Copy Bot Website

http://www.slbrowser.com/

I went to the website after this conversation with a vendor and sure enough there were all of the textures ready for download by anyone. These are NOT just snapshots, these are the textures themselves. This si a copy bot trolling the sims and stealing the textures to use on the site without permissions.

Now these textures are out there for anyone to use. Personally, I dont care about my logos. But I care about the vendors and shop keepers selling here and looking business cause the copy bot is on my sims stealing.

Things like this make me sick

This is the copy of the letter that was send to the owner. I know many others have sent a similar letter as well.

I would advise everyone to do the same. The fewer chances of stolen item the better.


Hello Diva Canto,

I wish to have all things created related to my sims unlisted from your SL Browser. I also want the 10 private sims, Venice Island, Tuscany Island, MotorWorld, Ocean View, Statue of Libery, Governers Island, Rockaway Point, Roosevelt Island, Voices Island, Celestail Requiem NYC put on a list that your bots are forbidden to crawl.

The reason for this is that when you have posted your finding on your web site, my texture that my vendors make in Photoshop, are shown and anyone can take those textures off your site and used them in Second Life.

They work very hard to make all thier own content and should have as little chance for theft as possible.

This has been brought to my attention a few of my renters. With the current state of copy infringment in SL, I feel the need to help them in any way possible.

Thank you for your time.
Melody Regent

March 11, 2008

Hi Melody -

had a looksee and did a search on my own stuff.... are you sure these graphics are directly ripped? There appears to be a watermark on the bottom right side of each thumbnail that says 'second life search'. Could not these items be individual objects set for sale in the sim AND set to show up in search?

I saw a bot I think it was SLbrowser one on my land but we have nothing for sell.
I make textures I don't sell them.
I am curious where is it on the site that they had the textures listed of yours?

The images seem to be hot-linked directly from SL. My photos are shown and could easily be copied. These are NOT the images I use in SLX to show the products. These are textures from within SL and my inventory. The only place they are used and shown is in my apartment. No sales as to date. So something is ripping textures and images.

Never mind went to site and put in texture/ sl products and they have full images there that anyone can take.
http://webi.slbrowser.com/webadapter/results.jsp?query=Textures&startat=20&mode=products

What would prevent me from cropping out the watermark and using these?

Are they not all linked directly from SL's search engine? I'm not sure how this makes SLBrowser a copybot, any more than LL making these textures available in the first place.

Dn't get me wrong - this does present an issue for me - if i were to sell my artwork in a gallery again, this could pose a problem - but 1) These are graphics SL rips from our vendors 2) They are also warped and squished to fit that standard size 3)As such, they don't present a usable graphic in many cases.

Am I missing something? Isn't it only showing textures from vendors? The only items it lists for my place are all vendors, and not the items themselves. It's not exactly ripping textures from furniture and making them available. Or am I missing something.

Lot are listed @Yahoo on following pages very few have the original artist names and I recognize a few because I am very into textures.

I looked at the sites that FD posted with the textures. Can you copy & use them ... sure ... you'd have to take out the watermark - but the quality would S-U-C-K ... if you are a content creator, well, at least me personally - i would NEVER use a texture that size ... they would look horrid, in game.

I just wonder if SL browser has these people's permission. I had no clue Yahoo was avatar name.

It gives you a list of the bots it uses, I suppose you could ban them all.

NOTHING!

I just checked for some of my stuff and while most of the textures it is displaying are off of the vendors, some textures it is showing are the actual products - so someone could grab these files and crop or remove the watermark then use them.

Yes the quality would be crap, but if you're just stealing people's work, I don't imagine you are going to be that worried about poor quality.

I did check closely and the actual images themselves are being served up by secondlife / linden lab; slbrowser is only hotlinking to the images via the image UUID.

One other thing I've found which I am not happy about is that slbrowser is listing land parcels which are *not* for sale and *not* flagged to show in search. It is showing people's homes, including the parcel name and description.

I have already looked at this website a while back, but there does not seem to be an opt-out function, like the sheepbot had. It doesn't appear to have occured to them that people might want to be delisted completely.

-Atashi

Actually Yahoo is name of shop. I am there right now.
I noticed they don't have only maybe 6 pages listed. they only showed me like 800 out of 22000 or something textures

I typed in my name and got this;

The issue I would have is that something like this should be opt in. Business and parcel owners should be asked for permission before these guys run off and start displaying our respective images.

at the bottom of the bots page (http://slbrowser.com/bots.html) there is a link to a script that is supposed to tell the bots to stuff it if found on the parcel

and as said, it pulls the images directly of the SL site so i guess we have the lindens to thank for it this time heh

the watermark is useless as you can just look at the uuid of the texture and set it with a script, no quality loss there... go figure LL...

Yes there is - http://slbrowser.com/scripts.html

The first one is like robots.txt, if you know what that is. It allows you to ban all of their bots from indexing on your parcel, as long a they continue to comply with it.

That can be said for some things that web engines do - like index graphics - but this engine is so tiny, and the number of people who even know about is so miniscule, that they wouldn't have any data if it were opt-in only. Although I don't necessarily disagree with you right now, I'll reserve judgement until I know exactly what's possible from it.

Yep, it took the images/texures from the photos on the wall in my apartment. Its actually states where the image/texture located. So much for security, it walked right through.

My images (though smaller) can now be cropped & uploaded back to SL without any payment or notification.

I just added a comment to there article;
------------------------------------------------
There is a problem with your search engine. It can take textures/images (though smaller) from products (like my photography) and show it in your listing. It can now be cropped, copied and uploaded to SL without payment or permission. Also, how did you bot get through my security? Its not part of the land group or on ANY whitelist.

One more thing; REMOVE ME AND MY PRODUCTS FROM YOUR LISTING IMMEDIATELY!
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I saw the thing with their scripts.

I feel it's pretty inconvenient if I have to devote prims and script cycles on my regions to cover the entire possible area with scripts running just to maybe keep these guys away, assuming they don't decide to change things or ignore the scripts in the first place.

Just like it's pretty inconvenient to waste a dozen or so of our limited ban-slots to ban all their bots, and trust them not to make new ones that we don't know about.

I understand that ultimately the responsibility lies with SL for a) making all this information available to everybody everywhere, and b) responding to every new bot with 'gee whiz thats cool', and maybe c) not understanding, or simply not caring, about the value of IP to the content creators, and finally d) not understanding, or simply not caring, about the desire for privacy among some of their customers.

I suppose we could always disable 'show in search' and then our textures, parcels, and lives would be protected. The protection would of course include us eventually selling out, deleting, and quitting, because new search is the defacto standard, and without it we'll be protected from sales, protected from customers, and eventually protected from second life.

Bah, I need to quit now before I let myself get really steamed.

-Atashi

If you want to complain about someone putting the images on the web, that would be Linden Lab.

I don't exist on SL browser and I make, have lot of textures on land and friend who owns the sim often sees the bots.
She said she didn't think there was problem with them doing this unless you were want to hide textures that were gotten off the web illegally,etc.
I don't know I think it would creep me out.
I see 2 things under the name Miiho Mizin no images though it has store location too.
http://webi.slbrowser.com/webadapter/results.jsp?query=Miiho+Mizin&mode=all&submit=Search

Well, they pulled them. The image links changed. They must be taking some heat.

They also removed my comment from their blog. I must have struck a nerve.

Well that was until the new SL viewer's release. But in previous versions using basic Client options it was possible to get texture id.

Textures are stored in cache too, but I don't know about its format, is not a clean tga. But I'm sure that more of one knows how to work with them.

EDIT: I'm check slbrowser.com, these images are taking from the slsearch engine that's why the "Second Life Search" watermark.