Linden Lab in twelve years he has not been able to solve a problem as the fraudulent copying of user-created contents and the list of creatives abandoning Second Life or at least interrupting activities of creation and distribution of original content continues unabated. The latest to surrender was in these days Nadine Raverie, owner of 3D Trees one of the most beautiful shops of digital plants of all Second Life.

In a note for its group Nadine explained: “I’m sorry, the group 3D TREES is now canceled. I’ll not post new group. I’m tired of copybot attacks on my person. I do not know how else to defend. Thieves abusing my group for sending my stolen trees to all members of my group. I do not want them to make work easier”.

But is it really impossible to defend the creatives from abuse of plagiarist using copybot to create illegal copies of original content to other users, who perhaps you are then also having to defend themselves against allegations “artfully” made on the basis of Dmca to create additional troubles? According Sniper Siemens, Italian Second Life user wellknown to Mondivirtuali readers, if only for her reproductions of the Leonardo da Vinci machines and for the artistic path dedicated to the Second Life history exposed a few months ago in Lea, it would be enough “change 3 lines of code to eliminate the problem of copybot”.

It could essentially, argues Sniper, “inhibit the functions that any copybot draws. Not all the SL code is open source, it would be enough to change those lines and put them in a way that no creator viewer, let alone illegal, can change. End of games, 10 minutes of time to do it”. Speaking in the debate, which took on Facebook, Raffaele Macis (aka Licu Rau), owner of Opensim grid Craft, has, however, noted that a copybot program is based on the fact that any information regarding objects and textures is sent to the viewer in their entirety in the form of xml and bitmap; the viewer then reconstructs the 3D environment on the client of Second Life user (or any other digital environment displayed on a PC remotely connected), but each object and information (except scripts) is actually in the cache viewer.

Actually, therefore, there would be no need of copybot to copy Secod Life contents displayed on a PC, you can do it with the official SL viewer without editing or downloading anything.After closing the viewer can just go in the cache and (if you know how it is organized) you can reconstruct every object seen or visited every place. With such a system to defend themselves effectively from copybot is very difficult if not impossible. Sure, it would be enough to prevent the information to reach integral viewer, maybe criptandole in whole or in part, for example using a filter like Canopy, which processes the 3D environment and sends it to the PC–client in streaming format, you could prevent these abuses.

“But for an OpenSim grid like ours (Craft) would be an investment unthinkable and Second Life would be a nice boost to the cost, not to mention the difficulty of maintaining acceptable performance” since with this filter the lag in terms of responsiveness tends to increase, at detriment of the user experience already very “sensible” to the problem. The problem is essentially intrinsic in the server–client architecture that Linden Lab has choosen until the beginning of Second Life development.

“If you continue to do everything to prepare your viewer / pc – concluded Macis – you can only make copybot more difficult, but not impossible. Even the encryption in this case would not help: the encryption is used to prevent transmission is intercepted by a third party, but both the server and the viewer have key and access to data”. It would perhaps greater respect of copyright linked to the work of genius of creative Second Life and beyond. But this is really another story: if you want to continue to be informed of what happens in Second Life and virtual worlds, continue to follow Mondivirtuali.it, even through our account on Twitter and our fanpage on Facebook (but remember: Mondivirtuali is also on Flickr, on Pinterest, on Scoop.it e su Paper.li and also on Youtube).