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.

Comments

Re:Industrial Revolution

[Wile_E_Peyote]

Without DRM, the copies cease to have value, but the skilled labor that goes into their creation still does, and could be sold even in the absence of DRM (or copyright).

This makes sense in the context of SL, but not in something such as music. Basically, musical artists would become minstrels. They would have no incentive to reproduce music for the masses. Instead, you'd most likely have crappy quality recordings of live concerts made by some guys who snuck in a recording device...