Defeating The Second Life Copybot Crime Lords
The virtual world of Second Life has a real economy where real people are making real money. And now some of those people are getting ripped off by a black market economy of knock-offs as their creations are being stolen by the Copybot created by libsecondlife. The Copybot was supposed to be a useful tool, but the script was modified by someone outside libsecondlife and is being used to copy objects without an owner’s permission.
Libsecondlife is an open source software project. The idea behind the project is to understand how SL works and provide a toolset that allows the creation of third party applications capable of integrating Second Life with the rest of the internet. The Copybot is one of those tools and after much protest from the SL community, LindenLab, the makers of Second Life, have declared malicious use of Copybot to be a violation of their TOS. Violators will be expelled.
The Genie Is Out Of The Bottle
Name brand knockoffs and counterfeit products have plagued businesses in the real world for centuries. From twenty dollar Gucci bags to shady guys with raincoats full of cheap Rolex watches, black markets have thrived and expanded to make fraudulent versions of everything from software to electronics, furniture, and clothing.
Knockoffs are very profitable for their makers. There’s a definite lack of quality in counterfeit products and in some cases a lack of safety standards in their construction. In recent years, knockoff manufacturers are increasingly making a real effort to infiltrate the market, not as knockoffs, but under the guise that they are selling legitimate products. The reason is simply to make much higher profit margins.
In the virtual world, creating knockoffs is easy, which makes it potentially even more profitable. Once a snippet of computer code is copied it can be duplicated endlessly without cost. Although the Copybot only copies objects and not the scripts that animate or bring life to them, new versions of the bot with increased capabilities can’t be too far away.
Protecting Yourself Against The Copybot
Like the endless war between spammers and anti-spam software, this is likely to be an ongoing struggle.
A few programmers have developed scripts which shout out instructions to any avatar that comes near them. The instructions tell the Copybot script to stop running if it’s present. The problem with these scripts is that they add a great deal of automated spam to any conversation. And they have already been circumvented by patched versions of the bot.
The biggest tools in the war against unauthorized copying are LindenLab’s commitment to expel offenders and the vigilance of Second Life citizens to find and report offenders. Neither of these efforts will completely erradicate devious use of the Copybot, but they will slow down the crime rate. The future will involve complex theft-combatting tools yet to be written. It might involve groups of vigilante script warriors taking on the task to hunt down and stop Copybot crime lords.
The only thing for sure … somewhere inside the virtual world of Second Life, reality is setting in.
