's never okay to copy without the creator's approval." That is, after all, the reason behind the little copy box that creators can check/uncheck... our only line of defense, come to think of it.

Okay, that's my two cents worth.

What we're doing is unlinking all of our builds that are out on the property that were normally set for sale. We are than locking the pieces in place so they can't be bumped off alignment.

We are then dropping a fully linked version of the object for sale into the contents of main prims of the sale item. Also the main prims will have the sale price on them and be set for sale of the "contents"

When someone hovers over any of the main prims, the price will show and a rightclick will let them buy the contents (which is the entire object..fully linked and loaded with scripts and whatever)

If someone wants to use copybot on the these unlinked builds, all they will get in their inventory will be a pile of prims, and they will then need to rebuild the object on thier own. I doubt that they will want to go through the trouble of rebuilding seeing as how they are apparently lazy azzes anyways and need to resort to copying instead of building themselves.

sure its a little extra work...but it seems silly to close up shop because of a few bad apples....most people in SL are good people and won't resort to stealing.

Hummm. I suppose I could sell my houses entirely as sets that use Builders Buddy to place all the prims on site, as individual, unlinked prims, and then wipes the internal scripts after they lock the build on-site. It will be a royal pain to set 200+ prims to each have their own ID script for that, however. No... just not worth it, I fear.

Oh no no, most of us here to give an opinion and indulge the less informed. I wasn't trying to be rude in what I was saying, just questioning you to either enlighten me, or enlighten you.

Actually, if you are selling ripped DVD's or knock off of clothes, you CAN be arrested on the spot. Don't believe me, search flea market arrest raid. ARing for a ToS violation doesn't make anything easier. In fact it makes it more difficult. Most of the time, they are gonna ask you to use LL's channels of punishment since it's thier platform and thier ToS. They are supposed to be the one's who protect the intellectual rights in the first place, since they actually host the content.



No, they aren't, but they sure aren't jumping the ball on banning the avs. The list that was passed around in one of my groups still has people in the game on it. Some have provided pics. Not only are they in a swamp with all the copybot AR's, they have other game aspect AR's. Now if they had set up a specific person or small team to deal with a special link to where copybot violations go to one set to handle it, it probably would have eased the flames as such. But considering the amount of AR's still in backlog....

I do agree that the biggest part of the problem is the alts. Right now, we can't tell if (hypothetically) it was 1000 people or 10 people that made 100 alts throughout the day.



Actually, I've personally discussed and found 5-8 different ways viable to get verified. What was the biggest response? "I shouldn't have to do that, I want to play, and play right now." I did however help hook up about 15 residents with the answers I provided them, at no charge because they WANTED to be verified. I charged them the fees I incurred only (about 2 bucks per), in the form of Lindens.

They have now successfully used a few methods to either verify paypal or directly get verified, bought up the Lindens that was available to them, and for one instance, the card is no longer valid, but they are forever verified.

While I agree that the original post was poorly worded and contained at least one error (the DMCA doesn't require that redistribution be for profit), it did not actually say that using a bot like this was OK... it said that as a legal point copyright violations are not theft (Robin should have explained why this was relevant), and that copying is not automatically a copyright violation (which is true, but again, Robin should have elaborated on that).I suspect that Robin simply didn't realise what was actually going on, and was trying to head off a witch-hunt. This part of the message was marked as a digression, and really should have been a separate posting.

The actual content of the article came down to "we haven't got a good handle on this yet, but if someone uses this program to violate your copyright, we will enforce our policies against copyright infringement". In the past the fact that these policies are so "hands off" has been good for SL merchants, since so much in-world content (even completely innocent stuff) could easily be the subject of witch-hunts from outworld trademark holders. If you think you're Ok because your hands are clean, well, so did a lot of people who've been messed up on the Internet when their ISPs were too ready to bend over for corporations.

Yep, if you're Paramount or Pierre Cardin or someone of that stature... and you're dealing with someone who's violating a registered trademark, you can get a lot of heat applied. But for businesses of the scale of anyone in SL?

And on top of that, getting a registered trademark ain't even as easy or cheap as filing a DMCA complaint.
Even if someone says "I shouldn't have to do that" that doesn't mean they wouldn't do that if they had to. And in any case that's not your problem or my problem, that's Linden Labs' problem. If they have to solve it, they'll solve it - even if that means fewer signups, them accepting that problem solves *our* problem. Because right now our problem is they don't think they have to deal with it one way or the other. Well, I say that this situation is exactly why they do have to deal with it.

That's why it comes down to them taking it on, and us making them realise they have to.

Agreed
It that case I would unlink the house and lock it and put a copy of the house inside of a box out in front. Set that for sale of 'contents". I'll be doing that for my larger builds...depending on how the prims are set up.
I don't particularly like having sale boxes laying around.

Another idea is to load up the information sign with the build.

After some consideration, while unlinking every prim in a home for sale isn't much of an option, dividing a home into several component sections and using Builder's Budy or Rez Foo to assemble it for the user makes some sense. You could still make it enough seperate parts that it would be very difficult to copy completely.

And it isn't 'store samples' of a house build that I would worry about. It's the homes that you have already sold, far away from your store, which might get copied without you having any way to be aware of it. Those are what need to be somehow de-linked, or made into more small component sections.

Hear hear!

This is like the Communist scare of the 50's. You can either give in to SL's version of McCarthyism and close your shop - thereby doing yourself more damage than CopyBot is ever likely to - or you can just take a breath, and keep breathing.

* Are you going to stop CopyBot by closing your shops? No.

* Are you going to protect your IP by closing your shops? Yes, but you also will never sell another single thing.

* Will you be missed if you close your shop forever? Yes. For about the four minutes it takes for your customers to look up a competitor who didn't close their shop in a Chicken Little panic. Nobody will know or care why you left, unless you want to pay tier for land to hold a sign explaining it, which will drain your money away even faster, because now you're not selling anything.

* Will new shops and content creators come in to fill the void? Yes. Six months ago we had 160,000 citizens. Now we have 1.3 million citizens. Do the math. Falling upon your sword in pointless protest is simply lost in the tsunami of new businesses opening every day in SL.

* Will the Lindens notice you're gone? "Cleverly Named Avatar's Clothing Boutique" who?

Remember when everybody "suddenly" discovered that a tool that's been around over a decade could be used to capture textures directly from SecondLife? There was a lot of frantic tearing of clothes and wailing from content providers in SL who thought it was surely the End of the World. Or at least, that the SL economy would collapse in a week.

That was back when we had 160,000 residents. Did the economy collapse?

There's nothing more to see and dissect here, folks. Move along, move along, go about your business.

So yes, congratulations to those who kept their shops open! And this is the overwhelming majority of you, too - it's so encouraging to see that the people succumbing to ignorant, mindless fear are apparently a fringe group with no real political or social influence.

This is actually encouraging and uplifting, and reaffirms my faith in human nature.

Say that all you like, Kalal.

Whether we stay open or not, we have made a significant splash - all the way out to the mainstream media.

Moreover, this problem is neither one we created nor one LL has a handle on.

Until LL gets their head out of the hacker sand, this will continue to be a growing problem.

That has little to do with us storeowners, and more to do with the unviable nature of the situation itself.

Only LL can resolve the situation, no matter how much they try to wash their hands of it. Strong messages against the use of copybot (with perhaps an application system for legitimate usage) would be a start.

coco

Well, you did make a blip on the radar. But just a blip. SL certainly isn't the world, and it isn't even significant in the face of such MMO's as Warcraft, or Sims Online. And MMO's taken as a group are just one segment of the world's game industry - the media is much more interested in the people in their tents waiting for their PS3's at the Walmart this week. The "splash" is already over and done with, to nearly zero effect.

The real problem isn't with Linden Labs anyway - it's with the vocal, uneducated minority who insists that this or that such a thing is a problem with a simple solution that involves the "and something magical happens" step in the middle somewhere.

In order for an MMO to function at all, information must be passed from the server to the clients and back again. No matter what anyone does, this data stream must be interpreted at the client end to be usable, and because actions must take place that are not under the direct control of Linden Labs on other people's computers in order for SL to exist at all, there is no way to prevent people from intercepting, altering or completely regenerating that data stream without shutting down SL completely.

It's really just that simple, and people without this understanding are the ones who believe that Linden Labs is somehow abdicating a moral, ethical or legal responsibility.

To illustrate my point about the awareness of technical process and inherent limitations, I once wrote a commercial game for the Radio Shack Color Computer way back in the late seventies. A friend of mine at the time wanted a free copy of it. The only problem was, he didn't have a Radio Shack Color Computer. He had a Commodore 64. Despite the fact that he had a completely incompatible system, he believed I wouldn't give him a copy of my game simply because I was holding out on him, and our friendship actually ended over this.

Sheer ignorance of the technical limitations led him to entirely the wrong conclusion, and so it is here.

I don't deny that there is sand, or that some people's heads are in it. But Linden Lab's heads certainly are not.

The real problem is SQUARELY with LL. They should have made a post similar to what LibSL did before the coup by Baba.

LibSL stated the following (now removed):

. They "deeply apologized" for the copybot mess
. They had kicked out those responsible for its dissemination
. They would BEGIN THAT DAY to use their considerable skill to come up with things which will combat the copybot
. They promised to allow only people who have shown themselves to be responsible into the group, who would not harm SL intentionally or negligently.

I wish I had copied that message, because I was inordinately cheered by it. It was a tremendous confidence booster that would have put the kibosh on a lot of this right away. I didn't dream it would be removed, and LibSL would fall into the hands of the very individual who was supposedly ejected.

I figured a similar strong and reassuring message would be forthcoming from LL, and the whole problem would fade away.

It is ALL in the PR and the perception, and it is ALL in the hands of LL. People want strong leadership, not the perception that LL is weak and helpless and they are throwing us to the wolves - and worse, don't even care.

Here is what they could have and should have said, and could still say:

. LL apologizes for the mess, and to all the content creators and their customers, though this sort of thing is unavoidable.

. LL has kicked out all those responsible for unleashing this on the grid, and promises have zero tolerance and swift punishment for anyone who steals or aids and abets the stealing of other residents' property, up to and including Lindens.

. LL will protect its economy, its residents, and its content creators and their customers as their first priority and primary responsibility, within the technical limits of their ability.

. LL will take a more responsible position in overseeing LibSL's actions and behavior, especially given that they have already given them a free pass on the TOS, which none of the rest of us have been given.

. LL values its customers, and values the content creators who have made the very world they are busy selling and profiting from, and values its residents far above and over LibSL or any hacker within it.

. LL will make it a priority to keep the world a safe place for its residents, and move to quickly and decisively punish any wrongdoers within it.

They could say ALL that, and still allow for the use of copybot, and still get what they want to get out of LibSL.

And if they did say all that, they could prop up their house of cards for a lot longer.

coco