Copybot Shutting Down Second Life Vendors
Second Life businesses… no, wait, I should stop and let you take a moment to actually process the fact that honest-to-God vendors exist in Second Life.
No, no, let the brain-hurting pass.
There. All better? OK, good, I’ll continue. Second Life vendors are shutting down their stores because of a third-party program known as Copybot. Copybot is an open-source application created to allow a player to back up their character/inventory data. However, players are also able to clone items belonging to other people. Now, this is all well and good for players, but for the in-game businesses that actually sell custom designs and items it’s a problem. Gee, who’dve thunk that getting having one’s intellectual property ripped off would be a hot button for so many people.
According to Warren Ellis’s Blog:
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 DMCA complaint in the US.
Businesses started shutting down moments later.
Uh… yeah. I’m sure this is major news to those who actually have stakes in the Second Life economy, but it’s just something for the rest of us to stare at in a confused stupor.
In case you missed the reference, Copybot was also a villain from the Mighty Morphin’ Power Rangers
Boy of Tomorrow
Posted to Video Games on 16 November 2006
· Comments (2)
Other stuff like this: copybot, copyright infrigement, second life, second life vendors, warren ellis
I don’t do SL. I went there once for 15 minutes, realized it wasn’t my cup o’ tea, and bailed. But I have been watching it closely. I think as an experiement in virtual worlds, it is important. This is the birth of the Metaverse. Okay, maybe the pre-alpha build of the Metaverse. But, as silly as it may seem, they are breaking new ground and exploring something very new… both technically and socially.
The Copybot fiasco is interesting on many levels. The Lindens are clearly trying to be hands off as much as possible because they realize that SL is special because it IS user created… and mostly user run. I would also be VERY interested in SL folks opinions now about DRM in general. How many of them have not so kosher music on their mp3 players? How many use BitTorrent to download movies?
Freedom is great… until you see your art copied right in front of you.
You know, in the real world there’s no difference between “copying something” and “making your own”. They both take similar amounts of effort…. in fact, copying something (like a bookshelf, or a pizza, or a car) might take more time because you’re working off of an example rather than a specification. And business models take that into account.
In the digital world, copying things takes much less effort than creating them from scratch, and business models need to take that into account too rather than adding artificial restrictions just because they enable untenable business models.
If the SL market is truly being flooded by knockoffs, the so-called “content creators” need to start filing for and enforcing trademarks like Nike, Levis, etc. do in the real world, rather than trying to pretend their imaginary products are real.
Personally, the fact that people are starting to ask Linden to implement DRM in SL just makes me unwilling to bother giving it a try. If they officially announce that they intend to never add DRM, though, I’ll give it as fair a shot as I can without compromising my work, family or real-world social life.