—oh, ive also changed all you thoughts to the exact opposite, since its easy to do in html.

so now your making me money and your “role” as “pundit” will work in opposite effect to “your” intentions.. glad to see you have no problems with that:)

see you in san trope

c3

doing this was so much easier than even using copybot, thanks,

cube3

Because the crowd feels cheated. They implicitly assumed that SL, as a technology, worked to protect their creations “magically”. In certain cases, this was assumed because of an implicit trust in LL’s developers to be so insanely good that they were able to create something that, say, the music and video industry, have been unable to do for decades: preventing digital copies of content shown on your computer.

The average user has no idea how a computer really works. They don’t understand the concept that “if it shows on your screen (or speakers), it can be copied”. Thus the first ones on the resident’s targets is Linden Lab — they feel cheated and claim that LL did not do their best to protect their interests.

Actually, 1) Linden Lab *is* doing their best, but they are not magicians, and can’t create a technical solution to a problem that is impossible (the only way to prevent digital content in SL to be copied is to shut down the grid!) and 2) Linden Lab did *never* claim superhuman abilities to be able to protect digital content — all they do is respect owner’s copyrights through *legal* mechanisms. It would be insane to claim that there exist *technical* mechanisms to prevent copyright fraud. If they did exist, the RIAA would have solved their issues decades ago…

The next target are the researchers (in this case, people working with the endorsement of Linden Lab to document the Second Life Protocol that enables client/server communication, and supply tools to work with these). This can be seen as the high-tech, “ivory tower” lab people, working on things so advanced and so detailed that nobody beyond their circle really understands what they’re doing — and thus, the streak of Luddism on the average person will quickly surface to the top. This is not different from the hordes of ecoterrorists who routinely wreck havoc out of high-tech labs in biotechnology. In several cases, the targets are companies working on the cure for cancer, AIDS, or genetic diseases. They work on animals and sometimes human material; by destroying all their work, they set back the hope for a cure for decades. A good example is cystic fibrosis (http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Cystic_fibrosis), which affects 1-2% of the human population, and it could already have been erradicated easily if the ecoterrorists didn’t routinely destroy the labs where this is being researched.

This is a common Luddite approach to new technology — people fearing the consequences of advanced research, which might bring solutions in the near future (ie. cure for cancer; an open-source SL client) but may suffer unintended results in the short term (mice and human material get destroyed in the labs; digital fraud). Failing to explain the purpose of this kind of research will postpone an advancement of technology that will enable us to have a better experience in the future, in exchange for a short-term peace of mind.

Scientists all over the world struggle with ethical dilemmas every day, and the governments supporting their efforts also have a horrible time explaining their own population why it is important to continue that research. This is definitely not “unique” to Linden Lab’s Second Life.

The third target, of course, are the exploiters. Naturally enough, it’s to be expected that the creative community will single these out and force LL to ban them. Still, we all know that these people are naturally alts, created just for the purpose of doing the exploits. I’m not against alts myself — I have a few to do permissions debugging, always a tricky area in SL — and respect the others “need” for alts (eg. rental facilities needing more groups or more tier, or simply role-playing opportunities). But it naturally makes things so more easier for the culprits. And people’s anger will be targeted — once more — to anyone having alts, and on LL for *allowing* alts to exist. Both extremes are worthless. If alts are banned, only criminals will have alts. That’s easy to explain and is exactly the same example you gave above:

If the libsecondlife project is banned, only griefers and crackers will have access to those tools. This is something that most people fail to understand: forbidding technology means that the only the criminals will have access to it. Because they always did, and always will have.

There is even another side-effect: by closing down libsecondlife, which is a peer-reviewed open source project, exploits used by criminals/griefers/crackers will only be identified by a very small number of experts — namely, LL’s developers. libsecondlife, being open source and open to *all* programmers, allows these exploits to be found, and quickly and efficiently dealt with. It’s completely different to submit a bug report to LL or a *complete solution to a bug, fully documented, with source code* to LL for them to fix it. The latter is what libsecondlife will be able to do — in fact, has already done often in the past, it just never deserved the attention of the public. And what the public doesn’t know, they can’t understand.

So we need definitely to educate people. Some comments made from a few elements of the libsecondlife core team did also not help much; on one side, they presented themselves publicly as valid, honest, ethical researchers. On the other hand, in “internal” chats published elsewhere, they used irony and sarcasm which can be misinterpreted by others as being “what they’re thinking about”. That’s the worrying aspect of the “Big Brother”-type of society where everything you say is stored somewhere — it’ll be hard to explain “sarcasm”, “irony”, or “a joke in bad taste” when you’re confronted with what you said ages ago. Still, people will have to deal with this as well. Scientists all over the world have PR teams to try to explain to the public what they are really doing and how it will benefit us.

The fourth issue is far more worrying to me: it’s the witch-hunting. Sites have been popping up left and right, as well as notecard-based lists, or IM group chats and notices, warning everybody to “ban this avatar, for she’s a known copybotter”. This will increase dramatically in the next few days. Everyone even mildly associated with copybot, libsecondlife, or — who knows! — open source software might get into ONE of those lists. Since this is “mob rule”, the mob is impossible to argue with — once you’re in that list, you very likely won’t get out of it. Ever again.

People used to mail servers blacklisting your ISP know what I’m talking about. If one person from AOL starts spamming the whole of the Internet, AOL gets on a blacklist — thus preventing *all* users of AOL to send their legitimate emails. This happens every day, and it’s a mess to sort it out — AOL has to “prove” that they have indeed identified the culprit and banned them, and only them, slowly, the blacklists tend to disappear. Put into another words: on self-regulatory, mob-based behaviour, it’s far easier to get blacklisted (which can happen almost immediately) than to be able to prove your innocence.

And to make matters worse: Linden Lab, in a desperate attempt to appease the masses and control the hysteria, is moving swiftly. Just get them an email of a SUSPECTED copybotter (or CopyBot/libsecondlife supporter), and they’ll ban you. Temporarily, “for verification purposes” — which can take months or years, especially now that the number of ARs will certainly increase exponentially.

What this means, Tao, is that both you and me — who have been patiently trying to explain what the issue is about (it’s a legal/social one, not a technical one) — might one of this days be the target of a furious content provider. They’ll ask LL to verify our inventory to see if we have any item created by, say, Adam Zaius, or Baba Yamamoto, or Eddy Stryker, or whomever has been working with libsecondlife. And you might be unlucky and get Random Linden (who just joined SL yesterday and never was in-world before becoming a Liaison) simply to ban you — without notice — and send an email to the one pressing the charges and say “Don’t worry, Nice Avatar, evil Tao and Gwyn have been banned for SL forever and you can log in safely again”. But “Nice Avatar” can simply be an alt, created for the purpose of getting us both banned… and now things get complex, as Robin and Philip and others don’t have a clear system of appeals to see who has been banned illegitimately without the right to defend themselves publicly. Or, even if they set one up on the spot, this will be way hard to deal with, in the middle of tens of thousands of pending processes.

So we might very much fall into a downward spiral of witch-hunting and McCarthyism. As a content creator myself, and thus with a few items that could now be easily duplicated, I worry far more about McCarthyism than loss of sales. Because people can duplicate my content but not my *mind* or even my reputation — but all it takes is an alt to forge a case against me, AR me, and I’ll be out of Second Life in minutes.

For reflection, I’d like to suggest what the worse scenario is — a world just like the real world, where digital fraud happens every day; or a world where witch-hunting will be able to shut you out of SL completely without the right to appeal. As said, having lived under a dictatorship in my country, I know what is the worst of both scenarios — but the vast majority of the users in Second Life don’t. For them, preventing digital fraud *at all costs* is far more important than ensuring proper legal process, fair trials, the assumption of innocence until proven guilty, and the right to appeal.

1.4 million users learned recently the lesson about what “copyright” really means. Or rather, they finally understood what it means for content creators who live from the royalties honestly earned through their hard labour on their own cop…

Informative post but your conclusion betrays a lack of compassion for those who build. I make furniture. A tremendous amount of work goes into each design, something like 20 hours of crafting. I take great pride in the results, there is really is a piece of me in each one. So I don’t take any comfort in your releax it is the future prediciton. If I cannot have protection why would I make things for SL? You say the same is true in RL. It is for some items but try to make a copy of sofa sometime. Kinda hard huh?