Baba Sucks

Sucking up the web

****Bot

November 14th, 2006 | Category: Second Life, Stuff, libsecondlife, open source

THis is from a blog comment I made to Robin Linden’s blog post on Copyrights and Content Creation in Second Life(still in moderation 11:30 pst)
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CopyBot is not a product that we sell or distribute. It’s a debugging tool and silly demo with a [now] obviously bad choice of name. Hopefully you won’t be seeing copy bot on SLex any time soon..

The issue at hand with copy bot seems HUGE!

“Oh my god why would they do something like that?!”

But our reason for showing this application around was partly we were proud of or achievement, and then on the other hand, if it’s this easy, we should tell people that relying on the Second Life systems to protect content is not feasible any longer.

For a while now we’ve had this project on the back burner that has been asked for so many times by content developers, an ability to back up content to your hard drive and restore it in Second Life. Basically import and export functions.

That’s the basis of CopyBot as well excepting the permission check. The problem is the difference between CopyBot and and import export tool is little more than 1 line of code that is easily commented out by even novice programmers.

What you see in CopyBot is the same capabilities that any import/export tool would have.

It’s not something easy to deal with, and we’re struggling ourselves with the issues that CopyBot has brought. It’s caused many personal conflicts as well between developers and their friends who do not see the merit in what we do.

Viewing 5 Comments

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    In the long run the only way for SL to succeed as a platform (for web x.0) is to open source it and make it distributed. I agree that this is an excellent push to force the platform to become more secure for at least open source clients, but imho, but wouldn't it be more beneficial for the whole community to release f.ex a python to LSL byte code compiler than a digital copy machine? 
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    In these hours, many SL people are complaining, often without even knowing what they are talking about. It looks like Armageddon if you listen to them. They ask for jails, handcuffs, encryption and DRMs (you know, it's a so-good-working approach... :) against Copybot and its developers.

    I would be interested in insightful comments and analysis of CopyBot meaning and consequences. It would be great if you -baba and other lsl devs- would collect some interesting articles about it in order to give people some clue.
    Or maybe you're already doing that?

    Please let us know if you're going to do something similar - and where you are going to publish the links to these articles.

    If I may ask, what you think about recent SL Herald articles about the CopyBot?
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    Prokofy rants? What can I say...


    Anything we post will in all likelyhood be linked from libsecondlife and this website.

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    I only got one Q here. ;) Say you had two hundred /unlinked/ cubes arranged in a pattern. Can Copybot copy their locations relative to each other and reproduce the patterns, or would you end up with just a lot of cubes that you'd have to manually reassemble? Just a thought, it may mollify some people that have complex statues and such on their land they don't want copied, to simply be able to delink them into single prims and be effectively 'immune' to copy attempts (else they just get a massive pile of prims) :)
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    In the current state copybot would not be able to duplicate the statue. Nobody on our dev team will be adding that function any time soon, and I don't think the people who released it have the ability to do it.. 

    I say go for it Psyra 

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