Slashdot Mirror
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...
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.
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.
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.
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
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.
So LL said "if we catch you using Copybot we'll cancel your account" and you took that to mean "acceptance"?
Frankly, these sorts of things have been around forever in SL, but Copybot was the first to gain a lot of notoriety. If people are closing their shops now (I doubt this is more than a small handful of vocal protesters) then they're just late on the train. Ultimately your client needs to be able to display the data, and the client is in the hands of the users, so as LL rightly pointed out, no technical means will ever make your creations 100% secure. If you can't handle the thought of that, then not only should you step out of Second Life, but you should probably step out of your Real Life, since that also holds true there as well.
Being able to report someone for using a Copybot and having his account suspended is probably the best solution to this problem. You'll just have to accept that a few people may slip through the cracks, but given that SL is a largely lawless society anyway I'm not sure why you'd expect strict enforcement on this one thing.
I read the internet for the articles.
Circumcision is child abuse.
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'm a moderator and I'm really pissed of that there isn't a -1 completely wrong.
A copy of a Picaso doesn't lower the value of the original--but if it was the ability to make an EXACT copy, of course it would. If you couldn't tell the difference between the original and the copies, then the original is only worth what the copies are worth.
That's exactly how digital copies of digital entities work.
SL is different from other games in that users are allowed to create objects - they're even encouraged to do so. If you can design an object, you can create it within the game, and everyone agrees that that's ok.
The problem is that people want to keep their designs secret, even while using them in the game. Obviously, this is impossible because in order to render the object, each SL client has to download the object's wireframe, textures, etc.
Most duping bugs are solved by securing data or fixing a bug on the server side, but that won't work in this situation because what's being copied is the same information the game client needs to display the game properly.
"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.
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 I read about 1,000,000 accounts, and the money people were making and so forth, I decided to give it a try. It was the most boring and slow thing I've ever seen. Its demographic appears to be people who don't have a first life.
"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.
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."
If they think their time is worth $1,000 (or whatever, some arbitrarily high value) an hour, they can certainly try to sell themselves at that rate. I doubt they'll get any takers, though.
And yes, the photographer should price their time irregardless of the number of photos the customer will print later. How many they'll make is not relevant to the sales transaction, once you rule out the possibility of pay-per-copy (as in the case of a nonconservative informational realm without DRM). You can't view it as a 'loss' when it's not possible to make money that way in the first place.
I suspect that although there would be initial resistance to the business model, you would find that many photographers would be willing to turn over reproduction rights for slightly less than a hundred dollars an hour, depending on their reputation and skills. (Actually I used to know a good local wedding photographer who worked this way, although he catered mostly to other photographers.)
So anyway, I guess I'll agree with you: the photographer would price their time with the assumption built-in that you would make a lot of copies (or at least, that you wouldn't provide any further income to them by buying more copies). So their rate would be basically the rate they charge now, plus an amount equal to the income they obtain from further print sales, divided out per hour of labor. E.g., if right now they charge a base rate of $50/hr take the photos, an average shoot lasts 5 hours, and then charge $10 per print, and on average sell 10 prints per shoot, then they'd probably want to charge about $70/hr if they were going to turn over all the negatives to you afterwards instead of holding onto them. There's nothing unfair about that, and it's not even clear that the customer is getting a bad deal: if the customer makes more prints than average, then they actually save money.
My point is that this pricing is basically inevitable: without onerous DRM, you can't give someone a photo in a digital format without also allowing them to copy it. So if you want to stay in business, you're going to want to charge the "prints included" rate, rather than the lower one. If I was going to open up shop as a wedding photographer (shudder) tomorrow, given that people are going to want their photos in some sort of digital format -- to send to relatives, make into DVDs/books/whatever -- I would certainly not try to keep myself afloat by artificially lowering my rate, hoping that I'd make it up later on "in volume." Trying to sell the same string of numbers more than once (particularly to the same person!) is a mistake.
"Ladies and gentlemen, my killbot features Lotus Notes and a machine gun. It is the finest available."
So you change 1 point or 1 LSB on a texture. The entire hash changes and the protection is completely circumvented.
It would require something much more process intensive, such as similarity matching. That would be a PITA as well, since it would be much less process intensive to modify the object, but make it look the same, and if the comparison points are too broad, it could block anything that's even remotely similar -- all spheres, as a simple example.
https://www.eff.org/https-everywhere
You're making a faulty assumption that the gold price is static. It isn't, and never has been. In particular it tends to skyrocket in times of political or economic uncertaintly(ie after 9/11). There are a number of other reasons for the rise in gold price, but a doubling of the number of US dollars is not one of them. If that were the case the price of everything would have doubled, not just gold.
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
"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 would require something much more process intensive, such as similarity matching. ...not necessarily. Just use something like...oh...conventional DRM?
Every time you create a prim it gets a hidden field, that's a signature with LL's private key of something unique to the prim (like a GUID) and your UID (or GID if it's group-owned). When you give it away (directly or recursively, as part of a larger object), LL will give the object a new signature. If you make the object freely copiable, the signature will be of the GUID and the null string. If you try to copy an object that doesn't belong to you (or the null string), the server will refuse. If you sell an object, its copy-ownership stays with you, but the conventional ownership (for rezzing, etc.) goes to the purchaser - so only you can authorize copies of it but only the purchaser can do anything with it.
Since you can only create signatures with LL's private key, but you can verify them with their public key, this should give pretty much tamper-proof ownership of objects with a literal "copy right".