CopyBot, Community and Controversy
What a week to be away. While I was busy chatting to fans of the best MMO going, the virtual world of Second Life was getting its knickers in a twist over something called CopyBot, an application that intercepts data flowing between the Second Life servers and client and can be used to re-create objects that would otherwise not be copyable. For a variety of reasons, perhaps chief among them the fact that many people earn not insubstantial incomes selling their creations in Second Life, the episode has roiled the community in some pretty ugly ways. (For reference, here is the del.icio.us page and the Digg page on the topic.) I’m unavoidably late to the blogging game on this, so rather than recap the controversy in depth, I’ll look at something I think the CopyBot episode helps illustrate on a broader scale: the fact that Second Life has now grown to the point at which it’s no longer possible to speak of the “community” I just mentioned in a meaningful way. Second Life is no longer the walled garden that it was perhaps originally intended to be, but now belongs to the billion-plus users of the World Wide Web. Interestingly, though, that kind of community is still possible in SL, it just takes a bit more work.
In an email list I receive, someone compared copying assets in Second Life to copying jpeg files on the Web: it’s not “right” or even necessarily legal, but it can be easily done. Linden Lab, creators of Second Life, have attempted to build copy protection into their platform, but the results have never been good; there have been ways around most native copy protection in Second Life almost since the beginning. Because the platform was new, however, most residents didn’t have access to such tools. Social norms, which were stronger when the population was smaller, also led people to avoid infringing each other’s content, to a large extent.
As the population has grown and more and more interesting things are being done in Second Life, the place has attracted the interest of a group of programmers known as libSecondLife, who have been reverse engineering much of the client code, with the blessing of Linden Lab. The code behind CopyBot was originally theirs, though the intent of the original code was not, apparently, to wreak havoc with Second Life retailers. Somewhere along the way, however, one adventurous programmer had the idea to create a bot which could steal SL assets — he may even have been commissioned to do so. The resulting controversy has resulted in much outrage, threats of lawsuits and a revamp of libSL leadership (though this too is suspect, as there’s indication that some members were paid to take a fall, strangely).
But much of the kerfuffle is based on an assumption it’s important to point out: That Second Life is a place where different standards apply, where content enjoys protections it enjoys almost nowhere else, and where it’s somehow wrong to investigate what can be done with the code behind the platform. Raph Koster points out that all such client-server platforms as SL have similar holes, and even Cory Ondrejka, Linden Lab’s chief technology officer, acknowledges that in Second Life, “like the World Wide Web, it will never be possible to prevent data that is drawn on your screen from being copied.” Using CopyBot to “make unauthorized duplicates within Second Life” (emphasis added) is a violation of the SL Terms of Service, Cory writes, but CopyBot itself is merely an interesting application someone has written to explore the code.
But many SL “residents” (a term I am coming to see more and more problems with) are now crying out for RIAA-like protections for their SL content. As with the music industry, this is problematic. There are already laws in place to protect against copyright infringement, and most technological protections serve to stifle creativity and innovation to an extent that seems to outweigh the benefits to business — depending on your point of view, of course. But even Cory’s blog post acknowledges that “We are not in the copyright enforcement business.” In that sense, Second Life is no different from the World Wide Web, where service providers must respond to take-down notices but are not responsible for putting in a technological solution to prevent infringement in the first place.
Cory goes on to make an interesting point: “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.”
What’s interesting to me is the plural communities. Second Life itself is a place where anyone can show up and do more or less as they like, within certain restrictions. As on the Web, though, you’re generally quite vulnerable because of how open the technology is. Anyway can copy a blog post or a newspaper article, after all, and pass it off as their own. There are various schemes for watermarking content like jpegs, but it’s important to note that most of these are solutions that have come not from service providers but from users offering their own solutions to the wider user-base that exists on the Web.
Practically the only way to truly safeguard content is to put it behind a wall. Even take-down notices are generally not enough, as the various authorities tend to be non-responsive to infringements that don’t pass a certain threshhold of harm. Keeping information private on the Web is generally done with passwords and invite-only venues — i.e., the formation of smaller communities that are a subset of the larger user-base.
This may be the way forward for a place like Second Life, which explicitly supports such communities in its code. Various people are looking for various standards of protection. With a million and a half registered users in Second Life, more than 600,000 of whom have logged on in the last 60 days, it looks nearly impossible to give everyone the standard of protection they seek. The place is no longer the fantasy world it once was, disconnected from the real world and the rest of the Internet but for a login screen. But it’s perfectly possible in SL to create a smaller, more private community of people who respect a certain standard, just as it is on the Web. This solution isn’t ideal, of course, but it isn’t ideal on the Web either. (One mechanism that would aid in this would be a user-created reputation tool by which, as on eBay, users whop contravene the social norms could be singled out. To work, though, this takes a critical mass of users that I doubt any SL community could currently muster.)
The problem for Second Life at the moment is whether unique user-created content is a sustainable model for an open platform. It’s hard to argue that it is. Anyone can view the source on this Web page, for instance, and go create their own copy. Second Life faces similar problems. They’ve been there all along, but it has taken CopyBot to wake people up to the fact.
Feeds
The fascinating part for me is how it’s proven that you can give something away and charge for something and sustain just fine. The Long Tail works, open source works, it all works. It’s a culture thing. As far as copyright/infringement issues, the path is the same. Doesn’t matter if it’s in world or out of world, it has to be protected, period.
And that ‘resident’ word is starting to make me wonder if it’s more appropriate to clearly denote the two second lifes. SLW = Second Life the World and SLS = Second Life the Software.
The ‘world’ is great- awesome people, good times, booming economy.
The software is also great and would be greater if it could run on our own installs. :-)
“it’s proven that you can give something away and charge for something and sustain just fine.”
Totally true. I do think you need that critical mass to make it happen, though, which we may or may not have reached yet.
Something that’s missing from a lot of coverage about CopyBot and its aftermath is the emotional component. I think that most content creators who’ve been around for a while in SL know that it’s a deeply flawed system and that the stuff they make is never going to 100% safe but there *is* an emotional component to creation for a lot of creators, even if they make it their RL day job. It’s pretty difficult to divorce yourself from pride and accomplishment and yes, joy, that you get from making things that people like enough to pay money to have.
If you look at all of the communication from LL about CopyBot there’s never really an acknowledgement of this component of creation and it — to put it mildly — chafes many creators who see a very wide gulf between what LL promotes Second Life as and what it really is.
I think, in short, a lot of feathers would be unruffled if LL would — to put a perhaps illadvised Clintonesque stamp on things — “feel their pain.” I don’t know if betrayal is the right word, but certainly there is a very very large perception among many content creators that LL doesn’t give a moment’s thought to the outcome of their businesses.
What Cory wrote on the Official Blog is 100% correct, but all of the communication from the company could’ve been a lot more artful in acknowledging a lot of SL best customers (from a tier point of view) make money within the flawed permissions systems SL offers.
Also, welcome back! :-)
Thanks, Celebrity, it’s good to be back.
You’re absolutely right about the dissonance between “SL as advertised by LL” and “SL in reality.” LL have never been very good communicators in any case. We’ve argued for a long time at the Herald that the “Your World, Your Imagination” line should go out the window, but mostly because the world is not as free and easy as LL likes to make out. I think LL is fast approaching a point where they’re going to have decide just what they’re up to over there — is SL a world, a country, a platform, a service, what? Until they figure that out, they’re not going to be able to answer some of the most important questions they face.
finally, I think someone else gets it. Can we move on now? :-)
Yes, um, they got their knickers in a twist because they lost hundreds of RL dollars just due to the panic, from people not buying, or closing stores and not renting, and that was real damage, in a real way, even merely from mass panic — you wouldn’t understand this Walker, you don’t have any skin in.
Your notion that libsecondlife are these interesting, neutral programmers who become intrigued by SL only when it gets bigger is just plain stupid. These are lifer Secondlifevers, charter members, beta-buddies, people who have been around forever poking at this thing and who have friends who are Lindens because some of those Lindens used to be residents.
Your notion that their planning and execution of this was just some pure-science intellectual pursuit of knowledge is utterly belied by the transcripts that show them to be utterly cynical, manipulative, and destructive — and BTW, that’s in keeping with their behaviour patterns in the world, too, which you never see because you don’t follow it — you have no skin in.
Cory and his pals are blessing and annointing libsecondlife because they do free scut work and find holes and make “kewl stuff” that Cory can then GOM or patch — and be utterly cynical like them about the feebs and choads who are gullible enough to imagine they have emulated land and commodities somehow protected by some notion of rights or permissions.
There is a very big difference between Napster and RIAA stuff, and people who download songs thinking that they do no damage because artists already sign huge contracts with record companies and already get huge amounts, and their willingness to copy and exploit their neighbours’ skin made by 50 hours of work and sold for a mere $3.50 US.
Eric, your belated recognition of the “world” and the “software” still needs you to catch up on the political groupings of the Worlders/Immersionists and
The most obscene and cynical thing about this is the answer that gthe creator-fascists and tekkie-wikinistas give to those fearful and angry about coypright theft:
create faster
creater more and better
stay ahead of the copybots
Ugh, ugh, ugh.That’s the attitude that benefits YOUR community and YOUR sponsors at ESC — it privileges those who can assemble crack teams of programmers who can quickly build one-off “experiences” rather than “buildings” for big corporations with deep pockets and big PR budgets.
The other community of poor folk making 17 cent shoes for more hours than people even spend in China or Haiti on RL shoes — they’re just to be pitied as those with “no lives”.
The fascinating part for me is how it’s proven that you can give something away and charge for something and sustain just fine. The Long Tail works, open source works, it all works. It’s a culture thing
This is one of your biggest fallacies, and one that you keep airly spreading without any heeding of what you are saying — because you have no skin in.
You, Eric and Walker, can make money off SL making “experiences” or “doing consulting” or writing for mainstream media or whatever the hell you do without worrying about putting your item in a vendor, having its permissions stick, and having it sell and stay stuck with its permissions. These things don’t matter in the least to you.
You view it as a humorous and quaint problem of blingtards. Either those blingtards should shut up and just work harder and faster to make new things quickly to keep ahead of the CopyBots, or they should make customized products for the rich and secluded private islands who can ban everybody they don’t vet and filter off their islands so that no bot can ever come and copy their jewels and fine gowns.
Or they should make “experiences” in which gowns or shoes are mere throwaway props, not valuables in and of themselvse.
Prokofy Neva said:
>This is one of your biggest fallacies, and one that you keep airly spreading >without any heeding of what you are saying — because you have no skin
Here’s an idea. When the gold dries up, move on. Don’t try to legislate your business model and wreck it for the rest of us. We’ve already seen how that turns out.
*Rolls eyes*. It’s not MY business model. It’s the model *the Lindens sell*.
Walker is being completely misleading here by saying the ability to copy his webpage is here is something that is always there, and was always back of Second Life, and implying we’re just naive and stupid not to realize that we were always pned by griefing reverse engineers in cahoots with the Lindens.
Hell, no. If somebody were to steal Walker’s blog name or his articles, you could be sure he’d be complaining bitterly. He may not have the name trademarked yet, but it’s clear that it is creative work that moral, if not legal considerations, that keep MOST people from doing that, and the ability for social constraints to *work* sustains the blogosphere just as it could sustain the world of SL. If someone were to break down that social contract of the blogosphere and start massive copying and even sale of blogs all over the place, people would be in the same kind of angry furor they are with CopyBot — and THEN we would likely not hear any pious lectures from Walker, Raph, and everybody else issuing these homilies now about how the Internet is a giant Xerox machine.
And thanks for letting me know just how rapacious and inhumane the big RL scary 3.D is, Krakrok. I get it. If those of us who bought into the “created content as commodity on simulated real estate model” were misled, and didn’t get out in time, and weren’t compensated, who are you to care? Why should Walker or the ESC or any of you care? You have nothing invested — and now you only get paid huge amounts to analyze the suffering of others. Nice work if you can get it!
I must say it’s one of the most shockingly immoral scenes I’ve ever seen in life, you all leading your big horses to water that literally created from the drops of sweat of a million brows.
Why would you take the model LL gives you and accept it?
Are we only allowed to make money only one way? I didn’t see that in the TOS.
Just askin’.
Wow, Eric, I always knew you were amazing and talented and able to walk around the robots LL throws at you like “their model”. Woot!
The thing is…it’s not just a business model, it’s a social contract. The Lindens say they provide “real estate” and a system of “commodities” where you have “IP”. You can wink and nod and say this is oh-so-last-week, but it’s also important to call them on fostering libsecondlife as long as they did, and enabling this to happen.
And it’s more than fine to make money any way you can off SL, and also more than fine to characterize some of it as crass and rapacious : )
The fabulous metaversal consultans who are tour guides of the world predicate the whole notion of their tour on the concept that there are millions flocking to this world, and buying “real estate” and “commodities”. So be cynical and flippant about that as much as you like, but it’s what made your clients come in the first place. I doubt they would have come if you told them Second Life was a string of Hollywood stages where companies can launch their press releases in 3-D. So those buying into the myth of the real estate and commodities are just so many walk-ons to you, backdrops, those silly immersionists, but you do owe them more respect since literally your meal ticket is based on their continued willingness to suspend disbelief.
Good luck with your stunning multi-media career, Eric!
“If someone were to break down that social contract of the blogosphere and start massive copying and even sale of blogs all over the place, people would be in the same kind of angry furor they are with CopyBot — and THEN we would likely not hear any pious lectures from Walker, Raph, and everybody else issuing these homilies now about how the Internet is a giant Xerox machine”
Prokofy, I get the feeling that the glass is half empty. You make a good point, that the social structures help in preventing passing others work as your own. In the case of rampant IP theft, there is legal recourse. The existense of CopyBot is no different, the technical ability to copy does not translate to rampant copying as the social structures and legal options do not alter. If copybot (or similar) use can be prevented without impacting other aspects of the environment adversely all well and good, go forth with the blessing of all. To risk impacting the technical freedoms of creators to protect against the possibilty of copying if perhaps not a good idea on balance
Two analogies. 1 - should Walker encrypt his blog and only allow people who confirm their identity to read it through a browser that had technical restraints on cut and paste operations? This would prevent his blog posts being copied, but would make it harder for people to access, therefore limiting its use. Alernatively he can leave it as it is. If people copy and it comes to his attention (and the larger the infraction the more likely) then he can wield either social, or if needed, legal pressure to remedy.
2 - Universal getting a fee for every MP3 player sold (only Zune so far I know) because some people that buy them will pirate. If there is the potential for some people to steal, we should treat everyone like a thief.