Persig Phaeton

A possible implementation would be for the Second Life server to watermark all incoming images with the name of the owning avatar. If it sees another incoming image with an existing watermark, it can trivially flag the account as a texture thief.

For protection from Copybot, it doesn’t actually upload textures when it makes copies of prims. Instead, it assigns the original UUID and texturing information to the prims of the object it is rezzing. A security enhancement on the server side would be to disallow the assigning of texture UUIDs to prims that don’t exist in the avatar’s inventory.

Texturing is the biggest part of making stuff in Second Life. Guarding the textures with a digital watermark makes it prohibitively difficult to duplicate and steal.

you seem intelligent enough to understand that making something “way harder to copy (not impossible” just benefits the rogues. while being harder to break doesnt make it harder to spread/share; all it takes is one break thru (by someone somewhere) and it can be made available worldwide in a moments notice, nowadays. its the nature of the intertubes. some see good in it, some see evil. id say it swings both ways but its a very very good thing regardless.

Putting something online is sharing it with others. sharing something with others has the caveat those Others will do with it whatever they are moved to. its the way of information and knowledge. once knowledge is shared its up to the recipients what they do with it. one can be inspired and leap forwards on the shoulders of those before us just as much as one can seek sleazy (even damaging) ways to make a quick (perceived) profit.

…and on the opposite end, the idea of being able to share something while retaining control over it is … id offend someone by trying to qualify it and all the while still falling short. its not a coincidence the word ‘release’ is so often used. you release something and its out there, roaming the world, with a life of its own.

these are universal dynamics at play, wherever the answer is, it is not in fighting against them but working with(in) it.

or leave it for the salmon to swim up stream. *shrugs*

go sony go *cringe*

all the best to you.

Generally when you wish to protect your copyright over something in the real world, you place several copies of the content into envelopes, and mail them by recorded delivery to yourself, your solicitor/attorney etc. When a copyright dispute arises, you present the sealed envelope, compare the date it was sent/received to the date the “stolen” work was produced (it would presumably be dated after the hard copy was mailed out), open the envelope and compare the contents against the accused stolen work.

Digital productions can be modified easily, making the creation of fingerprinting algorithms a little troublesome- a texture for example, could be rotated, offset, flipped, tinted to create a texture that had a slightly different fingerprint. In most cases (except for clothing) these differences could quite easily be corrected for in the texture parameters of an object.

The basic gist of a fingerprinting process would be to say “This asset is a stolen copy of that asset”. Visual inspections of a wide variety of content may take time, the purpose of fingerprinting would be to add an extra step/defense in the proceedings. If an automated process identifies that the resultant fingerprints of the accused work and the original work are completely unrelated, that gives weight to the idea that a claim is fraudulent, or if the fingerprints match to within a certain degree, the claim is likely truthful.

Granted, given that the DMCA is quite possibly a big pile of convoluted mess, fingerprinting may just be another pain to deal with- but when OGP swings around, there’ll be asset servers that don’t reside in territories governed by such troublesome legislature.

Additionally, the fingerprinting scheme would be useful for passive identification of stolen content- given a modified viewer (this is the subject that Gwyn and I discussed in more depth).

The idea is that you’d run your content through a program (likely open source) to generate certificates containing the details of the fingerprinting scheme. You’d then “install” these certificates in your viewer of choice.

While browsing around the virtual world, the viewer would have a process in the background that runs the downloaded content through the fingerprint generator (probably not in real-time), and compares the results against your installed “certificates”. Your viewer could then alert you to a discovery, so that you may take appropriate action.

The fingerprinting scheme isn’t only limited to copyright disputes. It could also be used as a means of identifying and implementing content upgrades- you’d have pairs of “certificates”, one for the old content and the other for the newer, high-quality or replacement content, again with appropriate notifications so the content creator can take appropriate action.

A third option that’s just popped into my head (one that Gwyn and I didn’t discuss previously) is that content creators that socialise a fair bit could use the fingerprinting scheme to check of the avatars in attendance of an event were wearing any content they were wearing, allowing those avatars to be notified of any new creations that they might be interested in.

While I agree that it is a problem, I do not see a feasible way of protecting something that involves you sending a copy to them. If it was more like first life, where you can show things to people without giving them copies, the idea of protection would be far more feasible in the regards of trust networks.

I have ideas for preventing or at least keeping texture theft to those with a high level technical background but I also believe that the most obvious way is to simply watermark things. It does not have to be a huge gaping image over your content, it just has to prove the point that its yours, this is where it came from. Even watermarks can be defeated, removed or simply ignored.

I never want to avoid true commerce, its what runs everything. I simply wish to point out that in its current form, those technicalities are stopping points that prevent a true system of protection. The work that I do I hold close to myself and don’t want to see it stolen, but I have come to understand that with enough will, people can and will steal it and claim it as their own.