Texture Snagging Using The SL Tools

I have heard and now witnessed for myself a way of literally snatching textures off prims using the tools LL provide us with.
I dont want to go into too much detail but needless to say 2 people have brought it to my attention now both saying " we will keep it under our hats" but for those ppl who like to explore SLs 'engine' this is a very easy thing to do.
In the interest of IP laws is this feature so important that its accesable by anyone who can log into SL?
Without wanting to stand on my soap box I think I stand for ALL texture artists whether they sell their work direct or use it on their personal and commercial builds when I say its bad enough that people not related to LL bring in 3rd party texture snatchers without it now being commonly available to all and sundry.

If LL claim to take steps to do what they can to help their customers ie : us protect their IP rights why is this openly available to people other than direct LL staff?

This is appalling and upsetting, The texture business is already under constant threat from ppl who will go out of their way to bring 3rd party software into SL but when ppl discover they can do the same actually using LL 'tools' it sends out a messege that LL 'must' be ok with this or why else make it available to all residents?

Can we have this removed please?

I don't remember where or what, but I vaguely recall Linden Lab having the position that there actually are enough legitimate uses for it to warrant leaving it in.

On the other hand, it isn't all that trivial to use this as an exploit, because you only get the texture's key - which can only be applied programatically. So this isn't one of those "anybody who feels like it can steal and use my textures" things.

Still, I'm at a bit of a loss for what legitimate uses this could really have, vs the obvious problem you point out.

zk

That option has been around for a while.

The general purpose usage (which doesn't give the key) is to get the size of a texture.

There are a number of ways to use this: texture stores don't generally bother to tell you the size of the texture and while a door texture may look great on a .5x.5 prim, it looks quite awful on a door sized prim when it's only 128x128.

Using it on an entire linkset will give you the size of each *different* texture. When I'm buying furniture, it's nice to know whether the creator bothered to optimize the texture, or used 20 different 1024x1024 textures and it's going impact my already low frame rate.

And by far the most useful: you can get the face number of a particular side on a prim.


The "advanced" option tells you the texture key, which isn't particularly useful really.

One reason I can think of why it would be in the viewer: a Linden might come across an copyrighted/illegal/highly offensive texture, in which case that texture would need deleting from the database. Every copy of the same texture has the same asset ID for that texture, so deleting it from the database removes it from anything, anywhere on the grid whether in inventory, in a script, or a applied to a prim.

Useful personal uses: texture aligning is a rather big pet peeve of mine, and most people just don't bother aligning textures from one prim to another, leaving horizontal or vertical overlap. I can get the texture key, put a texture aligning texture on the prims, align them proper and put the original texture back on.

Another one is retexturing: if I buy a mod piece of furniture with one texture, and I think I have one that *might* look better on it, I have a way to try it out that won't ruin the entire piece. If the new texture ends up looking awful, I can still put the original back.


People could potentially use it to "steal" textures, but given how clumsy texture keys are (if you feel threatened, try building anything that involves prims with textures on different faces, using only the texture keys of your textures, you'll find it's simply not worth bothering with compared to using another program and paying the L$10 upload fee) this is really a non-issue.

Oh noes! A tool that can copy textures? It shouldn't be allowed! The creators of this evil software must be stopped, protect the content creators!

!quit (spam free)
!quit (spam free)

</sarcasm>

Any texture can be copied using a screenshot and Photoshop. Basically almost any image that can be displayed on your computer screen is subject to theft, inside or outside of SL.

Web graphics are the most commonly stolen images.

Many textures in SL are themselves property theft because they were swiped from the internet.

Wish I heard as much indignation over the theft of intellectual property from web sites as I do about fear of theft from SL designers, but that's because I'm still a web master. I'm somewhat innured to any alarm or indignation over this issue.

Why do people keep using an end sarcasm with no start sarcasm?

There should be some syntax checking to prevent this sort of error.

I guess it's better than the reverse, a start sarcasm with no end sarcasm, which would cause all following text you read, like for example, phone numbers you look up, or your grocery list, or stop signs, to have to be taken sarcastically.

Throwing a few end tags around helps to clean up other stray bits of sarcasm that have never been resolved and are just left dangling open, confusing people with their errant tone.

If I am remembering correctly, there are really easy ways to steal textures, skins, and most other images from SL with free third party tools. I also remember LL saying there is nothing they can do about it either. But if you think you are a victim of theft, you can always file a DMCA.

Well I guess I over reacted. My bad. I had assumed and half shown you can literally grab the texture from any prim in SL.

If anyone makes a living from what they make in SL its human nature to want to protect it.

Thanks for those that added constructive replies. I feel better relaxed now.

As for DMCA yes i file one or two via my PC fax but it wont stop ppl from helping themselves to textures from my stores and the other artists who display their work in TRU which is what bothers me. Long term if ppl can just help themselves the SL texture business will die.

Might not bother people who spend their VL in forums but it will effect those hand full of ppl who make a living from making and selling prefabs and custom builds using textures made by myself and other SL texture artists.

oh noes a land baron whos hasnt got a creative bone in his body and just spends his days scanning land auctions and forums posts because he has way too much time on his hands

Look bud, look beyond your ' Buy & Sell Land' exsistance and look long term . The land you buy & sell/rent ppl want to BUILD on it...building requires skill and textures- textures ( hand or custom made) require skill....Both involve IP and copyright protection.

Take away the security of IP or copyright protection and ppl wouldnt want to BUY your land

SLs whole 'active' community are involved in creative work whether that be making it or buying it...without us 'content creators' your land is worthless.

bah why bother the earlier poster was right...feeding the trolls... excuse me I have some 'work' to do and customers to attend to.

I think this is also an exaggerated fear. It's as likely as saying "if people can just help themselves to web graphics, the web design business will die."

The actual possession of a single stolen graphic, or even a portfolio of stolen graphics, does not suddenly create a business. What you're overlooking in this equation is that any product -- whether it be a web site, an SL suit of clothes, or an SL building -- is just the starting point for a business.

Being able to swipe every single beautifical graphic ever made and displayed on the internet does not make you a successful web designer. You need a host of other skills -- from HTML to Photoshop to marketing -- to launch your business. And the first time someone asks you for an item you can't steal, you're dead.

Same thing goes for SL.

Creating an identity, creating marketing tools, getting display space, paying for advertising and providing customer service are the key ingredients to success. Often, a good designer with poor marketing skills will fail where someone with a mediocre product but excellent business savvy will prosper.

The most likely use of stolen items is either for personal use by someone too cheap to buy them from a legitimate source, or some fly-by-night sleazoid merchant who catches a few impulse buyers. Neither one is going to substantially hurt sales for a well-established business.

I'm not saying theft won't take a little nibble every now and then, just that it's unlikely to have you for dinner.

Yes I agree totally.
But then I also am the person who has to deal with relentless 'resellers' who get given a bunch of TRU textures or worst still buy them and totally disregard the EUAL slapped on customers forheads when they TP to the store and sell them anyway.

It has reduced somewhat I find education was the issue... no one knew or cared what copyright was and believed " I paid for it therefor its mine"

I sponser ASL and they did some classes on ethics of texture creation and usage which apparently opened a few eyes and the new residents on the whole said they had no idea and would keep a keen eye open for texture theft or resellers by checking the owner/creator perms etc

I also pay for information leading to the find of a reseller of TRU textures of 500L

For the most part customers DO respect and apprecaite the messege about hand made textures being their to use but not to own and are honest and good people.
But if you dont nip it in the bud it can get out of hand.

If I didnt file DMCAs or fight with ppi I find selling TRUs textures then a chain reaction occurs.

Joe Blogs sells a bunch of TRU textures at a yard sale...Jemma Blogs buys them and theres no user licence in Joes bundle. Jemma sees Joes not the creator so she does the same...and on it goes.

Ive had to chase chains like this 7 people long and lost the thread in the end

Its what comes with HAVING to sell txtrs with full perms because as yet after 4 years LL still havent come up with some sort of extra perm for textures such as ' Transfer As Rendered' or something for ppl who sell what they create and need some transfer option on their textures.

If I removed Transfer or Modify my customers would go NUTS.

Ive seen other stores trying things like ' Buy Personal' ( cheaper ) ' Buy Commercial' ( overpriced) and I did a survey in the store asking my customers if they liked this idea...no one said yes apart from one...in short the majority of TRU customers are SL business ppl. They need full perms.

Ive also had total nut cases sending me hate mail ( but using other peoples notecards and not identifying themselves) bragging that since I banned them because I found them sellin gmy textures they just use their alts and buy what they want and ' are still selling my textures without guilt and have made 40K so far bitch"

There are some ugly uncreative lazy SOBs out there...and Thank God they remain in the minority but none the less it 'does' play on my mind. Its not just me...I have 20+ artists displaying their work at TRU and I am responsible for them too ( or I feel it )

If LL would JUST give us the same IP protection regards the perms as other content creators then the world would be a happier place in the land of Texture artists

You're quite right in this assessment of the impact on the building texture swatch market. I was thinking more in terms of clothing and accessory textures, rather than the building textures, and should have qualified my remarks. That's what I get for scanning threads too quickly. Not to mention the very confusing use of "texture" to refer to a wide range of photo image uses.

Theft in your area is rampant, starting at the creation level where anyone posting a texture pattern or even building part photo to the internet is going to get ripped off.

This thread began with a focus on specific tools for theft, and my contention is that you don't need to fear SL tools because there are so damn many other ways to steal that it's a losing battle.

And for what it's worth, it's because of the EUAL at TRU -- plus the quality of the overall store -- that I shop there almost exclusively. I start there, and go elsewhere only if I can't find what I want.

Disclaimer: Umm, actually I'm not allowed to buy building textures. Regan, my main, buys the building textures. Whew! I could get in such trouble for making statements like that...

How well do digital watermarks hold up on textures transferred to SL (and out)?

They don't. At all.

Textures are uncompressed and recompressed using JPEG200 codec for everything. Also, while you can upload textures in any size and aspect ratio you like, the image is rescaled so that it's vertical and horizontal dimensions are set to the nearest sensical power of two, meaning that rows or columns are subsampled or supersampled to produce the resulting image. This is a requirement imposed by the video graphics hardware in your computer.

Then when the texture is displayed, there's a process called LOD, or Level of Detail. The texture is automatically resampled again to different sizes to speed up the draw rate - textures in the distance are much smaller in area than ones used close up. Further, if the texture is something on an avatar, it goes through a compositing process which puts the texture through some pretty extreme pixel torturing. No watermark would survive any of these operations, and most textures go through more than one of them.

And there are two ways to steal textures - one is by using nothing but the tools available in SL, by programmatically using a texture key to set the texture on a prim surface - then there's another that dumps the decoded graphics straight out of your video card's buffer onto the disk - it doesn't even use SL's cache, which is ignored in this process. Since fixing that problem would also break your video card and the Second Life client in its entirety, don't look for a fix for this any time this millenium.

They don't work in SL. The SL import process converts the file format, and any embedded stuff that isn't visible is lost. Any embedded stuff that IS visible destroys the valur of the texture by marring it with a mark that all work made with it must show.

Reselling textures is pretty low on the low shady business scale.

Especially when the texture sellers sell them full perms to allow you to actually produce items you can deed to your group, etc.

I own several $1000L of Lilly's textures, for example. I wouldnt even consider selling those even though the perms system in SL would let me.

People have mentioned with new clients it will be easier and easier to steal content. I think the only thing that will keep businesses going is honest people willing to pay for their merchandise so the creator gets their due.

Digital watermarks work by altering the picture in such a way that the naked eye can't detect the alteration, but it can be read by software. So digital watermarks can't be removed from pictures, per se. Digital watermarks are resilient to degradation in picture quality, but only up to a certain point. I don't know how Second Life stores images, but I assume that the upload degrades quality, and further that capture will degrade quality. I was wondering if the uploads and downloads destroy enough of the quality to make the watermark unreadable.

If no one has tested this before, I might try.

Not true. Strong invisible watermarking holds up fine. Weak watermarking, by it's definition, will get completely obscured during the J2K conversion process. Strong watermarking will survive conversion and most manipulation, and is probably the best type for SL since we care most where the texture originated from and who created it, not so much how it was manipulated (which weak watermarking is useful for). Strong watermarking can be made invisible to the naked eye using HSL variances in texture grain throughout the image. No one can extract the watermark unless they have a copy of the original image without the watermark (which no one else in SL would, but the creator).

People can create their own watermarks very easily in Photoshop (Digimarc is not needed). The simplest kind is just a logo/name stamp often with a © present to indicate in no uncertain terms that the image is copyrighted. Note that the absence of a © or any other distinguishing mark in no way means the image is not copyrighted. All images/artworks are protected by copyright the moment they are created. Designers of avatar textures have the added luxury of being able to hide visible watermarks like this in the unused spaces outside the UVW boundaries. Raw texture resellers have more of a challenge since their entire texture is usually visible. Those textures require invisible watermarking, or a special note indicating that the image must be resized to obscure the watermark. This could be done by creating a seemless texture at a size smaller than the typical 256x256 or 512x512 and repeating the pattern out to the required dimensions. The watermark would be placed between the original and extended area of the image. The customer would be required to enlarge the texture to the correct percentage to hide the watermark and match the seams. Of course, this probably wouldn't go over well with customers, and the textures wouldn't sell because of the extra hassle.

The more stealthy (invisible) method of strong watermarking involves minor random alterations to the HSL variances throughout the entire image. This is most useful for people who sell textures that require the entire texture remain visible (i.e. most raw texture resellers like TRU). Still, this is a very useful method for any texture artist because any theif with wits about them will emmediately erase all the obvious watermarks once they get a copy of the texture.

The best practice is to employ all known methods of watermarking , even those that can't survive image conversion, because each alteration and conversion tells a story about where the image has been, what was done to it, and (in some cases) by whom.

I use Digimarc for digital watermarking. It creates the (for all practical purpose) invisible watermarks in pictures, and inserts an identifying code that is kept in their database so that a particular watermark can be traced back to me uniquely. Digimarc can also use the information to search the internet for your pictures (though that service requires a separate fee). The plug-in and 1000 uses cost about $70.00 if I remember correctly, which I feel is cheap, all things considered.

I have put medium watermarks in 256x256 pictures that hold up, but that's only after one jpeg compression.

I'll add that I see blatant copyright abuses all the time on SL in the form of selling others' artwork as posters. One example is a yard sale I saw with various Boris Vallejo pictures, and knowing the steps that he has taken to protect his intellectual property on the internet, it's a good bet that he didn't license someone in Second Life to sell the pictures cheaply in a yard sale.

One day when I am bored I'm going to start writing these down and notify the appropriate copyright holders.

From my understanding of the processes, all textures are downloaded into the SL cache, how long they stay there is relevant to how long you stay in that area and the size of the cache, much the same as IE. The only thing that actually prevents someone from lifting them from the cache is the client that marks them as 'protected'. That's not to say you can't do it manually.
The UUID of each texture is stored on the LL asset server database which links it to the creator and the current owner and is asigned at the time of uploading. Of late this has gone awry and a lot of items are missing the creator UUID, hence the 'you do not have sufficient permissions to look at the notecard you just created yesterday' sign appearing more and more. Look at something created say a year ago, and it spends a lot of time 'waiting' to identify the original creator/owner. Add to that any item deeded to a group which may or may not still exist which has been inactive for a period of time and the thread becomes unravelled.

My suggestion is you do the same for any 'internet' content with regards to textures. Copy them onto a single write CD which will date stamp them before you upload them off your PC, and keep that safe to use in the event you have to prove true ownership. However don't be to quick to blame someone in possession of anything orginally your creation as they may not be able to gain proof of what point of access they got it from, given the very nature of the internet.
The copyright laws state that someone would not be infringing, if they make 3 obvious alterations to an original created by another source. It dosen't however state exactly to what degree those alterations should be, other than size, which doesn't count. The Mona Lisa was copied several times whereby the copy artist made changes to the background scene, another argued that by applying his own signature (name changed by deed poll) counted as a single change.

Something to be aware of with Digimarc is that the code they use to match information in thier database can easily be hacked and forged. This makes their method less secure than a closed proprietary method. The database search will mostly be useful for tracking web stuff, not for searching LL's servers and the terrabytes of image data on them.

It would be nice if LL formed a partnership with Digimarc or similar, so that thier servers were included in such database searches. I'm not sure how they would do that though? It might be too much of a security risk.

I didn't expect that it would be possible to use the watermark to search the Second Life database (though a way could be created, I'm sure, with sufficient motivation to do so). However, once an artist has discovered a stolen work on Second Life, the watermark could be useful in establishing who has true ownership and who copied without permission.

I think that threads like this serve a very useful purpose.

It is exactly a thread like this that started out as a difference of opinion and displayed many different viewpoints before being clarified towards the end of it by some very knowledgeable
sources that sparked my own interest in copyrights and an increased awareness of the
proprietary work of artists when I was a new person in SL.

Perhaps there should be a sticky on copyrights at the top of this forum, including the
weird permissions system in SL that requires that us original texture sellers give full perms
on our textures so that they posses inherent value.

I hear quite often from people that they gave this or that person textures and I want to
cover my ears, because I feel required to inform them that the SL permissions system has nothing to do with copyright laws.
Most of these people do not even know that it is wrong to do.

Most people I have found just want to go do and learn by doing, so to the uninformed
a glimpse at the permissions showing textures as 'trans' makes them think they can do whatever they want with them.

When I do inform people of the actual texture legalities, no matter how delicately I try to
put it, it seems that I am putting them on the defensive making it uncomfortable for everyone.

One thing I would love to see is that fourth option for texture perms.
Maybe something like "texture prim trans" where you could leave the normal 'trans' option
unchecked and then check the "prim trans only' circle instead.

At least that way people would not be able to casually pass them around. I believe most people are not dishonest but that they are confused by the permissions.

And even if some person is a little dishonest I don't think those people would go to the trouble of stealing textures in the more technical ways available
The current permissions system just makes it waaay too easy.

Also a no snapshots on land parcel option would be great, once again a person could
use a screen grab, but once again they would have to take that extra step which helps
to make it very clear that it is something that is not approved of.

This would at least provide a couple of stop signs, certain people can always choose to break the rules just as in real life but in RL there are clearly posted stop signs.