CopyBot

A fairly important event is happening in Second Life now. Some software called CopyBot, part of the libsecondlife package can apparently make copies of any in game artifact regardless of permissions.

As background, things you make in SL can be assigned permissions, and their creators retain copyright, unlike most games. The creators can then sell you, say, a shirt, and the permissions are such that you can’t replicate the shirt. This artificial scarcity is the cornerstone of the second life economy.

To further complicate things, Linden Labs has stated they have no interest in becoming copyright enforcement. This seems a delicate distinction since they create the software that implements and enforces these permissions. They seem to be saying they are not copyright police, but they do accept that second lifers need better tools to see when people are violating copyright. So, they’re working on it.

It’s interesting though for a couple reasons. People that play second life are much more likely to know about creative commons, and be, in general, aware of free content culture. How will they react to this? Are their reactions any indication of how people will react to post-scarcity economies in the future? I’m glad Linden Labs is taking the approach they are. Giving people the tools to see if something is a violation, but not actually stopping it. This will allow us to really see how people respond. Maybe a solution will emerge where you can copy anything, but if you do you are made some type of pariah, disallowed from entering any of the interesting locations. Maybe when you walk in to one of these places the zone flags you as being a thief, and you have to walk around with a banner over your head. The possibilities are endless really.

Cory Doctorow, as usual, has some interesting points as well regarding the concept of copyrighted works inside proprietary structures.

But there are much gnarlier problems here — for example, in real life, questions of copyright infringement are adjudicated on the basis of law passed by elected lawmakers, while in Second Life, these questions are adjudicated by a company based on its non-negotiable terms of service. You can fire law-makers who make bad copyright, but you can’t fire companies that make bad terms of service. You can take your business elsewhere, but if all your “assets” live in a proprietary virtual world, you have to go away empty handed, without any of your “copyrighted works.”

Cory is not opposed to SL, but those are very good questions. SL is not open source, it’s a for profit enterprise. You can pretend you have the copyright for that shirt all you want, but it resides on private servers. In the end this will be the downfall of second life. Too much of their enterprise is based on false scarcity. They make their money selling land basically, artificial land on their server farms. What happens when there is an open source clone of second life? (it’s not like the graphics are good anyway!) that’s run by some non-profit? You still pay them for co-lo servers, or shared etc, but people would have a say in governance. More importantly they would have the actual right/ability to move their data elsewhere if need be. It seems a more stable solution to me, and one I don’t understand how SL could stop.