Baba Sucks

Mike over at Techdirt comments on ongoing discussions over whether sites like MySpace are exploiting it’s users.

The whole idea is idiocy to me. And PETA would say you’re exploiting animals when you take them as pets. It’s a mutually benificial relationship.

Are Sites Like Digg, YouTube And MySpace Still Exploitation If People Get What They Want?

So lots of people seem to think IRC is the place to find true character. Let’s talk about what I knew about CopyBot, Second Life, and you.

People seem to think CopyBot was developed to cause the destruction of Second Life. That’s simply not true. Am I saying it wasn’t going to cause a lot of discussion and worry? I knew it would, because it’s something that’s important.

The issue isn’t CopyBot. The issue is what real protections you can expect in Second Life.

Nothing will prevent copying. You can only react to it after the fact. Trying to stop it will only lead to failure, and it will have the effect of limiting fair use.

We’ve seen the same words from Linden Lab, from Robin and Cory. We’ve all been saying the same thing. I’ve been saying it for months, others have been saying it for just as long if not longer. A lot of people are aware, and it still seems that those who would be effected by it, the content creators, do not hear us.

CopyBot isn’t a very good copier. It’s inefficient and buggy. One good thing about CopyBot, and also mirrored in my comments taken from IRC, if it can copy an avatar down to the last prim and with the same appearance it will have HUGE visual impact. That’s the kind of thing you don’t shrug off. It almost instantly connected all those disparate dots for anyone that watched it do its thing. What is yours is now suddenly somebody else’s.

I didn’t develop CopyBot, but I was aware that it would cause a controversy. I was glad for that because now almost nobody is not aware of the limitation in the protocol. Happier? Probably not… Do you want to be happy, or rather oblivious of libsecondlife and angry at Linden Lab for something else?

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.