A short history of copying
Wednesday, 22 July 2009
Copying is a fact. Copying has happened over the millenia. The first cavemen copied fire from lava flows or burning trees. Cultural advancements were based on copying. Things like a number system and written language got copied. Copying helped win wars. Copying helps fighting AIDS in Africa. Copying comes with a whole variety of names like "learning" or "inspiration". Babies copy their parent's behaviour when growing up. Copying is deeply ingrained in the human nature.
I am not saying copying is right. People spend a lot of time and effort into creating things for commercial gain. Those people have all the rights to be extremely pissed if someone copies them and threatens their business model. Again it is not as black and white as it seems, when it comes to cases were the copy is superior to the original, or where the original is so simple that it could be considered as public domain, but that is a different blog post altogether. Someone whose fruits of labor get copied should have a way to seek compensation, and most countries have legislation in place where this can be achieved. The machinery grinds a bit when it becomes international or when different standards come into play, but basically it works.
Exact digital copies change the game
Admittedly, the digital technology we have since the Seventies/Eighties makes copying extremely easy. While copying a painting by a Dutch Master took the contemporaries an equal, if not longer amount of time and work, copying a DVD in 2009 is a matter of 30 minutes instead of the 15 months the movie making needed, not to mention the cost. If you look at copying as an arms race, the side of the copiers has quite an advantage nowadays.
The answer to this is Digital Rights Management - DRM. It's the technological answer to the technological reality of exact digital copies. But DRM is nothing more than an illusion of security. DRM puts up a huge smokescreen and repeats the mantra "You are safe, you are safe" over and over. It's the 21st Centuries equivalent of dried frog pills and love potions. If digital content is to be consumed by humans apart from being encoded digitally it needs to be decoded again. And the decoding process can be reverse engineered, and sooner or later will be reverse engineered. So while DRM does not discourage the determined, it does however annoy the compliant customers by limiting their experience.
What is the best protection?
What is your best protection against being copied? Innovation! Let's take the fashion industry - a prime target of copying not only in the atomic world but also in Second Life. What Diesel or Armani or Calvin Klein or Gucci show on the catwalks in Milan and Paris will flood the trash boutiques on High Street all over the world a few months later as copies "inspired by...". The large labels are definitely not thrilled about that, but do they call for "Design Rights Management"? Do they ask that at airports or railway stations or in police controls, women get stripped who wear copied dresses? No. Do they demand show trials where women who bought copycatted dresses get charged for thousand times the worth of the dress? No! They do two things:
- From the commercial side they make their initial, innovative releases incredibly expensive. This enables the folks who can afford them to feel part of a rich elite, as well as as cover the design and production cost plus a hefty margin.
Or they may take the approach of going for the masses, showing their new creations on the catwalk only to sell it by the millions themselves as long as they have the head start. - While the copycats pick up on the new releases and the sales of the old collection starts to dwindle, they are already busy making the next collection, working on new designs, only to surprise the fashion world with their new creations in Milan or Paris again. They either sell few for high prices, or many for low prices, they collect their margin, eventually they get copied but by then they have their next collection in the works already. Lather, rinse, repeat.
From the atomic to the virtual world
Let's finally come to Second Life, a world with a DRM system weaved into the very fabric of the system. The DRM system was certainly part of the success of SL, since for a while it gave content creators security and a commercial model that allowed them to receive economic gain for their work. I do not blame anybody for believing this system was foolproof. Not everybody is technically interested, and the advocates of DRM never stop claiming that DRM is safe and the answer to all problems.
However it was only a matter of time until the inherent vulnerabilities got exploited. Intercepting the the OpenGL protocol to retrieve textures was the first step, working on the viewer protocol to retrieve prim parameters and other attributes only the second step. Rika Watanabe made a short but drastic summary what can be copied and what can not be copied. It should be mandatory to read for every content creator.
Was it foreseeable that copying happened? Yes. Could it have been prevented? No. The way Second Life works is that your viewer gets a kind of blueprint, and recreates what your avatar sees locally on your computer. And for that, all parameters and all textures need to be transferred to you. The only way to prevent this would be if the Second Life servers would transfer only frames of a kind of movie to you - every action would happen inside the server. And this is simply not feasible.
Accepting copying as inevitable is one thing. Making it too easy is another thing. Burglary is as inevitable, but you don't leave your door open to make it easier for the thief. So when earlier this week UK-based metaverse development company Rezzable announced the release of BuilderBot, a tool that could copy a whole sim regardless who owns the items on it, emotions ran high. Rezzable back paddled two days later, announcing it will keep the source code of the program under tabs and implement DRM conformity. The discussion is the same since over a year ago the tool "Second Inventory" was released. In its first versions, "Second Inventory" did not bother as well who the creator of items was. Quickly, the author was convinced to include DRM checks as well.
As of today, copying of all content from Second Life (with few exception - see Rika's article linked above) is possible for everyone. However, special technical understanding is required not many people possess. Tools like "Second Inventory", export features like included in the Gemini Viewer or BuilderBot, aimed for the masses, limit copyable content to content you created yourself or where you have full modify rights for. And I think this is good as it is. You can't prevent the determined from copying, but that does not mean to make the technology available to all.
Getting copied sucks. Getting copied hurts. Getting copied wants you make to drop everything and go lick your wounds. But it is a fact, and throwing technology at the problem will not prevent it from happening, but make life more difficult for the legitimate users. If you got copied, by all means, report the person and seek legal action if possible. But stop asking for a technical solution, because there can't be a technical solution!
Copybotters don't innovate! Copybotters can only feed on what actually exists. Beat them with what you can best: create! Create amazing content for Second Life! Refine your skills. Don't waste energy on worrying about being copied. Use the energy to innovate. Be ahead of the copybotters. Don't focus on people who don't buy in your shop anyways (those who buy copied content), focus on the people who are willing to spend money! Don't let the copybotters win. Show them you are better, faster, more innovative.
Stop worrying now. Start creating now!
Labels: BuilderBot, Copybot, Digital Rights Management, DRM, MV-SL-General, rezzable, Second Inventory, Second Life
A typical manifesto of not only Stakhanovite communism but creator-fascism -- work harder, and only creators who work harder and better get to have rights. Pretty awful stuff, and you wouldn't want these theories applied to your translations. If everything is so wonderful "free," and workers should just "innovate" more, why don't I just copy all your translators, Peter, and you can "innovate" some new ones?
Your notion that there is no "designer rights movement" is uninformed. Try this Google search and others, there are plenty of designer lawsuits to protect their rights.
http://www.google.com/search?source=ig&hl=en&rlz=1G1GGLQ_ENUS289&=&q=fashion+designers+copyright+lawsuit&aq=f&oq=&aqi=
Peter I have to agree with prokofy, if we applied your thinking on agrand scale to everything that was difficult and hard to stop murder would be legal. I strongly dissagree that if it's hard to stop just let it go. There are so many many things both big and small where that attitude would hurt so many people. We just want to lock the door Peter not leave the gate open with a big sign on it saying come in and steal what you want! Being better than the theives won't help you, will just make theives want to steal from you rather than the not so talented. Your philosophy puts the onus on the victim to prove theft and go to court, which by the sound of it, is a long and often very unsucessful route, or ignore the theft and allow theives to rip you off contantly over and over again. This thinking also breeds viglanty type responses which I have personally seen. Expect a lot of that in your" can't stop it so give up" world people will greif and storm the theives putting themeselves at risk of being banned by L.L this allready happens as creators feel the correct channels are useless to go thru. It will be a lot worse in your world. Of course we can't stop it we can't stop the drug trade or murder or fraud but if we don't put all efforts into stopping it everybody loses.
Paisly, I think you misunderstood what I intended to say. I did not say it is right. I did however say that determined people can't be stopped. DRM - and in this context SL itself is the biggest DRM since before BuilderBot moving content out to use it elsewhere was not really an option - can only but a high enough barrier to disencourage the casual, otherwise tempted individual. It can not stop the determined. I am not arguing to remove all DRM. What I am saying is that the DRM we have is good, what I am saying is that the community control we have is good (and BuilderBot is a great example for that). Neither is perfect, but to make it perfect would result in a technological battle that can't be won. Instead I encourage people to not let fear rule them, but to boldly and proudly innovate.
Or, to use your murder-analogy. The laws did not stop murder from happening. Not even the tight weapon control in my country stop murder from happening. Ethical (laws) and technological (weapon control) measures keep the otherwise tempted from committing murder. But not the determined. But again I am not suggesting to eliminate the laws and allow weapons for everybody. In fact I am a vocalist for even tighter weapon control in my country (if you are a certified member of a shooting range, you are allowed to keep your weapon at home - I see no reason why this should be the case and in fact the recent amok runs where from people who had their weapons at home).
So sorry if my points were unclear, but I am definitely no advocate of "let's get rid of DRM altogether".
Good post.
I find it amusing that disdain for technology and requests for that same technology to fix all their problems go hand in hand in some people :)
True DRM is an impossibility, unless we are willing to consign our computers and content to some large corp and let it decide what we can do and what we cannot do. Google "microsoft Palladium", Prokofy - I doubt you will like it.
I like the SL DRM system, have spent tens of thousands of Lindens on content and never copied anything (or bought anything copied). But it has its shortcomings, and some of them are just not fixable.
Sometime I think we in west need's to rethink how we see on copying.
The first time I was in china, I was into something that opened my eyes. We was at a theatre and looked at one of the classical Chinese operas. The performance was great maybe a little irritating that in every "pause", you see the opera stops in striking poses images now and then. The place was lit up my flashes in masses as the people took images.
Well as the show ended our guide approached us worried that we didn't like the show. We told her it was great, and we loved it. She was not convinced, we had not taken photos to make out own copies of it. How could we think it was great if we didn't like to copy it...
After that experience I'm not so self assure about right and wrong in the copyright world any more. Also seeing so many of people die,
because the patents on medications. Yes it helped to make the companies risk money into making the research, but now they keep the price up. And let people die for it, it's close to murder, we could save you but then we make less profit... It's all so grey, there is no one easy side, what ever we do is wrong.
well, at one thing should never be copied the phrase "i have to agree with prok"
Peter I think the way you wrote the piece inferred that you were suggesting we don't express outrage over builder bot, but accept that someone will allways release something that can steal, and focus instead on excelence. I'm suggesting in my reply that in this modern day we stay ever vigillant, and do all we can to prevent theft and fraud whilst being excelent.
Of course copying has been around for ever and so has fraud, particularly in the art world. If a painting is sold as a Picaso but it's painted by Snidley Whiplash the police were certainly notified and if caught, the fake was charged with fraud and art theft.
In todays world, authenticity is prized in so many consumer items, a million times than even 100 years ago, copying and then selling the item as your own design or as a design by the original creator is no longer copying it is fraud or theft.
Comparing copying in cave man times or even 50 years ago is not relevent now. It's a totally different world. Yes we must adapt to this new world and the ability to copy almost everything, but, like trying to stop the devistation from drugs, we have to keep trying to make it as difficult as possible so that our creators and innovators can make a living. Or they may give up completely through loss of income. You will find this happening with the music industry soon, as musicians don't create as many albums but charge more for live concert tickets as they are allready starting to do. It costs a small fortune to make an album and if the record companies can't make their money back due to. Theft. They simply won't keep making albums, they will work more like promoters selling live appearances. We have allready heard creators in SL say they want to quit because the theives are more protected than the victims, and they are being compromised financially.
Something like builder bot could have been the nail in the coffin for many of them. It was because of he outrage that it was not released as first suggested. A fine example of consumers and creaters being "worried" and so they should have been.
I hope on behalf of all creators that there continues to be worriers and protestors to stem the tide of fraud.
Regards paisley
copying sucks and i don't know that it could ever be stopped
it takes us, as consumer, to make sure (as best possible) to not supposrt copiers
i take pride and joy from buying nicely made things from the original creators and think they should be rewarded
i lost a big resident once (on the order of $84 USD per month) because i insisted he not use obviously copybotted Straylight trees
what else can be done? i dunno :(
