Content Theft: The worst is still to come?

After a discussion with Tigerlily Koi, I’m of the opinion that things are only going to get worse for Second Life’s retailers and content creators. In a market where content theft is rife, and copybot/texture ripping cases are coming to light daily, it makes you wonder why anyone else still bothers to make anything anymore. A recent demonstration of copybot showed how an object that took weeks to make was copied in under 5 minutes. It’s heartbreaking.

Yet, nothing appears to be done about it. There have even been instances recently where review bloggers
have been caught by surprise when products they’ve featured have turned out to be stolen copies. The problem lies herein that Second Life has gotten too large to control. In a world which we control, we have little in the way of policing the grid.

So essentially, we’re fighting a losing battle. But wait – Legend City Online offered a place where designers can move, without fear of their work being stolen. That was fine, until a group of people started digging a little further. DocWes Legend, who used to work for LCO, left a long comment on this blog detailing allegations about the way LCO was being run. The owner of LCO were invited to make a statement in response, but they have not answered. This, coupled with evidence of stolen skins from Second Life being sold in LCO doesn’t really fill me or other designers with much confidence.

And that in itself raises another worrying question. With the advent of Second Inventory making the transfer of items between OpenSim grids easy, the problem of content theft will only spread from one grid to another. And there aren’t many designers who have the time to keep checking new grids for their content.. we have to find the time to make things too, remember?

Read the rest of this entry over at Metaversally Speaking.