Any serious artist surely will think twice about investing long hours creating great content, if it can be snapped up by anyone making it worthless.

I’m a RL architect with a serious interest in creating SL content. SL offers an amazing potential to present and display designs. But the copybot saga has stopped me investing weeks and months putting good content together, specially if Linden is not really putting effort into removing such crippling code.

What do I get from it if my content that took a month of work is copied? Nothing but extreme frustration.

Rather spend time investing content out of SL where it can be controlled.

I’ve read the available summaries and chapters of his book, and all the debates with him on the Internet, and I see that he has a Marxist or “critical” approach to the problem of transfering wealth, where he loves the idea of third-world people being able to mix and mash the artifacts of old white dead guys.

You, as someone clearly on the hard left in all your responses, aren’t in a position necessarily to appreciate how left Lessig is; he may seem mainstream to you.

Oh, not at all, there’s LOTS that can be done. I’ve given 3 good social solutions to the CopyBot and libsl problem in the other thread.

Regardless of any political or philosophical interpretation of recent events, that fact remains and should be considered by anyone who creates any sort of digital content. Ultimately, there is nothing the Lindens or anyone else can do to prevent it.

If that fear drives them to close their stores, then it’s a shame, because there are a lot of talented people in SL, making wonderful things. And a few of those things are even original and not “stolen” from someone else’s designs.

Everything, including my response to your comment, is instantly copyrighted the moment it is created, according to US law. CC doesn’t abuse copyright or promote any sort of agenda other than making it clear what the creator wants, without having to track down the copyright holder to do it.

Your whole argument that it’s an extreme leftist movement by a minority is hogwash. If you’d like to learn more about what you are talking about you should pick up Free Culture, by Lawrence Lessig. You might take note that the original issues taken with copyright were from people who printed books, a very real world commodity.

The point you make about clothing being like real clothing is also ridiculous. The essential reality in Second Life is that there is no cost of manufacturing. No paying for that rosewood inlay on a Robbie Dingo guitar, no paying for that fine silk and cashmere. Besides, haven’t you ever heard about bootlegged t-shirts? Yeah, they make them in secret labs and they look just like the real thing.

But you know what? Copying them isn’t illegal, nor is it amoral. Copying things has been going on in every culture in existence. The issue is not copying, it’s selling a copied work. In that regard LL should investigate claims.

On freebie selling, in fact, SLers often use this argument — “just because you can physically do it doesn’t mean it’s morally proper”.

I disagree on using that argument for freebie selling, however, because a freebie seller has a conscious, available ability to uncheck “transfer/resell” and leave the box blank. He could theorize that someone selling his freebie if that box IS checked off is selling “against his will” but given that he has ample, visible, easy opportunity to uncheck that box, his claim is hollow. If he doesn’t avail of this opportunity, because he wishes to put the rest of SL to work crowdsourcing and virally copying his object to give him a) attention as a big newbie helper and enhancement of his reputation and/or b) loss-leads to TP to his store from seeing the object’s creator name — that’s just too damn bad.

The problems with the GLINtercept and CopyBot issues are that they are copied against the creator’s will, intention, and physical settings on his object to “no copy”.

Sure, I can take screen shots with “print screen” and snag somebody’s texture, or a poor copy of it, even if checked to “no copy” — but wouldn’t everyone argue that is theft? It is theft because I am overriding the obvious constructs of his will and the physical permissions of the SL system.

The CopyBot stuff is done defiantly, deliberately, and gleefully, with victory dances — and it surely represents criminality. People deliberately, maliciously are deciding that just because there’s an open stream of something they can dip their cup into it when it was not the streamer’s intent — that simply doesn’t fly for me as a moral proposition.

2. I also have to contend Tao Takashi’s notions that Creative Commons represents some mainstream, garden-variety legal solution. It doesn’t. First of all, people are no more likely to obey a Creative Commons license than they are a check-off box saying “no copy” if they intercept the streaming world at its source or in its reflections and grab it.

Second, the whole Creative Commons thing is merely an extreme leftist/liberatian/tekkie utopian concept that they are trying to pass off as a mainstream liberal notion — and many are fooled.

The ideology at its root propagated by Lessig and others is a very decided socialist “property is theft” and “information wants to be free” sort of radical ideology.

Who gets to decide what “a little more free” is or “what’s looser”? That’s absurd.

Certain kinds of content makers might benefit from taking an attitude that their stuff should be free and that they can still sell around that free stream.

Example: Frogg Marlowe puts up 3 clips of entire songs of his on his website (not just the little partial clips many musicians put up). He also puts up a web page to order his CD. And he has inworld concerts where he accepts tips. I imagine his living is meager, given the ability of SL people to pay tips or buy CDS, which isn’t as large as everyone imagines, but in his case, he evidently feels putting out a whole song to be heard like that in full any time for free is part of the whole climate for marketing and sales of his work to sustain his creative abilities. So an argument that says his decision to have some stuff free and some for pay is supportable.

A store owner who has a loss leader of one t-shirt or dress and the rest for pay might also argue this.

But basically, Creative Commons doesn’t work for commodities. It works for intellectual property and digital arts in the sense of images, or lectures, or machinima, or writings in text.

Software programmers have a very hard time accepting that users of SL who have commodities like shoes and hair trading view them as discrete objects and want to treat them as such. There is no such thing as an amazing wardrobe that you can have as a Creative Commons license always for free, and also hope to sell some part of it. Clothing is the kind of commodity that simply doesn’t work with this concept of intellectual/artistic work in the same way. Clothign is part of fashion, and it can take many hours to make and then even in SL where everything can last forever (until the server crashes) it has a function of wearing out, becoming outmoded, overtaken by others, etc. So it’s value isn’t as permanent as a work of written art.

The extremists in the software gang say that all visuality on the SL servers is an artifact/feature/property of their software and therefore “belongs to them”.

The Lindens liberated us from this extreme leftist notion by saying, no, the copyright to the commodities people created with the software as discrete viewable and inventoriable objects belong to the people who make them. They cannot be viewed as only the property of the intellectual and credentialed programming class which wishes to pwn everything on the servers; it also belongs to those who labour and create and market their goods.

If Marx were here, he’d say the programming class wishes not only to alienate the worker from his product, making it ephemeral and dependent solely on programming wizardry; he’d like to claim ownership totally of other people’s labour, which is crowdsourcing theft and exploitation.

In fact, the laborer should retain more discretion over his product and if he is granted the right to sell and move it he should expect copyright protection to some degree from the server owners WHO EXPLOIT HIS LABOUR TO SELL THEIR OWN PRODUCT AT A FAR HIGHER COST.

Tao Takashia is merely one of the noveau riche making his living off his reputational enhancement and possible also product sales, not sure which, by positioning himself as a “media arbitrater”. He simply grabs the streams of everybody else’s content, some of whom are paid to create that content, and RSS feeds it from his Planet of SL blog. He’d like to think that’s just a public service — and it is, that, in part. But it also positions him to be seen as some kind of famous media maven that enhances his SL rep and also gets him RL contracting jobs.

Tao and others who are in the apex of the pyramid of content creation or content re-fabbing and manipulation can command huge sums as RL consultants, or have RL discretionary income that lets them play in SL and get reputational points.

This New Class is heavily oppressive of the rights of those many rungs down below them, merely pushing old-fashioned meat-world type of commodities — clothes, hair, shoes. The labour in hours and the payment in micro-payment Linden dollars of these hordes of toilers is far, far below what the Metaversal Consultants and tekkie web page owners and podcasters earn in RL and even in SL often. They scorn these lower classes and sneer at their concerns about copyright protection in ways that are really shocking — I’ve never seen such a sharp class dichotomy with such rigid castes in any RL society in my life — this one in SL borrows from all the worst features of all the most stratified and hierarchical societies out there.

How about all the paintings and posters people sell that are simply real life posters imported into the game? Those are all copies. How about the images of the art? Did they go to a museum and photograph that Van Gogh? How about that Johnny Cash poster?

Did you get permission to stream those movies and music onto your land for public consumption?

Where does it end? Most of SL is based on the rip.mix.burn culture.

Digital Rights Management technologies of whatever kind also offer only a false sense of security. Given time and technical skill, DRM scheme can be cracked, just as any lock can be picked by someone with the tools and skills to do so. All DRM does, ultimately, is create a hassle for content creators and infringe on the legal rights of end users to use their property within the guidelines of fair use.

As a show of solidarity against digital property theft, could all the merchants displaying the “closed due to Copybot” signs also display their receipts for their copies of Photoshop and related software, and also prove that the textures used in the creation of their wares are completely original and not “stolen” using photosourcing, copying from the web, or snatched from the texture banks of other games? Often in life the people shouting the loudest and waving the biggest pitchforks are the ones with something to hide.

i find this rather interesting being that baba has long had ties to w-hat and indeed has defended them on occasion.