The tools for stealing content in Second Life become more and more advance each passing day. It started with text only clients which are really not that easy to use to the current ones which are full SL viewers that makes stealing content as easy as clicking a button. Before, all you can steal are baked textures and prim objects but now almost anything can be stolen (textures, sounds, scripts and even animations).
I still remember when many forum posters in the now closed XstreetSL.com forum deny the existence of CopyBot. Going as far as attacking those who became victims of it and were starting threads about it. They kept saying that it doesn’t exist. Well, for something that doesn’t exist it sure is getting a lot of attention lately.
In recent weeks, CryoLife took the spotlight and, although, its creator seemed to have already abandoned it, copies of CryoLife are still being distributed and pass around both in-world and off-world. CryoLife, as stated by others, is already an obsolete viewer and has no other legal useful use except for stealing other people’s creations. Of course, I can’t verify this since I have never used this viewer.
Currently, the spotlight is on PN’s latest toy of mass SL destruction which they appropriately called ThugLyfe. They describe it as “the very latest in griefing and ban-evasion technology within the realm of Second Life”. Surprisingly, the features listed in their about page are those from Greenlife Emerald plus Ban-Evasion. There was no mention of any copybot related features but, I guess, one can assume that those will be in there too.
Fortunately for everyone in Second Life who cares, ThugLyfe is still not available to the public so we can worry about it later but there is already a viewer out there that claims it can backup almost everything including sounds, textures, scripts, animations and objects. Now, this viewer uses the term backup as a cover because if you are the creator then you already have a backup of any sounds, animations or textures you uploaded into Second Life in your hard drive. So, there is really no need to backup those but this viewer uses the term backup which can only mean backup of sounds, textures and animations you didn’t create. In simple terms, stealing content you didn’t make.
The creator of this viewer does encourage his users to ask the original creators for permission before stealing from them though. Ha ha ha! It’s like approaching someone from the street and asking them permission if you can steal from them. Seriously, I don’t think any creator would give anyone permission to export a copy of their creations unless, of course, they paid some serious amount of linden dollars for it.
These are just a few of these so called ripper viewers or ripper clients or copybot viewers or whatever they are called. I’m quite sure that there are more self compiled viewers out there that do all of these things logging in and out of the grid everyday. I read somewhere that, if you know how to code, you can take the Greenlife Emerald source, disable permission checking, compile it and you got yourself a copybot viewer. Of course, since I can’t code nor do I have the tools to compile, I can’t verify or confirm this theory.
With all of these things happening in the background. What can a content creator do in Second Life to protect his creations from being stolen? Nothing! There is absolutely nothing you can do to protect your creations from theft. Once you’ve been targeted, you can kiss your creations goodbye. Yes, you can file some sort of complaint and even abuse report the thief or thieves but these are actions after your creations were stolen which are kinda pointless, really. It doesn’t change the fact that they were already stolen and damage to you as a creator has already been done.
Without any form of protection, a content creator victimized by massive content theft can either take it to experience and move on or pack-up and quit Second Life for good. Of course, quitting is kinda extreme and we don’t want to see content creators quitting Second Life, do we?
Linden Labs should STEP UP to the challenge imposed by those who develop tools that make content theft accessible to everyone and should immediately find solutions that will better protect content created by their creators. As for content creators, as well as concerned residents, they can STEP UP by joining the STEP UP campaign. As I understand it, the campaign aims to spread awareness about the on-going massive content theft that is currently happening in Second Life.
As a preventive measure (not 100% guaranteed to stop content theft), content creators can use the following tools to detect, and even ban, those who use one of these content theft tool or viewer namely CryoLife.
- CryoBan Script
- OpenSource CryoLife Detection Script by LGG CRYO
- Greenlife Emerald Alternative Second Life Viewer
Here is an article dated November 15, 2006 titled “CopyBot Challenge to Linden Labs“.
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Tags: content creators, content theft, copybot, cryoban script, cryolife, greenlife emerald, linden labs, massive content theft, open source, Second Life, step up, thuglyfe, tools for stealing content, xstreetsl.com
geez…stealing content in Second Life – FACTS – Less than 10% of all content in secondlife is ORIGINAL or imagined/built/textured by a single person. ALL the rest is hijacked from movies/internet etc and imported to LL AT A PRICE – no royalties or permissions there. Then theres the price the so called creator asks – and again LL gets its cut.
Funny thing is if the original artist complains the law says the Lab is entitled to hold such data on their servers – which of course makes anti piracy laws useless. Dont believe it? try logging in and counting how many movie characters u can in 5 minutes travel.
I see! Because of the facts you mentioned it is okay for anyone to copybot in-world content. Hmmm… interesting…