wired.com — Rogue copying software lets users clone anything or anyone they want in the virtual world. By letting its community respond, Linden Labs sets the stage for a bold experiment in alternatives to U.S.-style copyright.
Nov 20, 2006 View in Crawl 4
sengaraNov 21, 2006
I just have to say that i really hate this writing style. The writer of this article takes something like 6 paragraphs of redundant information to finally get to a point that is simple and not nearly as profound as he makes it seem before telling you what it is.The Sengara synopsis of "This is a bad article":Second life is not very happy about this program that lets anyone copy any texture or item in the game. So instead of going the legal route (lawsuits for everyone!), they are opting for a better detection tool to identify players using the copy-anything program. As a result, they will ban anyone using the copy program, and believe they are allowed to based on their EULA.
generalsunNov 21, 2006
Man I don't understand what's wrong with all of you people. Wired makes for a valid point about copyright, this is a digital experiment that could have vast implications upon the real world. So who cares if it wasn't that big of a deal, that doesn't matter, the implications does. Stop thinking in such a narrow minded way please. And the geek bashing is just sad, especially on digg...
fanttNov 21, 2006
There aren't many serious residents in Second Life that call it a game. That term shows a lack of understanding. Second Life is a platform. There are plenty of games that use Second Life as a platform.
armbarNov 21, 2006
Fantt, Digg is 3D too; it has a gradient and a drop shadow.
vholdNov 21, 2006
"True enough, and if the camera had been invented before paint, there would have never been any commercial artists."That whole argument is a strawman. Commercial artists don't make exact replicas of the objects they are painting, not even a camera does that, and that isn't even what people want from art/pictures. There is zero metaphor there.Is there a big problem with taking screenshots of things in SL? No. The problem is creating an item that is indistinguishable from the original with zero effort.Sure you can burn a DVD, it also happens to be illegal, and it turns out quite a few people actually do obey the law and therefore movies still make money because people spend their money, and therefore profitable movies are still being made. SL is just enforcing their law.Also consider the fact that I have already acknowledged that people do in fact create things for free in SL and my statement already qualified that just the people trying to make money would have been dissuaded from making their objects if they didn't have copy control.It's not that hard to understand that if somebody did something in the first place because of financial incentive, if that incentive weren't there, they would have been a lot less likely to do it.
akinderNov 21, 2006
I bet anything the people that are bitching in the game, are the same people grabbing torrents of movies and 'defending' the 'right' to steal/copy movies and music. Turnabout hurts doesn't it?
vholdNov 21, 2006
One of the strangest things I saw when I first played around with SL was an in-game Movie Theater full of money chairs that was streaming a movie that was currently in theatres at the time (Constantine) onto the screen. It's not just the blatantly illegal aspect of that which is remarkable. It's that Linden Labs gives money to property owners based on how many people are there, so property owners put out "money chairs" which give the person sitting in it a little money for every 10 or so minutes they sit in it.So you've got all these people getting paid a little money, with some movie piracy thrown in for good measure. The pure evil is that the amount of money that probably actually changes hands after all of that is probably less then the cost of electricity to support the whole scheme.
vholdNov 21, 2006
Ah that's good to hear. It was completely insane.