Melancholy
March 4, 2008
I spent most of last night feeling entirely melancholy about Second Life. After all of this copybot crap coming back up, between viperous fashionistas and even worse – Linden Lab – I’m just irritated, I don’t see much point in creating new content just yet, I don’t want to log in… but I can’t not log in, if I want any sort of a fun conversation, logging into Second Life is the solution. Many of my friends are there.
Copybot is nothing new, these intercepts and ways to worm into SL are nothing new; the problem comes in under the fact that Linden Lab has known about these “Hacks”, if you will, for a good long time and they’ve had time to develop viewer updates and put a bit of a slapdown on it. Have they? No.
When I emailed Robin Linden last week bringing her up to speed on all the new rash of content thefts, I wasn’t even granted a reply email. She commented at the Herald piece I wrote, and that was it. I will assume at this point that Linden Lab has no plan of attack or solution in place and are just going to let things ride out.
There is a way around this, and that is as stated previously: the owners of the world, the blessed Laboratory, must enforce rules far more strictly. It is not a perfect solution, as clearly there are far more places than can be checked, but without it nothing will happen. Not just “DMCA” nonsense, which is just a mechanism for covering one’s bottom in the face of future legal action, but actively removing duplicated content.
There are all sorts of ways that this can be made easier – registers of content being uploaded, watermarks and so on – but in the end it is the will that is important, and that means governance, active enforcement of rules. Attack content-thieving accounts; delete them and their alts. Enforce DMCA takedowns properly, as rubbish as they might be.
Without that? Oh well, nothing terribly serious. Content creators will be discouraged from ever entering SL. Nobody will bother to learn the obscure, undocumented, ever-changing details of how the tools work – unless they already have a out-world patron, in which case they will rarely be putting anything on the open grid. Second Life will become less and less interesting. And the “Second Life Protocol” will become less and less relevant, and less and less likely to become the dominant virtual world protocol, and then it will be 2009 and we will all be speaking about SL as certain old-timers do about ActiveWorlds.
You know, nothing that anybody might care about.
8. User-Generated Content. This is portable if it was always in Photoshop all along. But what if there isn’t a set of permissions to protect it? Fallingwater Cellardoor might not wish to move to OpenSim if nobody is going to bother to prevent the copying of her exquisite flowers. Will I want to live in a world that doesn’t have Fallingwater and only has cheap knock-offs? No. That’s why the most urgent, the most paramount thing the Lindens have to do, more important than ANYTHING else they are doing because events are unfolding so rapidly, is to concentrate on securing their top content creators’ loyalty to their platform. Let me say this about it: I’m going to look the other way and not watch how they do this, because it won’t be pretty, and I won’t like it. But do it, they must.
I mean, jesus christ… content is ART. Art theft is not awesome, not funny, and grabbing it and reselling it for profit isn’t cool. (To those of you who absolutely photosource but cry about content theft: STFU. The hand-drawn creations are the ones who have a right to be concerned here.)
You can’t watermark textures very well – usually, watermarking detracts from the piece.
When the game developers leave us without anything to defend ourselves… what are we to do? This is a text based world, a binary world. We can’t grab the thieves and tie them up. Well, we could, but Abuse Reports are so fucking useless. Hell, even DCMA’s are useless because Linden Lab refuses to hold up their end of the bargain.
/me kicks a cupcake.
Linden Lab fucking owes us. They wanted us to create our world, which turned into THEIR world, which made Philip fucking Rosedale god knows how much money. They fucking owe us something to work with, and they’re not coming forward with it.
More evidence of Linden Lab screwing people – and their creations – over:
From Cristiano Midnight:
Quote:
Yes, once I demonstrated it to Philip and Reuben, the next thing I knew I was getting the hard press from LL to have it ready so they could announce it on a certain date in a really short time frame (ie like three days). I did get it finished, and Snapzilla did have the rare distinction of being on the SL home page, sign in message, inworld announcement and community site all at the same time.
Initially, LL was very supportive of it. Things soured between us when they started intercepting images being sent to my site and funneling them through the home page of Secondlife.com, with no credit to my site, totally unannounced to me.
I got all kinds of flack for it (…) and I didn’t even have any control over it. After going ballistic, they did put “Powered by Snapzilla” briefly, but then it disappeared. Ultimately, the feature disappeared altogether on their home page, and now they promote Flickr.
So… Linden Lab screws over Cristiano, Cristiano gets the blame (???) and Linden Lab does their preferred “bandaid” on the issue by briefly linking to Cris’ site and then, once again, takes all the credit.
What the fuck, folks?
From the Second Life Herald:
If you want to understand the Linden position on bots and hackers you need to read Snow Crash. It’s a pretty crappy piece of fiction, but it seems to be the Linden corporate bible. Code is cool. People are only relevant according to the code they can create. Destructive code is better than no code. Your information wants to be my free information.
Your information WANTS to be my free information. Destructive code is better than no code.
Clear cache and relog.
March 4, 2008 at 5:00 pm
Well put Tenshi! I especially like your last point where you say “they wanted us to create our world, which turned into THEIR world”. I hadn’t thought of it like that before! Excellent point. I suppose in the end, the only thing that would make LL wake up is a significant loss in revenue. Hmm..*scratches head*. Guess we could go on strike!
March 4, 2008 at 10:19 pm
[...] March 4, 2008 in Boredom / No Category Whatsoever by Tenshi Vielle I just wanted to link all of you over to my thoughts on content creation and Linden Lab. I’ll post a small excerpt here, click the link below if you want to read the rest. Basically, it’s a lot of me whining and bitching because there isn’t much I can do to fix anything for you guys besides kick and scream. Melancholy [...]
March 4, 2008 at 10:32 pm
[...] briefly linking to Cris’ site and then, once again, takes all the credit. What the fuck, folks? Crap Fashion Rant Blog __________________ Shopping Cart Disco http://www.shoppingcartdisco.com Happier than a tornado [...]
March 4, 2008 at 11:11 pm
It seems like LL’s grand strategy is to ignore the issue entirely until it goes away.
March 5, 2008 at 6:27 am
Good article, Tenshi. I see the pendulum of focus at LL swinging from “people can make REAL money here” to “people can collaborate on real world business and (education, science, etc.) here.”
Linden Lab started this stealing of content by taking down GOM, and then Snapzilla left the front page, user-created code was implemented into the client with no payment for the actual creators/coders. User created content always belongs to The Lab, it’s on their servers. They are also big fans of Creative Commons.
When Open Source comes, a specific server belongs to whomever owns it, but it will have to pass through LL’s servers (will there be customs taxes, trade agreements, etc.?), until it is like the web, in which case everything will become advertising-driven (“free” sure, but it all depends on people willing to create content and send it out there, receiving nothing but admiration and sometimes a “thanks”, unless the creators strike deals with advertisers also.) Perhaps designers should stop creating, like the writers who were striking, until they get guarantees they will be fairly compensated for their creations? (and who gets to decide on “fair compensation?” Will there be a Designer’s Union to work out the details?)
I don’t know, it could become a huge discussion series, but there will always be people who take a shortcut to a profit.
March 5, 2008 at 7:09 pm
You know, I agree with just about everything said here. Linden labs inaction, the weakness of the DMCA “solution” to the problem, all of it… But this bothers me. “To those of you who absolutely photosource but cry about content theft: STFU. The hand-drawn creations are the ones who have a right to be concerned here”. Maybe I’m reading this wrong but the implication is that only the creators of hand-drawn textures deserve protection and/or a voice in this issue. I’m sorry but no. Content theft affects ALL designers of content, Shapes, Skins, clothes, textures, prims, scripts, all of it. I understand you are frustrated and at your wits end at how this is affecting you, but we ALL need to be united in this.
I had a good friend leave SL recently over this issue. She became totally obsessed about content theft to the point that it was literally affecting her health and she had to just give up SL completely. Her prim work was simply amazing; however she was admittedly not adept at Photoshop and often relied on outside “sourced” images. Did she simply just need to STFU? No.
United we stand divided we fall on this issue people!