It sounds like the SL server software needs to think this way too.

Retail has been paying the tab all over SL, in fact it’s encouraged a kind of retail sprawl. If retail isn’t making money, they can’t pay the tier fees so they’ll sell land. If this issue has been solved, it’ll be one more part of SL’s sordid history. If it hasn’t, look forward to a radical restructuring of the land and economy.

Widely used, CopyBot would depress price level towards free. The drop in sales would depress rents and land prices, forcing many malls to close (hopefully shutting down billboards farms), followed by a glut of property for sale.

For creatives, this could actually be the best thing that ever happened. At first LL would be tempted to buy back land in order to maintain price levels, but if left with enough dark servers LL would be hard pressed to not just open them up and accept that their profit model had to change (eg charge the visitor, not the host for bandwidth).

Maybe hosting large-scale sims for pure recreation will become affordable again. There are some incredible sims – legendary sims – that never made a cent, that I’d love to see come back to life.

Also, can you comment on what this *temporary anti-copy bot*
thing is that is being circulated now as somehow being able to resist the botting effect? Can it? Why temporary then?”

SVN (or Subversion) is one of available systems for version control, a software which allows developers working on a project to keep track on changes done over time. It’s very useful in environment with multiple people working on many different source code files, as no matter what changes are done, the version control system preserves earlier versions of code and allows to see who made changes to the files and what these changes actually were. But in situation like this it can be most inconvenient, because rather than remove elephant from the living room you can at best put tablecloth over it and pretend it’s no longer there. The official Subversion page is at http://subversion.tigris.org/

GNA is a service site for free software developers, supplying them with web space to host such source code repositories, amongst other things. http://gna.org/

I don’t know enough about the issue to comment on Lindens’ decisions here, but it seems they cannot do much at the moment because copybot is simply altering communication coming from SL client, so from the server point of view it is no different from a regular SL client issuing the commands. And since LL were relying on their client being closed source to skip a lot of client-server verification, the client has a lot of leeway about what it can tell server to do. Which in turn grants the same amount of power to 3rd party application like copybot.

The “temporary anti-bot” works by issuing IM’s to everyone in its vicinity, with a command that’s interpreted by the copybot as signal to quit, and as annoying spam to anyone who is not a bot. It’s “temporary” because it only takes small change in bot code to either change the quit command to something else, or to stop it from taking commands from anyone and anything as it currently does.

Also, can you comment on what this *temporary anti-copy bot*
thing is that is being circulated now as somehow being able to resist the botting effect? Can it? Why temporary then?

Since Copy-Bot requires the making of an alt and the logging on of that alt to ensure permissions (supposedly other avatars are going to be able to click “no” to the options or avoid being hit), then one obvious thing for the Lindens to do is bar all members of libsl from creating more alts.

Just in time for Nov. 7, the Lindens created a new feature — pay for as many alts/bots as you like.

That bot then becomes the mule for all the copied stuff to be sold later.

the source code is still fully available. I don’t think Jesse is ignorant about how SVN works, so that’s a bare faced lie and gamble on people’s ignorance in attempt to pacify them.

All one needs to do is, simply request earlier revision of the source code from the repository and it’s there intact and up for grabs (copybot was yanked in build 581)

Item Details
Prims : 0
Permissions : None
SLX Sales Rank : #3

While a solution, it’s one the Lindens will never take, as you can see from Robin’s remarks yesterday to the Sellers’ Guild, and many other Linden statements over the years. The Lindens have always said you’re on your own when it comes to copyright. Robin said something different now indicating that LL will “help you” with this, but that’s very vague, and may mean nothing more than cooperating, as a tripod.com would, in being swift to take down something pre-emptively IF they are persuaded there really is a copyright issue.

Given the current overwhelming lack of response from Live Help and from support@, I hardly think there’s any reasonable expectation of remedy.

LL has resolutely rejected the concept of any Linden adjudication of resident disputes, ever (unless, of course those involved are their FIC friends, in which case, as we recall from the dispute between Hank Ramos and Adam Zaius, LL will intervene on the side of their preferred resident if the stakes are high enough).

That means what we’ve always suspected: Lindens don’t scale.

What’s baffling is that the Lindens would *participate in* making a copy-bot that so undermined confidence in their world, merely for the sake of creativity and freedom to program.

This is likely to be one of those “destroy the village in order to save it” type deals, as LL will likely argue that they encourage and participate in libsl in order to have reverse engineers test and find holes in the software, and that’s good for the long-term future of the platform. This is, of course, den Platforme uber alles thinking.

I think they can be this cocky now because the probably figure that the 3,000 who make their livings from content production are now easily replaced by new sign-ups, and that corporations who will pay out of their own PR or R&D pockets to sponsor creators will replace the model of the old-fashioned individual proprietor.

The geenie is out of the bottle here.