TOmmy Fairplay at DragonFly entrance
Last week it seemed as if it might savage the world, but less than seven days later, it's truly difficult to even find the damage, let alone assess it. As I write this sentence, at about 4:30pm SLT, nearly 15,000 Residents are currently in-world, while over the last 24 hours, the L$ equivalent of over $600,000 has traded hands. All signs of a thriving economy and a bustling society, not one teetering on the brink of disaster.
After running "Copying a Controversy" on November 17, I went in search of Residents who were directly damaged by the emergence of CopyBot, the third-party hack that enables some replication of some SL content, especially clothing and other avatar accessories that comprise the heart of the world's economy. But no one replied to my interview request. And though my reader poll overwhelmingly criticizes Linden Lab's handling of the CopyBot crisis (nearly 50% call it "Poor", while just under 13% describe it as "Good") it seems the company's ultimate response-- explicitly making misuse of CopyBot a violation of Second Life's Terms of Service-- has mitigated most of the outrage. (Indeed, Linden Lab reports that less than 100 complaints have been filed, a miniscule number in relation to the 200,000-plus who have been in-world during CopyBot's putative reign of terror.)
In retrospect, it seems that the Second Life community experienced an information cascade, a collapsing domino reaction based on incomplete knowledge and the behavior of influential individuals, leading to a rush of boycotts, protests, and giant boulders.
Among those influencers was TOmmy Fairplay, owner of the DragonFly club and shopping emporium, the most popular location to join the boycott.
"One by one the creators were closing shops," he recalls now. "I was one of the first to close both of my sims down... I think it wasn't one person but a big group of creators that did. It wasn't spoken, 'Hey, let's all close it.' Was like, for example, I stood up and said, 'I'm closing.' Then the next person did the same, and so on and so on. Everyone was in a panic and Linden Lab was doing nothing, so we took the control into our own hands by closing down our sims, lands, etc."
While he still stands by the boycott, he goes on, "I think a lot way overreacted... people on the Forums, people in the groups, were just going off on things when they had no idea really what the program could or could not do. They-- and I'm not speaking for all, but some-- didn't take the time to do the research before just saying, 'Ohh no, Black Friday.'"
Now that he knows more about the hack's limitations*, he's less worried. In a supreme irony, someone associated with content vendors like him installed and ran CopyBot, to figure out how to reverse engineer protections against it. "I simply do the basics," he says. "The CopyBot from what I've
gathered from people who have tested it can NOT read foreign letters,
so I put these letters in my group titles." Fairplay cites some other protections, which you are also likely to see (along with large anti-CopyBot warning signs) at many popular locales.
The only obvious evidence of CopyBot's harm, in other words, are the defenses created against it.
"All this," I muse, "to prevent a program that far as I can tell, has never actually stolen content from anyone."
"[K]nowing what I know now, compared to last week in those first hours, I'm not worried about the CopyBot harming my content or business in any way," TOmmy Fairplay acknowledges. "But I'm not sayin' it shouldn't be banned, because I do. It has caused much havoc in SL, and needs to be gone for peace of mind."
And while many other content creators and vendors are concerned, most of those I spoke with in recent days offered a reaction that was measured, and decidedly wait-and-see. Some of their thoughts after the break.
