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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.
artificial scarcity as a business model makes me laugh. i am a cruel man.
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.
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.
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.
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 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.
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."
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.
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)
The solution is simple: When someone creates a new object, SL can just register some digital signature or hash of the object in a central database. The SL server could then refuse to transmit any object with that signature unless the creator authorizes it.
A slashdotter who didn't build his own computer is like a Jedi who didn't build his own lightsaber.
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 $500 for your organizational and negotiation services to connect the creator to the customers). That's a pretty fair system, and everyone has motivation to participate and make it happen.
This is progress?
Yes. It guarantees that creators get paid squarely for their time and hard work, while also guaranteeing consumers a fair price and total control over what they've paid for. It also is a system that encourages progress by making it legal to spread knowledge, learning from others, build on the ideas and works of others, etc, in a cumulative way.
Moderator hint: a comment is neither "Flamebait" nor "Troll" if it is true.
If you've ever wondered what it would be like in a world without intellectual property, trademarks, patents, etc. then you've found it.
Sorry, that's untrue. SL is a world where the cost of reproduction is zero, not the cost of production. Even still, just because the cost of reproduction is almost nil, it doesn't mean an item's value is zero. What's the marginal cost of reproducing your last picture of you and your dad before he died? Near zero. What is the picture's value to you? Quite a bit.
Without reward, few will continue to produce in SL.
No, few will make money reproducing, distributing, buying and selling things. That's entirely different than not producing unique things in the first place. This whole "without IP the world would collapse" perspective is nonsense. And this is coming from a Libertarian, so I'm in favour of property rights, just not where there isn't any actual property.
Higher Logics: where programming meets science.
you're not getting the point. Items need only be unique in a world where everything can be copied without (much) effort. I can get a fake rolex, which is indistinguishable to anyone but the experts, functions just as well to, for only 20$. The only reason Rolex can stay in buisiness is that the copies are illegal and because of bragability. It's a bit more difficult to "copy" a mercedes, and a lot less usefull to copy a bigmac. With the copybot, selling copies is uselss, thus one can no longer sustain the economy on sales of a product, thus it must be sustained with services. I'm sure there are a lot of economists going crazy about this.
What's unique is not the instance, but the design.
Let's say I have a few million Linden bucks to spend, and I want a giant sculpture of myself. I pay a sculptor to build it for me. Now everyone else can have a copy, but so what? I don't mind everyone having a statue of me in front of their house.
Or let's say I have the idea for a new kind of hat. I pay a hat designer to make one for me, and after a while I start seeing people wearing copies of that hat. Am I upset because they're getting the hat for free... or am I happy because I've started a fashion trend?
I, for one, won't mourn the loss of certain people's ability to "show off" the fact that they have something no one else can have. Scarcity is generally a bad thing.
Visual IRC: Fast. Powerful. Free.
You're partially right. It's not theft by the people granted the copyright (at least not directly); the theft (or infringement of rights, whatever term you may prefer) is committed by the government itself (which Linden Labs is not, except perhaps within SL itself) against its citizens, through the act of unilaterally prohibiting them (against their will) from making copies of said creations. "The government" (the group of individuals actually making and enforcing the decisions) hasn't the right to make that agreement on behalf of everyone else; at most they may represent those who participated in the voting process (assuming one existed), though even there the participation could be considered to be under duress, in which case they represent only themselves. (Aside: There is no historical basis for the "social contract" theory of society; all governments in recorded history have arisen through force. Even if there was such a contract at one point there is no way those alive at the founding of the government could contractually bind their descendents. Contracts must be voluntarily accepted to be meaningful.)
Has anyone ever bothered to considere that "more arts and sciences at any cost" might just be a rather short-sighted arrangement of priorities? There are trade-offs, you know; perhaps the actual amount of creation (vs. all the other things people want) would better reflect people's real priorities if it weren't so heavily subsidized. (This is formally known as the "broken window fallacy": you can easily see the additional creations resulting from the subsidy, but not the things that could have otherwise happened and didn't. A full analysis must take into account the unseen effects as well as the seen.) Certainly copyrights and patents encourage the sorts of activities that qualify for such priviledges (though how well that may correspond with "encourag[ing] the sciences and useful arts" may be debatable), and I would certainly agree that people want inventions and artistic works, but at what cost? What goals are they willing to give up to achieve that increase? The answer will obviously differ from person to person (another reason why it shouldn't be a collective decision), but I doubt it's nearly as much as the government's chosen to concede on their behalf.
"The state is that great fiction by which everyone tries to live at the expense of everyone else." - Bastiat
That works for something you can sit down and design in an hour. The designer will charge for an hour of their time. It doesn't work when what you want requires lots and lots of time and many people. Supposed you *could* put a car on a Xerox machine and get a real copy of it. It still takes a lot of time to design the car (aerodynamics, mechanical design, etc.). So, do you want to go pay the salaries of 10 engineers for 6 months to get your unique car? and then let everyone else have it for free?
Sure, you'll say you just want to customize the color and such but not the design. Well... we have that now. And the way the salaries of the engineers and all the workers to assemble it is amortized over the cost of selling many such vehicles with "personalizations" such as color.
So I gather it's an open source effort to build an alternative SecondLife client. Being a client, it receives definitions and textures of objects in order to render them on screen. It was a small step to take those definitions and use them to create exact copies of objects in the game. The only difference is the copies then belong to the copier, and can have their mod/copy/transfer permissions set to whatever they like. Quite possibly a useful development/test tool. Trouble is, someone else downloaded the tool from their public SVN repository and is using it to make unauthorized copies of in-game objects.
Does that sound about right?
If so, that's a tricky one. I'm not sure how you could avoid this issue. OSS makes it easier to exploit, but even with closed source software, you can only slow someone down so much with layers of encryption, obfuscation and so on. Ultimately, the client has to be able to decode and display the content, and therefore can be copied.
I'm thinking the only course of action they can take is to identify the copies and taking action against the copiers. I was wondering if they could deduce this from some kind of log describing the object's creation. For example, if A and B are complex but identical objects (or at least identical within a tolerance), A was created before B, and B was created in a fraction of the time that A was, would that indicate that B was cloned from A? If A's creator reported seeing B's creator with the object, would this be sufficient proof that a copybot was used, in order to clobber B with the ban stick?
Better to use beer barrels...
During the oil refinery blockades back in the UK in 2000, a taxi driver stored 230 litres of petrol in beer barrels and a wheelie bin. The petrol had started to leak from the wheelie bin due to the plastic becoming brittle from a chemical reaction with the fuel.
Emergency services evacuated up to 20 homes in Derby after almost 230 litres of petrol, stockpiled because of the fuel crisis, began to leak.
Firefighters went to the home of a city taxi driver after a strong smell of petrol was reported. They found the fuel was illegally stored in beer barrels and a wheelie bin.
Vintage computer adverts: http://www.vintageadbrowser.com/computers-and-software-ads
Starfleet may be a free society, but it's also a military society. Thus, if you want to, say, command a starship, you have to be productive.
And there was an episode where they dealt with "holodiction".
Still, it was never really made clear. Sometimes there's talk of money, sometimes there's talk of how we've done away with currency. Sometimes there's barter, most often there's no mention of it. Kind of like how sometimes the replicators can produce any material you want, yet some materials are somehow scarce and can't be produced by the replicators. Yet, even these can often be beamed, which is supposedly the same technology.
It's a fascinating universe, but still a space opera -- they cherrypick the "science" they want to suit a particular fiction. In fact, it gets so bad that some scripts literally have "TECHNO" throughout -- as in, "Insert technobabble here." So, you see lines like "We can't TECHNO because TECHNO! But maybe if we TECHNO..." Which, of course, maps pretty closely to what most people hear.
Don't thank God, thank a doctor!
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!)
I recently spent a year in northern Mozambique, and US dollars were very desired and heavily sought after by anyone middle class and above. Indeed, transactions were often stated in dollars, even if they were conducted in Metacais. My landlord insisted on me paying my rent in dollars. Pounds, Euros, Yen, none of these were of any value. Rand were of value in the south of the country but not the north. This is a place where the US Gov't has little influence (despite a desire to the contrary). I'm sure that if you went to Somalia, people would insist on being paid in dollars in a place with no gov't and no US influence to speak of. Dollars go almost anywhere in the world. This is will no doubt change one day, but for now, the dollar is the new gold around the world. It goes way beyond simply the US Gov't.