My musings about the CopyBot and Linden Labs response to it:

I've spent the last few months creating content so that I would have enough inventory to open a store. I took stock of what I had and at a list of things people ask me to make and (since the price was going up) decided to buy an island.

The same night CopyBot hit SL.

Now shops are closed everywhere. I'm using the Test Female Avatar and I've stopped working on content. I'm considering cancelling my order for an island. I suppose I could always put up rentals for non-paying accounts, but that isn't the business I wanted to start.

As for LL's proposed solution of using a Creative Commons license, as I look at the website, isn't this just another licensing solution with no enforcement through software? It looks like another system that uses an honor based system to prevent copies.

Having said that, and having been in the business of creating digital content for years, I propose that LL adopt a solution commonly used there that is enforceable via software and cannot (easily) be thwarted by programs such as CopyBot.

Before I provide anyone with a digital copy of an image I've created, either with a graphics program, a scanner photograph I've taken or a picture from a digital camera, I add an invisible digital (nearly irremovable) watermark to the image using a plug-in from Digimarc. That watermark uniquely identifies me as the content creator and will survive almost all transformations and/or compressions applied to the image.

The information is steganographically encoded into the image.

Linden Labs could make a change such as the following to the upload system:
Upon image upload, the upload process checks to see if there is a digital watermark in the file.
If there is no watermark, the UUID of the uploader is added to the image.
If a watermark is already present, the upload process compares the UUID of the uploader to that in the image. If it matches, the upload continues, if not, it fails.

Granted this will likely take some time to implement, but should provide a better content protection mechanism than first uploader hover text tags.

As for an immediate fix to the CopyBot, why not make a minor change to the wire protocol to disable all existing copies of CopyBot. Ask that libsl cease work until a software based solution can be implemented. Since LL has granted an exemption to the TOS to libsl this should not be a difficult prospect.

Until then, any time I spend in world will be either as a "test female" or with appearances set to random. Any clothes I wear will either be freebies or something I got for L$1.

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