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Second Life Businesses Close Due To Cloning
Warren Ellis is reporting that many Second Life vendors are closing up shop due to the recent explosion of a program called "Copybot," designed to clone other people's possessions. From the article: "The night before last, I was looking around a no-fire combat sandbox, where people design and test weapons and vehicles, when an argument broke out; a thing going by the name Nimrod Yaffle was cloning things out of other people's inventories, and claiming he could freely do it because he'd been playing with Copybot with employees of SL creator/operators Linden Lab. All hell broke loose, in the sort of drama you can only find on the internet. Linden Lab's first official response? If you feel your IP has been compromised by Copybot, we'll sort of help you lodge a DCMA complaint in the US. Businesses started shutting down moments later." Update 20:43 GMT by SM Several users have mentioned that the Second Life blog has a few thoughts on this issue and quite a few comments from users already.
And hence the "real value" of virtual goods is exposed for the umpteenth time...
Will cloned items be taxed in the future?
Whether or not there is some sort of god, I'm not supposed to say/god is a word and the argument ends there-Smog
If these users don't want to freely share their creations, they should shut down their "businesses". Copyright is theft. The more Second Life culture moves away from the petty obssession with commerce, the better off the game will be. People can get back to what's really important (like yiffing ;) )
right?!
Reality is nothing but a collective hunch.
Is he going back to the cornfield or is perma-banned?
Don't these people know how much work it takes to come up with a crude polygonal rendition of Lindsay Lohan making out with Christina Aguilera? They should maybe spend some time creating their own disturbing and mind-warping objects rather than stealing other peoples! And if you think I'm kidding about the mind warping bit, check out Something Awful's 'Second Life Safari', a look at well, the less savoury objects to be found around Second Life.. http://www.somethingawful.com/secondlifesafari
artificial scarcity as a business model makes me laugh. i am a cruel man.
and to think about 10 lines of code could have prevented it. Game makers need to stop thinking their game is perfect and will never be hacked and put in code to prevent things that are never supposed to happen.
Google's Super Secret Search Algorithm: SELECT @search_results FROM internet WHERE @search_results = 'good'
Of course, the more the community respects intellectual property in SL, the greater the benefits of using CopyBot. It's the Prisoners Dilemma all over again.
Funtime Candy Wow! - my plan for eventually conquering Japan.
Silly individuals, didn't anyone tell you that since big corporations were the ones who pushed the DCMA provisions through congress that they can only be used to defend those big corporations? Equal protection under the law is _so_ 20th (or perhaps 19th) century!
This Space Intentionally Left Blank
... when the quote in the summary is 3/4s of the article. Wouldn't it be nice if there was some more meat there to actually expand upon the summary? Maybe give us an idea how many shops closed? Perhaps even get the letters in the acronym "DMCA" in the right order? I usually support the idea that bloggers should be extended the same protections as print journalists, but then I see posts like this...
09 F9 11 02 9D 74 E3 5B D8 41 56 C5 63 56 88 C0
Second Life has been getting positive press in the EDU sector . Hope this doesn't have a chilling effect.
Who gives a rat's ass. The graphics are almost on par with Atari 7800, and the people are more moronic with no lives than the chinese gold farmers in WoW.
Get a real 2nd life, get out and enjoy nature.
TFA is seriously lacking in details, so I went to the google, which kicked up a few links to blogs http://sr.wordpress.com/tag/secondlife/
One & Two,
etc
Basically, this CopyBot program was created with the aid/knowledge/acceptance of the Linden Labs folks.
Here's some discussion straight from Linden Labs or you can read what the CopyBot creators have to say http://www.libsecondlife.org/
Summary: "if it's this easy, we should tell people that relying on the Second Life systems to protect content is not feasible any longer."
[Fuck Beta]
o0t!
Sounds like SL needs its own version of copyright. To encourage innovation in object creation, grant the creators limited monopolies on creating said objects, and then after the copyright expires CopyBot to your heart's content. They could enforce with code, or they could simply enforce with Terms of Service/Use, depending on their philosophical bent.
I get the sense that this will be remembered as an important battle in open vs. closed development models.
We have content creators that were thriving because of DRM-- the content creators wouldn't have put the same kind of time and effort into their creations if they couldn't be protected. And we have all that business coming to an abrupt close because of open source development.
I'm not saying open source is bad, or that DRM is good. I'm just saying that this is bringing to forefront the fact that people are going to need to change in the future how they think about work and ownership.
As the Register put it, Second Life is a game where: "people who have sex with dolls in real life can have sex with cartoon animals in fake life".
I don't think people are quite grasping the significance of this.
What will happen when we have replicators (like the ones on Star Trek) that allow us to replicate everything in the real world quickly and easily? (not just music)
Think about it... the end of scarcity. A fundamental shift in the nature of the world economy. I'm not sure where it leads, but life sure gets interesting right around then...
Reality has a liberal bias
Copyright (notwithstanding developments of the past 50ish years) is an agreement that a government (which SL is in this case) makes with people that they can benefit from their creations for a time in exchange for everyone eventually getting to benefit from the creation.
Commerce is not inherently petty. Commerce can motivate wonderful creations (such as SL itself). It can also motivate horrible acts.
I create some because I like it. I create more when I have financial interest in doing so.
I tried Second Life for about 15 minutes, and then realised exactly how boring it was.
The interface was more complicated than most MMORPGs, and there wasn't anything interesting.
Linux - because it doesn't leave that Steve Ballmer aftertaste.
Wrong. Patents are theft, Copyrights are for people who want compensation for their own legitimate original creations, or at least that's how it was intended to be.
If you want to make another item identical to mine that's just fine, No Patents, but you have to do it from the ground up not just cutting and pasting, Copyright.
This could be one of the "Big Bads" that eventually kill Secondlife outright.
BTW your simple analysis that "Copyright is Theft" is more than enough to peg you as someone too immature to be yiffing anyway.
So say everything can be cloned. What do you barter for? It would have to be services, experience, wisdom. How do you reward these things then? It's hard to imagine a world without trade of physical items (money, good, etc). The "price" for doing things would be just cost of labor, as parts are free. But then you need to put a value on services, education, knowledge.
"I'll fix your roof if you fix install my dishwasher."
"I'll do research on fuel cell membranes if you build the rest of the car..."
Head...hurts...
This sounds to me like the equivalent of hand-crafted piecework being replaced by mass production. If I understand you correctly, creators of content-for-pay are closing up shop, but there's still no shortage of content, because the bots are building stuff. And, just to carry on with my devil's advocacy, the "time and effort" (implying quality) complaint further enhances the idea that this is the craftsman's complaint against the factory.
If the analogy applies, then macroeconomically speaking, this is good -- now SLers can have in-game content and their money too, instead of having to choose one or the other, having been liberated from this choice by open-source development.
I'm not so sure this requires a new way to think about work and ownership, although it may require content creators to think of new ways to get at the money. You'll have to invent a new shiny to get it from them.
2*3*3*3*3*11*251
So what does this look like in Second Life? I mean, could it be that 2 or 3 people have logged off yesterday after this happened and not logged back in yet and you could say that those businesses have shut down??
...I'd actually go into Second Life once more if I could stage some massive heist. Nothing would be finer than blowing away some nerds' avatars and leaving with a fist full of Linden Dollars. Virtual Hookers, here I come!
Use of CopyBot and Similar Tools a ToS Violation
Tuesday, November 14th, 2006 at 3:47 pm by corylinden
Tags : none
Second Life needs features to provide more information about assets and the results of copying them. Unfortunately, these are not yet in place. Until they are, the use of CopyBot or any other external application to make unauthorized duplicates within Second Life will be treated as a violation of Section 4.2 of the Second Life Terms of Service and may result in your account(s) being banned from Second Life. If you feel that someone has used CopyBot to make an infringing copy of your content, please file an abuse report. Note that this is completely separate from any copyright infringement claim you may wish to pursue via the DMCA.
Like the World Wide Web, it will never be possible to prevent data that is drawn on your screen from being copied. While Linden Lab could get into an arms race with residents in an attempt to stop this copying, those attempts would surely fail and could harm legitimate projects within Second Life.
There are features to allow Second Life residents more choices about how they respond to potential infringement beyond the DMCA. Specifically, we will add data to allow residents to compare asset creators and creation time; incorporate Creative Commons licenses so creators have the option to create content that allows free copying, modification, and exchange without having to utilize outside applications; expand ban lists and reputation so residents can share information about those who abuse copyright; and, publish additional statistics on the website so creators can make rational decisions about the health and strength of Second Life's economy.
These are important features because the implications of copying should not be about Linden Lab's approach to copyright enforcement. We are not in the copyright enforcement business. The communities within Second Life should have the tools and the freedoms to decide how and when they deal with potentially infringing content. Many will decide on less restrictive regimes in order to maximize innovation and creativity. Others will choose more restrictive options and ban visitors who do not respect them. Consumers, creators, and all residents need to have the final say about which approaches work best for them.
Please recognize that using the Terms of Service is not a permanent solution. Nor is it shift in Linden Lab's support of libsecondlife (who have removed CopyBot from their Subversion repository), machinima creators, or others who have explored Second Life beyond the features of the Second Life client. I continue to feel that libsecondlife is an incredibly important part of Second Life's development and community.
I do not extend those feelings to residents attempting to profit off of infringing use of CopyBot.
To the community, 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. Adding in support for CC and expanding the ban lists will be deployed 3 to 6 months later. Until then, as described in the first paragraph, use of CopyBot or similar tools to create infringing copies within Second Life will be treated as a violation of the Terms of Service.
http://blog.secondlife.com/
When I click on the link in the summary, all I get is a short blog post with hardly any more detail or description. Do we have any other details or coroborration? These are some pretty bold claims which need coroborration.
We all know what to do, but we don't know how to get re-elected once we have done it
How sad it is to learn that people don't enjoy things becase they have these things; they value them because others don't have them.
Computers make very fast, very accurate mistakes
Some Shmuck is reporting that many musicians are closing up shop due to the recent explosion of a technology called "file copying", designed to copy other people's files. From the article:
"The night before last, I was looking around a music store, where people buy and sell music, when an argument broke out; a person going by the name Average Joe was copying tracks of musician's CDs, and claiming he could freely do it because he'd been playing with the copy command produced by the maker of his operating system. All hell broke loose, in the sort of drama you can only find in music stores. The RIAA's first official response? If you feel your IP has been compromised by "the copy command", we'll file a lawsuit against the copier and not give you any of the profits from the suit. Musicians started committing suicide moments later."
Seriously... think about it. Music won't stop being created in the real world just because people can copy things. And objects won't stop being created in Second Life just because people can copy them. All it means is that one thing that used to be a valuable service to people (creating copies of things) is no longer valuable because people can do it themselves.
The other thing (creating new content, or unique content (such as live performances)) is still of value, and always will be, as it will never be the case that all people are equally able to be competent creators or artists. Change your business model. Instead of selling copies of your thing, sell your creative services under contract. It's a model where people hire you to create something new that has never existed before, rather than paying you for a copy of something that already exists elsewhere.
This could actually be the best thing that ever happened to Second Life, because it can result in a more innovative and open "society" and a fairer "economy", and serve as an example for the real world.
Moderator hint: a comment is neither "Flamebait" nor "Troll" if it is true.
"And hence the "real value" of virtual goods is exposed for the umpteenth time..."
You would get modded insightful around here, but your implication that physical goods have "real value" is as naive. All goods and services have an intrinsic vale to their creators but their value to others is more transitory.
What I find funny is that SL isn't treating a duping bug as a duping bug, even though this clearly qualifies as such.
The book "A for Anything" by Damon Knight jumps immediately to mind. The book centers around a real device that could duplicate anything. Is it the end of world hunger and need - or an evil machine bent on the destruction of our way of life, one that must be destroyed immediately?
- I wanted to call myself Anonymous Coward, but that name was already taken by somebody
Unlike real goods which are never copied? Doh. Anything that can be made can be copied. Anyone with a copied item, bought or stolen, just has a lame bit of crap anyway. The interesting stuff is the original. Sure someone can buy a copy of a Picaso painting but that doesn't decrease the value of the original or the creator of the original.
If the Linden Labs people would give me a free account and land I'd be glad to let people copy my stuff for free.
At what price learning? At what cost wisdom? The price is a man's peace of mind, and the cost is his life.
It's the Gay MMORPG! Really, SL is a huge blatant Web 2.0 candy-ass con job.
"If you've ever wondered what it would be like in a world without intellectual property, trademarks, patents, etc. then you've found it."
I've pointed this out in the past and will point it out again. IP laws put IP on an equal footing with physical goods even though they're not equal. Physical goods enjoy a natural barrier to their abuse that empherical goods do not.* That artificial barrier is their to make things equal, not unequal.
*Technology makes the situation worse for both, but the consequenses are unequal.
The principle of benefitting from the fruits of ones efforts is older than commerce itself.* The only wrench that technology throws into the works is the ease that it allows one party to abuse another. Work and ownership doesn't need to be rethought, but the ease in which one party can abuse another should be.
*Keeping in mind that a benefit can take many forms.
People who are not creative undervalue creativity. This is not surprising.
I've created content for Second Life. Despite the trivializing that comes from the "information wants to be free" crowd I will say with firsthand experience that it's a lot of work. Linden Labs' business model explicitly (as in, from the horse's mouth, in writing, in its mission statement) relies on the hard work of people creating content for them. They've now changed the terms of how this work will be compensated. It's now for glory only, and that will draw a different crowd. Certainly nothing wrong with that motivation or that crowd, but frankly, as evidenced by the quality of freebies available compared to for-pay items, the game will suffer.
I think you nailed it.
The businesses that are closing were all operating on the wrong business model. Rather than try to make money selling the same object over and over, as if each copy had some value, they should have been figuring out ways to make money selling unique, individually created, bespoke objects. Selling the same stream of bits over and over is stupid. But if you could create something new for each person, then you'd not be selling bits, but your creative labor and skills -- it's not "bits" that you're selling anymore, but "service." That's a sustainable, proven business model.
I hope that Linden keeps the copying devices around, and lets people have free reign with them, because I think in time, you'll see the SL economy recover, and it would be a good demonstration of an 'information economy' that's not based on artificial scarcity or restrictions on information, but rather on mutually beneficial services.
"Ladies and gentlemen, my killbot features Lotus Notes and a machine gun. It is the finest available."
I heard a report on public radio a few months back (either NPR or Marketplace - I don't have time to search through their archives for the link right now), where they said that this same kind of effect is what has stopped any recognizable brands of products to come out of China.
They have all this manufacturing power, but because of weak enforcement of IP laws, as soon as some product starts to stand out, 50 other factories will start making the exact same thing, even using the same packaging and logos (clones, just like in SL), making them undiscernible from the real thing in the eyes of the consumer. Instant dilution of brand power.
It makes sense if you think about it and compare to some other Asian countries - Japan has a ton of well-known brands, Korea has several brands that are starting to establish themselves very well, like Hyundai and Samsung, but there really isn't any established/recognizable Chinese brand of any product. I think the report went on to say that Lenovo is one of the first companies trying to break out of this pattern, but whether they will be successful is yet to be seen.
Sounds good. Maybe the rest of the world should use that as an example. Instead of one rich company you get 51 companies making a living. No-one becomes big enough to abuse the advantage. Surely that is the free market.
"a thing going by the name Nimrod Yaffle was cloning things out of other people's inventories"
To clone something in the real world requires energy. This energy can be sold. The people who own the means for energy production will essentially set the cost of items in that society.
If you are an inventor, you will sell your creation to the energy company who bets on how many people will pay for the energy required to clone your creation.
This is a far fetched thought experiment that is entirely unworkable, but if we ever make some kind of transporter/cloning machine we're going to run into a drastic shift in our economy.
IANAL, but I play one on
http://secondlife.reuters.com/stories/2006/11/15/l inden-bans-copybot-following-resident-protests/
-- Boycott Shell
The copies are worthless, probably, but the original is not.
Let's assume we live in an all-digital, completely non-conservative world, where any object or piece of information can be duplicated instantly, at zero cost or energy expenditure.
You might think that this makes a lot of professions impossible. How could you be a photographer? Quite easily. Rather than trying to sell content that has already been created, you sell your ability to create new content. E.g., I would still pay you to take a portrait of me, because no pictures of me exist already (or none that I want / don't have already). After you take the picture, and I pay you for your time, I can then go and make a billion copies of it -- but you were already paid for your time. Rather than trying to be shady about it, and amortize the value of your time over 100 copies that you might sell me in the future, you demand the payment up front, you get it, and I take my new picture and you take your money. The transaction is complete.
In short, if you can copy goods already extant at zero cost, the demand that remains is for customized goods, or goods which don't already exist. Rather than looking at an artistic occupation as essentially a production/manufacturing job, turning out identical intellectual-property widgets, you have to view it as a service job, selling your time and skills in order to produce something which meets a customer's specifications.
"Ladies and gentlemen, my killbot features Lotus Notes and a machine gun. It is the finest available."
On Second Thought, there isn't even glory in it, anymore. Since the bot puts its own name on the copied object the creator doesn't even get credit for making the thing. As in-game others have pointed out, the creator may even be accused of re-selling freebies (it happens in the game).
Most people that rail against patents and even those that want to water down copyright, have no opposition to enforcement of trademark law.
Trademark law is a valid protection for the company and the consumer. It is effectively not even "IP", it's more like an extension of anti-fraud laws.
I've had enough abrasive sigs. Kittens are cute and fuzzy.
Yeah, and when you buy a bottle of your favorite beer, you'll never now know if you're getting donkey piss instead. No thanks.
So we get to see in a virtual world what would happen if replicator technology appeared in the real world (and *wasn't* laden with mandatory copy-protection). The capitalist economy based on supply and demand of limited resources, controlled through financial transactions, is destroyed almost immediately. Cool!
I guess the difference is that, unlike real life, in SL land can be added infinitely just by adding a new server. Not even replicators could give everyone their own luxury home on a private tropical island.
(Something this apparently does expose is the number of people in SL creating objects solely for money as opposed to those who do it for the sheer pleasure of making something they want to share with others...)
You must think in Russian.
The interesting part is that it's partial scarsity. Some things have almost zero value, while everything else retains its normal value. Imaging what would happen if, say, a precious resource taking a great deal of effort to produce - say cotton - could suddenly be created with 1/100 the labor? Nobody would make cotton, right? Or would those people with the tools to make it cheaply produce it for everyone else, at commodity prices? In some ways, the cotton gin did this. The cotton market did not collapse, it merely evolved. Any modern widget might be the same way.
When reproduction costs are near zero, the number of different bulk items goes down because the return only justifies a certain smaller intellectual effort/cost. What happens then is a new industry springs up - offering higher priced "custom" items - ones which are specifically tailered to meet the original buyer's requirements. Software and music are two examples of this happening, and OSS is probably the best comparison. Anyone can copy the generic application for free, but if you pay to have a particular application created which exactly matches the needs of your business, you pay the entire cost of development. Customization is the new value.
Is it just my observation, or are there way too many stupid people in the world?
"not just music". I don;t think you need to point that. What happened with Music is exactly it. In Star Trek, the invention of replicators set the world in a kind of golden age, where people work only for self fulfilment ('m not the ultimate trekkie, but i'm pretty sure its how they put it).
In the real world, everytime something gets copied easily, all hell breaks loose. Music, games, videos, books... Someday, it will be real objects, and if the world doesn't change (hahaha, world, change? ROFL), there will be equivalents of DMCA and entities like the RIAA to bitch and complain, instead of embracing this as a way to throw society in a world where money doesn't matter anymore... It is kind of sad, and i'm glad i'll be dead before it happens.
And I'm not putting any kids in that world, either.
"They have all this manufacturing power, but because of weak enforcement of IP laws, as soon as some product starts to stand out, 50 other factories will start making the exact same thing,"
Uh-huh. And how's that working out for the GDP growth rate of China vs. the more monopoly hugging economies?
"Instant dilution of brand power."
Because huge resources spent on the production of commercials which people jump through hoops to avoid is desireable in the economy?
Or, wait, wasn't the whole point of the free market was to ensure the most optimized production of desireable products, not to create maximum desire for artificially limited products.
Is this how corporations will respond when we have the technology to have a microwave sized device that can build almost any consumer object under the control of a computer?
Shut up shop with a sign that says, "Sorry, Godti Makers did us out of business" ?
I for one, welcome our matter-assembling, programatically controlled, electronically fucked-out-of-their chip overlords.
This is why Capitalism will fail in a society which is able to replicate any commodity at no cost and no effort.
It may be a while for this to happen to our society, but think of it like this...
You live in a virtual world. You might be living in a synthetic body living in a lavish apartment, a brain in a life support box in a large facility containing nothing but brain boxes, or maybe a bum with a direct neural interface living off welfare in a trailer park somewhere.
You don't really care... Because you live in a virtual world and have no real world concerns. Anything you desire you can simulate. You can replicate anything anything you want and since your personal desktop computer has more brain power of all the humans that ever lived then you don't even have to bother other people to make things for you.
Your AI simply will create based on your specifications... Earl Gray... Miso soup... What have you...
Since you no longer need humans for anything else than conversation... (Even then at this point your AI desktop can pass any Turing test with flying colors)
You don't really need to pay anyone for anything.
I'm sure a great deal of wealthy CEOs would cringe at this, but what is the point? They will be able to lavish whatever they feel like as well in whatever virtual world they want?
They wouldn't know the difference anyways is the simulation was good enough...
At this point in the evolution... Capitalism will cease to be... Simply because there is no need for each other except personal relationships.
This is what SL is going to be like someday. Give it 50 or 100 years...
"I am the king of the Romans, and am superior to rules of grammar!"
-Sigismund, Holy Roman Emperor (1368-1437)
True that because you can copy something in SL, its value is gone, but not the value of the initial creation time. Open up a shop where people will pay you to make something for them. Sure they may not have the only copy for long, but for a little while, they will. I think that coresponds to the open source model. You get paid for your skills, not for your merchandise. If there is something of value that ppl in SL want, I'm sure that they would be willing to pay for it. If SL has no real value to people, then it will just die off like buggy whips.
except that it was never difficult to copy/clone their models to begin with... all digital remember... so why would anyone go to the effort of making anything new (excepting personal joy in doing so) if everyone can have one just like it instantly.
Maybe not everyone wants to have the same thing? Seems like there would be a market, over time, for custom-made stuff; where you knew that you were the only person in the game to have this particular item, and have complete control over it (to give, copy, destroy it).
"Manufacturing" goods doesn't make sense in a virtual world. I always thought it was silly in WoW, but there it works because they essentially have extremely stringent controls that prevent you from using the natural advantages of digitization (non-conservativeness of information). However, labor-based trades still do. They're just not money machines: you can't make something cool and then watch the cash roll in, as people buy it over and over. Even if you're really good at your trade, you have to constantly work and sell your time, if you want a continuous income stream.
"Ladies and gentlemen, my killbot features Lotus Notes and a machine gun. It is the finest available."
Where does it lead? Communism. Really, according to my reading, Marx believed that capitalism would push for advances in technology until scarcity was a thing of the past and there was no longer a need for a class society.
Of course, some crazy people thought that Russia of all places was ready to be a land of abundance and gave it all a bad name...
As I understand, if you go to any US mint and ask to exchange your US currency with an equal value of gold, they will do it. If you go to an online game and ask to get an equal value of gold for your online currency, you get nothing. Sounds like a stronger guarantee to me...
...and buy her a diamond already, ya cheap ass. ;-)
You dumbass.
Trademarks don't 'artifically limit' the supply of anything. Trademarks make it so you can trust the product.
Without enforced trademarks, all products are the lowest possible quality, because there's no point in making something better than that, because no one can say 'Hey, that worked well, I'll buy another one of those.' or 'Well, that fell apart immediately, i won't buy that kind anymore.'.
Trademarks are merely artifical signatures. Just like someone shouldn't be able to walk up to a hospital and say he's you and request your medical records, someone shouldn't be able to sell something he claims was manufactured by you if it wasn't. Trademark law is, at root, a specific form of fraud prevention.
That's not say trademarks haven't been abused, and that selling the brand instead of the product is stupid, and I realize there's sort of a knee-jerk reaction against 'intellectual property' here, and I agree with a lot of it, but anyone who thinks society would be better off if people had no way to tell the difference between a Toshiba laptop and some craptacular Korean brand designed to look like one with a Toshiba labeled slapped on it is an idiot.
If corporations are people, aren't stockholders guilty of slavery?
Yeah, this is pretty much how I feel. Trademark law can get out-of-hand sometimes. But it's generally a good thing and has not overstepped its bounds in any severe manner.
Need a Python, C++, Unix, Linux develop
After all, in some episodes/movies of Star trek, there is currency, but in other episodes/movies, there is not. I mean, the Ferengi are always in it for a profit, but Kirk is completely lost trying to "get" the concept of currency in the 20th century.
But it does make you wonder.
Don't thank God, thank a doctor!
Tank: "So what do you need?"
Neo: "Guns. Lots of guns."
You produce a tool X. Let's pretend it's a hammer. You sell the hammer on a street corner. I see your hamer and realize it's a stick with a rock on the end (you make crappy hammers). I go to the next lot and pick up a stick, pick up a rock and stick it together, then I go use it? Did I steal anything? Well yeah, I stole the idea. But do I have to license the idea from you?
In second life I buy an item, but the item is in the game already, I'm not taking the item out of the game, I'm just duplicating it. I'm essentially getting access to it for free. That to me sounds like just a simple robbery, and one that's even hard to prove.
If the TOS says you can't dupe that's fine, kick the guy off the server, however it's far from a DMCA problem to duplicate an object for your own personal use, especially if you're not backwards engineering anything, you're just copying it. It's like saying that if I sing britney spears song I should have to pay royalty even though I do it in my personal bathrooom, and make no money or fame off of it.
There can be no such market in a world where your custom-made object can be recreated by anyone who wants a copy.
Okay, so I've just paid to have some unique content created for me and someone comes along with a copy tool and duplicates it and gives it to all their friends, and puts it in a freebie store for everyone to share.
You're misunderstanding what you paid for.
You didn't pay for the tangible thing. You paid for intangible, but nevertheless valuable, concepts. You paid to be the first to have it. You paid to have someone create exactly what you needed. You paid to get it when you needed it. You paid so that you wouldn't have to wait around
(perhaps indefinitely) for someone else to create something that might or might not be what you needed.
Other people making copies of the thing you paid for doesn't go back in time and decrease the worth of those intangible concepts.
I've paid for something that exists elsewhere
Wrong -- you've paid for something that didn't exist elsewhere before you paid someone to create it.
but I've paid (say) $50 instead of $1.
If you only want to pay $1, then you team up with 49 other people who all need the same thing you do. Everyone contributes a dollar, the creator gets paid to create the thing, and then 50 copies of it are given by the creator to the 50 people who paid for it. Those 50 people are then free to give copies away to whoever they want, because the creator has already been paid for their services. The creator can sell ongoing creative services that support the thing (repairs, maintenance, modification, extension, etc), and the creator can try to sell copies of the thing (for people who for whatever reason are unable to make copies for themselves), and those would be fair. But why should the creator get paid over and over and over again for something they already did? That's inflationary economics.
Or suppose you want a cut of things. You figure out that there's a lot of market demand for thing X, but it would cost $500 to create it and no individual wants to pay that much for it. So you sign up 1000 people and tell them that if they commit to pay $1, you'll commit to pool their contributions and pay the creator. You do it, the creator is happy (he/she gt paid), the individuals are happy (they got what they wanted for only $1 whereas it would have cost them $500 before), and you're happy (because you got paid $500 for your organizational and negotiation services to connect the creator to the customers). That's a pretty fair system, and everyone has motivation to participate and make it happen.
This is progress?
Yes. It guarantees that creators get paid squarely for their time and hard work, while also guaranteeing consumers a fair price and total control over what they've paid for. It also is a system that encourages progress by making it legal to spread knowledge, learning from others, build on the ideas and works of others, etc, in a cumulative way.
Moderator hint: a comment is neither "Flamebait" nor "Troll" if it is true.
The people whining about this are those making "shoes" and such (just models with no interactivity to them)... This is like me making a web page with a bunch of jpgs and complaining because people can right-click to save them. SL is a platform, and is now moving past its infancy a little. This is a paradigm shift, forcing people who want to leverage the platform to have to *gasp* offer something of value. A prim object is essentially a 3D .jpg. .jpgs have very little value. An interactive web application with a backend has value... as does an interactive SL application. Take the many holdem poker tables in-game. Or the full scale golf course of Nber Medici and MarkTwain White...
and the sailboat races... and DarkLife...
People... stop your bitching, or just leave and watch the next phase of innovation happen from the outside. :-)
http://blogs.zdnet.com/social/?p=21
Until someone blames President Bush for tanking the second life economy.
LK
"Hi. This is my friend, Jack Shit, and you don't know him." - Lord Kano
"Sounds good. Maybe the rest of the world should use that as an example. Instead of one rich company you get 51 companies making a living. No-one becomes big enough to abuse the advantage. Surely that is the free market."
Sounds good. Maybe the rest of the world should use that as an example. Instead of one rich company you get 51 companies making a living. No-one becomes big enough to abuse the advantage. Surely that is the free market.
This has already happened in photography. The ease which which you can scan and print photos has turned the professional photography business on end. At the high end, the large publishing companies are trying to stick with the old model and respect copyright. But occasionally copied or misattributed photos do slip through.
At the low end, photographers are giving up on the old model (payment per photograph) and migrating to a new model (payment for services rendered). For example, wedding photographers used to shoot weddings for no or minimal charge, then make the bulk of their money on the sales of the photos. Now many of them are charging for the wedding up-front, and giving the photos for free or little charge.
It's not ideal, but it seems to be working, at least in this specific case. I'm a little puzzled that companies who owe their very existence to a capitalistic market seem so reluctant to trust capitalism to find a new business model which works in the face of free (or near-free) digital copies. The business models which will arise will be different, but I think it's naive and hypocritical to assume that they won't arise. In the music industry for example, most bands already make most of their income from concerts. That won't change, it's just the distributors and middlemen who will be squeezed out.
I've thought about this quite a bit. The enabling technology would be Molecular Manufacturing, i.e. The original vision of Eric Drexler. You could have a microwave oven sized device that takes in a raw chemical feed and constructs your objects. I'm sure that there will still be issues of copyright but there would also be a thriving open source culture. There would be open source chairs, tables and probably more complex efforts such as electrical goods.
One problem I can foresee though is safety. If I made an open source chair that worked fine for me but collapsed for heavier people (and killed a few), I would feel pretty bad. Who is going to test the open-source physical objects for safety?
You're whipped.
McDonalds and Mercedes sell identical items over and over, because if I have a Mercedes, I can't just copy it and give you a Mercedes, too -- the real world doesn't work that way, because of pesky things like conservation of mass and energy. However, in the realm of information, if I have an "item" (and I would say that the term 'knowing' it is preferable and more appropriate to 'owning' it), I can give ('tell') it to you, without affecting the original. In this realm, the copies have virtually no value; in time, their cost will drop down to the marginal production cost (which is very low). So it's silly to try to have a business model that revolves around amortizing the cost of production out over not-yet-sold copies.
Anyway, I hope that clears it up. I was not implying that manufacturing identical goods and selling them was an unfeasible business model in the real world; it's not and won't be. However, selling the same piece of information over and over, is not, in my estimation, sustainable without a lot of heavy-handed controls on the market.
"Ladies and gentlemen, my killbot features Lotus Notes and a machine gun. It is the finest available."
...That intellectual property is utter bullshit and that all related laws and treaties should be abolished.
I think donkey piss sold as beer may violate the trade descriptions act... Oh Wait... How did Budweiser get away with it?
Deleted
1. Assuming that this report is correct: HOW WILL WE EVER GET BY WITHOUT BRANDING. I mean, whatever will I do if I can't automatically buy something because it has a Nike logo on it!
2. The report is bullshit. Branding grows because people are like sheep. They want a logo that others recognise. It has fuck all to do with IP (beyond simple trademarks).
Oh, there is still plenty of scarcity in this case....
(1) Energy - takes a lot of electricity to do all this.
(2) Raw Materials - if you want a 10 kilo gold statue, you still need 10 kilos of gold atoms
(3) Land - finite resource that people are still going to want.
(4) Power - people want power over eachother, and this will always be fore sale.
I started a SL account (should have canceled it sooner, hardly used it) under the nick JeanLucPascal and logged on to the n00b area. Five minutes later I hear the "Captain Picard" techno song playing from somewhere in the game... Someone must have uploaded it when they saw me (the only explaination that doesn't involve freak coincidence).
Anyways it gave the willies and I never played again!
vs gold anyway. Which kind of suggests the supply of US dollars has massively increased.
Deleted
Blockbuster cancelled its move into China for pretty much the same reason the SL businesses are bailing out.
Those who think piracy has no negative effect on the market should look to the recent events in Second Life as a warning and example.
Interesting!
I cloned the grandparent's post, which should have benefited myself, the grandparent, and the reader. Yet for some reason, my post was modded down. I guess people trust the JonnyCalcutta username more than the slackmaster2000 username. If slashdot didn't enforce these crippling username policies, then I could have posted as JonnyCalcutta and we both would have flourished with positive mod points. Or something like that.
This sounds like The Street Performer Protocol. Anyone know how sucessful this technique is? I've only heard of the guy who wrote The Circle trying it, but I can't remember what happend. Seems like it would work for well known authors at the very least...
Objects should have known their manufacturer and value. Then any copying of it with the CopyBot would deduct the value from the user of the CopyBot and credit the manufacturer. Copying does not change the manufacturer. And possibly an additional fee credited to the possessor of the object being copied, settable by that possessor. Thus the manufacturer could make unlimited copies as he'd be transferring Lindens to himself, and he reduces the need to maintain a point of vending as each customer becomes another point of sale. The purchasers would also have a motive for becoming points of sale (franchises?).
All such values would be non-negative and with protections in place to prevent overflow into negative value.
That's how I'd do it if I controlled the game environment.
The next question is should the manufacturer be able to change an object's value after sale, or should the first sale effective fix the maximum price of the object, unable to be increased to increase profit from demand?
Also necessary would be the inability of creating a device that can reverse engineer an object, thus remanufacturing it rather than copying it. Perhaps CopyBot is technically a reverse engineering and remanufacturing tool. But then, they should have enough control over the world to destroy all CopyBots too.
Oh, say does that Star-Spangled Banner entwine / The myrtle of Venus with Bacchus's vine?
An AI stronger than all the humans that ever lived?
I would give that prediction 500 or even 1000 years.
And I could also be too optimistic.
We are Turing O-Machines. The Oracle is out there.
In the absence of copyright, only people who can either afford to make their works alone (primarily wealthy people) or people making small works could afford to do so. The absence of copyright makes the development of works other than by those for whom the payment is irrelevant (people who make things for noneconomic reasons) unlikely, because the time to develop the skill to make them (which is in part tied to the complexity of a work which is in turn tied to the size and resources required to make it) is unaffordable to most if not all. We know how not to make music or books because so many have made them (and badly); if others couldn't have afforded to do so (and in some cases do so badly), they wouldn't have, and so the few who could would be spending at least part of their time making things that didn't work because they don't have the experience to know otherwise.
While the skill to make large works can be sold, the cost to obtain those skills would be prohibitive, and so few would work to obtain those skills. The costs of learning those skills would be further increased by the lack of available works to learn from (not to many works-for-hire are likely to be published freely if their cost is high). Organizations are unlikely to pay for the development of those skills because they can't make money from them. How available were books (and literacy) when each one had to be made by hand?
Everyone needs physical goods, but if the people who find ways to make them better and cheaper can't profit from doing so, then most of them will not work to make goods cheaper but will do something else instead from which they can profit (the protection is patent law, not copyrights, but an intangible and copyable work is made in both cases). If goods are expensive, then the likelihood of people having lots of time to produce other things (intangible goods, and large works of art, music, or literature) is low - the works won't exist because they can't be produced.
Yes, it can.
Assume you're the tradesman, and I'm just some guy who's bored and wants something new. I come to you, and say I want a widget unlike any other, built just for me, for my particular requirements. You tell me how long that will take to make, and calculate your price. I agree to pay you (we find some mutually agreeable terms for conducting payment, in a currency we both perceive as having value). You make the thing, give it to me, and I pay you.
Now, I have the only copy of my widget. I can take it, use it, and do whatever I want with it. I can copy it and give it to my friends, who might then give it to their friends, and to everybody else, at which point it might cease to be unique, or I can destroy it. Or I can just keep it a secret and look at it myself.
It's the difference between getting a picture of yourself, or your family, and the little sample picture that comes in a picture frame when you buy it at WalMart. Why do people bother going to the expense of getting pictures of themselves (cameras, film, processing) if they can just get a picture for free in the frame? Well obviously it's because their picture has special value to them. That value is not easily copyable from one person to another. Because I can get a photo of you, isn't going to stop me from still getting my unique picture made of my family, to go in my frame. There are a whole range of goods like that, where having 'a copy' (or a million copies) available doesn't make you less likely to buy one of your own, that's customized to your liking.
You don't just have to use something that's as personal or emotionally connected as family photos. A similar market could exist for anything from coffee cups to weapons (although I don't know if it would in SL, not knowing the mechanics of the game world). Anyone could get a "generic" coffee cup, or a coffee cup designed for somebody else, but if you had money, you could get one that was uniquely yours. Over time, I am confident that there would be strong social pressures, borne out of our need to demonstrate our relative wealth to each other, to possess things designed specially for you. Over time, it would probably seem as chintzy to have a coffee cup that wasn't designed for you, as it would to have the generic "WalMart Family" in the frame on your desk. And like the family photos, yours would have only limited value to anyone else; though you could copy it, it wouldn't have value to anyone else and thus they probably wouldn't bother.
"Ladies and gentlemen, my killbot features Lotus Notes and a machine gun. It is the finest available."
What would be interesting is to see what would happen with the building of the first replicator. It would be worth quite a lot, because of the R&D work that went into creating it. However, if the replicator itself could be replicated, its value would quickly drop, thus giving the designers little incentive to create the replicator in the first place (unless they were motivated by motives other than money).
This is true only in a completely anonymous market. If you can identify that the person you're currently looking at is the same person who sold you good (or bad) stuff the previous week, that's all the information you need to make an informed decision. Trademarks are not required, they're just a way to boost the effectiveness of marketing campaigns.
thus one can no longer sustain the economy on sales of a product, thus it must be sustained with services.
This is exactly the point I was trying to make.
"Ladies and gentlemen, my killbot features Lotus Notes and a machine gun. It is the finest available."
Only in some fantasy world where the replicator creates its copies from thin air - rather than manipulating and modifying existing material, and where the energy costs are negligible or free.
I.E. a world where the laws of physics have been repealed and replaced by magic.
What will happen when we have replicators
Oh "Insightful" my ass. Just the energy requirements for something like this (ever hear of conservation of mass?) mean that if "replicators" are commonplace, then society has long ago changed drastically, and scarcity is not a problem.
Gods I wish these geeks would find something to agonize over other than these outlandish, ridiculous science fiction scenarios.
"They built a large computer cluster - oh noes! It will become self-aware any minute now!"
"A robotic device has been engineered to do X - we are all doomed unless they progam it with the Three Laws!"*
Oh, and of course generally being kept up at night by how the imminent invention of time travel will affect our society.
Etc, etc, ad infinitum. Get a grip.
Remember the whole movement to rename it "Speculative" Fiction after Science Fiction developed a rather mediocre reputation? As pandering as it may have been, the name is apt - the whole purpose of SF is to create implausable situations which may afford unique perspectives on various philosophical questions of humanity. They are not meant as literal warnings of things to come. They are not meant to be taken literally at all.
Um, sorry about the rant. The mindboggingly narrow viewpoint just gets to me sometimes (along with the "irrelevant development + science fiction = everybody panic!" formula).
* Did anyone actually read the books or, you know, get the point? Seriously, I see people on here talk about the "Three Laws" as if they are some sort of pre-requisite for (real life) artificial intelligence.
sic transit gloria mundi
Exactly. The problem is that the enforcement stage is handled from the wrong point of view.
If the problem is fraud, committed by the disreputable producers against their customers, who should be prosecuting it? The other manufacturers, or the customer? In anything but trademark law the answer would be the customer, the one who was actually injured by the fraud. I submit that trademarks should handled the same way.
If I make a product and call it WidgetX, and there aren't any other "confusingly similar" products out there named WidgetX, then (in most cases) my product would form the common definition of the term "WidgetX" in that product domain. Assuming the name becomes fairly well-known, if someone else were to start selling something slightly different and calling it WidgetX (whereas most consumers thought of my product as WidgetX) then they'd be misrepresenting their product. If their customers expected something other than what they were sold (design, quality -- anything, really) on the basis of that name, and a court agrees that their expectations were reasonable, then those customers would have a legitimate claim against the fraudulent seller.
The difference between this and the current system lies in who defines the terms. The current system grants that priviledge to the producer, and works under the assumption that all unlicensed use within that product domain will necessarily lead to confusion. The system described above allows producers (who are quite aware of what their product is already) to suggest names, but ultimately places control over the language in the hands of the consumers (the ones looking for the product). If two producers decided on the same name for their business or product, and the unpopular one managed to register the name first, the current system would force the vast majority of consumers to accept a less suitable marketing label for the product they actually wish to refer to, whereas the system I described above (based solely on protection against fraud, needing no new laws) would "assign" the name according to social convention (and thus probably in favor of the more popular producer). The result: less confusion among consumers.
"The state is that great fiction by which everyone tries to live at the expense of everyone else." - Bastiat
If you've ever wondered what it would be like in a world without intellectual property, trademarks, patents, etc. then you've found it.
Copyright, trademark, and patent law do not stop people from engaging in illegal copying. They provide repercussions for those who do. I'm sure, with a little effort, SL could go a long way towards finding copybot users and banning them or otherwise punishing them, but that doesn't really matter.
What really matters depends on whether or not you take the game seriously.
If you do not take the game seriously, then gamers who pretended or were fooled into believing that artificial scarcity could be imposed on limitlessly copyable information (in order to give information the "feel" of a physical good) were in for a rude surprise from the beginning. It is the same rude surprise experienced by anyone who has ever believed in the fantasy of DRM.
If you do take the game seriously, then there are actually tiny people running around inside your computer with their own little society, and someone has just invented replicator technology straight out of Star Trek. Copybot could be used to make limitless copies of the necessities of life and to distribute them instantly to everyone who needs them. It would be wrong to deny the necessities of life to all of those tiny little people to keep a few people in money-making businesses, especially since money is no longer necessary. What good is money if everyone can have everything they want in as great a quantity as they desire?
The real reason all of those "businesses" are closing is that Second Life made the same incorrect assumption the players did: DRM could work. Instead of setting up a ransom licensing scheme, or a version of the patron system, or some other mechanism to reward player creativity, they went with DRM. Oops.
Until digital signatures are ubiquitous, fully secure, and viewable in a HUD implanted in our eyes, trademark law serves an important purpose in fraud prevention.
It's a pragmatic solution that enhances commerce, and there's no coercion involved, generally. SLAPP suits would be the glaring exception, but that's something the courts need to address, not a fundamental flaw in the idea of trademarks.
I've had enough abrasive sigs. Kittens are cute and fuzzy.
See, the only reason this is even an issue is because the premise of SL was not open to begin with. Personally this is why I thought it was a typical lame half-ass closed approach from the start. If it was really worth creating a virtual community worthy of the title "Second Life", it would certainly be worth doing it as open source. It's not called Second Dreary Business World now is it? If it started off free and open then these issues wouldn't be disruptive because the system would have started with the premise that the whole world was free as it should be in a virtual space. The premise was flawed. Life is not about money. Life is about love, knowledge, food and sex. And sleep. And a few other things but if you think money is a crucial part you're a loser in the most dismal sense.
You are already paying a monthly fee to access a virtual world, and you take all risk and responsibility as a client uploading models into the world. When you buy items from other people, you are exchanging virtual in game currency, there are no EULAs to click through, let alone VALID contracts being signed here that describe the terms of use.
It is foolish for a vendor to enter this market and expect to somehow impose scarcity onto entites that which the game engine does not pretend to enforce any resource control. The risk of violating 2nd Life's policy (if this activity is forbidden without permission) is low for those that would use these techniques, so it's meaningless.
In this case, this is the seller's fault, their own calculated risk.
Clearly a different model is required for successful sale of objects in Second Life to guarantee success for vendors. I applaud the action of those that exploit obvious weaknesses in the system because they will cause people to take notice and change their business approaches to minimize their risk.
They should not expect Linden Labs to do this job for them. That is poor business practice and it artificially restricts the rights of individuals who are not the clients of these vendors.
THIS THING CAN TURN ON A DIME, MACROSSZERO STYLE ALSO FUCK BETA, ~NYORON
Yes indeed, your "wrong business model" insight is spot on.
We've seen it all before of course in the music business, with the content providers trying desperately to hang on to a business model which has no place in a world where the cost of replication is next to zero.
It's even more of a "wrong business model" in Second Life, because while music still costs a fair bit to produce professionally, items in Second Life are totally trivial to create rapidly from scratch, in addition to being trivial to replicate. Yet, those content providers still think it right that their source of income be protected artificially. It's all pretty scummy.
"Sounds good. Maybe the rest of the world should use that as an example. Instead of one rich company you get 51 companies making a living. No-one becomes big enough to abuse the advantage. Surely that is the free market."
Except that every company realizes this and thus will never introduce a product at all. You'll have 0 companies making a living.
E = m c^3 Don't drink and derive E = m c^3
...with the business model being based entirely on time and effort, you're much less likely to find someone who's willing to fund an incredibly time consuming work. Things that exist in the real world information-wise like encyclopedias, feature films, and console video games.
It would be really difficult to find someone who'd be willing to pay for the entire production costs of "Gears of War" knowing that as soon as it was done, everyone else would have it too for no money. The ability to sell multiple copies of something allows hundreds of thousands of people to pay for it.
If you rely on individual investors to create something, you'll most likely end up with a lot of special purpose, barely good enough products that just get spread around because no-one has enough money to commission a full product.
Anyway, that was my impression as I was getting an answer to a programming problem out of a handy book I bought for much less than it cost to put together.
Except maybe 1984?
Reality has a liberal bias
"I agree. It's why they exist right now. And up until a few years ago, copying bits was pretty hard -- it was the era of stone tablets as far as computerized information technologies go. However, as copying those bits becomes easier and easier, it becomes harder and harder to guarantee that you can recoup the cost of the initial investment by selling copies."
Which is just a polite way of saying that people will abuse technology for their benefit to the detriment of others.
"So yes, I think that ultimately, when copying becomes easy enough and widespread enough, the only software that will be written, is that which is paid for up front and in advance. It's not as though this doesn't happen all the time, right now. In fact, I suspect in terms of lines of code written, far more 'software' has been written on contract than on speculation. (Think of all the business software, billions of lines of customized stuff.) I make my living this way, as do a whole lot of other people. (Granted, a lot of what we do involves implementing and working with already-written software, but the cost of that is usually small compared to the cost of implementation and customization, and the latter are also where the value is added.) In this model, you don't even try to "sell" software, or any sort of "products" at all -- you sell services. Essentially, what the client buys is the time of a bunch of skilled people, to accomplish a specific task."
There's one fundamental flaw with the above argument. Availability. The code that your "service" people are paying for isn't widely available (open source excepting). Ease of copying isn't as much of a problem. Plus the "service" model has already been tried. It was called the patron system. You may want to look it up and the resulting consequences.
"I'm not really engaging in any value judgments here. I don't think software "should" be sold in one way or the other. That's a meaningless argument. I think it's inevitable; DRM and other copy-control technologies are a finger in a dike that's already broken. It'll probably always be hard or annoying enough to copy information, notwithstanding the ever-present bludgeon of Copyright, that some commercial development will always continue because it looks lucrative enough on paper that people will try it ("write one piece of code, and sell it a thousand times over?"), I just don't think that's where the majority of the money is, in the long term."
It's not an issue of absolutes any more than Linux security is. It is however an issue of those two words that slashdot consistently ignores. (morality and ethics). NO business model can survive an ever increasingly immoral public.
It has nothing to do with capitalism. It's a great misunderstanding to think that an object, concept, design or even data can be "protected" in any way from duplication when it is exposed to other people. It's the same misconception the music industry is suffering from when they pay for the creation of a piece of music and think that they paid for the exclusive rights too, when they give up these rights as soon as they expose the music to the public. All that matters (in the capitalistic sense too) is how much the creation and the duplication cost and these factors determine how fast something will be spread. The concept of imposing fees or fines for duplicating something (in addition to the actual cost of physically duplicating it) is not capitalistic, it's anti-capitalistic command economy that protects lobbyist minority interests and hinders competition.
"I love my job, but I hate talking to people like you" (Freddie Mercury)
Interesting stuff. People here are in the large downplaying the consequences if we had this in reality. It would probably be an abrupt end to invention. About the only thing of value would be land, everything else could be replicated. How many people would be working to do anything, if they could already replicate anything on the planet. How are you going to get a team working for years on the next Ferrari if there isn't even money anymore, no one needs for anything.
Of course you need mass+energy, but you can replicate solar/windmills, with that energy you could replicate more advanced power plants if you had the land. If not I guess you would go to war, replicating fighting robots/tanks with your nano-lathe. Eventually it might come down to two sides left, shall we call them Arm and Core... Cool, I was training for this 10 years ago.
The sheer amount of profound stupidity you just displayed is truely astounding.
Bravo!
That was my thought too, only I went further.
The rampant and blatant copyright infringement in China can only go so far. Since it is the driving force behind China's growing economy, eventually the Chinese will be creating their own IP and will find that it is infringed by their countrymen. China will then have to implement a solution.
Second Life, it seems, has created the perfect test case for this problem. Once a solution is found in Second Life (perhaps after a few tries, perhaps the SL economy will collapse before a solution is found), countries whose economies rely largely on lax enforcement of IP rights will be able to build toward that model.
Meanwhile, we'll still be stuck in our industrial-age paradigm, assuming we haven't revolted yet.
- RG>
Hey pal, this isn't a pleasantforest, so don't waste my time with pleasantries!
It attempts to show what a society would be like when manufacturing cost is reduced to a simple utility charge, like water or electricity (due to nanoscale manufacturing). It's a fascinating book on a number of levels, though it doesn't seem as well-known as the prior work, "Snow Crash."
/.)....
Author is Neal Stephenson for those who don't know (should be few here on
Build a man a fire, he's warm for one night. Set him on fire, and he's warm for the rest of his life.
I don't think people are grasping the INsignificance of this. Copying textures and geometry is certainly possible with any 3d application, all you need is a hacked driver. Sure if we get physical replicators that will be interesting but this is certainly not the huge deal it has been made out to be.
The sky is NOT falling.
--IronHelix
Equals zero.
You can make two things in SL: graphics and code. People have been able to steal graphics on the internet since it began. And you still can't steal someone else's code in SL. So who cares? The shopkeepers who are leaving are just protesters. LL should ignore them entirely, but they didn't, and Copybot is already out of circulation. (hehe actually it's not, but it's out of PUBLIC circulation!)
it doesn't make any more sense in a made up world (made to look like th real one) - than it does in the real one.
imagine that!
You're missing one major point: raw materials. Sure, I can have an AI and some hardware that can create anything I want. But where does it get the right atoms from to make it?
This is why the physical world will always be different from virtual worlds like Second Life - whoever controls the resources will be able to charge what they like for them.
Q.
Some people in Second Live have been seen distributing "defenders" which are supposed to guard objects against copying. I do no know if they work or not, it would seem to me that it couldn't do a perfect job.
It is known that CopyBot cannot copy objects in someone's inventory, or in an object's inventory. Most importantly, this means scripts, the true power behind Second Life's object creation system, cannot be copied, and because script code is only ever sent over the line when it is opened for editing, and you can only do that if you have rights, scripts are wholly immune to this approach.
I'm surprised to see businesses closing up shop so quickly, actually. CopyBot hit the streets not very long ago -- I think those business owners are probably overreacting.
All this is possible because Linden Labs, in direct opposition to just about every other MMORPG out there, not only allows but encourages third parties to make software that works with, and can even serve as an alternative client to, their system. This likely will make far more interesting things than a simple prim copier possible available in the future. (The story is that CopyBot was originally a libsecondlife debug tool....)
It's DMCA, not DCMA. It's a copyright act, not a millennium act.
http://www.bbspot.com/News/2003/07/hardster.html
Then we could have 51 JonnyCalcuttas doing alright instead of 1 JonnyCalcutta getting all the glory.
What is this DCMA thing which is spoken of? I see it all the time here on Slashdot, but nowhere else.
Only in some fantasy world where the replicator creates its copies from thin air - rather than manipulating and modifying existing material, and where the energy costs are negligible or free.
Thin air is still matter and could be manipulated and modified to create different kind of matter.
- Raynet --> .
So where do I get this CopyBot, then? :)
You miss an important point. You are looking at the issue from the perspective of an engineer. Photography has a large artistic component. It isn't an engineering discipline. With artistic works, how much time is spent creating an art work is worthless -- it doesn't really matter. It is the object that is of value in an aesthetic endeavor.
The end result in photography isn't always of the same quality. You are paying photographers for artistic ability -- the better they are, the more they get paid via picture orders. Those with little to no ability may barely make it by or may need to find another business.
I'm sure if you advertised for someone to just come in and sit behind a camera and take snapshots on your camera, where you pay them $100 dollar an hour, you'd find takers. You may not like the quality, but quality would no longer be the issue -- only time.
The Photographers are not imposing their fee structure on you. You accept it.
However, you are equally capable of coming to alternate arrangements.
It sounds like you want to force photographers onto a preset hourly wage. Don't they have the right make a product and sell it for the price they want? In photography you pay for the quality of the output, not the amount of time input.
Photography is not necessarily something you can necessarily put value on, until after the photographs are evaluated. Something that "counts" so much more in art and photography is the quality of the end result. In engineering professions, you expect two different plumbers to do not too dissimilar work. Most do it at, or near the minimum required by law. But certainly one plumbers work won't be valued at 1000 times the work of another. In art and photography, one does have such large differences in the final work.
I would propose that your system would be unworkable. It would allow more incompetent photographers to make a living and severely cut down the rewards available to the finest professional photographers. The finest ones would drop out, the lowest skill level would drop due to the lack of instant feedback (via copies of their work). People would have to pay more, like you said, all photographers would have to raise their rate to compensate for not having residual rights to the originals.
The end result is people pay more for less quality.
I submit that trying to "force" a "pay for time", _only_, reward system would either
be detrimental to society or be unworkable at all.
-l
Except that it's not the end of scarcity. You still need to get the energy, matter, and space. And you need the designs and ideas. OTOH, it will be interesting to see what happens if you need only a trivial investment of your time and effort in order to meet living expenses.
So they've basically created a Xerox machine? Publishers all over this Earth and librarians were not able to ban these even though you can copy creations (books, articles) with them...
"It would be really difficult to find someone who'd be willing to pay for the entire production costs of "Gears of War" knowing that as soon as it was done, everyone else would have it too for no money. The ability to sell multiple copies of something allows hundreds of thousands of people to pay for it."
Amazing how a forum full of educated folks forget the simplist fact. More sharing goes on because of economics of scale than the patron system or the "beggers can't be choosers" aka street performer. And yet everyone wants to go back to the bad old days all because they can't handle the present system, or they want free stuff.*
*There may even be some envy of others people's success.
The platform (not game) did pretend to enforce resource control. I think that's one of the reasons there are so many pissed off peeople. They assumed by unchecking the "next owner modify" and "next owner copy" box, that would actually mean something airtight.
The permissions do mean something for scripts, since scripts run server-side and are never downloaded, but for prims and textures, those have to be downloaded to the client so protecting them is an intractable problem.
I've had enough abrasive sigs. Kittens are cute and fuzzy.
Copybot reminds me of Damon Knight'c classic SF novel A is for Anything". in which a device called Gismo is mailed around the world. To quote from the opening chapter "THIS IS A GISMO IT IS A DUPLICATING DEVICE-- IT WILL DUPLICATE ANYTHING-- EVEN ANOTHER GISMO. TO OPERATE, SIMPLY ATTACH A SAMPLE OF WHATEVER YOU WISH TO COPY TO THE LEFT HAND ARM OF THE GISMO, AS SHOWN."
Economic and social chaos ensues, innovation grinds to a halt, civilization collapses... By the middle of the book only people have any real value, even these can be duplicated but they have opinions about what can be done to them; it is a great read.
I'm not sure how your argument speaks against his. Although he does specifically mention charging for time spent, that wouldn't be the only way to charge, just like it's not the only way to charge now. Obviously a photographer that produces higher quality photos could charge more, and people would pay more for the quality. What does that have to do with having control over the reproduction?
--
Promoting critical thinking since 1994.
I don't think people are grasping the INsignificance of this.
Dude, we are talking about people copying virtual shoes and goats on the internet. THIS IS SERIOUS STUFF.
Funny examples.
We don't have much documentation about Mona Lisa, but apparently some Francesco del Giocondo wanted a picture of his wife so he hired Leonardo. Would signore Giocondo complain if the whole Italy had a copy? Don't know but you can go to the Louvre and paint a copy as long as you do it in a different enough size, and you should because it is not very big. It does not end her. Guess what?
Leonardo did not sell the painting to signore Giocondo for unknown reasons. He took it to France with himself and sold it to the king. Would he had bought a copy? Don't know but there are early copies and:
About Van Gogh, Wikipedia is not clear on whether he ever sold more than one picture in his life. Apparently he did not sell the Starry Night, he'd do it as an exercise or because he had to. However he did two versions of the portrait of Dr. Gachet.
DeBeers I'd say is more actual rather than artificial scarcity. I understand they hold back some diamonds and release them as they will, but still, big fancy diamonds for wedding rings still cost a lot to source (the mining operations and production of finished diamonds) and so can be sold for a huge amount. Hence the terrible 'blood diamonds' situations.
;-)
You n me can't knock out the artificial scarcity because there just aren't diamonds all over the land for digging up with a pick and shovel and an hour's work.
Now if somebody produced a 3D copying machine which allowed you me and anybody to copy and produce real diamonds as good as De Beers ones at a dollar a time, then the bottom would drop out of De Beers business model and they'd be out of business. Of course if they patented/copyrighted/ otherwise did some legal rubbish that artificially prevented you or me from producing these 'photocopied' diamonds, then we'd be into artificial scarcity.
I think the latter situation is where we're at with the SL software silliness. Same as any other code and software. You just got to go to India or China (or talk to any high school geeks) to see that - where people don't give a damn about the legal barriers but can technically produce, software is pretty close to free. SL is just discovering industrialisation....
The same mentality applies here as peer-to-peer file sharing. Why buy it when you can get it for free, even if you happen to violate a few copyrights in the process? Given that P2P is still going strong despite large-scale initiatives to snuff it out, I'm sure Copybot will only be the first Napster of its genre.
And to make it worse- IF anyone else can see the idea of green oak leaves on a sandy background they can duplicate it regardless of how well protected the original texture is.
At a minimum you could video capture it to another computer via a camera and clean up the texture.
At a maximum you could recreate it from scratch just like the creator did with photoshop.
She was like chocolate when she drank... semi-sweet at first and then increasingly bitter.
Um...huh?
That's not how fraud is decided at all.
If I offer to sell you a grapefruit, and sell you an orange instead, I can't defend myself on charges of fraud that oranges are, in fact, more popular. If I claim to be 'Jesse McDonald', and enter into a contract with someone, I can't defend myself on the grounds that people in general would rather be working with me than with 'Jesse McDonald', so all I did was make it harder for me to land the contract.
Fraud is not decided by popular vote. Fraud is making factually incorrect statements to gain to gain someone's money.
And I fail to see how what you talk about makes things less confusing to anyone! Randomly changing ownership of trademarks because some people misuse them is not a good idea. And, I note, we already do that when they reach a certain level, anyway, or at least we public domain the trademark.
And I'm baffled as to why you think someone pretending to be me in an interaction with someone else isn't harming me. My reputation will suffer, there could be misdirected bills and lawsuits, all sorts of bad things could happen. Same thing if pretend-Toshiba laptop batteries explode.
It's not technically 'fraud', it's some sort of libel or slander. It's misrepresentation, it's 'identity theft' and it would be actionable even if it there was no trademark law at all. Trademark law just provides a framework for made up names to exist. (And while I think companies deserve almost none of the rights of human beings, 'Having a name' is a right I'm quite willing to grant them. In fact, sometimes I think we shouldn't let them change their name.)
If corporations are people, aren't stockholders guilty of slavery?
Um, that's stupid. It would imply that no one could ever switch distributors.
Your 'anonymous market' is called multiple suppliers of the same product and it's how capitalism fucking works. I would like to be able to walk into Target and purchase the same things that I could purchase at Walmart, or purchase it online, and know it was the actual same thing.
Under your system, you've make the manufacturers anonymous, and have to trust distributors, which means we're basically stuck with purchasing from one store, instead of the real world, where we know both the manufacturers and the distributors, and can trivially purchase the same product from anywhere, or, if we so choose, trust a store instead.
However, you're even dumber than that. Because, under your system, stores would just start advertising their products.
If corporations are people, aren't stockholders guilty of slavery?
But you don't need to. You can simply buy one from each store and compare them for yourself - or, if they are expensive, you can read a review by a person you trust, who has bought one from each store and compared them. There is no requirement for trademarks here.
Troll. Obviously this is not true. Nothing stops you from trying multiple distributors.
I think you misunderstand what I wrote. The sale is fraudulent if and only if you misrepresented what you were selling in order to get the contract. The term "grapefruit" has a definition, determined by consensus ("popularity"), which an orange does not meet, and so selling an orange under the name "grapefruit" would be fraud. I think we are in agreement on this point. I am simply saying that if people associate the term "WidgetX" with one definition, and you sell a product under the name "WidgetX" that doesn't live up to that definition, that is fraud.
It's less confusing because the name changes aren't "random", they're based on the language. How is it more confusing to use the consensual definition (the "reasonable person" standard) of the name as the determining factor for whether the use of that name was fraudulent or not? We do the same thing all the time for other, non-trademarked terms. This merely applies the same rules to trade- and service marks.
For a sufficiently loose definition of "harm", they may indeed be "harming" you, if only due to an inadequecy in our legal system. If the legal system were operating as it should, you ought to be able to simply ignore any bills or lawsuits incorrectly directed your way -- it should be up to the bill collector / prosecutor to prove that they have the right person before inconveniencing you. (This policy policy would tend to make identity fraud far more difficult to begin with, as creditors, etc., would necessarily require more stringent proof of identity up front.) As it is, if you felt that their actions damaged you or your property (legal fees, time, "emotional distress," etc.) you wouldn't need special identity laws to sue for compensation; we already have a framework for resolving such disputes.
Your reputation is your own problem, of course, being merely the sum of how others think about you, and not something you have any natural right to control directly; the legal system should not be involved.
As for the "pretend-Toshiba" batteries, I expect the reasonable definition for "Toshiba" would be determined to be the specific corporation that holds that trademark today (even of "Toshiba" wasn't a trademark), so selling a "pretend-Toshiba" battery with the "made by Toshiba" label on it would still be fraudulent, as the battery wasn't made by Toshiba.
That framework already exists -- it's called a language.
"The state is that great fiction by which everyone tries to live at the expense of everyone else." - Bastiat
Second Life has turned comments off in the particular post(s) relating to Copybot. /.'d
What I gather from an earlier post, is that people are making in game money, coverting it to meat space money, and using that to pay for the in game property that is needed to sell the in game items. What happens when someone finds the way to replicate the in game money as well. Now people can afford thier land. If Linden sponsered software that allowed other people's property to be copied, I don't think they should complain when it it used on their propert ( the in game money).
This is very close to the senerio that would occur in real life. If anything could be duplicated, people would lose jobs left and right, but what would be the purpose of working. You work to get the things you need to survive and what is left goes to the things you enjoy. The only problem left would be land and entertainment. Even with replicators, creating land mass has some serious effects on the gravitational pull of a planet. Land would still be a comodity, but who would have the money to pay for it. Unique songs, movies, books, and video games would probably be in high demand for people that did not need to work for food, but what would they do to earn money for such luxuries. The people that had land could only sell it to people that made money from entertainment, and the people that made entertainment would only be able to sell their services to the people that were selling land. Capitolism no longer works in a society with these parameters. It is time to start looking back at older economic methods or develop new ones. A modified form of socialism would probably overcome it's flaws in a society that was not dependant on the people working to provide the needed goods for the people.
I think the main problem that Second Life will have, is that Linden is basing its' profit on a capitolistic model for a virtual world in which it has just destroyed the motivation behind capitolism.
Except that's not what actually happens, if you look at China.
Weak IP laws do not imply weak helth and safety or weak truth in advertisement regulations.
Weak IP laws would mean it would be easy to copy trivial things, but all the copycats could fall under strict regulation regarding the quality of the product offered, specially in stuff for human consumption.
IANAL but write like a drunk one.
Content developers should approach patrons interested in raising their profile (advertisers, politicians, artists, etc).
These patrons can sponsor the design of a new outfit, lets say, release it in a big SL party and live with the fact that it will be copied at nauseam.
People that were producing outfits have to think about new bussiness models that do not realy in artifical limitation of supply.
IANAL but write like a drunk one.
Galileo was sponsored.
As were Bach, Beethoven, Mozart, Leonardo, and many others.
It is a fallacy to imply that an sponsorship system would drive us back to the dark ages.
The flourishing of books have everything to do with easy copying and nothing to do with publishers paying copyrights. Many books were copied and reprinted without permisssion.
And during the dark ages, the only mechanism to keep culture alive was copying stuff without permission. Nothing to do with patronage but with a general disregard for wordly mathers.
IANAL but write like a drunk one.
Tha would mean that land price would go down.
What is the problem with that?
IANAL but write like a drunk one.
Open Source does not facilitate piracy. Period.
People may decide to release piracy tools as open source, but that does not taint the development method, it taints the individuals tha do not respect copyright laws.
IANAL but write like a drunk one.
I would do things because I enjoy doing them. SInce everything would be replicated at no cost all my wants would be fullfilied anyway, so no need to stay in a job I don't want.
Bring it on I say.
IANAL but write like a drunk one.
Excellent. Less competition for my obviously superior genes.
The roots of trademark law have gone far from the current actual situation. Most 'brands' are more or less generic products produced by the same factories, which rather negates the whole point of trustworthiness.
"someone shouldn't be able to sell something he claims was manufactured by you if it wasn't."
Neither should someone be able to sell something he claims was manufactured by him if it wasnt.