>Actually, my contention is that CopyBot would exist with or without the TOS, with or without the Lindens saying or doing anything, because it’s inevitable. It’s just about impossible to prevent. You yourself cite the GLIntercept folks.

Raph, if this were WoW or something that got heisted by being hacked, you could say, this always happens. And it’s true, games often get cheat-hackers and they get ruined when the game can be cheated or gold-farmed, etc.

SL was sold and is still being sold as a place where your IP is protected. They created a walled garden and claimed it would remain walled and they would enhance this ability to keep it walled by having all these togglable permission check-offs on creations.

But as all these things like Glintercept and SLICE and CopyBot show, that’s all bogus. Knowing that, the Lindens and their pals look pretty shabby, shilling all these people to come in and create their first million sign-ups and claims of RL income from this platform, then taking such a cynical, and even belligerent attitude toward the problem.

If we were not first fed this line of thinking, and then had it repudiated, people wouldn’t be as mad.

I think the programmer Khamon Fate has summarized it very cogently in the thread that began the exposure of libsecondlife and eloquently in response to Jarod Godel’s support for CopyBot:

Jarod, the central point of everyone’s angst is the betrayal of Linden Lab in supporting a mechanism that circumvents Second Life’s permissions system. It is true that right’s are not inherently violated by the ability, or act, of copybotting. It is true that we can invoke real life enforcement of our real world rights at great cost of time and money. It is very noble of Linden Lab to host our content without claiming inherent rights to it as other perveyers of virtual environments do.

But the owners of Linden Lab have consistenly told us that their permission system is inviolate under threat of account closure. Now lab employees are involved in a project that has not only produced, but distributed, software that bypasses inworld permissions. They should’ve listened to people such as yourself years ago and developed an open client API for us to use. That would’ve provided them a buffer to allow customization while retaining the ability to block undesirable activities. It would’ve also granted them the ease of classifying any other data manipulation software illegal.

Now it’s just a free-for-all. The reaction of the people who’ve been lied to all these months is understandable and should be treated with the sympathy it deserves.

>Linden Labs’ stance may have hastened it along, is I think the real core of your point. You accuse the group of having lots of griefers, and presumably think that Linden should have been more aware of what groups they were sanctioning. I have no quarrel with that point of view (I don’t know anything about the griefer groups you mentioned, either).

Raph, all the more than 25 people who were permabanned from Second Life in October for crashing the grid, spreading grey goo, and using the various exploits generated by libsecondlife for making jumbo prims, god-mode-stalkers, etc. are the people who have long been in libsecondlife. The Lindens themselves have a half dozen of their own staff in libsecondlife. That meant they, too, were in on the chats and the scuttle — and the transcripts show this on all the third-party sites chewing this over now. Over and over again, I and others assiduously abuse-reported the v-5/w-hat people within libsecondlife and the event-griefers within secondlife even with leadership roles, for doing things like harassing others in TOS-violation actionable offenses. Among the many things v-5 did was exploit the holes in the group-tools to drop malicious scripts within group-owned prims.

The very dubious and destructive activities of all those w-hatters within libsecondlife, the callous relationship of libsecondlife to this griefing and people’s suffering, the presence of Lindens as enablers — and chat that looks like they are in on it — all of this is pretty nasty stuff that creates a social climate where people have lost faith in them.

>Remember, I agree that the CopyBot folks have gone about this in the wrong way. I don’t actually think our positions are particularly far apart. My points on things like “the more you’ll have to use real world laws” have more to do with what you do after the eggs are broken. I’m focused more on the omelet than on how it happened. I think that even if everything had happened in a completely aboveboard way with only true saints of the community involved, that everything I’ve said would still hold true.

I think the social havoc caused by massive loss of faith in the premises and laws under which the world operates is something you are underestimating. When the magnitude of it becomes more visible, I think I won’t have to keep arguing it.

If you have a group of reverse engineers who operate in good faith, who don’t have a cynical attitude toward the whole notion of emulation of real estate and commodities for sale (which these folks, including Lindens do in fact have) then you have a different climate.

Prok, I’d let this drop if I didn’t love this blog and Raph’s work.

We do indeed have a developer who is a non-code-contributing member of the open source libsecondlife project. There are a lot of good, honest developments coming from that project. Libsecondlife is not the same as copybot. Libsecondlife is an open source project that is reverse engineering Second Life’s network protocols with Linden Lab’s blessings. Copybot is a separate project that used the libsecondlife code to build something malicious. We are involved in libsecondlife (mostly as lurkers), we were not involved with the creation or distribution of copybot.

What about his alleged, reported client who inworld who commissioned the mannequin program which, while separate from CopyBot raises similar issues and is also related to libsecondlife?

I especially can’t let this accusation slide. Neither ESC, nor Christian has a client that commissioned this mannequin program. Allege all you want. You know very well someone was feeding you bogus information. This is just not true.

I dont know why your so hell bent to pin this one on ESC. We collectively, and as individuals were not involved in the creation of Copybot. Period.

No, Raph, you’re not getting it.

This is a different setting that you are characterizing it as.

The whole reason the CopyBot even exists is because the Lindens *in violation of their own TOS, overriding the TOS strictures against reverse-engineering* allowed one special, feted group of people to reverse-engineer. And no, I don’t buy that the clause in the TOS saying something like “only as stipulated by law and for the interaction of two programs” or whatever that people cite as getting libsecondlife off the hook — the Lindens themselves admit that it is a circumvention of the TOS by admitting they need to rewrite the TOS to accommodate their need for crowdsourcing the reverse engineers.

Next, these reverse engineers were reverently blessed by Cory Linden at SLCC and they were given other love pats by having Lindens in their group.

And this group, on open, attracted dozens of serious criminally-minded people who repeatedly, over the last year, have crashed the grid, deliberately and with malice. That’s the thing people keep not seeing — or don’t know about — libsecondlife. It was riddled with v-5 and w-hat, the griefing groups — and their alts. When Philip Linden announced that as many as 60 people were banned from SL for serious offenses, what he didn’t say was that nearly ever single one of the 25 people we could identify as permanently banned was a member of libsecondlife.

Worse, not only were they members, they wre actively grabbing the code off the open-source hook and using it to grief people inside SL — first grabbing god-mode and stalking and harassing people; then grabbing the capacity to create giant prims, and blocking people’s land and for-sale signs and names of their sims in a whole region. And then unleashing the copy bot maliciously.

So this isn’t just some happy hijinx from some sincere group, Raph, it’s a group with a long history of aiding and abetting griefers. There are ample transcripts from the chat in their channel now that show the malice and cynicism involved, which has rightly been condemned by the group’s serious and more responsible members.

I’d make this case best by citing the work of the people who used Glintercept to make the fabbed avatars in RL. They, too, announced laconically in August at a metaverse meet-up that basically you can just copy anything in SL — whatever capacity you build to inport basically does the same thing to export. But they didn’t rampage thruogh the world copyign people’s stuff on the spot and gleefully enjoying their misfortune or even actual damage. Bif difference.

The moral issues here — the lack of any moral compass about other people — the legal issues regarding the TOS — the social issues regarding such sudden, abrupt changes — these all matter, and the way this was handled doesn’t bode well for the moral climate in the future Metaverse.

Basically, what they are saying is, “We need to grow the platform at all costs, the ends justifies the means, get out of the way, we will get to change the laws of nature to suit us”.

People simply reject that line of thinking.

Let me remind you, Rik, that I’m not some pitchfork bearing FUDite. I don’t say “get off my lawn”. I say don’t harm my tenants by terrorizing them with the prospect of losing all their livlihoods in a day. Do the responsible thing and break this in within 30 days by not being an obsessive zealot about defending open-source, and controlling the tweaking of the client when it happens this way. Be honest and educate people (and to some extent the Lindens are doing that).

I don’t feel Raph gets to be annointed with the unction of being “the voice of reason” (the Lindens are tendentiously doing that by pasting him into the Educators list, etc.). This is a legitimate and needed controversy. The people on the non-tekkie side of it and the tekkies who are against the licentious and extremist libsecondlife position on this have as much weight and are certainly not ignoramuses.

I’m so glad Random Blankes has backed me up — and I think that’s the story — that people even sitting in jobs using the technology they were supposed to lean don’t get how to use it — it’s a reality of technical advancement that tekkies may not like to study.

Ah, it’s probably unwise to get into another debate with Prokofy, but here I go!

Seriously, man, I swear. You put up a balanced short version of the issue, and try to show how each side will never really support the position of the other team, and suddenly Prokofy booms in with “How dare you take their side? Damn Tekkie Hippie Liberal. Get off my lawn.”

In this case, Linden Labs has allways stated that the data was protected. They don’t say “Second Life: A good place for virtual prostitution and gambling.” Nope, they say “[R]esidents retain the rights to their digital creations, they can buy, sell and trade with other residents.” Linden labs needs to respond to this threat to the playstyles/business models of many players/residents swiftly, and with the feeling that if someone else comes along they will get dealt with as well. In this respect they have been a masive disapointment. The first response was “Don’t think of it as your designs being stolen, think of it as your ideas being violated.” My goodness. That wasn’t quite the expected response.

So the Lindens went further and legalized Chinese gold farming, so to speak and made the currency able to cash out.

Actually, what makes “Chinese” gold farming a real problem in MMO games is that it’s not done by the players. So the Second Life version of this would be GM moving in and creating 5 sims about car culture.

BTW, I should have said this before, Thank You Raph, for being a voice of reason in these troubled times, and providing this forum for discussion.

> It’s not the big companies that are trying to profit, it’s the little guys.

Shouldn’t you bring some fact and reference about this?

I’m not aware of any earning coming from Copybot abuse (not selling).
Has anybody a reference to similar episodes?

Thank you all.

Well said Raph. I had a really interesting talk with someone a while back about how technology is moving so fast these days that people’s ethical notions can’t keep up. It seems that is what is going on here. But it’s a good thing. IP and the ethics thereof are still something that I think a lot of the world struggles with and it’s good (if not very disruptive to those participating) to have these things come up, challenge people’s ideas, and at least get us started on the dialogues we need to have. Of course, as we see here, it can be really challenging to get past immediate emotional responses and look at the underlying problems. We see that happening all over the place with everything from cell phone usage (no one wants to be without a cell phone anymore but everyone can cite lots of istances of people being rude in how they use their cell phones) to stem cell research.

I personally think that IP isn’t going to become “free” or “cheap”. I think that people will continue to find ways to make money off of their ideas and brands. However, I think the way that happens is going to be changing a lot in the ear future.

I can verify what Prokofy said about the demographics of SL. I have a ‘bar’ in SL, and due to it being one of the very few of it’s type, I get a LOT of newbies who’s first act in SL is to do a search for this type of place.

Also, I own the land that touches the center point of the sim I’m in, Pogon. Therefore, anyone who pops in to Pogon without specifying coords ends up on my land. I get a lot of those too – they weren’t going anywhere specific, just clicking on the map and teleporting.

I spend almost all my time in game giving “newbie classes” and handing out “survival” info to these newbies, instructing them in how to wear clothes, adjust prims, etc.

You have no idea…

The level of techno-illiteracy is appalling…heartbreaking at times. I have to wonder how these people manage in real life. And yes, I’ve run into people who have never used Google (Yikes!).

Not only do I have to tell them how SL works, I’ve often had to tell them how to look things up in Google, what “open source” means, and that there even exists things like free image editors…and what an image editor does.

People ask me, “How do I make things?” and don’t even know what an image editor DOES.

I assume that the techno-savvy come to grips with SL by themselves, but even so, I have met a large number of people who had specific technical knowledge (who seemed to be the younger, 18-22 people), such as photoshop and streams, but couldn’t articulate their thoughts well, or follow the first steps in a set of instructions (right click on yourself, choose Appearance, now click on Shirt..) to their logical conclusion: click New Shirt, and start moving the sliders. I would classify them as “non-techie”, too. Let’s face it, critical thinking and logic haven’t been taught in schools in a long time.

And those aren’t the minority, they’re the majority. When I’m on my land, I can count on a newbie (usually created that day) popping in about every 15-20 minutes, and more often during the evening hours, so I meet a LOT of these people.

And like the un-educated (in this case “technical” knowledge) everywhere in everytime, they are terrified of threats that they don’t understand, like copybot. I’ve spent a good deal of time in the last two days spreading real information, refuting mis-information, and generally trying to stop hysteria an rumors. People are scared, and scared people don’t act logically. It’s all very well to tell them that “this too shall pass”, but the current situation is going to polarize people, and most of them are going to end up in the “we need more rules” camp. They see technology as magic, and don’t understand why LL can’t just wave their magic techno-wand and make this problem go away. And they want blood.

You want to talk historical imperative? Historically, what has happened to anyone/anything/any concept, when the masses howl for blood because they fear this new whatever-it-is? Sometimes decades of suppression or backsliding or whatever you want to call it.

I see the lack of hands-on crisis management by LL as being a serious blow to their desire to go open source, etc. The “common people” have been told that copybot is the result of open source programming efforts. For a long time to come, there will be a knee-jerk reaction to “open source” anything. LL could have thrown out some basic info, educated folks a bit, and this would hardly have been a blip on the radar screen. Now it’s a full-blown socialogical crises.

I don’t think it’s too much to say that the repurcussions of this event are going to be felt for a long time to come, unless some serious effort is put fort by LL to help make the average SL resident more techno-savvy. A little education could go a long way to furthering their aims of an open source SL. Right now, the masses are ignorant, and ignorance is NOT bliss; a the moment, ignorance is fear.

Any discussion of the “common weal” needs to be based on what “common” really is. And in SL, “common” is really common people, who obviously own a computer, and can a navigate the web to a degree…but may know nothing more.

“Products do not generally vault past early adopters straight to mass market.”

What makes you think this did? The so-called early adopters I know are aware of it, and completely uninterested… unless they’re interested in issues like intellectual property. They’ve passed it by for exciting gameplay and eye candy, neither of which are SL’s strong points.

Like Prok, I could tell you about the people I’ve met in SL. Most are late adopters who work non-technical jobs (e.g. construction, postal worker, grandmother, real estate agent, aso). And by far the majority of people who share their RL info with me (easy to do since my RL info is out in the open), tell me they’re much older than the stats say; usually mid-40′s to mid-50′s. They’re so out of the whole MMORPG/videogame scene that they don’t come in with preconceived notions of what is acceptable graphic quality or acceptable physics simulation. These people – believe it or not – are even using dial-up! They tolerate it. The early adopters I know just aren’t interested and don’t tolerate much.

“Someone who can “barely use Google” is going to be completely unable to navigate Second Life, IMHO.”

I’d point out that learning the UI in a non-competitive simulation like SL or There is very different than something like Counter-Strike. Mass-market noobs who aren’t teenagers aren’t interested in being insulted by children while playing on a CS team and learning the UI. In contrast, SL provides a significantly better situation for just these kinds of people: no pressure, plenty of help, and plenty of people in the same boat. Just as SL is not like MMORPG’s, neither are the people like most gamers.

Truth is, most people I’ve met inside SL are, in fact, pretty clueless about computers in general. Most have NEVER played a 3D-rendered game like Quake or Half-Life or Everquest. They’re maybe not “Google wha?” clueless, but they’re close. That’s part of what I find so amazing: these people are trying to figure it all out. And they’re discovering that they can learn about the 3D stuff they hear about (some from grandchildren) using SL. There’s something a little surreal and pretty amazing about having a sixty-year old asking how to use layers in GIMP – their first attempt at using a creativity application – so they can make a piece of virtual clothing.

I just have to point out.

The advent of the replicator in Star Trek did not really kill capitalism. It just moved it to a larger market, the galaxy. The planet became a unified capitalist company.

I’m about to gain some geek points here, but.

There are many items that CANT be replicated, and thus trade still is present between the federation and OTHER worlds and cultures. Dilithium (sp?) crystals for one (the basis of all FED tech), could not be replicated. It was only the federation, and namely earth, that did not have capitalism, but it DID still have a hierarchy of its society. Scholars, collectors of off world goods, scientists and the like were still the Top level of society, the service industry did still exist, and there were serfs. While the replicator took care of most people basic needs, it still had to be fed matter of some sort as building blocks (My theory on that was human waste and garbage, but thats a different thread) The value of original items became astronomical! And, if you read up on your lore (lol, im a nerd), Re placated items had build in flaws… This is also why you would never see someone walk up to a replicator and order a phaser, it could not be recreated, due to something about the power source.. Jordy, however, did replace items that required power sources, but he installed that separately.

This is a point i argue allot when people talk about making a ST mmo.

The free sharing of information was technically the turning point of society in ST, Not the replicator, that turning point required the unifying of the planet ageist a cause, AKA, “The others, out there”.

What this has to do with the topic at hand, i don’t know, but there is something….

Raph, while I agree on many points, I believe Prok is correct in saying that many SL residents are the exact opposite of what some believe and how you characterize them. Prok’s experience mirrors my own. I rarely meet tech-savvy people inside SL. Most are surprisingly computer-illiterate. Many seem to work in relatively low-tech occupations and have little or no experience in the Web 2.0 apps that often are associated with SL. They somehow managed to find SL, however.

I suspect that the reason for the seemingly wide gap in user types is because people who are not coders/tinkerers but otherwise tech-savvy (e.g. hardcore videogame people) consider SL too primitive. They want the latest games, not a world like SL. They get bored in SL. So you have a rather large group of pretty technical types and you have a very large group of people are very non-technical.

Again, just my experience.

There are other things you can entrust to the client.

To take two examples in Eve, it has to retrieve data for the map each tiem you open that screen. Well, all the system data and such is allready avaliable from freely downloadable files provided by the devs so secrecy isn’t an issue. Ditto on market data – it’s easy to export, but instead of being cached with it checking for updates, it gets the whole lot, every time.

Add this to the Eve server issues, and I don’t see how they can possibly justify the overhead when they provide convenient ways to get the data out ANYWAY!

I think it’s worth looking at what the infamous Baba Yamamoto says in his own group chat: http://www.sluniverse.com/forums/Topic12867-1-1.aspx

Here he admits to a deliberate and malicious use of this CopyBot.

I was right.

And for him to come on here and tell Raph he is “spot on” is absurd — and malicious.

Raph, what you say is true or accurate for what it is — a technical summary of the realities of virtuality — but it is very limited in leaving out the entire social and ethical dimensions of a shared, digital, online virtual world. And you’re missing some stages here when you think that all these people you imagined were “hoisted by their own petard” are copyleft tekkies who came into SL early and made and sold stuff, even as they downloaded Limewire tunes for free, and now are getting karma pay-back time. It’s not like that at all.

What’s actually happening is that one faction of the class of tekkie libertarians are saying “information wants to be free..therefore I’ll free YOUR information and steal it” even as other factions within that same class of technologically capable programmers and designers are saying, “You are being reckless and irresponsible unleashing copybots into the wild where they are used for stealing, griefing, and causing havoc and the spread of fear”. SLDEV, a group with some of the top developers and programmers had a vote in which the majority voted YES to the proposition as follows:

The TOS explicitly states that reverse engineering the client is not allowed. Should Linden Lab enforce this TOS rule and disable all third party clients/hacks until the they can protect our content from being copied/violated?

Then, underneath this class at the top of the pyramid of Second Life, are the next tiers of creators, some technically capable, some just stay-at-home moms or Wal-mart clerks or disabled veterans or retired postal workers who learned PSP and LSL on the fly, within SL, not even in their community college, who began making and selling stuff and having a kind of suspension of disbelief, that this was a *world* with *discrete commodities* that *traded* — no different than the suspension of disbelief that occurs in any meatworld society where people say the green papers are dollars and the green stones are emeralds.

And then, what happened with CopyBot is that there was an entire immoral dimension to it — not only was there rampant griefing and scaring and copying of people and their stuff (many people were more upset at having their avatar cloned in full from what they had felt was their special and unique avatar, than they were about losing cash from a sale of a virtual good through theft). There was gleeful, malicious, hateful victory-dancing about wrecking the world people had so carefully made and constructed out of the “your world/your imagination” motif. There was despising of people who made virtual hair or shoes and malicious deployment of the copybot on them in order to cause them harm. There was reckless capitalizing on the desire of the anonymous unverified to spread this griefing/get-rich-quick scheme around quickly.

It wasn’t just a group of indifferent and callous tekkies — we’re used to that — who said smugly, oh, whoops, that one got away — we meant it to be used just for learning how to back up builds or finding holes in the client but eek…what happened was, we put it up for open source, and then goons got it and started causing havoc. But hey, information wants to be free, so we have to take the bad with the good.

The goons of course are the http://www.somethingawful.com gang who have the factions W-hat and V-5 and their banned variants in SL — it’s merely the same lot of alts.

They are the exact same people and groups who crashed the grid and are supposedly under FBI investigation; the same bunch who keep coming back on alts; who do stuff like create scripts pouring tub-girl pictures in particles all over sims; the same people who take my RL picture and deface it inworld — and do countless other nasty things like “virtual rape” and destruction of property through breaking up prims or overloading sims to send back builds.

They deliberately took names that illustrate their affiliations and their attitudes of defiant hatred as extreme leftists — they took up the communist hammer & sickle, they deployed the bot on Nov. 7, which is the Soviet Revolution day, and they shouted all the Bolshevik slogans.

The Lindens had handily provided the name “Revolution” in the list of names that week to be used. Lindens support Libsecondlife; Cory Linden did a frankly disturbing apologia of it, without any awareness (or else lack of concern) of the griefing these people do.

When confronted about this bad faith and bad behaviour, the leaders of Libsecondlife, some of whom are V-5 and W-Hat supporters, kept hammering on all the points you make about how basically, it’s all a big stream, and anybody with a metal tin cup can dip in it and get the stuff out of it. OK, but…they don’t. They restrain themselves. They don’t harm others. They don’t strip others. It’s one thing downloading a song from an artist whom you feel already earned millions in his contracts with rich record companies (so the mentality goes); it’s another when you swipe a $3.50 US skin off somebody who spent 20 hours unpaid to make it who lives next door to you in a virtual world.

And doing that still requires some expertise to deploy the cup, if you will, and get it right. So it has to be conscious, and deliberate, and there has to be malice up front to do it.You can’t legislate morality. But you can condemn immorality and make a culture and a social contract that also serves as a break on the tendency to steal and destroy.

Some of the libbers who are long-term members of SL and are also in this group say it was wrong what was done and condemn it — and do not condemn, as the extreme libbers do, the Lindens’ response (banning some selling the copy-bot and making a statement that it would be a TOS offense to use it for “unauthorized coping” — lame, but a patch to quell public anger).

Others are continuing to sneer at concerns people have for their loss of IP and their copyright aspirations — which is all anyone can say about SL for those who didn’t use copyright processes in RL.

What they refuse to do, however, as a group, is to expel those who use the fact of the stream and the ability to scoop out of it as a griefing and terroristic tool against others. They insist that they have to keep it open source — first they lied, and said they took it off the SVN, then they said that in fact it was open source, and already copied to such an extent it was no longer stoppable.

Sure, Raph, everybody has to get the idea that the Internet can copy itself and nobody has anything except he who owns the servers and he who programs the software. Yeah, we got all that. But the vast toiling crowdsourced masses are not going to accept life in that brutal pyramidal system. What, they are supposed to come online, toil for $1.50 US an hour tops or even $1.50 US a month, creating items they sell for 17 cents, making a compelling fantasy world for corporations to come on and pwn with their mainstream media campaigns and big-ass islands? Hello?

They are supposed to just sit still, while elitist knowledge workers in consulting companies who are paid $30,000 just for one campaign for a week to put out a textured logo and a concrete stadium get to acquire PORTABLE knowledge that doestn’t depend on THESE servers?

And then hear these elitist programmers smugly inform them that their labour, their product, their society are all worthless artifacts totally pwned by software publishers?

You have to sit in the groups and hear the awful things people are saying, Raph. The tekkies are not only saying regretable and ruefully, oh, your world is copyable, get used to it. They are saying, make more stuff — stay ahead of the botters — you need to create more and make your business model be about constant new creation. Now that is fascistic and sick.

They are saying, throw away your model of commodities, and just create “experiences’ on big sims run by corporations making synthetic fun and “interacting with the brand” in a staged, stilted atmosphere.

They are saying destroy your village in order to save our platform.

So what, given that attitude, people are supposed to go on being indentured to the Lindens’ servers, like Governor Lindens’ quit-renters, making clubs or rentals or hair or shoes that callous tekkies can merely rip off and copy and then sell their programming knowledge to the next customer who comes along?

No.

People will not sign up to live in such a harsh, brutal, Darwinistic, Bolshevik world. It’s an evil world, and a world where the tekkies can trade among themselves, thank you very much, and keep it as a walled country club. The millions will not come in for this, no.

What was encouraging about SL was that a middle class was being formed that somehow smoothed out some of the harsh, radical edges of both the Lindens’ copyleft ethos and elitist approach (letting their friends have the heads-up, the perks, the early copies of the client API stuff, etc.) and the oligarchic approach of giant content-creators and landlords who have virtual monopolies — and now the uber-oligarchs of RL companies who have even bigger footprints in the village of the virtual world.

A whole layer of smaller and medium-sized business and communities was beginning to be built that represented something more stable than the endless sandboxing of the Lindens merely to build their platform for huge corporations to use for business applications.

But, like all fragile things that balance the extremes of the real world, this phenomenon was short-lived.

I could write about this much more and I will on my own blog, but try to understand the ethos of these new-wave scientists who endlessly tinker, reverse engineer, cause havoc, with utter disregard for other human beings, all in the name of Bolshevik abstractions like “information wants to be free” or “knowledge is power”.

Imagine if Sakharov or Oppenheimer had no remorse about giving their countries’ leaders the hydrogen and atom bombs. Imagine if they gleefully, maliciously, went around the world intimidating little countries around them — not their leaders doing that with their invention, to their horror, but THEM doing it as scientists. Imagine if they copied, sold, distributed their knowledge of the atom all over the world, causing havoc, in the name of some peoples’ liberation front type of radical ideology.

That’s the mentality we’re dealing with. Absolute reckless hatred of stability and communities in the name of maximalizing “disruptive” technology’s capacity TODAY and RIGHT NOW, to make people feel uncomfortable or even miserable, merely to have power over them.

Not over time, with adaptation, or even compensation. But wrecking everything NOW and harming real-live people.

You rightly mention fabject and the people who used Glintercept or whatever to export stuff out of SL — it’s every developers’ dreams. Those people didn’t spread their concepts and capacities all over the grid in malicious glee. They did their experimentation, wrote their blogs or websites, tipped people off to the reality of the giant Xerox machine we are living in 24/7. They didn’t deliberately try to cause social havoc with it.

To be sure, for many it’s only a game, and only a million sign-ups, and only a tidal wave of media hype that may blow over next week.

But in fact, I think you know it’s a distinctly dark side of the future, and one I’m not entirely sure you are working to prevent, instead of actively cheering on.

Good job, Raph; very thought-provoking and it lays out the issue very well.

And yes, it was Kelton who first articulated the “client/enemy” statement, from his experiences with the client for Kesmai’s Air Warrior on GEnie. The first time I heard him say this was 1989, I believe. Ask him some time about one of his responses to this, the day Superman fought against hacked WWII aircraft, .

-Jess

You put it better than I ever could Ralph.. Everything spot on.

As a long time user of SL (3 years in March) I have been around for many a fiasco. This one is no different then any of the others, people have been caught up in it and don’t fully understand it. You have written a brilliant article that accurately portrays both sides. Almost two years ago I went digging through the SL client, and at the time it was my conclusion that nothing was safe. There was no magic to it. I struck up a dialog with LL and it turned out they knew; they weren’t planning on doing anything. What could they do really? “The analog hole” is huge (but when Trusted Computing comes along, it will shrink). CopyBot got dumped on. There are smart ways and there are dumb ways of doing things, and CopyBot was the smart way (hacking OpenGL is the dumb way; which people have done; but thats another fiasco).

This wasn’t the first cloning fiasco. Back in 2005 Jeffrey Gomez released a Prim Mirror, it was a script that when used would create a mirror copy of the prim (you had to own the prim). He got jumped on because a few people purportedly were using it for object cloning. Has the scripting language changed since then? Not really. Is SL safer from script cloning? No.

Will things change because of the present circumstances? Maybe. Will things actually change? No. Can anything in SL be cloned without the use of sophisticatedly software? Yes, your eyes are the analog hole; your ears are the analog hole.

People want property rights and people want copyrights; and they are in contention. This fiasco will not solve this core issue and there will be many other fiasco’s after it.

The emotion is real, and every solution is wrong in someone’s eyes.

I’ll reread this again, but it sounds like you’re saying Linden Labs has no responsibility here? How hard would it have been to have a better, encrypted protocol in DTLS? I agree with what you’re suggesting overall about content, but I think this was avoidable.

That is an essential difference between ideas and objects. Ownership of an object can be exclusive after it is shared, but an idea cannot be shared without granting permenant possession of it, to be used, moulded, and exchanged by anyone who is exposed to it. The difference is not in the sharing, but in the thing being shared.

“I present an idea, I instantly share ownership of it…”

If we’re going to use the word “share” to mean replicate and distribute, then we need a new word for what I do with tangible things I “share”.

Let me start by saying this has been one of the more fascinating things I have read as of late. Now, my question:

It seems that we are coming from a world in which both goods and services have had value; but due to CopyBot (in SL) and other forms of Content Copying (in the RW) we are seeing more value placed on the service side. How do you envision this occuring in Second Life–what services will be provided now, rather than goods? And if these services are automated through SL code–couldn’t that simply be replicated too?

Intellectual property is inherantly unprotectable; once I present an idea, I instantly share ownership of it with anyone who understands it, yet, ultimately, ideas are really all we have to offer beyond our physical labor and emotional support. Ideas aren’t just cheap, they are free.

So it is that you meet few wealthy poets. And so it will be.