Just today, Rezzable announced the release of their new tool: BuilderBot. In the essence, BuilderBot is used to copy the content of the entire sim and turn it to OAR file. Then you can import the file on your own OpenSim sim, whether it is on some alternative grid or on your own computer. The tool is BSD licensed and free for non-enterprise use. There are another two parts of it: the OAR editor and importer for Linden’s grid. Those, as aimed to professionals, will be distributed under different license and charged.
And now, even before I say the spooky word ‘copybot’, I hear some of you screaming about stealing and theft and copyrights and about the world crumbling down into hell.
And some of those screams and concerns are understandable although, IMHO, exaggerated. Yes, it is possible to use BuilderBot to steal someone’s work. But, how likely is that that is going to happen? We are talking about the whole sims here. And copying the whole sim is not the same as stealing a skin or hair here and there. You know, sims are pretty big. Hardly that copying the entire sim will go unnoticed and that there will be any doubt about the copyright infringement when the case comes to Lindens or the court of law.
On the other side, we get the great backup tool for free. And if you ever did some significant building, you know how desperately needed that tool might be. Not to mention the possibility of making the whole region on local sim (installed on your own computer and working off-line) then uploading it to the grid of your choice.
It’s the building tool against the stealing tool case. But it’s not up to the software developers to do the job of lawyers. And lawyers should not interfere in the job of software developers. You know that a knife, a simple kitchen knife can be used to kill somebody. That happens quite often. But that doesn’t mean that knife shouldn’t have been invented nor that we should stop using them for good purposes. If and when it is used for murder, there is law to deal with the case.
But let’s leave the knives and talk a bit more about digital tools. You know, digital stuff is terribly easy to be copied, multiplied and distributed around. It’s not only second life stuff, it’s text, music, movies… everything. And our society is spending enormous amounts of money to get some control over the process. Most of the time, those efforts are fruitless attempts made in the completely wrong direction. Instead of software protections that get broken the day after they are released, we need better system that will cover both creators and the consumers. So far, if one wants to be 100% sure that their item won’t be copied, they should make them of wood or stone, not bits and pixels.
So we don’t need the anger against the tool, we need better system to protect our intellectual rights. Or you disagree?
Aha…. a voice of reason! ;)
I like the idea in general. In the ideal world the server wouldn’t be sending much down to the client that the user didn’t have IP rights to anyway, so saving a copy of whatever the client can see would be no big deal.
I do worry about the potential for abuse, though, given that this isn’t the ideal world. The rather casual “it has no DRM checking at all because that would have slowed it down and in our original use-case it was all our own stuff anyway” bothers me a bit.
I think part of what keeps society stable is that it’s relatively hard to steal stuff, and people smart enough to steal and get away with it are also smart enough to have honest jobs and not have to steal.
If Builderbot turns out to be a tool that allows even the idiots to steal (the ones who wouldn’t have been able to figure out how to grab textures out of the opengl pipeline on their own, say), that would imho be a bad thing. If that could be avoided, while still allowing the legitimate “backing up your own stuff” uses, that would be better.
@ Dale — DRM checking would be easily disabled in the opensource version as well. So it would need to be compiled only, but then we would not be able to improve it. Even the compiled version can be hacked as well. No one has bothered to hack SecInventory because copybot already is out there and even something like Meercat allows copying.
I think we worry so much about how people might misuse stuff that we do not enable people to do the right things they want to do. SL has always been about making your own stuff–why not allow people to back-it-up? SL maybe could support this and then we wouldn’t need a tool and could just export content the way it is imported.
Frankly if someone’s smart enough to patch the source to remove the DRM checking and then recompile, they’re probably in the set of people that it’s not worth trying to protect against this way anyway (’cause they could just intercept the opengl path or something).
What it’d be nice to avoid is making abuse so easy that a new set of people can now do it.
I think the other thing you mention is a very good idea: if there was save / export / import on the server side, which nicely supported DRM, then there would be much less reason to develop these more easily abused client-side solutions. I think the OpenSim folks are working on that :) but I don’t know how fast. I wish LL had done it from the start…
note: right now Meerkat checks permissions and it only allows exporting of prims you have full perms on.
http://meerkatviewer.org
Nice article!
[...] BuilderBot: Tool Or Menace | Living in the Metaverse [...]
I’d love a backup tool. It should simply inherit all DRM from the SL grid. I don’t think the issue is the utility of the tool at all.
The bigger issue is quite indpendent of Rezzable. That such a tool can exist such that it can ignore DRM is really a failing of the SL implementation.
Lawyers and the law are hopelessly behind on iNet intellectual property issues. My thought is this is largely a business issue and how the SL economy will be sustained or not.
LL’s response should be interesting, even if it is no response at all, because this tool, copybot and others to follow are most certainly striking at the very heart of the LL business model.
Well, technically, in the real world it’s hard to do something like SL without making *some* such tool possible; the viewer can’t show you a texture unless it has a copy of it, can’t render a prim without knowing its shape, etc. Sad but true. :)
Yes, there is always the OpenGL hack and so on. Short of having a completely secure DRM path from the server through the net to the graphics card hardware, it’s tough to pull off.
Of course, at the moment, with open source viewers able to connect to a sim and just download the primitives in an easily deciphered form, it’s a whole lot easier than it needs to be.
I am with dande on the issue that tools – good tools – are needed, and that the existence of such tools would certainly dissuade all but brilliant unethicals from exploiting such holes for the express purpose of theft.
What happens now is the ethically brilliant make use of such things to do good stuff, which is then exploited by the less brilliant unethicals.
To address dande’s question directly (because I realized I hadn’t) I’d observe that there seems to be only one effective judiciary in SL atm – the court of public opinion.
I don’t really care for this mechanism of enforcement. It leads to a mob mentatlity and public executions without any due process at all.
An SL court? A virtual judiciary? I think it’s time has come.
Why not supply the entire GREENIES sim as a sample DEMO in order to SEE how EZ your ” better tool” works for all.
let us all copy it, then reup it to our os or sl sims, and rename ourselves as owners/creators and we can all “share” in your work and efforts?
Free the Greenies! Free for all to sell and try to get sponsors like Loreal for!
Reasonable?
People are making too big of deal about this. We need tools that work. If copybot wasn’t against the terms of service, people would be using it. And as mentioned above by someone else, copybot is readily available to anyone whom wants it. If someone has the wrong intentions, they most likely are using it already.
This whole discussion is about people whom want to backup their own content. If all it will do is backup whole sims, well don’t count on super duper sales. People want to backup more than just whole sims. Not everyone in SL even has a sim. They need an opensource inventory backup coupled with what meerkat has for backing up to xml.
I like the idea,
at least until somebody abuses it.
and somebody eventually will.
I’ve heard a lot of good things about this new tool, it’s a good ideea but just until somebody abuses it like Seraphine says!
keep up with this!