One of the HUGE issues i see with controlling content theft has been mentioned all too briefly a couple of times above:

SL is an international community.
I realize there is a HUGE US community, but please remember that not all of us come from or live in the US. Laws regarding content vary country to country as do ips, means of accessing the web and many other variables such as identification.

If SL is to remain multinational these are ALL things that must be kept in mind when creating a solution.

I dont’ pretend to know the answer.

I do what i can to keep my designs and builds original, and hope people are honest enough to pay me for it. In reality no one has to steal my stuff, because if they NEED or really want it and can’t afford it i’d be happy to give it to them, but we all know its not the needy folks who steal the stuff, its the greedy ones who want to make money on someone else work.

Will Content Theft cause me to stop creating?
No. I’m sorry it happens. I do what i can to discourage it, but i can honestly say i’ll keep doing what i do anyway.
I’m creative and need an outlet for that creativity, something Second Life provides. So even if i never make my fortune as a virtual designer, i’ll keep doing what i do.

Thank you for the great article!

While my initial reaction to that was pure shock, slowly, after thinking twice on the issue, they might have a point there. You won’t feel so confident in copying content in SL if you’re actually being tracked by LL with at least some RL data, and thus very easily liable for your acts.

The difficult bit would be how to allow regular avatars to use their attachments, or drive vehicles, if they don’t have access to scripting and rezzing…

p.s.If you dislike non-payment info users so much you could modify your vendors not sell them anything (limiting your potential buyer’s base of course,so you want that LL will do that for everyone).

p.p.s.And, as I say earlier, payment info is really NOT a protection against person who really want to get some big L$ on pirating your items. This could be circumvented rather easily provided that you know how to do that. And such information is widely available(well, may be it is not so easily available in _English_) simple because it’s needed sometimes to legitimate things(I personally used such way myself to get to Sociolotron MMORPG,after CCBill declined my own card(they needed card to perform age validation, you could think that all of Socioltron is Mature in SL terms),Socio stuff, which I consulted, said that it’s ok to do such a thing but it was possible to me NOT to ask, and underage person(or person not wanting to show any documents to anybody) could be in my place). I could write down one of possible ways here if that’s interesting(basically, it’s using pre-loaded Visa Gift cards and phony name while paying by this card).

Restriction rez will mean that people cannot change their appearance (for example) at all,even if they have L$ or giv en freebie (becouse if we move object from inventory it needs to be rezzed).

Default script in every prim is NOT solution to anything. As far as I understood how prim copiers working they are not in fact ‘copy’ item. They measure it’s characteristics and instantiate new object with same characterstics.End result could look same but technically result of copier is new object,possible having some differences from original. Do you think that prim copiers will modified to copy your ‘default’ script too(instead of inserting their own default or no default at all).
Also, if prim copier is client-side bot, object could just put in no-script zone and any scripts in it will not run. Do you suppose to change logic of no script zones too?

Adding checking for UUID to be in Contents will not help. If we have texture’s UUID that will prevent us to put that’s in Contents of (possible newly copied) prim?If texture is NOT visible – then it is not needed. If it’s visible – copier could get UUID from looking at it

Also, bots _can_ be used sometimes to legetimate reasons (I don’t see examples of such usage,except SLBrowser’s bots but they could be used as NPCs in fantasy sims for example.

WHEN IPv6 will become more widely used this could be legitimate option. (If we forget that it’s rather easy to get more than one globally routable IPv6 address).

As for idea of checking is given UUID is in Contents – why bot couldn’t add contents with his acquired UUID. After all, that forbids malice user to not use UUIDs at all, they have actual texture image after all and it only costs 10L$ to re-upload.

Also, if you think that having ‘protection’ script in prim protect it from copying, think again – as far as I understood this process, prims are not copied, rather they parameters are recorded and they are reconstructed. Why code that perform reconstruction should bore with copying your protection script?

Idea of restricting rez to payment only users means that non-payment users could not use any object, change appearance( for example to get freebie skin they need to rez it first…),etc.

If you dislike no-payment info users too much, why you just not change script code in _your_ vendors so that they don’t sell anything to such users(and possible make objects no-transfer)?

It also looks that you forget that bots can be legimately used to do good things.
Range from SLBrowser.com’s search indexing bots to usage of bots as NPCs in some fantasy sims(yes, currently there is not too much use for that, becouse using full client for this is rather problematic and libsecondlife is not mature enough), and this funcionality cannot be replaced without making LSL much more involved.