Cory Linden Stands With Crowdsourced Libbers
by Pixeleen Mistral on 15/11/06 at 10:39 am
LL to address CopyBot rights management issues sometime next year?
by Pixeleen Mistral, National Affairs desk
the (now missing) GeForce Go removing Copybot vendor from Manitoba sim
“i will NOT be adding anymore products until LL amends SL to entirely negate copybot and similar technology – lip service to the TOS is not enough. second, i will not be the source of any more income to LL due to their sales of L$ that would pass through my store.” said Jacqueline Trudeau in response to Cory Linden’s attempt to reassure metaverse shopkeepers and content creators. Jacqueline Trudeau was one of over 560 citizens responding to the Cory Linden’s blog post in the wake of serious fallout from the CopyBot scandal.
To address the scandal, tuesday night Cory Linden declared that using CopyBot-like programs to duplicate copy-protected objects is a violation of the TOS. Shortly after this announcement, two citizens selling the CopyBot in-world – GeForce Go and Prim Revolution – no longer appeared in the find people tab – apparently having been banned for TOS violations. However, these action have not calmed the content creators of Second Life.
Cory Linden’s announcement had garnered mostly negative responses as of press time – with questions being asked about why LL is involved in the libsecondlife reverse engineering effort. These questions are especially telling because currently the Second Life server does not verify the messages sent from a -possibly hacked- client or proxy – opening the door to a number of exploits. Residents also questioned the feasibility of abuse reporting and DMCA complaints as a mechanism for policing DRM violations – the Lab’s staff has been visibly stretched by the growth of the metaverse and Linden inaction to abuse reports is presumed to be the norm by many residents.
With no immediate technical solutions promised, residents are left to fend largely for themselves without new tools, as Cory Linden said, “I am very sorry that we have not already completed the features needed for you to address these concerns yourself. We are working very hard to complete them and will release them as soon as they are ready. In terms of prioritization and scheduling, additional asset data will be deployed in Q1 2007”
The level of anger was perhaps due to the perception that the Lab is not playing fair. For instance, Jeremy Bender said, “It’s like living in a country where the law enforcement officers and politicians are in cahoots with the business elite and organised crime elements to test the very laws they are entrusted to create, defend and enforce.”
Questions also swirled around how content and business will work in a more open environment, with Property Resistance suggesting, “You need to make a statement how asset and transaction security will be handled in an open source development environment. Will we see clients designed to “click and copy” every asset then? Or will this be efficiently prevented. You as company need planing security, we do so too.”
The common theme to all this is an understandable need on the part of residents to know what the new rules of the game will be and a desire for more transparency from the Lab about its development roadmap and timeline for addressing these issues. How seriously this affects the in-wold economy will be a story that plays out over the next few week as content creators ponder the incentives and costs in the new world order.
Meanwhile, at least some residents ask how the DCMA applies to a company helping create some of the technology to defeat its own copy protection, and CJ Carnot pointed out that using the copybot “may be against the TOS but creating it violated the DMCA. LibSL created it and the Lindens are involved with this project. Should we file a DMCA against LL ?”
Eric Maelstrom
Nov 15th, 2006
I’d like to hear CJ Carnot’s reasoning which led to believing that the act of writing the code for Copybot violates the DMCA, because it’s just not true.
SecondCast.com
Nov 15th, 2006
Fashion Dash Postponed (updated)
The Fashion Dash event scheduled for this evening is canceled.
We have decided that the substantial protest by the fashion community over Linden Labs handling of CopyBot will interfere with the quality of the event we had planned.
We will ann…
Lewis Nerd
Nov 15th, 2006
So I guess it’s beyond the collective intelligence of all at Linden Lab to have a look at Geforce Go’s transaction history, to get all the names of those who bought the copybot thing, and ban all of those too?
WoW banned and terminated 75,000 accounts for cheating. Linden Lab need to take similar action against those who bought copybot. After all, the evidence is clearly there, with no need to prove any ‘intent’.
Lewis
Tao Takashi
Nov 15th, 2006
Why should they ban people who bought copybot? They should ban people who use it (on copyrighted material)!
Buying it is not cheating, using it is not. What if I want to have it a similar device for being able to back up my _own_ objects to my hard drive?
In Real Life not all people who own a DVD recorder land in jail althought they possible could use it to violate copyright.
Prokofy Neva
Nov 15th, 2006
The Lindens have to decide politically, not technically, what they are offering here with their own world-product.
If they so wish to fete the programming class, even at the expense of certain members of that class who make commodities, that they will avail to them without punishment the ability to copy/intercept not only their own products for back up, but everyone else’s, then they are offering a world with a horribly tiered class of labourers and a terribly exploitative atmosphere.
Anyone toiling at low micropayment rates making shoes and hair has to consider their work useless and valueless in the fact of the extreme left expropriators of their product who, in the name of the right to back up their own creativity, back up everybody else’s, too, and pwn their efforts and their market.
Therefore the labouring creative class and the amateurs not yet admitted into the guild class can decide to make themselves minions in entities like Millionsofus and be paid by the Man outside of the exploitative micropayments and quit-rent system.
So people who are the part-time moms at Wal-mart and the Chinese students and the disabled war veterans have two choices:
a. risk exploitation and loss on the wild inworld grid making and selling objects before a CopyBotter or Glinterceptor wielded by the powerful programming ruling class notices you
b. hire up with the Man and get paid outside the wild grid for being part of the whole Travelling Metaversal Road Show
Cocoanut Koala
Nov 15th, 2006
So far I have picked:
c. No store.
I’m going to give this a few weeks to shake out, and if it doesn’t look better, I’m also going to choose:
d. Sell 1/2 sim, go basic.
coco
Woodward
Nov 16th, 2006
this is rich
a must read for everyone, especially the lib sl apologists (though i am sure they will find some way to play it off)
http://www.sluniverse.com/forums/Topic12867-1-1.aspx
Eric Rice
Nov 16th, 2006
Amusingly, lots of content creators bought copybot to tear it apart and use it to see for themselves, and also, to find a solution to defeat it.
So to the showers, everyone!