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

value

[Anonymous Coward]

And hence the "real value" of virtual goods is exposed for the umpteenth time...

Re:value

[hunterx11]

Indeed, the value of such goods is based only on the recognition of others that they are valuable, unlike the case with, say, money. Wait...

Re:value

[gEvil (beta)]

That's why I keep all my money invested in tulip bulbs...

Re:value

[Hawkxor]

Is it a stronger guarantee than you will get from Linden Labs?

UHH... YES... in the financial world, US government bonds are used as a riskless metric because if the US government ever defaults we all will have bigger things to worry about than our investments.

Re:value

[richdun]

I agree with you (and, more importantly, the Market agrees with you), but maybe GP has a point... albeit accidentally.

Backed by the U.S. government only goes so far as the U.S. government can exert its influence. Sure, that's just about anywhere it damn well pleases at the moment (militarily, economically, politically, whatever), but maybe that's the point to make with SL. Items in SL are backed just as far as the game/construct/whatever can exert influence. The problem is that a lot of people are placing "real" value on these items, and there's no way SL rules are going to be able to exert themselves outside of SL. A EULA could get close, but even that means you just get kicked out of SL if you break the rules, no "real" world consequences on face value - unless you put "real" value in SL, which, in our current analogy, would be like holding up some other commodity as risk-free instead of US bonds.

It's an interesting and no doubt will be a growing sociological and psychological issue. Our whole basis for value is often how well the most basic unit can be backed. For money, that's a solid guarantee that if the US economy completely collapses we all go Mad Max. For SL and many other "non-real" worlds, well, it's definitely not that solid.

Re:value

[Erpo]

Indeed, the value of such goods is based only on the recognition of others that they are valuable, unlike the case with, say, money. Wait...

There are no "such goods" in second life; there is only light coming off of your monitor, and that light was put there by a computer processor following directions on your hard disk. Computer directions (instructions) are not goods--they are information.

Information can be duplicated practically for free, so there's no such thing as "scarcity." Honest, real goods on the other hand cannot be duplicated, so they can be scarce. There's no way to give your cake to someone else and eat it too.

Rather, when someone authors an "item" (short list of computer instructions) in Second Life, they are performing a service for everyone else who can play second life by making that item available. Once it's out there, it can (and, according to TFA, will) be duplicated as much as people want.

Re:value

[Anonymous Coward]

For the mod who marked the parent overrated: "Tulip mania".

The tulip bulb crash of 1636-37 reads a lot like the dot-bomb of our day and to the folly of investing in overvalued, non-critical items.

Re:value

[mikael]

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.

Re:value

[celardore]

How do you store gasoline for long periods of time? Can it be done? It's been stored underground for 60 million years or more...

That's just crude...

Re:value

[Cauchy]

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.

Re:value

[Maxo-Texas]

Money is a scoring system for how much we are willing to do to get scarce resources.

As long as *anything* is scarce, your society will never exist.

So...

Will beachfront property ever plentiful?
Will property in california ever plentiful?
Will the penthouse ever be plentiful?
Will the chance to screw the hottest model on the planet ever be plentiful?
Will the chance to attend the hottest parties ever be plentiful?
Will the funniest or smartest or best looking people ever be plentiful?

Nimrod Yaffle, ex-con

[Stavr0]

He was sentenced to the Cornfield back in january

Is he going back to the cornfield or is perma-banned?

Re:Nimrod Yaffle, ex-con

[Stavr0]

And to top it off, he's a repeat offender:
In fact, Yaffle was exiled to the cornfield for three days for reverse engineering a bit of computer code to steal virtual items from a vendor in Second Life. "The cornfield is not used often, and it is only for white-collar crimes," explains Catherine Smith of Linden Lab, the San Francisco-based company that created and maintains the Second Life site. "It is supposed to be funny more than anything.

Re:Nimrod Yaffle, ex-con

[Anonymous Coward]

They sent him to the cornfield, eh?

It's a good Second Life.

Damn you! How dare you steal from 2nd Lifers!

[Channard]

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

Property Rights

[Sean0michael]

If you've ever wondered what it would be like in a world without intellectual property, trademarks, patents, etc. then you've found it. Programs like CopyBot do not serve the community interest, and in the long term will hurt the individuals using the program. If your business' products are entirely reproducible and then sold for cheap, you cannot sustain a living in such a place. It kills innovation because there is no longer a reward for it. There is no gift culture like in OSS, no list of contributors to your code. Without reward, few will continue to produce in SL. This, ultimately, means there will be little to copy, and so those who use it will lose the advantage they have.

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.

Re:Property Rights

[vertinox]

Without reward, few will continue to produce in SL. This, ultimately, means there will be little to copy, and so those who use it will lose the advantage they have.

You can't be serious?

1. There is a demand for custom avatars and people will pay on commission.
2. A great deal of these "works" are actually infringing on real life trade marks and various real world intellectual property as it is.

If you hang out at various hot spots, you may see anything from famous people copycats, to Smurfs, to replicas of various Anime characters.

Innovation will happen in SL much like it did during the Feudal days of Leonardo and Michelangelo where people wrote books on commission and did works of art and science for their patrons.

We appeared to do well enough without copyrights for the majority of human history.

Re:Property Rights

[naasking]

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.

No need to RTFA...

[ReverendLoki]

... 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...

Details

[TubeSteak]

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."

Re:Details

[jandrese]

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.

Re:Details

[Scorchio]

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?

reason for copyrights

[tigre]

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.

Re:reason for copyrights

[tigre]

The one on the books is:

1. essentially intentionally broken to prevent any reversion to the public domain.
2. (even in its original form) geared towards a period too long to make it useful for SL to make much of an effort to help you enforce.

Copyrights benefit the game if the public domain (or an in-game version thereof) is enhanced at a reasonable point in time in the future. Otherwise, copyrights are a bad bargain.

SL can surely construct a licensing scheme whereby you are permitted to use their service to distribute your creations on a monopoly basis for a set period of time (I'm thinking months), after which you grant rights to anyone on said service to freely use it within the scope of that service. No violation of copyrights, just licensing within the scope of the game.

An important moment in history

[Unoti]

I'm a developer of scripted animals in SL, the number 1 developer, depending on how you count such things. I clear a a few hundred dollars profit every month after paying for my property. This copybot thing hasn't hit me too hard directly because the copybot doesn't copy scripts, only models. But it is hitting me hard in the sense that most of the content creators in SL are closing shop, which closes down the whole world as we knew it.

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.

Re:An important moment in history

[MenTaLguY]

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.

Uh, whoa whoa whoa ... since when has "open source development" meant "making unauthorized copies"?

You can't lump together the people working on independently creating something like Inkscape with the people distributing cracked copies of Illustrator. They are two completely separate things.

The latter, conventionally called "piracy" (rightly or wrongly), is why those businesses are coming to an abrupt close, facilitated by the fact that their business models were not particularly sound in the face of that reality.

Re:FP

[Anonymous Coward]

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".

This will be a major turning point for our society

[CokeBear]

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...

copyright is not theft

[tigre]

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.

Re:copyright is not theft

[JesseMcDonald]

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.

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.)

I create some because I like it. I create more when I have financial interest in doing so.

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.

No Not Good...

[Neo_piper]

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.

Tea, Earl Grey, Hot

[lymond01]

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...

Industrial Revolution

[Urban Garlic]

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.

Re:Industrial Revolution

[MBraynard]

It sounds to me like you are a moron with no clue what you are talking about.

This isn't mass prodution versus custom creation. It is buying CDs versus DLing them for free on Napster.

The original artist can create an unlimited number of his product in a very short time and sell them. Until now they came with DRM - so he could invest the time in making the first one and then profit by selling the clones that only he could make.

Now, since anyone can clone anything, he has no reason to continue to invest the effort designing them.

It works EXACTLY like DRM and breaking DRM. Not at all the way you try to describe it. Not at all.

Re:Industrial Revolution

[Kadin2048]

This isn't mass prodution versus custom creation. It is buying CDs versus DLing them for free on Napster.

I don't see why it's either-or. You're talking about two sides of the same coin.

When it's impossible to make money by selling the same work over and over, you must necessarily switch to a business model which demands payment for the entire work's creation up front (because you can't depend on being paid piecemeal by selling copies of the work later). Essentially, the artist becomes a tradesman, just like a plumber or electrician: pay me for my time and I'll make something for you.

DRM exists to prevent this, and preserve the manufacturing-type (payment per 'unit' or copy) business model, where the cost of production of a work is amortized out over the sale of many identical copies. Rather than charging what the copies cost to produce, it creates an artificial scarcity that allows their cost to be increased up to the maximum that consumers are willing to pay.

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).

Re:Industrial Revolution

[amyhughes]

what's the point of in-game money if not to buy in-game stuff from in-game shops?

One hopes Linden Labs is thinking about this with great diligence today, because without the need for in-game money the game needs to be paid for in some way that doesn't yet exist.

Just a couple weeks ago Linden Labs increased the price of new land in the game by 50%. If you want a place to build something beautiful you have to buy an island (because on the mainland you will find yourself next to Penis Palace and a casino), and those used to cost $1250 to acquire and $200 per month to run. Many of these exist because owners can recover some of the cost by selling things or renting space (to people who want to sell things). Then they raised prices 50% ($1675 to acquire, $300 per month). Then this copy thing happened. A lot of these places are probably wondering how they will pay for their island.

Islands equal useful content. As in, places people have built that are interesting to visit. Places that make the game more than an IM client. They cost a lot of money, and now they are likely going to be harder to pay for.

Re:Industrial Revolution

[Mr2001]

But why would anyone pay for anything, when they can just wait until someone ELSE pays for it and then copy it for free?

Because if no one pays for it, it won't get created at all. It doesn't take long to notice that the thing you're waiting for isn't happening, and at that point, you realize you'll have to make a move if you ever want to see it happen.

Seriously, are YOU going to pay top dollar to have something created, when it would cost you exactly nothing to sponge off someone else?

If I knew I could wait and get it for free, then of course not. But the only way I can know that is if I know there's someone else who values that creation enough that he's willing to pay for it, which solves the problem quite nicely: the creator gets paid and everyone gets to use what he created.

Linden Blog, update:

[Anonymous Coward]

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/

RIAA member businesses close due to cloning

[c0d3h4x0r]

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.

Value is in the ability to create.

[MikeFM]

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.

Re:Value is in the ability to create.

[bill_kress]

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.

Re:tee hee

[Stormwatch]

artificial scarcity as a business model makes me laugh.

Hey, it worked for De Beers...

Work for the glory, only?

[amyhughes]

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. I've paid for something that exists elsewhere, same as before, but I've paid (say) $50 instead of $1. This is progress?

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.

Value is in the service.

[Kadin2048]

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.

Re:Value is in the service.

[XorNand]

How is this +4 Insightful? You're arguing that items need to be unique in order to be desirable or profitable. Rolex, Mercedes Benz, heck, even McDonalds has "a sustainable, proven business model" of selling identical wares over and over again. Artisians enjoy making unique contributions to the world. Some of them make a very good living, but that's rare. Businesses, on the other hand, strive to make money the in most efficent manner possible. Despite being uncool, both have their place in the world. How much do you think your computer would cost if each one had to be hand-crafted?

Re:Value is in the service.

[DeadMilkman]

How is it still unique when as soon as you walk outside with it anyone else can have it too?

Would the rich society that supports artists buy art if all their fellow societians would have the same thing as soon as they showed it off?

(*Look at my new mink! Yes its now my new mink, and my new mink *)

This "Killed" uniqueness as it is now impossible to be "unique".

Those that WERE willing to pay prices for unique wares are no longer as copybot kills the ability to be unique and show off.

Re:Value is in the service.

[Alcari]

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.

Re:Value is in the service.

[Mr2001]

How is it still unique when as soon as you walk outside with it anyone else can have it too?

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?

Those that WERE willing to pay prices for unique wares are no longer as copybot kills the ability to be unique and show off.

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.

Re:Value is in the service.

[fitten]

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?

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.

This is kinda what is happening in China right now

[Optic7]

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.

Reuters coverage here

[objekt]

http://secondlife.reuters.com/stories/2006/11/15/l inden-bans-copybot-following-resident-protests/

Objects are worthless, time is not.

[Kadin2048]

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.

Re:Objects are worthless, time is not.

[Kadin2048]

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.

Re:Duping bugs happen in every game.

[xappax]

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.

Re:This is kinda what is happening in China right

[glebfrank]

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.

Re:This will be a major turning point for our soci

[Shados]

"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.

Re:Replication, Virtual, or Singularitian Society

[vertinox]

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...

Re:This is kinda what is happening in China right

[DavidTC]

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.

Re:This is kinda what is happening in China right

[Omnifarious]

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.

Re:US mint verses online games

[Mister Whirly]

You can buy gold and silver with your currency yes. But the Gold and Silver Standards are a thing of the past. You used to be able to bring US currency in, and get a fixed value of gold/silver for it. Now you just have to buy on the open market with fluxuating prices like any other commodity.

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Silver_standard
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Gold_standard

Re:Duping bugs happen in every game.

[Lord Ender]

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.

No, work for the money

[c0d3h4x0r]

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.

Was not referring to physical goods.

[Kadin2048]

How is this +4 Insightful? You're arguing that items need to be unique in order to be desirable or profitable. Rolex, Mercedes Benz, heck, even McDonalds has "a sustainable, proven business model" of selling identical wares over and over again. Artisians enjoy making unique contributions to the world. Some of them make a very good living, but that's rare. Businesses, on the other hand, strive to make money the in most efficent manner possible. Despite being uncool, both have their place in the world. How much do you think your computer would cost if each one had to be hand-crafted?

I guess I wasn't clear: I was only talking about in the digital, nonconservative realm, where you can duplicate an object that's already been created with virtually no effort or energy expenditure (well, there is some, but it's trivial).

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.

Re:Was not referring to physical goods.

[Phisbut]

I guess I wasn't clear: I was only talking about in the digital, nonconservative realm, where you can duplicate an object that's already been created with virtually no effort or energy expenditure (well, there is some, but it's trivial).

Let me guess. You also believe it's stupid for software makers to sell their software. Every video game you find in the store should be free (or maybe cost about 2 bucks to cover for the plastic)? After all, software and game companies are just selling the same object over and over.

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.

Just because it doesn't cost anything to make a copy doesn't mean the copy has no value. Take any piece of commercial software (and those virtual items can also be considered pieces of software). If a company invests 10 million dollars to make the software ("creating something new" as you put it), it wants to recover those costs. According to you, that company should charge 10 million dollars to a single customer and let that one customer distribute free copies all over because copies have no value.

Which is the best business model? Trying to sell one copy at a price of $10,000,000, or trying to sell a hundred thousand copies at a price of $100? Selling the same bits over and over again is a viable business model, and it's the only reason the software industry, the movie industry and the music industry exist.

Weirdest Second Life Experience

[QuantumFTL]

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!

Re:Duping bugs happen in every game.

[StikyPad]

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.

Re:US mint verses online games

[Moofie]

Hold on. There exist ATMs that dispense GOLD!?

Re:Offtopic, but interesting.

[SanityInAnarchy]

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.

Re:The US dollar has halved over the last 5 years

[Eskarel]

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.

This isn't business software, this is Second Life.

[Ayanami Rei]

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.

CODE can't be stolen. So who cares?

[descil]

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!)

Re:Duping bugs happen in every game.

[Geoffreyerffoeg]

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".

Re:cost of production and limited access

[gunnk]

Coming soon to a jeweler near you:

http://www.wired.com/wired/archive/11.09/diamond.h tml