Is Copybotting a Real Problem?

[Wulfie Reanimator]

1 hour ago, AdminGirl said:

But yes, I've wondered the same thing - why LL can't do more about it. Copybotting doesn't affect LL's bottom line. Maybe there's a connection.

Think about Youtube, or Twitch (a streaming service). They don't go around hunting for IP violations, they sit on their hands until someone fires a DMCA.

This is very much on purpose for a very good legal reason that enables them to exist at all.

Youtube, Twitch, and Second Life rely on hosting user-created content, not something they curate or post themselves. This obviously opens them up to a lot of potential IP violations since anybody could upload anything. You can upload a full movie onto Youtube right now. You can upload 3D models from big games onto SL right now. Technically, the host is responsible for the IP violations, not the uploader, since it's being hosted on their servers.

To make this business model feasible (since you can't possibly approve every upload individually or even automate the process), these companies are protected under Safe Harbor laws, which require that they in good faith try to remove violating content when they find out about it. This is where DMCAs come in. By filing a DMCA, you're claiming (under a penalty of perjury) that you are the actual owner of something, and it's being infringed upon. This is where Youtube/Twitch/LL are considered aware of the problem, and must remove the content. If they don't, they're literally taking personal responsibility for that content, and open themselves up for a lawsuit if they're mistaken.

Anybody can make a false claim that something belongs to them and should be taken down because they say so. DMCA requires you to give out your legal info so the other person and you can have a chance of sorting it out, and for LL to have a paper trail in case you're filing false DMCAs. It's not perfect but it's a big deterrent to malicious behavior. If LL goes around removing and banning suspected copybotters / IP violators, what do you think happens when they make a mistake and ban a legitimate user? What if that seller uses SL for actual income, or even relies on it? That's another outrage and possible lawsuit.

It's not about "their bottom line," it's about making sure SL can continue to exist as it does.

Edited June 13, 2020 by Wulfie Reanimator

[AdminGirl]

2 hours ago, Wulfie Reanimator said:

Think about Youtube, or Twitch (a streaming service). They don't go around hunting for IP violations, they sit on their hands until someone fires a DMCA.

This is very much on purpose for a very good legal reason that enables them to exist at all.

Youtube, Twitch, and Second Life rely on hosting user-created content, not something they curate or post themselves. This obviously opens them up to a lot of potential IP violations since anybody could upload anything. You can upload a full movie onto Youtube right now. You can upload 3D models from big games onto SL right now. Technically, the host is responsible for the IP violations, not the uploader, since it's being hosted on their servers.

To make this business model feasible (since you can't possibly approve every upload individually or even automate the process), these companies are protected under Safe Harbor laws, which require that they in good faith try to remove violating content when they find out about it. This is where DMCAs come in. By filing a DMCA, you're claiming (under a penalty of perjury) that you are the actual owner of something, and it's being infringed upon. This is where Youtube/Twitch/LL are considered aware of the problem, and must remove the content. If they don't, they're literally taking personal responsibility for that content, and open themselves up for a lawsuit if they're mistaken.

Anybody can make a false claim that something belongs to them and should be taken down because they say so. DMCA requires you to give out your legal info so the other person and you can have a chance of sorting it out, and for LL to have a paper trail in case you're filing false DMCAs. It's not perfect but it's a big deterrent to malicious behavior. If LL goes around removing and banning suspected copybotters / IP violators, what do you think happens when they make a mistake and ban a legitimate user? What if that seller uses SL for actual income, or even relies on it? That's another outrage and possible lawsuit.

It's not about "their bottom line," it's about making sure SL can continue to exist as it does.

True, and you raise good points.

Admittedly I don't know too much about copybotting in SL. But my thoughts were more on detecting or disabling the use of copybot viewers rather than banning based on DMCAs. Sort of like how streaming sites get taken down based on infringement.

[Wulfie Reanimator]

25 minutes ago, AdminGirl said:

True, and you raise good points.

Admittedly I don't know too much about copybotting in SL. But my thoughts were more on detecting or disabling the use of copybot viewers rather than banning based on DMCAs. Sort of like how streaming sites get taken down based on infringement.

Detecting a copybot viewer is also basically impossible.

The official viewer is open-source. That means anybody can take that code, modify any (or no) part of it, and use it as their own little viewer. It's how Firestorm, Catznip, Black Dragon, etc. exist.

Officially speaking, third-party viewers must self-identify themselves and cannot pretend to be any other viewer. Every viewer has a little "title" that they announce to LL's servers when they connect. It's a simple bit of plain text and there's nothing preventing a malicious viewer from claiming to be the latest release of Firestorm. LL can't truly verify it, especially if the homebrew is based on the latest version of Firestorm.

There's just no practical solution, considering that even if you were to do a thorough verification of each viewer when they try to log in (like comparing the executable to some list of trusted viewers), you would basically lock out new viewers (and viewer updates) until they contact LL and get manually "whitelisted" to the "maybe legitimate" viewer list. Then there's the fact that a "summary" of a file can be faked, low upload speeds would hurt many SL users, and there are tools external to the viewer that can be used to steal content from SL (or any other game).

Speaking of that TPV policy, I have no idea how much of it is actually enforcable, or how. I guess LL can ban the developers' SL accounts, or delist the viewer from the official TPV directory (if it even gets there or wants to be there)? Maybe a cease-and-desist letter, if they're in the US? Even if there was a way they could block a specific viewer from connecting, there's nothing stopping that viewer's developer from making a "new" viewer that's exactly the same, with only enough changes to make it "different enough" to bypass LL's viewer ban methods.

Edited June 13, 2020 by Wulfie Reanimator

[Lillith Hapmouche]

Even LL's very own viewer saves every single texture you see inworld quite easily available for browsing on your  hard drive. Permissions won't prevent that. Snake-oil anti-copying "tools" won't. 

So what's the plausible solution? Banning the official viewer or rather focusing on a loyal client base? 

[Lindal Kidd]

12 hours ago, AdminGirl said:

why LL can't do more about it.

Because, laws of physics.

Your graphics card has to be given a whole lot of information in order to display a scene in SL.  All Copybot does is make use of that information to re-create the item(s) your graphics card is seeing.  To keep that from happening, LL would have to block all the relevant information, which would result in your seeing...nothing.

Actually, LL COULD have done something, or more accurately, NOT done something, in the distant past.  Copybot was originally a troubleshooting tool developed by LL.  Unfortunately, they let it escape into the wild.

Oops.

[Chic Aeon]

Adding a bit of history as I tend to do -- mostly for the new folks. 

LL did release the code that made copybotting possible.  There was as might be imagined a HUGE outcry.  One of the campaigns had promenant designers photographed naked with sayings that referred to "rather be naked than wear copybotted clothing".  This was all in a time WAY before mesh, when clothing was primarily textures and if you had the texture file, you had the ability to make the clothing. 

Linden Lab (no I don't remember who in LL and likely there are no longer there) responded with something akin to "it really doesn't matter as they don't have the scripts and so it isn't a big deal". This was a GIANT slap in the face to folks that made clothing and skins and a myriad of non-scripted items that sometimes took many days to create.  

 

Tempers flared even more.  This was a long time thing -- kind of like the disappearance of last names.   

 

I added the white boxes (tacky I know) so that these wouldn't get deleted :D.

Spring 2008

 

 

Edited June 13, 2020 by Chic Aeon
spelling and adding info

[Drakonadrgora Darkfold]

is it real... yes. 

is it a myth... no

can it truly ever be stopped completely... no

some people want to think or believe it can or claim it can in hopes to dissuade others from trying but it really cannot be.

where there is a will and a desire there is a way to accomplish anything..

[NiranV Dean]

Whether some copybot code escaped LL doesn't matter really. A copybot isn't really hard to write depending on what you're doing, you just need to know the format you want to export to, gather all the information from various places where they lie readily available and output them. Aside from that the Official Viewer (and all TPV's) have several copybot features implemented that are only limited by a simple permission check. Saving textures to disk for instance, remove the permission check and poof. Texture copybot for all inventory textures. Animations can be exported the function to do so just isn't hooked up, animation copybot, right there and then. Prim copybot i imagine would be as easy as counting through an objects prim count while copying the object contents/information to an owned object and the way SL works would do the rest.

It doesn't require a copybot Viewer, just someone who's willing to install all the prerequisites to compile a Viewer and remove a few lines of code. Literally anyone can go to the SL wiki, follow the setup guide 1:1 and then search through the code with a few keywords to find what they want, code is no magic its just a simplified english sentence. No amount of hacks, permissions or stupid content creator tricks can prevent what i could do right now in 10 seconds but a lot of content creators are just stubborn and paranoid or simply idiots who use it as excuse for their money-making plans. Their propaganda drama ads leave me untouched completely and i even think if they get copybotted they probably deserve it. Good content creators simply dont care, they trust their customers to do the right thing and if you are a honest, good content creator you should not fear copybotting at all. Copybotting is really just the SL equivalent of piracy, apart from some few people who will always pirate things there are always those that pirate because they cant get it otherwise (due to money or store issues) or those that pirate to punish the creator for the bad content they delivered.

Edited June 14, 2020 by NiranV Dean

[Lindal Kidd]

Geeze, Niran.  Way to go and publish How To Build a Nuke In Your Garage.

[NiranV Dean]

10 minutes ago, Lindal Kidd said:

Geeze, Niran.  Way to go and publish How To Build a Nuke In Your Garage.

Maybe, maybe i'm going to do exactly that!

[Extrude Ragu]

I'm gonna go compile a viewer where the code that draws peoples pants is removed 🤭

[Drakonadrgora Darkfold]

23 minutes ago, NiranV Dean said:

Whether some copybot code escaped LL doesn't matter really. A copybot isn't really hard to write depending on what you're doing, you just need to know the format you want to export to, gather all the information from various places where they lie readily available and output them. Aside from that the Official Viewer (and all TPV's) have several copybot features implemented that are only limited by a simple permission check. Saving textures to disk for instance, remove the permission check and poof. Texture copybot for all inventory textures. Animations can be exported the function to do so just isn't hooked up, animation copybot, right there and then. Prim copybot i imagine would be as easy as counting through an objects prim count while copying the object contents/information to an owned object and the way SL works would do the rest.

It doesn't require a copybot Viewer, just someone who's willing to install all the prerequisites to compile a Viewer and remove a few lines of code. Literally anyone can go to the SL wiki, follow the setup guide 1:1 and then search through the code with a few keywords to find what they want, code is no magic its just a simplified english sentence. No amount of hacks, permissions or stupid content creator tricks can prevent what i could do right now in 10 seconds but a lot of content creators are just stubborn and paranoid or simply idiots who use it as excuse for their money-making plans. Their propaganda drama ads leave me untouched completely and i even think if they get copybotted they probably deserve it. Good content creators simply dont care, they trust their customers to do the right thing and if you are a honest, good content creator you should not fear copybotting at all. Copybotting is really just the SL equivalent of piracy, apart from some few people who will always pirate things there are always those that pirate because they cant get it otherwise (due to money or store issues) or those that pirate to punish the creator for the bad content they delivered.

You are completely correct about this, it is not nearly as hard as people like to think nor can it really be stopped or prevented by ll at all. All the security and safety measures in the world cannot stop it in reality.

A edited/hacked viewer and you can copy pretty much anything that is shown on your screen and there is really nothing LL can do about it but take down marketplaces that try and sell it once it has been reported.

Even bom cannot stop copybotting like some want to think it can.

if your viewer can show it there is away to copy it. because that is what the viewer does. it copies and renders the information from the servers.

some of the older fs viewers had an export feature where you could export items from the viewer and then use them in other programs like blender.

and yes it could export mesh it its complete form, not just the prims.

you dont need darkstorm to copybot with.

Edited June 14, 2020 by Drakonadrgora Darkfold

[Qie Niangao]

The economic viability never seems to improve for the one actual solution, purely Server-Side Rendering.

(Nor does network delay, the speed of light being what it is and all.)

[Drakonadrgora Darkfold]

1 hour ago, Qie Niangao said:

The economic viability never seems to improve for the one actual solution, purely Server-Side Rendering.

(Nor does network delay, the speed of light being what it is and all.)

that would still not stop it for the viewer would have to download certain aspects of what was rendered to be shown. and that could be stripped from the graphic memory of the os being used.

it it can be seen it can be copied/ripped/stripped/hacked.

or they would find sever side exploits to allow them to copy. nothing is safe to those who really want to copy/steal/use without permission and never was or will be or ever can be.

short of beaming it directly into your head there is no way to stop it.

Edited June 15, 2020 by Drakonadrgora Darkfold

[Mollymews]

it depends on what is streamed Drakonadrgora

think of a display terminal with keyboard and mouse.  All the display terminal receives is 2D screen pixel data, and the keyboard/mouse interactions with those pixels is sent to the server. All the compositing of 3D assets into 2D screen data is done on the server

 

[NiranV Dean]

5 hours ago, Extrude Ragu said:

I'm gonna go compile a viewer where the code that draws peoples pants is removed 🤭

Been there, done that. Black Dragon already removes all clothing.

7 minutes ago, Mollymews said:

it depends on what is streamed Drakonadrgora

think of a display terminal with keyboard and mouse.  All the display terminal receives is 2D screen pixel data, and the keyboard/mouse interactions with those pixels is sent to the server. All the compositing of 3D assets into 2D screen data is done on the server

 

Cloud streaming. Stadia. Nvidia Now. That kinda thing. It would prevent copybotting yes but this solution would not only amplify the delay of your actions by a million times it would also require a good and stable internet connection which still quite lots of people can't have. It would also eliminate third party viewers as a whole and send us back into the stone age and force everyone to use the Linden Viewer. I would be one of the first to cry out in agony if i would be forced to use the stock Linden Viewer and i'm sure LL is happy i'm not using their Viewer anymore, i'd be demanding way too many changes and fixes all the time.

Edited June 15, 2020 by NiranV Dean

[Drakonadrgora Darkfold]

1 hour ago, Mollymews said:

it depends on what is streamed Drakonadrgora

think of a display terminal with keyboard and mouse.  All the display terminal receives is 2D screen pixel data, and the keyboard/mouse interactions with those pixels is sent to the server. All the compositing of 3D assets into 2D screen data is done on the server

 

Even with completely streamed data there are still ways to copy images and other things. your video card would still be used to render out the data that is being streamed to it. there are ways to strip that data and then could be re-composited by other programs back into the items.

it would require a very basic viewer with no cache of any kind what so ever being stored on the players computer. or a completely separate device that people would have to buy or rent to use to be on sl. removing sl from pc play at all.

basically just a webviewer watching a video that they could interact with. that sort of thing is far from possible in sl with how its designed as it is right now. almost a total rewrite of the viewers and the servers would be needed.

basically it would mean sl would have to become just an interactive movie of sorts. it would drastically limit would could be done and exponentially increase lag and time to do anything.

Everyone would basically need a T1 connection to play sl at that point to reduce the lag.  and sl would become noting more than a point and click experience which is not what it is or was meant to be.

Plus I can envision it would cause sl to be a pay to play service at that point for everyone for all the upkeep of all the hardware needed to do this. Which would be way beyond what is currently needed.

Edited June 15, 2020 by Drakonadrgora Darkfold

[Aethelwine]

On 6/12/2020 at 10:17 AM, ChinRey said:

I think we should clear up the terminology here: Copybotting is not the same as plagiarism.

There's always a grayzone when it comes to plagiarism since there's no such thing as a one hundred percent original work. Every creeative person is standing on the shoulders of others.

Copybotting is when somebody rips the actual files for somebody else's works and there's no grayzone there.

 

 

Isn't Copybot a type of programme or process that whilst enabling what you describe also allows people to copy their own items?

I know a creator that told me he had used Copybot in the past to recover permissions on his own creations that had been lost because of over enthusiastic inventory cleaning. Wouldn't that also be "copybotting" because of using the process, but a non-problematic usage.

[Lillith Hapmouche]

In what way is plagiarism remotely related to a creator fixing their own work?

[Qie Niangao]

2 hours ago, Drakonadrgora Darkfold said:

basically just a webviewer watching a video that they could interact with. that sort of thing is far from possible in sl with how its designed as it is right now. almost a total rewrite of the viewers and the servers would be needed.

Not really. It's just running the viewer software on a farm of timeshared GPUs, and putting the network where the rendering output is now. 

In fact, there were businesses that did it for a while for SL. (That was OnLive's SL Go, right? and there was an earlier one, too, IIRC.) The hurdles are the economics of "who owns the GPU" (graphics hardware is cheap enough - at least on the desktop - for everybody to have one) combined with both economic and technical network limitations (much of the market served with barely qualifying broadband, and no way to get the same responsiveness from a network round-trip as from local control of the cam, for example).

It keeps cropping up in different forms. Its current incarnation seems to be to scatter the rendering hardware to the edges of 5G carrier networks.

[Ardy Lay]

5 hours ago, Drakonadrgora Darkfold said:

Even with completely streamed data there are still ways to copy images and other things. your video card would still be used to render out the data that is being streamed to it. there are ways to strip that data and then could be re-composited by other programs back into the items.

it would require a very basic viewer with no cache of any kind what so ever being stored on the players computer. or a completely separate device that people would have to buy or rent to use to be on sl. removing sl from pc play at all.

basically just a webviewer watching a video that they could interact with. that sort of thing is far from possible in sl with how its designed as it is right now. almost a total rewrite of the viewers and the servers would be needed.

basically it would mean sl would have to become just an interactive movie of sorts. it would drastically limit would could be done and exponentially increase lag and time to do anything.

Everyone would basically need a T1 connection to play sl at that point to reduce the lag.  and sl would become noting more than a point and click experience which is not what it is or was meant to be.

Plus I can envision it would cause sl to be a pay to play service at that point for everyone for all the upkeep of all the hardware needed to do this. Which would be way beyond what is currently needed.

<old fart alert>I am gonna get me a T1 to eliminate lag!</old fart alert>

[Ted McGregor]

6 hours ago, Aethelwine said:

Isn't Copybot a type of programme or process that whilst enabling what you describe also allows people to copy their own items?

It's programmed code within the open-sourced viewer which was indeed initially constructed for backup purposes.

[Sabrina Tamerlane]

If LL would implement some kind of invisible watermark system, at least for textures then it would solve part of the issue.

[Kyrah Abattoir]

20 minutes ago, Sabrina Tamerlane said:

If LL would implement some kind of invisible watermark system, at least for textures then it would solve part of the issue.

Would it?

A tech solution cannot guess licensing subtleties.

For example, many people who are using "manuel bastioni lab" (MB lab) and MakeHuman disregard the fact that all models outputed by it are dual licensed under AGPL and a CC license. Both those licenses allow copying by 3rd parties, and therefore, copying content made with MB Lab/Makehuman is (potentially) legal, regardless of what the person who uploaded it claims.

Some creators (that I will not name) just want a simple way to fuel their shopping habits and their idea of 'original work' involves downloading other people's freebies, from turbosquid, the unity store, or deviantart, putting them in SL and slapping a price on it. You can't really claim ownership of this kind of work can you?

[Sabrina Tamerlane]

1 hour ago, Kyrah Abattoir said:

Would it?

A tech solution cannot guess licensing subtleties.

For example, many people who are using "manuel bastioni lab" (MB lab) and MakeHuman disregard the fact that all models outputed by it are dual licensed under AGPL and a CC license. Both those licenses allow copying by 3rd parties, and therefore, copying content made with MB Lab/Makehuman is (potentially) legal, regardless of what the person who uploaded it claims.

Some creators (that I will not name) just want a simple way to fuel their shopping habits and their idea of 'original work' involves downloading other people's freebies, from turbosquid, the unity store, or deviantart, putting them in SL and slapping a price on it. You can't really claim ownership of this kind of work can you?

MBLab bodies are definitely not textures and not copybotted either. Watermarking textures would prevent someone from downloading a texture from SL and then uploading it as "creator". That would not fix all the issues but that would hinder seriously copybotters in that they would have to upload copybotted mesh without textures so everyone would notice the theft. Furthermore, it would allow you to add a signature texture in your package that would mention "Kyrah Abattoir Original Product" and while it could be counterfeited it would not be as simple as downloading/uploading. Also, it does not have to be done by LL, you can watermark your textures yourself, but if the textures were watermarked and the upload of these blocked afterwards  then copybot as we know it would be seriously limited.

Now if two people would download the same texture from "somefreetexturessite.com" then both textures would be watermarked differently, but a third person would have to go to that site and would not be able to grab this very texture with a copybot viewer from SL.

ETA: you can also make the watermarking optional if it so much of an issue, but the simplest is that if you got a licensed product, you should give a notecard with the license terms and where you got the files.

Edited June 15, 2020 by Sabrina Tamerlane