Second Life Businesses Close Due To Cloning 409
Warren Ellis is reporting that many Second Life vendors are closing up shop due to the recent explosion of a program called "Copybot," designed to clone other people's possessions. From the article: "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 DCMA complaint in the US. Businesses started shutting down moments later." Update 20:43 GMT by SM Several users have mentioned that the Second Life blog has a few thoughts on this issue and quite a few comments from users already.
value (Score:5, Insightful)
Re:value (Score:4, Insightful)
Re:value (Score:5, Funny)
Re:value (Score:5, Insightful)
The tulip bulb crash of 1636-37 reads a lot like the dot-bomb of our day and to the folly of investing in overvalued, non-critical items.
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Re:value (Score:5, Insightful)
UHH... YES... in the financial world, US government bonds are used as a riskless metric because if the US government ever defaults we all will have bigger things to worry about than our investments.
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Backed by the U.S. government only goes so far as the U.S. government can exert its influence. Sure, that's just about anywhere it damn well pleases at the moment (militarily, economically, politically, whatever), but maybe that's the point to make with SL. Items in SL are backed just as far as the game/construct/whatever can exert influence. The problem is that a lot of people are placin
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Which is exactly why all my investments are in ammo, gasoline and canned beans.
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During the oil refinery blockades back in the UK in 2000, a taxi driver stored 230 litres of petrol in beer barrels and a wheelie bin. The petrol had started to leak from the wheelie bin due to the plastic becoming brittle from a chemical reaction with the fuel.
Emergency services evacuated up to 20 homes in Derby after almost 230 litres of petrol, stockpiled because of the fuel crisis, began to leak.
Firefighters went to the home of a city taxi driver after a strong smell of pet
Re:value (Score:4, Funny)
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You can, in fact, still buy gold with US currency, and do so at the US Mint.
Re:US mint verses online games (Score:4, Informative)
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Silver_standard [wikipedia.org]
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Gold_standard [wikipedia.org]
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As long as *anything* is scarce, your society will never exist.
So...
Will beachfront property ever plentiful?
Will property in california ever plentiful?
Will the penthouse ever be plentiful?
Will the chance to screw the hottest model on the planet ever be plentiful?
Will the chance to attend the hottest parties ever be plentiful?
Will the funniest or smartest or best looking people ever be plentiful?
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There are no "such goods" in second life; there is only light coming off of your monitor, and that light was put there by a computer processor following directions on your hard disk. Computer directions (instructions) are not goods--they are information.
Information can be duplicated practically for free, so there's no such thing as "scarcity." Honest, real goods on the
reason for copyrights (Score:3, Interesting)
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The one on the books is:
Copyrights benefit the game if the public domain (or an in-game version thereof) is enhanced at a reasonable point in time in the future. Otherwise, copyrights are a bad bargain.
SL can surely construct a licensing scheme whereby you are permitted to use their service
Duping bugs happen in every game. (Score:2)
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The problem is that people want to keep their designs secret, even while using them in the game. Obviously, this is impossible because in order to render the object, each SL client has to download the object's wireframe, textures, etc.
Most duping bugs are solved by securing data or fixing a bu
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Re:Duping bugs happen in every game. (Score:4, Insightful)
It would require something much more process intensive, such as similarity matching. That would be a PITA as well, since it would be much less process intensive to modify the object, but make it look the same, and if the comparison points are too broad, it could block anything that's even remotely similar -- all spheres, as a simple example.
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Every time you create a prim it gets a hidden field, that's a signature with LL's private key of something unique to the prim (like a GUID) and your UID (or GID if it's group-owned). When you give it away (directly or recursively, as part of a larger object), LL will give the object a new signature. If you make the object freely copiable, the signature will
Value is in the ability to create. (Score:3, Interesting)
If the Linden Labs people would give me a free account and land I'd be glad to let people copy my stuff for free.
Value is in the service. (Score:5, Insightful)
The businesses that are closing were all operating on the wrong business model. Rather than try to make money selling the same object over and over, as if each copy had some value, they should have been figuring out ways to make money selling unique, individually created, bespoke objects. Selling the same stream of bits over and over is stupid. But if you could create something new for each person, then you'd not be selling bits, but your creative labor and skills -- it's not "bits" that you're selling anymore, but "service." That's a sustainable, proven business model.
I hope that Linden keeps the copying devices around, and lets people have free reign with them, because I think in time, you'll see the SL economy recover, and it would be a good demonstration of an 'information economy' that's not based on artificial scarcity or restrictions on information, but rather on mutually beneficial services.
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Was not referring to physical goods. (Score:5, Insightful)
McDonalds and Mercedes sell identical items over and over, because if I have a Mercedes, I can't just copy it and give you a Mercedes, too -- the real world doesn't work that way, because of pesky things like conservation of mass and energy. However, in the realm of information, if I have an "item" (and I would say that the term 'knowing' it is preferable and more appropriate to 'owning' it), I can give ('tell') it to you, without affecting the original. In this realm, the copies have virtually no value; in time, their cost will drop down to the marginal production cost (which is very low). So it's silly to try to have a business model that revolves around amortizing the cost of production out over not-yet-sold copies.
Anyway, I hope that clears it up. I was not implying that manufacturing identical goods and selling them was an unfeasible business model in the real world; it's not and won't be. However, selling the same piece of information over and over, is not, in my estimation, sustainable without a lot of heavy-handed controls on the market.
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Let me guess. You also believe it's stupid for software makers to sell their software. Every video game you find in the store should be free (or maybe cost about 2 bucks to cover for the plastic)? After all, software and game companies are just selling the same object over
This isn't business software, this is Second Life. (Score:3, Insightful)
It is foolish for a vendor to enter this market and expect to somehow impose scarcity onto entites that which the game engine does not pretend to enforce any resource
Re:Value is in the service. (Score:5, Insightful)
Would the rich society that supports artists buy art if all their fellow societians would have the same thing as soon as they showed it off?
(*Look at my new mink! Yes its now my new mink, and my new mink *)
This "Killed" uniqueness as it is now impossible to be "unique".
Those that WERE willing to pay prices for unique wares are no longer as copybot kills the ability to be unique and show off.
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Assuming it was a perfect copy (on the molecular level), how would you even know the difference between original and copy?
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A copy of a Picaso doesn't lower the value of the original--but if it was the ability to make an EXACT copy, of course it would. If you couldn't tell the difference between the original and the copies, then the original is only worth what the copies are worth.
That's exactly how digital copies of digital entities work.
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The interesting stuff is the original.
The concept of "original" only exists when there is imperfect copying.
Sure someone can buy a copy of a Picaso painting but that doesn't decrease the value of the original or the creator of the original.
What if you could copy a Picaso painting down to the quantum level, such that it was completely indistiguishable from the "original" (by any current or future technologies). If you can't tell the "original" from a "copy", the two concepts break down. Are you trying to t
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I once briefly looked to play SL, but it wouldn't work over dailup so I dismissed it. I've kept eye on them because it sounds interesting. I've read copies of books and pla
Re:tee hee (Score:5, Insightful)
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http://www.wired.com/wired/archive/11.09/diamond.
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Unless the item is of limited quantity or is protected by some means of duplication (like US currency), then the object is nearly worthless.
Objects are worthless, time is not. (Score:5, Interesting)
Let's assume we live in an all-digital, completely non-conservative world, where any object or piece of information can be duplicated instantly, at zero cost or energy expenditure.
You might think that this makes a lot of professions impossible. How could you be a photographer? Quite easily. Rather than trying to sell content that has already been created, you sell your ability to create new content. E.g., I would still pay you to take a portrait of me, because no pictures of me exist already (or none that I want / don't have already). After you take the picture, and I pay you for your time, I can then go and make a billion copies of it -- but you were already paid for your time. Rather than trying to be shady about it, and amortize the value of your time over 100 copies that you might sell me in the future, you demand the payment up front, you get it, and I take my new picture and you take your money. The transaction is complete.
In short, if you can copy goods already extant at zero cost, the demand that remains is for customized goods, or goods which don't already exist. Rather than looking at an artistic occupation as essentially a production/manufacturing job, turning out identical intellectual-property widgets, you have to view it as a service job, selling your time and skills in order to produce something which meets a customer's specifications.
Re:Objects are worthless, time is not. (Score:4, Insightful)
And yes, the photographer should price their time irregardless of the number of photos the customer will print later. How many they'll make is not relevant to the sales transaction, once you rule out the possibility of pay-per-copy (as in the case of a nonconservative informational realm without DRM). You can't view it as a 'loss' when it's not possible to make money that way in the first place.
I suspect that although there would be initial resistance to the business model, you would find that many photographers would be willing to turn over reproduction rights for slightly less than a hundred dollars an hour, depending on their reputation and skills. (Actually I used to know a good local wedding photographer who worked this way, although he catered mostly to other photographers.)
So anyway, I guess I'll agree with you: the photographer would price their time with the assumption built-in that you would make a lot of copies (or at least, that you wouldn't provide any further income to them by buying more copies). So their rate would be basically the rate they charge now, plus an amount equal to the income they obtain from further print sales, divided out per hour of labor. E.g., if right now they charge a base rate of $50/hr take the photos, an average shoot lasts 5 hours, and then charge $10 per print, and on average sell 10 prints per shoot, then they'd probably want to charge about $70/hr if they were going to turn over all the negatives to you afterwards instead of holding onto them. There's nothing unfair about that, and it's not even clear that the customer is getting a bad deal: if the customer makes more prints than average, then they actually save money.
My point is that this pricing is basically inevitable: without onerous DRM, you can't give someone a photo in a digital format without also allowing them to copy it. So if you want to stay in business, you're going to want to charge the "prints included" rate, rather than the lower one. If I was going to open up shop as a wedding photographer (shudder) tomorrow, given that people are going to want their photos in some sort of digital format -- to send to relatives, make into DVDs/books/whatever -- I would certainly not try to keep myself afloat by artificially lowering my rate, hoping that I'd make it up later on "in volume." Trying to sell the same string of numbers more than once (particularly to the same person!) is a mistake.
information wants to be free! (Score:2, Troll)
Nimrod Yaffle, ex-con (Score:4, Informative)
Is he going back to the cornfield or is perma-banned?
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In fact, Yaffle was exiled to the cornfield for three days for reverse engineering a bit of computer code to steal virtual items from a vendor in Second Life. "The cornfield is not used often, and it is only for white-collar crimes," explains Catherine Smith of Linden Lab, the San Francisco-based company that created and maintains the Second Life site. "It is supposed to be funny more than anything. [discover.com]
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It's a good Second Life.
Damn you! How dare you steal from 2nd Lifers! (Score:5, Informative)
Property Rights (Score:5, Insightful)
Of course, the more the community respects intellectual property in SL, the greater the benefits of using CopyBot. It's the Prisoners Dilemma [wikipedia.org] all over again.
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If your business' products are entirely reproducible and then sold for cheap, you cannot sustain a living in such a place.
Is SL intended to sustain businesses? AFAIK you can't make a living in IRC or most computer games either, but I don't consider that to be a problem.
There is no gift culture like in OSS
Why? If the OSS world can sustain a working gift culture and SL can't, maybe we can learn from the differences and improve SL.
This is kinda what is happening in China right now (Score:5, Interesting)
They have all this manufacturing power, but because of weak enforcement of IP laws, as soon as some product starts to stand out, 50 other factories will start making the exact same thing, even using the same packaging and logos (clones, just like in SL), making them undiscernible from the real thing in the eyes of the consumer. Instant dilution of brand power.
It makes sense if you think about it and compare to some other Asian countries - Japan has a ton of well-known brands, Korea has several brands that are starting to establish themselves very well, like Hyundai and Samsung, but there really isn't any established/recognizable Chinese brand of any product. I think the report went on to say that Lenovo is one of the first companies trying to break out of this pattern, but whether they will be successful is yet to be seen.
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Re:This is kinda what is happening in China right (Score:2)
Uh-huh. And how's that working out for the GDP growth rate of China vs. the more monopoly hugging economies?
"Instant dilution of brand power."
Because huge resources spent on the production of commercials which people jump through hoops to avoid is desireable in the economy?
Or, wait, wasn't the whole point of the free mark
Re:This is kinda what is happening in China right (Score:5, Insightful)
You dumbass.
Trademarks don't 'artifically limit' the supply of anything. Trademarks make it so you can trust the product.
Without enforced trademarks, all products are the lowest possible quality, because there's no point in making something better than that, because no one can say 'Hey, that worked well, I'll buy another one of those.' or 'Well, that fell apart immediately, i won't buy that kind anymore.'.
Trademarks are merely artifical signatures. Just like someone shouldn't be able to walk up to a hospital and say he's you and request your medical records, someone shouldn't be able to sell something he claims was manufactured by you if it wasn't. Trademark law is, at root, a specific form of fraud prevention.
That's not say trademarks haven't been abused, and that selling the brand instead of the product is stupid, and I realize there's sort of a knee-jerk reaction against 'intellectual property' here, and I agree with a lot of it, but anyone who thinks society would be better off if people had no way to tell the difference between a Toshiba laptop and some craptacular Korean brand designed to look like one with a Toshiba labeled slapped on it is an idiot.
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Yeah, this is pretty much how I feel. Trademark law can get out-of-hand sometimes. But it's generally a good thing and has not overstepped its bounds in any severe manner.
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You can't be serious?
1. There is a demand for custom avatars and people will pay on commission.
2. A great deal of these "works" are actually infringing on real life trade marks and various real world intellectual property as it is.
If you hang out at various hot spots, you may see anything from famous people copycats, to Smurfs, to replicas of var
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Binary can be duplicated. If something is valuable due to its uniqueness don't put it in binary. A
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Sorry, that's untrue. SL is a world where the cost of reproduction is zero, not the cost of production. Even still, just because the cost of reproduction is almost nil, it doesn't mean an item's value is zero. What's the marginal cost of reproducing your last picture of you and your dad before he died? Near zero. What is the picture's value to you? Quite a bit.
Without reward
Big business (Score:2)
No need to RTFA... (Score:3, Informative)
Details (Score:5, Informative)
One [wordpress.com] & Two [wordpress.com],
etc
Basically, this CopyBot program was created with the aid/knowledge/acceptance of the Linden Labs folks.
Here's some discussion straight from Linden Labs [secondlife.com] or you can read what the CopyBot creators have to say http://www.libsecondlife.org/ [libsecondlife.org]
Summary: "if it's this easy, we should tell people that relying on the Second Life systems to protect content is not feasible any longer."
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Frankly, these sorts of things have been around forever in SL, but Copybot was the first to gain a lot of notoriety. If people are closing their shops now (I doubt this is more than a small handful of vocal protesters) then they're just late on the train. Ultimately your client needs to be able to display the data, and the client is in the hands of the users, so as LL rightly pointed out, no techn
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By "aid/knowledge/acceptance" I meant that Linden Labs supported & worked with http://www.libsecondlife.org/ [libsecondlife.org] which is a site dedicated to 3rd party OSS programs.
The people running libsecondlife created CopyBot as a debug program, included it in their source repository and then showed it off.
CopyBot doesn't do anything that couldn't be done already, since the data is there. What's to stop anyone fr
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An important moment in history (Score:5, Insightful)
I get the sense that this will be remembered as an important battle in open vs. closed development models.
We have content creators that were thriving because of DRM-- the content creators wouldn't have put the same kind of time and effort into their creations if they couldn't be protected. And we have all that business coming to an abrupt close because of open source development.
I'm not saying open source is bad, or that DRM is good. I'm just saying that this is bringing to forefront the fact that people are going to need to change in the future how they think about work and ownership.
Industrial Revolution (Score:2, Insightful)
If the analogy applies, then macroeconomically speaking, this is good
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Actually that's not exactly what the situation is. One of the biggest industries in SL was clothing. People were buying new outfits all the time, and there was a thriving fashion industry. Most of the people making new clothes are stopping because of all the turmoil and rampant copying. Sure, there's no shortage of clothes. But there will be far fewer people making new and interesting clothes.
Re:Industrial Revolution (Score:4, Informative)
This isn't mass prodution versus custom creation. It is buying CDs versus DLing them for free on Napster.
The original artist can create an unlimited number of his product in a very short time and sell them. Until now they came with DRM - so he could invest the time in making the first one and then profit by selling the clones that only he could make.
Now, since anyone can clone anything, he has no reason to continue to invest the effort designing them.
It works EXACTLY like DRM and breaking DRM. Not at all the way you try to describe it. Not at all.
Re:Industrial Revolution (Score:5, Insightful)
I don't see why it's either-or. You're talking about two sides of the same coin.
When it's impossible to make money by selling the same work over and over, you must necessarily switch to a business model which demands payment for the entire work's creation up front (because you can't depend on being paid piecemeal by selling copies of the work later). Essentially, the artist becomes a tradesman, just like a plumber or electrician: pay me for my time and I'll make something for you.
DRM exists to prevent this, and preserve the manufacturing-type (payment per 'unit' or copy) business model, where the cost of production of a work is amortized out over the sale of many identical copies. Rather than charging what the copies cost to produce, it creates an artificial scarcity that allows their cost to be increased up to the maximum that consumers are willing to pay.
Without DRM, the copies cease to have value, but the skilled labor that goes into their creation still does, and could be sold even in the absence of DRM (or copyright).
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Because if no one pays for it, it won't get created at all. It doesn't take long to notice that the thing you're waiting for isn't happening, and at that point, you realize you'll have to make a move if you ever want to see it happen.
If I knew I could wait
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Also what's the point of in-game money if not to buy in-game stuff from in-game shops??
They might want different ones. (Score:2)
Maybe not everyone wants to have the same thing? Seems like there would be a market, over time, for custom-made stuff; where you knew that you were the only person in the game to have this particular item, and have complete control over it (to give, copy, destroy
Re:Industrial Revolution (Score:4, Informative)
One hopes Linden Labs is thinking about this with great diligence today, because without the need for in-game money the game needs to be paid for in some way that doesn't yet exist.
Just a couple weeks ago Linden Labs increased the price of new land in the game by 50%. If you want a place to build something beautiful you have to buy an island (because on the mainland you will find yourself next to Penis Palace and a casino), and those used to cost $1250 to acquire and $200 per month to run. Many of these exist because owners can recover some of the cost by selling things or renting space (to people who want to sell things). Then they raised prices 50% ($1675 to acquire, $300 per month). Then this copy thing happened. A lot of these places are probably wondering how they will pay for their island.
Islands equal useful content. As in, places people have built that are interesting to visit. Places that make the game more than an IM client. They cost a lot of money, and now they are likely going to be harder to pay for.
Really sad to hear (Score:2)
Re:An important moment in history (Score:4, Informative)
Uh, whoa whoa whoa ... since when has "open source development" meant "making unauthorized copies"?
You can't lump together the people working on independently creating something like Inkscape [inkscape.org] with the people distributing cracked copies of Illustrator [adobe.com]. They are two completely separate things.
The latter, conventionally called "piracy" (rightly or wrongly), is why those businesses are coming to an abrupt close, facilitated by the fact that their business models were not particularly sound in the face of that reality.
This will be a major turning point for our society (Score:5, Insightful)
What will happen when we have replicators (like the ones on Star Trek) that allow us to replicate everything in the real world quickly and easily? (not just music)
Think about it... the end of scarcity. A fundamental shift in the nature of the world economy. I'm not sure where it leads, but life sure gets interesting right around then...
Re:This will be a major turning point for our soci (Score:2)
Re:This will be a major turning point for our soci (Score:4, Insightful)
In the real world, everytime something gets copied easily, all hell breaks loose. Music, games, videos, books... Someday, it will be real objects, and if the world doesn't change (hahaha, world, change? ROFL), there will be equivalents of DMCA and entities like the RIAA to bitch and complain, instead of embracing this as a way to throw society in a world where money doesn't matter anymore... It is kind of sad, and i'm glad i'll be dead before it happens.
And I'm not putting any kids in that world, either.
Offtopic, but interesting. (Score:2)
But it does make you wonder.
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And there was an episode where they dealt with "holodiction".
Still, it was never really made clear. Sometimes there's talk of money, sometimes there's talk of how we've done away with currency. Sometimes there's barter, most often there's no mention of it. Kind of like how sometimes the replicators can produce any material you want, yet some materials are somehow scarce
Tea, Earl Grey, Hot (Score:5, Insightful)
"I'll fix your roof if you fix install my dishwasher."
"I'll do research on fuel cell membranes if you build the rest of the car..."
Head...hurts...
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Yeah... you wouldn't be able to pay for my services with your own services most of the time... but maybe your wife/girlfriend and I can work something out...
Re:Replication, Virtual, or Singularitian Society (Score:3, Interesting)
It may be a while for this to happen to our society, but think of it like this...
You live in a virtual world. You might be living in a synthetic body living in a lavish apartment, a brain in a life support box in a large facility containing nothing but brain boxes, or maybe a bum with a direct neural interface living off welfare in a trailer park somewhere.
You don't really care... Because you live
Linden Blog, update: (Score:4, Informative)
Tuesday, November 14th, 2006 at 3:47 pm by corylinden
Tags : none
Second Life needs features to provide more information about assets and the results of copying them. Unfortunately, these are not yet in place. Until they are, the use of CopyBot or any other external application to make unauthorized duplicates within Second Life will be treated as a violation of Section 4.2 of the Second Life Terms of Service and may result in your account(s) being banned from Second Life. If you feel that someone has used CopyBot to make an infringing copy of your content, please file an abuse report. Note that this is completely separate from any copyright infringement claim you may wish to pursue via the DMCA.
Like the World Wide Web, it will never be possible to prevent data that is drawn on your screen from being copied. While Linden Lab could get into an arms race with residents in an attempt to stop this copying, those attempts would surely fail and could harm legitimate projects within Second Life.
There are features to allow Second Life residents more choices about how they respond to potential infringement beyond the DMCA. Specifically, we will add data to allow residents to compare asset creators and creation time; incorporate Creative Commons licenses so creators have the option to create content that allows free copying, modification, and exchange without having to utilize outside applications; expand ban lists and reputation so residents can share information about those who abuse copyright; and, publish additional statistics on the website so creators can make rational decisions about the health and strength of Second Life's economy.
These are important features because the implications of copying should not be about Linden Lab's approach to copyright enforcement. We are not in the copyright enforcement business. The communities within Second Life should have the tools and the freedoms to decide how and when they deal with potentially infringing content. Many will decide on less restrictive regimes in order to maximize innovation and creativity. Others will choose more restrictive options and ban visitors who do not respect them. Consumers, creators, and all residents need to have the final say about which approaches work best for them.
Please recognize that using the Terms of Service is not a permanent solution. Nor is it shift in Linden Lab's support of libsecondlife (who have removed CopyBot from their Subversion repository), machinima creators, or others who have explored Second Life beyond the features of the Second Life client. I continue to feel that libsecondlife is an incredibly important part of Second Life's development and community.
I do not extend those feelings to residents attempting to profit off of infringing use of CopyBot.
To the community, I am very sorry that we have not already completed the features needed for you to address these concerns yourself. We are working very hard to complete them and will release them as soon as they are ready. In terms of prioritization and scheduling, additional asset data will be deployed in Q1 2007. Adding in support for CC and expanding the ban lists will be deployed 3 to 6 months later. Until then, as described in the first paragraph, use of CopyBot or similar tools to create infringing copies within Second Life will be treated as a violation of the Terms of Service.
http://blog.secondlife.com/ [secondlife.com]
Coroborration? (Score:2)
RIAA member businesses close due to cloning (Score:5, Insightful)
"The night before last, I was looking around a music store, where people buy and sell music, when an argument broke out; a person going by the name Average Joe was copying tracks of musician's CDs, and claiming he could freely do it because he'd been playing with the copy command produced by the maker of his operating system. All hell broke loose, in the sort of drama you can only find in music stores. The RIAA's first official response? If you feel your IP has been compromised by "the copy command", we'll file a lawsuit against the copier and not give you any of the profits from the suit. Musicians started committing suicide moments later."
Seriously... think about it. Music won't stop being created in the real world just because people can copy things. And objects won't stop being created in Second Life just because people can copy them. All it means is that one thing that used to be a valuable service to people (creating copies of things) is no longer valuable because people can do it themselves.
The other thing (creating new content, or unique content (such as live performances)) is still of value, and always will be, as it will never be the case that all people are equally able to be competent creators or artists. Change your business model. Instead of selling copies of your thing, sell your creative services under contract. It's a model where people hire you to create something new that has never existed before, rather than paying you for a copy of something that already exists elsewhere.
This could actually be the best thing that ever happened to Second Life, because it can result in a more innovative and open "society" and a fairer "economy", and serve as an example for the real world.
Work for the glory, only? (Score:4, Interesting)
People who are not creative undervalue creativity. This is not surprising.
I've created content for Second Life. Despite the trivializing that comes from the "information wants to be free" crowd I will say with firsthand experience that it's a lot of work. Linden Labs' business model explicitly (as in, from the horse's mouth, in writing, in its mission statement) relies on the hard work of people creating content for them. They've now changed the terms of how this work will be compensated. It's now for glory only, and that will draw a different crowd. Certainly nothing wrong with that motivation or that crowd, but frankly, as evidenced by the quality of freebies available compared to for-pay items, the game will suffer.
On Second Thought (Score:2)
Reuters coverage here (Score:3, Interesting)
Replicators! (Score:2)
I guess the difference is that, unlike real life, in SL land can be added infinitely just by adding a new server. Not even replicators could give everyone their own luxury home on a private tropica
Second Life / Copybot | Real Life / Nanobot (Score:2)
Shut up shop with a sign that says, "Sorry, Godti Makers did us out of business" ?
I for one, welcome our matter-assembling, programatically controlled, electronically fucked-out-of-their chip overlords.
The money is in custom models (Score:2)
Weirdest Second Life Experience (Score:3, Funny)
Anyways it gave the willies and I never played again!
CODE can't be stolen. So who cares? (Score:3, Interesting)
Re:FP (Score:5, Funny)
copyright is not theft (Score:5, Insightful)
Copyright (notwithstanding developments of the past 50ish years) is an agreement that a government (which SL is in this case) makes with people that they can benefit from their creations for a time in exchange for everyone eventually getting to benefit from the creation.
Commerce is not inherently petty. Commerce can motivate wonderful creations (such as SL itself). It can also motivate horrible acts.
I create some because I like it. I create more when I have financial interest in doing so.
Re: (Score:3, Interesting)
You're partially right. It's not theft by the people granted the copyright (at least not directly); the theft (or infringement of rights, whatever term you may prefer) is committed by the government itself (which Linden Labs is not, exce
No Not Good... (Score:3, Interesting)
If you want to make another item identical to mine that's just fine, No Patents, but you have to do it from the ground up not just cutting and pasting, Copyright.
This could be one of the "Big Bads" that eventually kill Secondlife outright.
BTW your simple analysis that "Copyright is Theft" is more than enough to peg you as someone too immature
Re: (Score:2)
Caveat: If you were the kind of kid who thought Legos were dumb and boring as a kid, uninstall your SL client now.
Caveat 2: Unless you're into polygon sex
Re: (Score:2)
I hated it too because I couldn't find anything to kill in the first 30 seconds.
Re: (Score:2)
features a sci-fi concept which ocurred to him, provoked by reading a news article
about an incredibly stupid set of events? Brilliant!