OPEN FORUM: COPYBOT CONTROVERSY

Screenshot by Kronos Kirkorian

There's at least two in-world protests over the sale of copybots going on right now, with a diverse mob of avatars waving signs, shouting slogans, some even attempting to impede sales of copybots by blocking the vending machines which sell them with giant prims and other barriers.  My story on the controversy should run tomorrow.  Meantime, here's an open forum to air your views-- is this a painful-but-necessary demonstration of Second Life's limited ability to protect IP on the architectural level, or a dangerous threat to the community of content creators?  Or neither, or both?  Discuss in Comments.

Update, 3:57pm:  In Comments, Moopf Murray makes an important clarification; in response, Moriash Moreau makes a particularly apt observation.

Update 2, 4:07pm:  Linden Lab just declared that use of Copybot and similar programs are against Second Life's Terms of Service, and that violators are now subject to having their accounts terminated.  (With terse words to those who already have done so.)

Update 3, 11/15, 11:57pm:  My story on the CopyBot controversy is here.

(And thanks to Kronos Kirkorian to passing on screenshots taken from the scene.)

Comments

[Moriash Moreau]

IT'S TEH DEVIL! EVIL! EVIIIL!! BURN THE WITCH! PASS OUT THE TORCHES AND PITCHFORKS! KILL IT! KILL IT! DIE DIE DIE!

Okay. That's out of the way now. On with the intellectual discourse.

[Moopf Murray]

Hamlet, I really want to take this opportunity to draw people's attention to the fact that I have NOTHING to do with Copybot. I've been getting IMs all day ranging from the 'for-shame' to the nasty and abusive, because people have seen my name on the vending machines being used to sell the Copybot and presumed that's it's myself that's responsible.

I sell vending machines, amongst other things. The person selling Copybot is using one of my Vendopf vending machines and I'm down as the CREATOR of it. But I'm not the OWNER, have nothing to do with it and can't do anything about it. The person purchased the vending machine from me and is using it - not me.

There's more info on my blog and I've put a notice in my profile but I'm still getting the IMs. It's made today a bit of a washout for me.

[Relee Baysklef]

It suddenly occurs to me that scripted torches and pitchforks would be a great pair of items to sell in my store.

[Jrrdraco Oe]

The creation of the Copybot is nothing new in the gaming industry, since all other games had something similar in the past, usually called Trainers or Hacks that would allow the user to multiplicate money, but this stuff, even claimed to ´help´ users backing up their content puts the owners onto another level totally unfair game. It´s true that the missing inventory item is also a problem, but helping bad people stealing content is not a fix.
This shows how unsafe is the data handled between client and server. I have seen this comming when they created that alternative SL client.

[Moriash Moreau]

Y'know, Moopf, considering the product being sold, I find it particularly ironic that the folks sending the IMs can't distinguish between "Owner" and "Creator" in the edit window. I'd expect that said hotheads would be both qualified and especially careful to make such distinctions, if they are so very concerned about someone/something stealing the credit and rights for their work. I'm sorry to hear you're being caught in the splash damage, in any case.

Unfortunately, this is another landmark on the road to becoming the new web. SL is one step closer to being Web 2.0. Yay.

It's difficult to the point of impossibility to, say, keep a copyrighted image from being kiped and stuck- uncredited- on a third party website. Seriously, how many personal website creators go to royalty or royalty-free sites to get their webpage art? It seems that SL textures are going that route, as well. Welcome to the future of the 3D web. (I'm fighting the urge to say "Web 3.D" here, mostly because I don't want to sully Walker's terminology.) I expect similar analogies could be made between prim constructs/scripts and other web entities (web layouts/formatting, and so on), but you get the idea.

I suppose the addition of owner/creator tags to the images will help in some instances, but when is the last time you checked the comments tags on a .GIF image? Or set them when you made one? I'm guessing it's been a while. (Yeah, I know, the tags are proof for the rare instances when the creator actually catches the thief in action.) We're at the top of the slippery slope the web long since slid down. "Yeah, I know, the image is copyrighted, and someone else coded that webpage layout I snagged. Eh, nobody will care. Upload!"

This sure isn't the end of content creation in SL- the Copybot has some pretty severe limitations, from what I hear. But there's going to come a time when casual theft will need to be factored into our 3D web design and programming economy as a fact of life... As much as that both sucks and blows, simultaneously.

[Jr Breed]

This game is a great chat program.

CopyBot aginst ToS.. And this means? ABSOLUTLY NOTHING. Your content you create will get stolen. Your time invested, wasted. Secondlife, on second thought, a pile of coded crap. Just let me know when the money hack comes out.

[humanoid]

What's funny is that some of the people bitching about this mysterious doppelgaengering device probably have a few gigs of downloaded mp3s on their hard drive. If you spend all day in the sandbox for any reason other than amusement, it may be time to step back and reevaluate how you live. I enjoy SL as much as the next person. But anyone who depends on an online game to make money should be stuffed in a sack and thrown off a cliff.

[Gwyneth Llewelyn]

Exactly, humanoid!

We have 1.4 million people in SL. So how many of those have ever copied a single MP3 file, just to know how it works like, or accepted a copy of a ripped-off MP3 from a friend?

Well, one single MP3 does not harm anyone, right? After all, the record labels and the singers are filthy rich anyway... it's not like they're going to miss the royalties for a single MP3...

It's tough when it happens to *your* creations, though, and I find it amusing but perhaps educational to see how freely people rip off MP3 or movies or applications or games, without thinking twice that they are effectively violatin g other people's copyrights... but in SL, they suddenly understand what "content piracy" is all about!

Naturally enough, I don't blame people for creating 3D content and getting worried that others copy it without paying you your royalties. But sadly this happens all the time. humanoid might not understand how people live from creating 3D conten, but anyone visiting Renderosity or any other similar site will quickly know what it means to be a digital 3D artist and make a living out of it.

Perhaps people will learn a lesson in SL. Now you know how artists/creators/software developers feel in RL whenever someone copies your work...

[CJ Christensen]

I purchased the copybot - well i paid 1500L got given a notecard with a url. I downloaded the software , created an alt at $10 expense and then got a coding buddy and we went to work on the program to see what all the fuss was about.

The software just allows you to copy the prims - so yer it can copy a table or another static object. but it cant copy anything within an object so scripts are safe as are objects within objects.

Upon seeing its ACTUAL functions ie clone of prims, anyone can do this by just studying how somethings made and replicating it with the create tool.

I went to the person selling the bot and asked for a refund. ( i got banned )

I then reflected on what all the fuss was about and found myself actually agreeing with the principle of copybot. So i did a short counter protest stating we should support FREE content. I then got banned from the protest land!

I believe we should be allowed to copy anything we buy in SL. I'm not saying copy and sell im saying just copy! I look at it as buying a CD and making a copy for MY OWN car. Thats all.

I think what this copybot showed was not an increase in IP theft but in the amount of corporate wailing of developers.

I think SL should be about creating unique content for other users not about creating yet another clothing line for lindens.

lets not use SL for money lets make SL a tool for creation.

I vote LindenLabs should remove the copy disabled option.

[CJ Christensen]

Remember there was maybe 100 people protesting but over 1 million people where not.

[SignpostMarv Martin]

What amazes me is that people were a) selling links to software and b) gullible enough to buy it.

This just sounds like those websites that charge you $20 for a guide to tweak your registry settings when it touts itself as "ZOMG WE WILL SPEED UP j00r INTERNETS AND P2P DOWNLOADZORZ"

Anyone selling a link to free software is nothing more than a greedy scalper taking advantage of a confusing situation. The software is free, and from what I'm seeing, people are paying $5 for free software.

Do you all realise this ? You've just spent FIVE DOLLARS on free software!!

You just got ripped off.

This whole thing about being able to buy a link to FREE software is just confusing the uninformed Resident/Tourist that copybot is an in-world script, similar to the one that uses llGetPrimitiveParams() to replicate modifiable objects.

People will always be able take what is not rightfully theirs. This is one of the many things you have to put up with when you're not living in a police state, where every action is restricted, monitored and censored by the government.

Attempting to make it harder for the criminal minority to steal music hasn't worked for the music industry, it's only made things worse for the law-abiding majority, going so far as to interfere with their computers and infringe on their privacy rights just to keep some ignorant fucktards in suits heads in the sand (would you like a side order of spyware with your main course album Sir ?)

You cannot stop the criminal minority, you can however make it easier to identify the criminal minority without making it more difficult for the law-abiding majority to live their (second) lives.

Regarding the proposal to remove the ability to "not copy" content:
"No copy" is one of these things that restrict consumers fair-use rights. In an environment where the cost of reproduction is almost entirely negligible, stopping consumers from keeping backups of content is moronic. A friend of mine just lost an item she bought because she had rezzed it in a sim, the sim crashed, and got rolled-back to a point before she had rezzed it. Because the item was no-copy, she just lost what she paid god money for.

A better situation would be one where you have modify/no-modify, transfer/no-transfer, resell/no-resell.

If you don't want people to make money off your content, give them the ability to customise (e.g. modify) the content, but disable the ability for them to resell it. If you want them to be able to put the content back on the market when they're done with it, disable modify perms, but enable reselling

Fair-use examples of copy-bot and similar tools:
# Transferring content from the beta grid to the main grid if you have a burst of creativity but can't for the life of you remember how the hell you made something.

# Backing up all your creations to disk, quiting SL because of the drama, then coming back months later on an alt and being able to pick up where you left off

# Connecting to a locally installed simulator (yes, it can be done), creating content offline away from all the region crashes, griefers, IM, inventory, and TP spam, then uploading it to the grid when you're done. Who needs sandboxes when you can have an entire simulator to yourself without paying to have it hosted on the grid ?

And finally, yes, if you can see something you can analyse it and copy it. It's been done for years in the art world by making duplicates of art work and reselling it as originals. Or distressing freshly made furniture to look like an antique. Or making fan-fic hentai. Whatever floats your boat.

[Luce]

@SignpostMarv

just wanted to thank you for your eloquent argumentation on the blog. People are too enraged to get it now, but still, good on you.

[Pacifien Massiel]

There is much in the comments here that has been some relief to me who has been so frustrated reading the enraged reactions against CopyBot and libsecondlife elsewhere.

CopyBot brought to the forefront issues that were *already* known to be problems. I imagine the larger businesses have all had an incident of texture theft and/or prim copying of their products. People knew the system was shakey, but the cracks remained.

Am I upset that there hadn't been a massive revolution sooner, before the CopyBot made the duplication of clothing a matter of seconds instead of a couple hours? I'm not really the best one to talk about how duplication of my objects affects my profitability because everything I've built has been free -- I don't create items in Second Life to be sold and occasionally throw in my version of a GPL into the prims that outright says I know I have no control over how my creations are used once I release it into the network.

This probably leads to what does bother me, which is that I'm very much in the camp that believes in open source projects and I've seen people take this incident as proof that open source will destroy us all. I don't know, I'm still in the belief that Second Life is still very much a beta program and probably needs to be destroyed and rebuilt a few times before it's ready for primetime.

If people discover their businesses aren't rock solid, it's because the program itself wasn't. That was the risk they took.

And now I'm wondering again why I'm rambling on about this. My Second Life experience and viewpoint is probably far too removed from the people who are running businesses and feel their creations threatened. I'm just not profit-driven.

[Cabridges Fanwood]

I think a lot of the backlash came from the way things were handled. Robin's initial post said, in essence, this is out there, copying isn't always bad, and if there's a problem we'll help start you on the lengthy, expensive litigation process. People responded poorly (with, I think, justification) to this, especially given that permissions problems in database items a month or so ago were apparently serious enough for LL to bring the thing down and throw resources at, but this all-but-Linden-approved bot could do the same thing at will with a touch and that was OK.

And the lib folks didn't help. Granted they admitted it shouldn't have gotten out and they disavowed any non-consensual use of it, and they have been dealing with lynch mobs and cries for all-out banning, but many of the responses in the blogs were on the order of "suck it up, people can always take your stuff and you're fools to try to stop it."

Had LL announced the TOS issue along with the initial blog post, people would have been upset but not felt as betrayed. Had the lib folks issued an apology and listed steps taken to avoid such breaches in the future, that would have helped. It would help more of the people responsible for the original source code could work on a way to block it, or to ensure that at least no-sell, no-mod permissions (and creator names) are kept intact.

[High Orbit]

I agree 100% with LL long term, but I believe they are making a huge mistake short term.

People saying that this cannot be stopped are only partially correct. This is simply a packet injection attack, made trivially easy thanks to an open text protocol and a trusted client. This kind of stuff has existed since the time of the telegraph and the solution is simply to encrypt the channel and authenticate the peers. Doing so will render all the existing bots unusable and creating new ones not worth the trouble. Sure, textures will still be ripped, but only through the manual process that has always existed. They can minimize the performance impact by using a key length only strong to make it economically impractical to hack it.

In the long term, LL is completely correct on going the open source route. They know they’ll become irrelevant if they don’t. However, open source doesn’t mean unsecured or free-for-all and it is imperative that they maintain the incentives for content creating. If LL could solve this problem in a generic way, they would be worth orders of magnitude more as a DRM company than a virtual world. But they don’t need to, they control where the content it’s used.

What they need to do is to publish an open source API and to establish a certification process so that only certified applications are allowed to connect to the grid. And I believe this is exactly where there are going. Their goal should be to become the certification authority and central bank, leaving all the development to the open source community.

All in all, this is just a necessary step to what will become the metaverse.

DON’T PANIC

[SignpostMarv Martin]

@ Cadbridges Fairwood:

Had the lib folks issued an apology and listed steps taken to avoid such breaches in the future, that would have helped.

Why should they ? Do you see gun manufacturers apologising every time someone is killed because of gun related crime ? Do you see the tobacco industry apologising every time someone dies of smoking related illnesses ? Do you see Linus Torvalds apologising every time a hacker uses linux to DDOS a website ?

Yes they produced this source code, but they did not use it to commit any crimes.

Do not blame the tool, blame the user.

@ High Orbit: I shall quote myself:

High Orbit

This is simply a packet injection attack

SignpostMarv Martin

The analogue hole concept is not an exploit, it is an inherent part of the way the system works.

and....

Do you blame car manufacturers for each person killed or injured in a car accident ?

Do you blame weapons manufacturers for each person killed or injured in a gun fight ?

Do you blame the hemp industry for each person that gets stoned ?

Do you blame Sir Tim Berners-Lee, and thus, the internet for porn ?

Do you, like Chairman and CEO of Universal Media Group, Doug Morris blame iPod users for music piracy?

Do not blame the tool, blame the user.

The act of using CopyBot is no more an attack than driving a car is doing a hit and run every time you run into some molecules. It is how you use CopyBot, and whether or not you're hitting air, rain, or a living thing that defines it as an attack or criminal act.

High Orbit

the solution is simply to encrypt the channel and authenticate the peers. Doing so will render all the existing bots unusable and creating new ones not worth the trouble./blockquote>

They can minimize the performance impact by using a key length only strong to make it economically impractical to hack it.

SignpostMarv Martin

The higher the level of encryption you add to content the more CPU cycles are required to decrypt it, raising the minimum system requirements to a level that may end up excluding a large amount of people, either through explicit requirements, or that the lower end computer systems within this bracket have their performance degraded to unsavoury levels.

DRM does not work. If your content is worth stealing, people will find a way to steal it, and if your content is not worth stealing, then there’s no point in encrypting it further. This does not mean that I think we should be given the ability to selectively encrypt our content.

If you limit the encryption key length, then you make it easier to decrypt.

[Jr Breed]

Makes me sick to see ppl use a sorry ass example like "copying MP3s". Get a clue please. Yes, You can copy a MP3, but if you resell it claming your the artist on it your ass is sued! Now please go slap yourself.

Anyone using copybot is in my opinion out to steal and thats it. CopyBot can steal and change the "Creators" name to theirs with full permissions.

CopyBot is not used to make copys for back ups, its used to steal ppls crap. There is already a permission called "COPY" you can tick if the creator wants or not. You the customers agrees to that term when you buy it.

Im really not impressed at all by these lame examples.

CopyBot is for no talent having people who wish they could build and texture.

My 2 cents.

[Moopf Murray]

Well to follow up on yesterday, you're not going to believe this, but I've just recieved a warning from LL in my email citing that I'm copying other people's content, the specific is 'Permissions Abuse'.

I just cannot believe this. I'm the creator of a vending machine that I have no control over how it's used and I get a warning?

I guess Linden Lab don't understand the difference between OWNER and CREATOR.

[Gwyneth Llewelyn]

Uh-oh, Moopf. That was nasty. Get in touch with Cory or Robin, quickly.

The worst thing that

Jr Breed, 2 cents on your 2 cents:

A technology exists that allows you to rip MP3 easily from copyrighted work. It's called Windows Media Player for Windows, or iTunes for Mac OS X, or [insert your favourite Linux MP3 ripper here].

So should we complain to Microsoft, Apple, or major Linux distros because they're including with their commercial software an easy-to-use tool allowing people to exploit commercial work from others?

Well. We should. But we don't. I don't know why.

Microsoft and Apple and Novell/RedHat/whatever are certainly honest companies. They have a good reputation. Still, they are empowering everybody to become a copyright pirate. Do they care? Not at all. Their tools are still useful for legitimate use... or so they claim... although they're used mostly and universally to rip off CDs.

I feel very sorry for you if you consider those lame examples. But any technology that empowers copyright piracy is at exactly the same moral standpoint. Videos, MP3, software, games — or prims or textures — are the same thing. Under copyright law, that is. If you're an SL content creator and not a musician, you'll naturally be more worried about CopyBot than Windows Media Player. But let me assure you that musicians don't share your view. For them, placing such an easy-to-use tool in the hands of "common people" is as immoral as CopyBot is immoral for SL users.

Oh sure. You can claim that Media Player and iTunes are only there for making "backups". Sure they are.

In any case, I naturally agree with your last comment. A creative content producer does not need to be afraid copybots — all they need is their heads. And that's why musicians, authors, movie directors and software developers still do their work iRL, in spite of knowing that they'll be ripped off as soon as they commit their work to digital media — which is bound to happen anyway. But they still keep on creating!

[Moriash Moreau]

Oh holy crap. That's... That's not good. I'd hope that the folks issuing warnings (and suspensions, and bans) would pay a little more attention to current events happening right on their doorstep.

"Hello, right hand, I'd like to introduce you to left hand. Lefty? This is Righty. Why don't you two get acquanted."

I hate having false/erroneous ARs filed against me. (I think there's been two or three in my 22 month tenure here.) Come to think of it, the last one was due to someone being too incompetent to sort out ownership data, too. I always feel like there's a black mark on my permanent record or something. Oh no, now I'll never get into college! I had a detention in third grade! No, wait. I graduated 10 years ago. Gotta love those old neuroses.

[Persig Phaeton]

To Jr Breed and all the business owners who are ready to cut and run because the sky is clearly falling: good riddance.
Seriously, shut down your copying machine...uh...I mean "computer" and go back to the analog world. You are not ready to accept the realities of a digital universe and you're only due for more disappointment in the years to come. MP3's are a bad example are they? Well how about any piece of intellectual property that can possibly exist in digital form? You see, CopyBot is only a tool- a very specific tool confined to a very specific platform, able to perform one specific (and rather limited) copy function. And, believe it or not, it has just as many legitimate uses as it does illegal ones. Similarly, the computer you're sitting at right now is a much more powerful IP violation tool than CopyBot could ever hope to be. If you truly believe that tools capeable of stealing intellectual property should be outlawed, then you really need to throw your computer in the trash and go live a simple life in the woods. So, do you truly wish for copying tools to be banned or only the ones that happen to affect your pocketbook, specifically?
Also, it's worth reiterating a point that some have already made. If the information is able to reach your screen, it is able to be intercepted and copied. Period. End of story. Even IF Linden Lab had some magical way to filter out every possible copying mechanism in SL (which they don't) a would-be pirate could still use OGLE to intercept all the textures and prims for recreation. Sure, it's slightly more work but still not impossible.
To sum up, those who have immediately closed shop and left need to get over themselves and realize that the metaverse does not, in fact, revolve around them. LL will actually do just fine without them; better, perhaps, because the only people who will remain will be the innovators- people who can still create unique experiences and things of value which CAN'T be devalued by a simple copying machine. You still can't copy scripts or experiences with a CopyBot, you know.

Persig

[Gwyneth Llewelyn]

Whoops. Posted without previewing. Moopf, what probably happened at LL was that they put all Liaisons tagging and identifying things, and we all know that technical know-how varies a lot between different people at LL. You should make sure to get in touch with either Cory and Robin to explain to them what happened, because this certainly is witch-hunting to its worst degree, and have them revert that decision quickly, since is utterly nonsensical in nature.

[Gwyneth Llewelyn]

To reinforce Persig's statement... the power of copying textures and prim data was *always* in people's hands. Always. Since the release of the closed beta :)

The difference is that it takes a rather knowledgeable programmer to write something from scratch to intercept those textures (well, even if you don't want to use OGLE or GLinterceptor, these textures are saved to your disk's cache anyway, and it takes just a few minutes to decode them...), whereas Copybot was, for a while, freely available and easy enough to operate for a technically un-savvy user.

It was the same thing with first-generation MP3-rippers, which had to be coded manually. Now we have Media Player and iTunes, and piracy is one click away.

Oh wait... wget -r http://nwn.blogs.com ... hurrah, I've just copied Hammie's *entire* blog to my harddisk! Woot, I'm such a genius.

I think everybody that forgot to hit the DON'T PANIC button have suddenly forgotten what kind of tool their computer is. All data that is transferred there is copyable — as soon as it enters your computer's memory. Even highly encrypted data will, at some point, be decrypted on your computer's memory, so encryption won't work for securing the transmission of texture data to your computer. Once it hits your video card for rendering, it has to be decrypted — and thus easily intercepted.

There is *nothing* Linden Lab can do to prevent that, like there is *nothing* the entertainment industry can do to prevent people from snatching audio or video files, or games, and save them elsewhere. The only thing that can be done is to make things harder for the casual user. Still, the harder things are to copy, the more valuable they'll be, and the more people will be working on ways to get at those valuable data.

Will now most people shut their shops down and go elsewhere on the metaverse? Hardly. All Web sites in the world — all 16 billion of them — are easily copyable, even with amateurish tools. And they did not disappear after 13 or 14 years of the World-Wide Web.

[SignpostMarv Martin]

Jr Breed

CopyBot is not used to make copys for back ups, its used to steal ppls crap. There is already a permission called "COPY" you can tick if the creator wants or not. You the customers agrees to that term when you buy it.

Umm.... a fair few donated dollars & a few hours of coding and you could probably have the libSL team code up a tool to back up your avatar, as well as your content, although with this recent bout of OMG THEY ARE TEH CRIMINALZORZ, I doubt they'd be willing to help anyone because someone would just take the source code, recompile it, and abuse it.

In the style of Goldie-Looking Chain, "libSL don't rip-off people, griefers do, saw it on a definition of common sense dude"

[SignpostMarv Martin]

Gwyneth Llewelyn

I think everybody that forgot to hit the DON'T PANIC button have suddenly forgotten what kind of tool their computer is. All data that is transferred there is copyable — as soon as it enters your computer's memory. Even highly encrypted data will, at some point, be decrypted on your computer's memory, so encryption won't work for securing the transmission of texture data to your computer. Once it hits your video card for rendering, it has to be decrypted — and thus easily intercepted.

This is precisely what I was telling everyone with the "analogue hole" concept

[SignpostMarv Martin]

BTW, regarding false positives on ARing, it's fairly easy to frame someone for creating a griefer tool by taking a full perms script, full perms prim, and modifying them.

Of course the transfer logs would show that the owner modified the content into a griefer tool, but will Linden Lab look into it in that level of detail on first look ?

[High Orbit]

@Gwyneth Llewelyn

Oh wait... wget -r http://nwn.blogs.com ... hurrah, I've just copied Hammie's *entire* blog to my harddisk! Woot, I'm such a genius.

Woot! now change the content and put it back on the server. Seriously, the problem is not the copying of the content but the injection of packets into the data stream. Stop that and you eliminated most of the problem. You’ll still be able to copy the textures, but you’ll have to manually process and upload them. For prims, you’ll have to capture the geometry with OGLE and hack the client (remember, no more proxy) to convert that to prim building commands.

Analog hole and web site mirroring analogies don’t apply as the SL content is useless if you cannot put it back in the asset server.

Now, I totally agree that this was bound to happen and that is a good thing in the long term. But firmly believe that any open-source solution must consider the security issues or the metaverse will never happen.

[Johnny]

Woot! now change the content and put it back on the server.

Copybot can't change the ownership of the original object is copying just like wget won't let you change the contents of the website you can copy.

You can however put up an altered (or not altered if you wish) copy of that website somewhere else, just like in SL with copybot you can put an altered copy (or not altered if you wish) copy of the original object somewhere else.

This has nothing to do with injecting data into the stream. Copybot is the *endpoint* for the data. Its just another client, much like the official SL client.

[SignpostMarv Martin]

@ High Orbit

Seriously, the problem is not the copying of the content but the injection of packets into the data stream.

Uhh... no.
You're confusing SL Proxy with just another client, as Johnny said. SL Proxy does reading of data and writing of data via packet injection. You know, because it's a Proxy, and not another client ? It HAS to do packet injection. From what I understand, CopyBot merely read the data required to render an avatar (which could be saved to file- offline outfit editing- w00t!), then uploaded the data in a manner identical to the way the client communicates with with the server when you're hitting the save button in the appearance edtitor.

For prims, you’ll have to capture the geometry with OGLE and hack the client (remember, no more proxy) to convert that to prim building commands.

Uh... no, you can't. SL does not do vertex modelling you know- things are made out of prims ? You cannot get a 100% accurate copy out of OGLE's output back into SL. You could, however use it to get a highly accurate model into some other 3D program. OGLE is another example of the analogue hole concept when it comes to the theft of SL content- e.g. once it hits the graphics card, you're screwed.

Analog hole and web site mirroring analogies don’t apply as the SL content is useless if you cannot put it back in the asset server.

Uhh... no, for two reasons:

1) You can put it back on the server
2) You can put it anywhere else

The whole point of the analogue hole concept is that once you get past the point of decryption, you can do whatever the hell you want with it, be that re-uploading it to SL, using it in other virtual worlds (e.g. There), using it in computer games, printing it out in binary and looking for coincidental ASCII art.....

I know this is an open forum, but could you please inform yourself as to what you are talking about before you click the post button ?

Also, you think SL content is useless once you get it out ? Did you see what once of the prime examples of OGLE was ? Welcome Area dragon in New York......

Negative: Unscrupulous machinimists could rip content using existing tools and a lot of elbow-grease tweaking, or use maliciously compiled programs to make it easier.

Positive: 3rd Party Content backup services. Don't trust LL to keep your data safe ? Store it yourself or on Amazon S3 or some such. If the sim gets rolled back, upload it again :-)

Wouldn't you prefer to rely on yourself to protect you content from sim crashes ?

But firmly believe that any open-source solution must consider the security issues or the metaverse will never happen.

Duh, but there's still the analogue hole concept problem. Oh, and by the way, the metaverse does exist, and has existed for quite some time (perhaps not in the way described in Snow Crash, but it has), and you'd know that if you opened your eyes and ears and observed what's been going on since the inception of the World Wide Web.

[Doron]

get over yourself.

mp3 or 3d models. if its digital it can be copied, as well as it should, it is the nature of the medium.

copy away, rip it off.
scarcity doesnt apply in an environment where 1:1 copies can easily be made.

Rip it all.
suckers for those who bought the bot. this also should be ripped.

[Carsten Agger]

I think what LindenLabs should do is GPL their client APIs so everybody could have a go at brewing their own clients.

Economy should then readjust to reflect the state of the art of today's technology, like the bands actually making money by promoting themselves via Creative Commons-licensed MP3 downloads.

I don't think LL would have to GPL their servers as they are strictly speaking not being published (only made available), but in the spirit of Freedom and free software they should GPL their clients.

[Persephone M.]

You hear all this bitching about Copybot. But, yet it's been proven that it does spit in relation to all the hype it generated.

Now, you really want a software pariah? I got one for you. GLIntercept. With that, you really can steal textures from SL and save them to your hard drive. And there's nothing that LL or anyone can do about it.

But, yet. Noone's bitching about it. Noone's up in arms over it. Noone's threatening to close their stores or threatening to sue the creators of the simple little program.

I wonder why?

[Vycrox]

Just wanted to say Hi. :)

I'm new to the forum and I hope that I can contribute something.

[ribkosnow]

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[thexgersrorne]

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[entitwome]

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[entitwome]

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[Abimbindike]

http://rapidshare.com/files/193825691/Partition_Magic_8_Pro_By_Jack_Docherty.rar

Partition Magic 8 PRO + SERIALS [FULL Version -
**********************************************

****************
Key Technologies
****************

* Partitions hard drive
* Create, resize, copy partitions
* Run multiple operating systems

********
Features
********

* Divides hard drive into two or more partitions
* Runs multiple operating systems on the same PC
* BootMagic? makes it easy to switch between operating systems
* Copy, move, resize, split, or merge partitions
* Guides you through the partitioning process
* Easy to find, copy and paste files in both Windows« and Linux« partitions
* Create and modify partitions up to 300GB*
* Supports USB 2.0, USB 1.1, and FireWire« external drives**
* Supports and converts partitions among FAT, FAT32, NTFS, Ext2, and Ext3 file systems
* Enlarge an NTFS partition without restarting computer
* Resizes NTFS system clusters to the most effective size

*************
INSTRUCTIONS:
*************

The serial number is in the file but here it is anyway:

PM800ENSP1-11111131

Enjoy ;)
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[3G Apple iPhone]

3G Apple iPhone - 2 release date looks like it may be in June or early July

[vicash53]

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[musicxroom]

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