I've just learned of a service for the web that allows searching for images based upon imagery, not based upon names, keywords, descriptions or other data, with it you are even able to find cropped, color changed, re-framed and otherwise slightly altered images! One of the biggest problems with trying to discover IP theft and copyright infringement is discovering it within SL. DMCA take downs are apparently immediately followed by re-uploading and redisplay in SL. Successful content creators in SL end up needing to spend much of their time "physically" searching the world and waiting for textures to rez, losing creation time, reducing revenue for themselves as well as Linden Labs, and taxing the service rezzing countless legal textures in the efforts to find stolen ones. Some hire people purely to seek out offenders. Even if textures are "watermarked", those marks would have to be discovered and not lost to recompression if uploaded again. There are videos on YouTube and tools provided purely to steal content with almost no way of discovering such! It occurred to me their image searching service could be applied to this purpose... The service and it's demo video can be found here: http://tineye.com/ The company can be found here: http://ideeinc.com/ According to their demo video, Adobe, AP and DIGG have licensed their technology. At this time they have over a billion images of the web indexed and can search for matching images from an uploaded picture or URL. The search results are ordered with closest matches first and there's even an easy comparison feature between the original and what is found! Wouldn't it be wonderful if there was another search tab in the viewer where one might drag a texture, or paste a UUID, and that search would provide SLurls of where similar images are in world? (Even with different names/UUIDs or having been altered?) Then instead of thieves hiding in obscurity, or behind other languages, or re-uploading stolen content, it might be discovered! Also often with the current implementation of Landmarks, if a store or creator relocates, the LMs lose contact with them. Unless creators have contact information in their picks, it might be hard to discover where they went. This type of search would allow discovery of where their products might be available. Additionally if this search were also implemented on the SL website, non-SL artists would also be able to discover when their artwork is being stolen and resold in SL without their permission. This would help them and improve Linden Lab's image, since currently SL is a haven for such behavior, as artists trying to protect their work can't "see" or "search" within SL.