Second Life Sued For Allowing Sale Of Impostor Virtual Goods

Whatever the outcome is, the days of unregulated content creation in SL seem to be coming to an end.

and here are the court papers

http://foo.secondlifeherald.com/slh/2009/09/eros-llcshannon-grei-vs-linden-research-the-class-action-complaint.html

The Veoh case sort of rains on that parade a bit:
http://news.cnet.com/8301-1023_3-10353563-93.html?tag=newsEditorsPicksArea.0

Will be interesting to see how all this turns out though.

Yes but has LL done this "…the company has implemented filtering technologies and created systems designed to help keep pirated material off of its site"

I wonder if LL will cancel his account now and delet all sexgens like they did with that lawer that sued them awhile ago.

agreed I shall be watching this very closely indeed

This will not end well...

No. Whatever the outcome, we "ordinary" users will suffer the greatest consequences. I guess we should make the most of this particular show while it lasts.

When they say that


I wonder which 'tools' are being referred to here?

I know it is still possible to get the UUID of any texture, regardless of permissions, by just using the regular client, is that what they are referring to?

Am I right in thinking that there is NO tool, including Copybot, that can copy animations and scripts in no-mod objects? If that is the case how can a sexgen bed clone be made? The bed is easy, but it is the anims and the scripts that bring it to life.

Rock

I'm all for content protection. I'm not sure this lawsuit, as written, can be won - however, it may force some changes that will make life in SL less fun, for sure. And possibly result in a very high barrier to setting up a business in SL.

To this layperson's eyes, claims 4,5, and 6 appear overstated. While LL provides the platform on which stolen goods are sold, they do not THEMSELVES directly sell stolen goods. The revenue LL makes from stolen IP is indirect (texture uploads, sales commissions on XStreet, etc.) Hasn't eBay already shown how to defend against such allegations?

And to say that LL has the technology to "simply and easily halt the alleged activity" of content theft seems a wild overstatement. I'd love to know exactly what that technology is.

The portion of the complaints alleging that the only reason why LL doesn't stop theft is that LL makes too much money from this activity, seems to beg a simple numerical defense (i.e. LL makes over 75% of their revenue from land sales).
.

Interesting.

I can still imagine some middle ground that would be a reasonable world for all parties: professional creators, consumers, and everyone inbetween.

Let's hope they find it.

The weird part is that many of us are sort of "participating" ~ I don't own any of those particular products myself, but imagine this:

~ a person with one of the beds, who also pays land tier. As a consumer, they stand to 'lose' on some front, no matter what the outcome, if it's a long hard fight.

The caches, in memory and on disk, perhaps.

Animations are transmitted when played, they work a bit like textures in that regard. Scripts are somewhat better protected just because there is no need to transmit them to viewers except when editing is allowed.

There have been past and present permissions exploits that have made this kind of thing fairly easy to do. One of these does require using some light social engineering on LL employees.

There are plenty of bed scripts in circulation, and the original animations could be captured, so a functional equivalent could be whipped up even if the original scripts weren't available.

sorry - double post glitch and can't delete.

Since the client software has been open sourced, it is possible to hack a version of the client that will copy animations. LL was responsible for making the client open source - that, at least, is undenyable.

There's always one of three things that leads to unautorized copies:
1) things such as copybot which recreate the original from scratch
2) permissions exploits that yield a full permission item
3) creator hands out the item with full permission (or copy/transfer)

The second or third are the most hamrful since the "copy" is indistinguishable from the original (same prim creation times, same creator name on prims, scripts, animations, etc).

The first would theorethecally work for anything but no-mod scripts since those never get sent over to the client (although some aspects such as particles do). Prims, notecards and scripts can have a spoofed creator name but textures and animations should always have the name of the copier.

I think Stroker had all three happen over time (as well as beds being sold that even though they weren't copies of his work were still sold under the SexGen brand name).

They can disallow building and scripting for anyone who doesn't have the proper account type but since that would impact regular people decorating their land it hurts their bottom line too much if they all get rid of their land since they can no longer build on it (and if any landowner can build then nothing changes).

They can disallow setting prims for sale for anyone who doesn't have a merchant type of account (and the barrier to get one would need to be prohibitively high) but even in-world vendors would get around that easily enough.

Getting rid of the ability to sell L$ for US$ for anything other than to pay tier would certainly stop being able to sell infringing content for real life profit, but I don't know if it would stop the amount of copying since some/many might simply be after "in-world pocket change".

About the only thing that would work is to make everything that isn't a notecard or a snapshot "no transfer". The *only* way to transfer an item to another account would then have to be something like XStreetSL where LL would end up selling "shelf space" (and a prohibitively high listing price) to make up for the loss of tier since there would no longer be in-world stores.

If being able to list content for sale in the first place is tied to a real life name (rather than any anonymous SL name) then once you get banned from being able to sell that's it. And since everything is unified in one single space copies will have a higher chance of getting spotted and reported and LL can always just delist both items if it isn't clear who made what first.

A great many stores would dissapear though since it would no longer be possible to sell content to other content creators to use in things they will end up selling (be it animations, sculpts, etc) since "full permission" would no longer exist. As well as anything that currently (partially) relies on income from a mall obviously.

It also still wouldn't stop copying (it could be distributed in notecard form or a text file the web or through email), but it would make it a lot less practical for both the seller and buyer which may be enough.

Those copybots can be stopped so easy.

Forbid all open source viewers.

I know there are some good ones but by only allowing the official SL viewer on the grid they can stop copybotting, trafic bots, ...

As long as opensource viewers are allowed to connect to the grid someone will make a tool to steal content, whatever they will do to try to protect this.

If LL can be sued for this, then it means that as far as the internet is concerned, anybody can be sued for anything!!!

Burn all sexgens!

The court papers only mention three tools that have used against the plaintiffs: Copybot, Builderbot and Cryolife. All those three tools will copy a build including the textures, but will not copy the content of prims, such as animations and scripts.

I understand how someone may make a prim and texture copy of a Sexgen bed, then add an opensource animation menu script, then fill the bed with opensource non-Sexgen animations, and pass it off as a Sexgen bed, and this is explicitly complained about in the court papers.

But I think it still is the case (whatever some believe might be possible) that there are no tools currently available that copies animations or scripts from the contents of prims, and no Sexgen bed has therefore been fully cloned.

Rock

so lindens pay a fortune in lawsuits should these people win...

next step - increased tiers to recoup the cost ? a cut back in services ?

Lindens throwing up their hands and saying oh stuff this for a game of soldiers and throwing in the towel.

And where do these idiots sell their virtual goods then ...

openlife ? where someone else emulates the style and they sue again ?

I see Lindens stopping the making of anything which impinges on someone elses copyright and a mass of legislation in world that will make the rules regarding 'adult' activities look like the ingredients on a cereal box......

Unfortunately with the amount of effort griefers & content-thieves are willing to put into their schemes they'd just reverse-engineer the official viewer anyway. Data HAS to be sent over the internet to your viewer so that you can, er, view it and whatever is transmitted can be intercepted. The reason scripts are protected more than anything else is that the only transmission is from the creator to SL. After that everything happens within LL's servers, except that visible/audible effects are sent to the viewers (hence particle textures can be trapped just like any displayed textures).

Collectively, this means all prim and texture details are potentially stored on all computers that connect to SL. Scripts are only stored within LL and, generally, with the creator. I don't know the situation with animations - whether they are run server- or client-side is the important factor.

They just didn't understood how the damn Capitalism thing works, and now they start Lawsuits no one needs.

He was expansive, cheaper alternatives where released...he loses income...that easy it is.
Same with Nomine.

It's not all caued by copying etc, it's about to evolve and develop ... to fit the own products to the actual market...point....they missed it....that easy it is.


And yes Indeterminate Schism....on the technical side (which are the most not understand here) is that there is everytime a way to Rome.....aka a System cannot be protected to 100%.

And that is what stroker and nomine wants....a totally impossible thing.

And maybe some are asking know : Why thinsg are stored on local computers ?

This Question is easy to answer : It is called Cache, which means it saves in the most situations your Bandwith...without this system SL would be inpossible to play in my eyes.

At least it will stop every newbie who thinks he can make some quick money by stealing content.
It's very easy to find these copy programs.

I find the timing of this rather interesting.

Didn't LL only recently announce work being in progress to protect peoples IP rights?

I am pretty sure I read something about it on the blog and feeling quite underwhelmed by the plans stated.

I have to agree on the fact that stroker has no small part of blame to carry here.


there used to be only him, neva, and MLP as fas as menus in furniture goes.


Now there's akaesha, mlp, xpose, stroker, neva, and a few others all working with the same principle.

now which of these have been making progress / innovations?


NOT stroker.

I don't think there has ANY new thing in a stroker/sexgen menu since 2007 (not counting new animations).

On the other hand, xpose and akaesha both do props, long scenes with more than one animation per avi, sound (if one likes that), xcite feedback (if one wants it).

Right now I'd rather not buy stroker/sexgen furniture.
Especially since the FURNITURE is fugly AND there are almost no beds available that have mod perms and not already a xpose/mlp inside.