Fighting the SL Way – Copy & Resell For Free
by Alphaville Herald on 26/02/08 at 11:14 pm
Content theft in Second Life on the rise
Don’t like someone? destroy their business
by Tenshi Vielle, fabulous fashionista
Resident content theft runs wild while Philip and Robin Linden have gone missing
Content theft has been absolutely rampant in Second Life lately. It’s like scabies – once you think it’s gone, a whole new bunch of the little jerks pop up.
First we had Nicky Ree’s dresses stolen by ADiva, shoes by Enkythings primjacked, then there were a bunch more smaller …ALLEGED… thefts – a Brasilian user ripped RaC, Redgrave, and a host of other skins, cackling the whole way that no one could stop him. Designers chased him around the grid in a desperate attempt to squash him down, protesting and contacting sim owners to get him shut down. The problem was, he moved around faster than the designers could count and tended to be hard to track.
The most recently publicized case of alleged content theft is Laynie Link vs. Lalinda Lovell — yes, THAT Lalinda Lovell – Laynie was trying to innocently raise money for autism research via “Autism Speaks” and Lalinda decided she didn’t like it. Of course, you all know the normal set of actions to take when you don’t like something in SL – you cuss the person out, ramble on endlessly, and then you find a way to get their creations and resell them for free at your own shop.
Both cases have resulted in some form of widespread panic across the Fashionista Blogosphere. Skinners from the first episode protested in homage to a 1960′s sit-in. “WE WILL NOT RELEASE NEW SKINS UNTIL THIS THIEF IS TAKEN CARE OF!” They screamed. I scoffed, pointed them towards the Lindens and DCMA’s and left it at that. Emelia Redgrave has yet to be seen since she quit SL after finding her few skins ripped and resold.
The problem is, the Lindens don’t know anything that’s going on – or pretend to not. I emailed Robin Linden two weeks ago asking her what the Lindens were doing to make thief takedown more efficient, and Robin replied with, “What content theft?”. Now, I can’t expect the Lindens to be up to date on everything, 24/7, so I emailed her back with the relevant information and plenty of reading material (along with Cliffnotes) – it’s been a week, no reply. Designers have also been looking for her at her normal Office Hours, but she hasn’t showed.
Most other Linden employees encourage AR’s (what is it now, 100 AR’s to get a person banned – and not even that gets enforced?) and/or state the Linden mantra, “That’s not my job.” Few Lindens are actually around to help any more. There’s a Linden assigned to Inventory Loss according to the SL Wiki, but no Lindens assigned to any aspect of content creation… but one Linden has been known to release the UUID of a skin to a resident who didn’t own the original texture. Yeah. Two words: Great employee.
Content creation was a hairy niche to enter in the first place, and now with theft abound and becoming easier to do, becoming a designer of anything in SL is much like Russian roulette. Sooner or later, someone gets the bullet.
Linden Lab should be providing better DCMA support and paying attention to ARs. Linden Lab should be communicating with its residents – and it’s not. Even Torley Linden has been turning a blind eye to this issue as far as I can see.
Where are we when Mr. Shinypants won’t even listen?
Dear Lindens:
WE NEED EFFECTIVE TOOLS TO DEFEND OURSELVES.
Sincerely and without much love at this point,
The Designers of Second Life.
Rowan Carroll
Feb 26th, 2008
A few people held a protest at a store selling exact copies of a designer’s boots. WITH the designer there. The ONLY Linden we got was Maggie Linden. Of course, she is only a Tech Linden, concerned with the fact that we were killing the sim with all our primmy attachments. She didn’t even seem to CARE that we were protesting blatant copy right infringement! She didn’t even seem to care that we were being actively griefed by the owner of the store, when we were peacefully protesting. I did however, get her Linden Bear!
Anon
Feb 27th, 2008
LL is well aware of the problem:
http://jira.secondlife.com/browse/SVC-676
Yet sometimes jira entries go unoticed:
http://jira.secondlife.com/browse/SVC-701
And more and more:
http://jira.secondlife.com/browse/SVC-1581
http://jira.secondlife.com/browse/SVC-1654
Zara Linden is on record promoting replicators.
LL will not care till they face loss of ISP status under the DMCA
There may be some legal precedents set soon in regards to “ISPs” enabling content theft. LL may fall into this class of “ISPs” unless they start growing some nads and doing something about it.
However, the purported “Brazilian” ripper represents an entire year of staff salary to LL so there is obviously money in content theft for LL.
Don’t expect LL to do anything unless forced to behave like mature adult business people.
Till then they will smoke dope and play BF and COD while getting lulz over the nobodies bawwwing about content theft.
The Lindens
Feb 27th, 2008
Dear Citizens,
Go fuck yourselves. Are you a fortune 500 company? are you a multi-millionaire investor? Are you Anshe Chung? Are you even a furry? No, you’re a useless piece of shit who makes useless fucking generic Shit, We’re better off without the likes of you. Who gives a flying fuck that you make prim dresses? They’re ugly. Only Basic avatar clothing is the proper way to look in SL. Don’t Like it? Suck our dicks, we don’t give a flying fuck. Our world, we own it, we say what goes. You’re just here for the ride. So shut it, give us your money and e-fuck each other for $9.95 a month on your little pathetic overpriced piece of server space.
Signed, The Lindens.
Prokofy Neva
Feb 27th, 2008
I think Robin is on vacation. People do get to take leave even running virtual worlds and working long hours as they do.
I don’t know if you can quite characterize this situation as “rampant” yet when you have about 3 examples, but we all know it’s a serious problem, and the Lindens’ default technolibertarian copyleftism is at the root of the problem.
There’s no substitute for doing what Stroker Serpentine did, however, and hire lawyers to do formal takedown notices and lawsuits if necessary.
I think demonstrations, tier-downs, mass log-outs, whatever it takes is justified to get LL away from this default extremist hackers’ viewpoint held by some key Lindens and their main pets.
LL has really messed up by not having a place to put this. If you go to the community team meetings (Robin, Blue, Jeska, whatever) you’re basically told “what content theft” or “file a DMCA” or sort of waved away.
If you go to Governance Team office hours, they cut you off, as copyright issues are not the sort of crimes they prosecute.
If you go to the wonky geeky meetings like Zero Linden’s, they shush you as a customer service problem in the wrong pew, because they just want to talk about opensourcing SL and sucking out all your content anyway, under the guise of backing up work or having interoperability or open standards.
If you try to go to their legal counsel, they also wave you away — customer service should deal with you.
How is it that a company that pioneered the IP protection could fail to have any department or office or staff dedicated to educating people about their rights and assisting them in implementing them?
When it comes to bank fraud allegations, Lindens now freeze accounts. Could they do this in content theft cases? Would you want them to, knowing that Lindens are colour blind and retarded half the time, and will prosecute you for tree-waving into Kalyrra Heart’s ridiculously fake “mini parks” made from her extortionist ad parcels and fail to notice she is still harassing the entire neighbourhood with her big-ass naked porn ads in PG.
In short, you can’t just complain about the problem, you have to come up with a remedy and press for it, working all the boring levers of state, such as they are, like putting up JIRAs and wrestling the hacker script kiddies over there who close everything down on you.
It seems to me that a company that creates a product with permission regimes on it, like “no copy” or “no transfer” has a certain responsibility in upholding those features.
However, the plan of other game companies to address this issue basically seems to be: come under our protective wing, let’s share profits and IP rights, and then we’ll protect them.
This is a company that openly endorses and encourages the reverse engineering that it claims is against its TOS, talking out of two sides of its mouth. I don’t think we can expect anything about them to change. The point is how can their behaviour be mitigated? What are the persuasive points of pressure?
MachineCode
Feb 27th, 2008
THIEVES SAPPIN MAH BUILDS
Alyx Stoklitsky
Feb 27th, 2008
I really have to laugh at the people screaming at LL to do somehing about ‘content theft’, without realising that there is nothing LL can do about it even if they wanted to.
Eris
Feb 27th, 2008
My instinct would be to have 3-tiered access to Second Life – free-unverified, free-verified and Premium paid – and only verified and Premium residents would get any build perm’s. If you’re unverified you can visit and explore, customise your avatar with skins, clothes and attachments – but you can’t build or script anything anywhere. That would keep SL open and free for visitors but would deny anonymous accounts the opportunity to rip off other’s work and resell it without being traced. For the free-verified or Premium accounts, anything stolen and resold would be traceable back to a RL person and action could be taken. The best disincentive to theft is always going to be the threat of capture.
SL has to remain open and free but unverified accounts should have strict limits on their activities. It won’t be popular to begin with and the change would be difficult, but i think it would be worth it.
Marc Woebegone
Feb 27th, 2008
Lindens win again! lmao!
Tenshi Vielle
Feb 27th, 2008
“It seems to me that a company that creates a product with permission regimes on it, like “no copy” or ‘no transfer’ has a certain responsibility in upholding those features.” THANK YOU, Prokofy.
Actually, there is something LL can do. They can LISTEN to the “stole it!” reports, they can actually LOOK INTO it, they can remove offending avatars and any re-uploaded content with a matching UUID. They COULD catch these people, and only *they* have the tools – they’ve provided us with basically shit. DCMA’s appear to be ineffective (re: Lindens don’t pay attention) and don’t even get me started on AR’s.
data is copyable
Feb 27th, 2008
“I really have to laugh at the people screaming at LL to do somehing about ‘content theft’, without realising that there is nothing LL can do about it even if they wanted to.”
QFT
LAWL
Feb 27th, 2008
The funnyest, darnest thing…
In the first part of the article you linked to Tenshi, on your shopping cart disco blog, you have an intervieuw with Laynie Link, she tells you that after the content theft and namebashing Lalinda did, her traffic shot up from 400 to 5000, donations to the Authism speaks organisation went from a mere 120 up to 20.000 L$…
Sounds to me, that content theft is not really a bad thing.
ANYONE WHO WANTS TO STEAL MY DESIGNS? please, you dont even have to use copybot or something, I’ll just GIVE it to you, with all permissions!
MJ
Feb 27th, 2008
“How is it that a company that pioneered the IP protection could fail to have any department or office or staff dedicated to educating people about their rights and assisting them in implementing them?”
Because “IP rights”, to the Lindens, were never anything more than a marketing manoeuvre.
And to the captain obvious boy tards here like Alyx — yeah kids, we know it’s impossible to stop. I have seen no one ask for LL to make it impossible to intercept the info.
I have seen people asking for LL to look into reports and for better tools. So, yeah, tell us what we already know, oh wise ass on the mountain.
Whatever it takes to prop up your flagging man-child self esteem, I guess..
RobinLinden
Feb 27th, 2008
First, I’m very sorry I missed my office hour meeting yesterday. I had another (RL)meeting and wasn’t able to get there on time. For those of you who are watching such things, I’ll also miss the next couple, so I’ve put up a sign at the meeting site with dates and times for when I return. (And yes – vacation and then a conference are the reasons for my absence.)
With respect to content copying…
- if I sounded dismissive or clueless when I responded to Tenshi it was because it was IM. “What content theft” means “I need the details of the problem if I’m going to help, but I’m on my phone responding to IM and taking a shortcut.”
- we don’t mean to be dismissive or to ignore the complaints about copyright infringement. The DMCA process works, but it’s complex (what governmental process isn’t!) and very frequently the complaints we get aren’t filed correctly. We have two people responding, and all complaints are investigated as soon as we have complete and accurate information. There have been takedowns as a result.
- I’ll let the people who are working with the DMCA claims know that there are continued concerns about the process.
- I’ll also follow up with the customer relations team and let them know some of you are eager for a better process to report content problems outside of the DMCA process.
We know how hard you work on the things you build, and that many of you are counting on sales revenue. This is a particularly difficult problem that doesn’t have a single or simple solution. Please keep reporting what’s happening so we can understand the vulnerabilities, or comment the JIRA tasks noted above. The more information we can get the better.
Razrcut Brooks
Feb 27th, 2008
“technolibertarian copyleftism ” wow, nice phrase Proky! I need to let those words soak in a minute…..
TO ANY PATENT/COPYRIGHT ATTORNEY READING THIS:
As far as texture theft, can someone explain the definition of an original texture that deserves protecting? Seriously, I do not know. If I take a RL photo of a wooden gate, then upload it into SL and create a gate with this texture applied–is this truly an original gate created by me? Doesnt the RL carpenter deserve some credit? If I photoshop and enhance this photo-does that then make it “mine” ? I CAN see an argument for computer generated graphics created and uploaded by a person as original. I CAN see an argument for a sculpted texture uploaded and turned into a SL object…but what else? I am not trying to say texture creators should not be protected from thieves. But if they upload pics of sand into a “public” forum like the internet…how can that be protected? Enlighten me.
Mister knowitall
Feb 27th, 2008
“Please keep reporting what’s happening so we can understand the vulnerabilities, or comment the JIRA tasks noted above. The more information we can get the better.”
Robin. Log into a resident account. Turn on admin options (Ctrl+alt+Shift+V with debug on), select a texture on a prim, then push Ctrl+alt+shift+T. It will give you the UUID of a texture even if you don’t own the prim. You could then add that to a script and it will apply the texture. Duurrrrr LL encourages texture theft!
Tenshi Vielle
Feb 27th, 2008
Thanks for the reply, Robin – we really enjoy getting acknowledgment that you guys hear us.
Tabby
Feb 27th, 2008
Sorry, but the DCMA doesn’t work. You win your case and LL takes it down. The next day the thief puts it back up. How is that working?
I’m not speculating, this ACTUALLY HAPPENED. I don’t want filing a report on the same person to become my daily routine.
RoFLKOPTr
Feb 27th, 2008
How can the Lindens even SEE the abuse reports when the JLUfags are spamming them for an hour because of one griefer? Yes… I did just go there…
Also, who gives a shit about your imaginary property? If you plan to make any real money on Second Life, then you need to get some sense knocked into your fucking head.
Razrcut Brooks
Feb 27th, 2008
@ Mister Knowitall: You forgot to add the appropriate code:
[php]
default{
state_entry(){
//– the next line sets the texture on all sides
llSetTexture( “insert uuid or name of texture in prim contents here”, ALL_SIDES );
//– the next line auto-deletes the script when you run it
llRemoveInventory( llGetScriptName() );
}
}
[/php]
Prokofy Neva
Feb 28th, 2008
>Robin. Log into a resident account. Turn on admin options (Ctrl+alt+Shift+V with debug on), select a texture on a prim, then push Ctrl+alt+shift+T. It will give you the UUID of a texture even if you don’t own the prim. You could then add that to a script and it will apply the texture.
Right. I remember going to an office hour of Blue Linden’s, and going through this routine with his famous blue swivel chair textures, and waiting for him to notice what I was doing. Finally I think Frontier Linden “got it”.
The attitude of the really hardcore copyleft hacker Lindens like Brent Linden is to argue with you when you report this as an exploit — which I did. They say “well, people will hack it and get it and that’s just life and you can’t stop it.”
But of course you can. You can’t stop people xeroxing stuff, either, but various routines, policies, laws are put into effect and implemented. This faux helplessness and pretending you can’t do anything about it is just so much word-salading.
Michael Wilson, the There guy, said it pretty clearly the other day at Metanomics: “It’s just plain wrong” (copyright theft).
The Lindens never stand up anywhere, and say “It’s just plain wrong.” They are no different than the griefer Alyx Stoklitsky of the b/tards, whom they give a pass to. They never set the tone. They never take moral and political positions they need to take to back up their coding positions like “no copy/no mod/no transfer”. Shame on them, truly. I am so done.
Greefin Oh
Feb 28th, 2008
The only thing I shall say here is: GET OFF YOUR LAZY SSI RIDING ASSES AND GET A REAL JOB ALREADY!
I’m sorry, but no one will take your little “virtual e-business” seriously. There is nothing the Lindens can do, nor will do, about “virtual theft”. They shot themselves in the foot, the day they Open Sourced the SL Client. The only thing that could prevent this from happening, is having the viewer client monitor what’s running in the user’s background processes. And in order for something like that to work, the Viewer would have to be taken off the Open Source market, alienating all the Alternate Viewer Creators, and pissing off a hell of a lot more users, like myself (Because I haven’t used the official viewer in a year).
The bottom line is: If you want Content Protection from the Lindens, there will have to be a major sacrifice here. And I don’t see Philly Boy taking that chance… unless of course he’s bullied into doing it by a higher power.
Who knows? Write the Better Business Bureau, or your Country’s equivalent. Tell them, that your e-business is vital to your e-success, and you need Guaranteed protection for your virtual e-penis business, from theft.
durrrr
Feb 28th, 2008
‘Robin. Log into a resident account. Turn on admin options (Ctrl+alt+Shift+V with debug on), select a texture on a prim, then push Ctrl+alt+shift+T. It will give you the UUID of a texture even if you don’t own the prim. You could then add that to a script and it will apply the texture. Duurrrrr LL encourages texture theft!’
DURRRRR too bad that’s removed in the newer client versions already.
Cheer Girl Allen
Feb 28th, 2008
in responce to Robin Linden “As far as texture theft, can someone explain the definition of an original texture that deserves protecting?”
1. Original Texture is Anything Created on a Legitimate Copy of Photoshop, Gimp or Paint Shop (NOT A HACKED OR CRACKED VERSION)
2. Photosourced Images such as your “GATE” or “SAND” examples are infact Original once they are Brought into any Photo editing software and Changed more then 20% from thier original State.
3. Textures for Clothing Items Created with PhotoShop, Gimp, Illustrator, or Pain shop Pro, then Uploaded are 100% original
4. Photosourced Skins, a Picture taken of a person and applied to one of your SL Templates is Original as long as U have the RL consent of the Person in the Picture.
5. Legitimate Adobe Software has the Capablity to Copywrite Images and Textures created by a person using the Lisence Purchased through adobe.com
Cai Pirinha
Feb 28th, 2008
@Cheer Girl
Whether the software that is used to create the texture has been legally acquired or not is imho not very relevant
DF
Feb 28th, 2008
Prok, I agree that you can do something to protect the people when it comes down to copyright theft, but really…
There is NOTHING you can do technically to prevent it.
You can do something AFTER the theft has been made, DMCA and such, but terchnically the lindens arent word salading when they say they cannot PREVENT it.
Whichever protection they add more to SL in the ways of copy/mod proptection as it is now, doesnt matter because it remains data sent trough your internet line and computer, that can ALWAYS be read out by a third party program.
So it’s not techie hacker wordsalading by Brent Linden when he says there’s no way to prevent it. Cause there isnt.
(and no I’m not techie wordsalading myself, I am a computer illiterate. But I do know a little about electronics so I’m able to tell you this much.)
DaveOner
Feb 28th, 2008
“- or pretend to not.” Love it! The “fashionista blogosphere” is hilarious since most of the shit I see being put out by the SL “fashion community” is already played out in the RL fashion world. If the real designers weren’t busy making real money off their work they’d have every right to come after you tools! Get a clue!
Not to mention you can also have your browser at a higher resolution and zoom in on a texture then take a screenshot. Now you have your own texture with a different UUID!
Someone’s always going to find a way to copy simple shit. The only way around it is to make it more complicated. You’ll figure it out someday, guys! Or not…
Razrcut Brooks
Feb 28th, 2008
@ Cheer Girl Allen Thank you for your answer. I assumed there were set standards and I think many of us are unfamiliar with them. By the way, Robin Linden did not ask that question, it was me..Razrcut. The format of this and other TypeKey blogs are somewhat confusing as to who has posted which comment. The author appears below the posts. Anyway, thanks again.
Kiddoh
Feb 29th, 2008
“They are no different than the griefer Alyx Stoklitsky of the b/tards, whom they give a pass to.”
Proky just gave me a grand idea!
Opening Narrative: Thundering across the grid, to save the metaverse from the unlulzy mines!
Alyx searches for his father to ignite the magic boot and lead his lulzy-league to victoly over the ever-changing form of Newfags.
Afro’d warriors EXPLODE into battle!
A fist-full o’loitnin’ strikes!
Intlibber: How can I help you, King Pro-Ko-Fy?
Prokofy: I NEEDAH MONSTAH TA CLOBBAH DAT DERE STOKLITSKY!!!
Intlibber: Why that’s what we do best, at A.C.E.!
Jim: You better get it with a moneyback guarunteeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeee!
[cue awesome rock]
The Griefer,
Alyx Stoklitsky of the /b/tards
&
the Terrible Dyno-Robo-saurus:
With special guest, Andy Griffith
DaveOner II
Feb 29th, 2008
Hi. I’m a fat old man who doesn’t know shit about fashion. I think I do though! I’m going to make severely generalizing comments and jack off about it later. I don’t think before I type.
Alyx Stoklitsky
Feb 29th, 2008
“I am so done.”
If you’re ‘done’ why are still in SL?
“[cue awesome rock]
The Griefer,
Alyx Stoklitsky of the /b/tards
&
the Terrible Dyno-Robo-saurus:
With special guest, Andy Griffith”
Holy shit, this sounds epic.
I love you long tiem, kiddoh <3
anon
Feb 29th, 2008
*Why that’s what we do best, at B.N.T.
Also, PN != Kirby animated series
Anna Gulaev
Mar 3rd, 2008
If you want to understand the Linden position on bots and hackers you need to read Snow Crash. It’s a pretty crappy piece of fiction, but it seems to be the Linden corporate bible. Code is cool. People are only relevant according to the code they can create. Destructive code is better than no code. Your information wants to be my free information.