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If someone steals a texture, this would likely be done by way of intercepting it when sent to the client.
In this case, the thief will have a copy of the texture on their hard drive. Now short of searching everyone's hard drive for images, which is a massive invasion of privacy, unfeasible, and possibly illegal, there is not much that can be done about this. Deleting the objects from inventory would be rather ineffective, as it can simply be reuploaded.. Option 3 is crackable, too. not to mention that this would make it impossible to trade images around and download them from SL. And ina. Really. What. Do you have any idea how many textures are in SL. A pixel by pixel comparison is an intensive thing to do or a single image. Comparing an image with each of the millions of textures in SL, would result in exponentially increasing delays on every upload. I'm not sure how long, but probably several hours/days. I share your concern for this cause, but I'm not seeing what can really be done about this. The only real option is legal action. While I agree with Warkirby on the practicality of the examples offered, I do believe there is simpler solution. Embed an invisible watermark into all images.
The watermark is simple the resident name and upload date. Do something like digimarc. If they using GLintercept like believed then it sould be easy to compare. Also, employ the same script on the suspected forgery that is done on the griefer objects. Delete them from the asset server and then block uploads from the offending account. WarKirby: Given the optimistic assumption that the vast majority of textures uploaded are varied and different, the "first pass" algo can be just a general "rough scan-thru" of the pixel contents.
recap: pixel-by-pixel isn't necessary for vast majority of cases due to dissimilarity in textures. A "first pass" scan could randomly select 20 pixels in comparison with pixels of existing data. If different, then keep; otherwise, "second pass" it; etc. The DMCA take downs are a bit of a joke. Simply taking a vendor off a wall doesnt stop anything. I have had my work taken down then seen the same person put it back up a few hours later. DMCAs are also taking a MONTH or longer before any action is taken. In the case of full perm freebies, a massive amount of damage has already been done in that month. LL should at the very least remove the ripped material from the asset database.
About the skins you see here. It would be very simple for LL to remove these rips without searching everyones inventory. *** Simply grab one of these ripped skins, get the UUIDs of the 3 textures used and delete these textures from the asset server *** When someone tries to wear the skin they will just see "missing image" textures. We already saw this happen when LLs garbage collection was marking assets for deletion by accident. I'm willing to bet all the rips you see here are probably only 1 or 2 different texture sets. It wont stop anyone re-uploading textures but its a GREAT start Whilst I recognise that many of these solutions to the insidious problem of copyright theft are unfeasable and most are technologically difficult I will vote to support this motion because I agree something positive needs to be done on this issue.
It's interesting that the top selling items on onrez.com tend to be the stolen goods. This was one of the stolen skins on the frontpage when I just logged in http://shop.onrez.com
http://shop.onrez.com/item/341567 Ina. Even doing a quick scan, there are millions of textures in SL. It would take an unacceptabbly long time to compare with them. And with each new one, the problem gets worse, and worse, and worse. Even if it were a feasible solution now, it would be totally unscaleable.
Folks, what you have to realize is that there's absolutely NO technical measure that can have any hope of preventing the copying of textures if those textures are sent to end-users. If the data's on my computer, I can make a copy of it. This is a problem that's plagued the world wide web since its inception. This is why DRM systems simply don't work to reliably prevent copying. Any effort put into this kind of technical solution will be wasted because it will always be possible to reverse-engineer it (or just read the code; the client's open-source!) and circumvent it. LL would be wasting effort that could go toward useful progress like bugfixes. Everyone always complains about LL wasting effort that could be put toward bugfixes!
There is one solution that MIGHT help in the specific instance of clothing, skins, etc, although I can already see problems. Right now, the reason it's so easy to copy clothing items including skins is that the base texture used to create the item is sent to each client. Your client merges all clothing layers used on your avatar and sends the result back to the server for distribution to everyone near you. This is called "Baking". Since those individual clothing textures are sent to your computer, it's possible to intercept them and reupload them to make a full-perms version of the clothing item. The baking system was implemented back when processing power was a little more expensive, and LL had a little less to work with. It was decided that efficiency required the computationally expensive process of baking to be done on the client side rather than on the server. I have heard mention by Lindens in town halls that perhaps it's feasible to do baking on the server side by a few special servers dedicated to the task. One advantage this would have would be that the actual clothing textures would never need to be sent all the way out to users' computers; just the baked texture. This means that there's less to steal. It'd probably still be possible to steal skins if this method were in place, because the baked texture created by the server would probably very closely resemble the source image for the skin in question. Other items like clothing wouldn't be as easy to reproduce, especially if they had transparency, because the transparent portions would be merged into the rest of the person's outfit, including underlayers and skin. So it's not a perfect solution, and I'm dubious as to whether the benefits outweigh the need fo rmore processing power at LL and development work. However, this is the only technical solution that is even remotely feasible and useful for mitigating the theft of clothing textures. Any other solution like those described above is pointless, especially given the fact that the client is open-source. Funks idea is usefull.. and is not very difficult technically.
Yes, people can still reupload the textures, but it WILL stop the massive spread of stolen items though full permission shops and resell. It will be a good step. If this stealing will go on, it may ruin a big part of secondlifes business. If people can get the highest quality skins for free, who would still buy the originals? It also kills business for any skin business, because who would still pay for any normal skin if they can get the highest quality skins for free? So many items are beeing stolen nowadays, it's just a matter of time till all popular skins, clothings, texture based furniture, tatoos, houses will be stolen and turn into freebie. As wrong and hurtful as this is to folks there Is little to nothing that can be done by Linden Lab. As stated by others DMCA does not work but will work is taking the law to them. Trade mark and or copyright all you original work. If you find some one steeling your designs sue them for copy right / trademark infringement . Its also important to note that if your case is proven and you win in court lawyers fees are paid by the defendant.
I disagree Crusials Armitages' post on several points:
* Off course Linden labs can do more than they do now. Its crazy if people have to remove their item after a DMCA and can put it back 10 minutes later because they still have in in their inventory. 95% of people selling stolen items are NOT the rippers themselves, so they could not reupload them, since they do not have the original textures. Most of them are (full perm) resellers or newbies in malls. Can you still find a mall in secondlife where the skins on top of the page arent sold for 5-25$? This wide spreading is a huge problem, not just the ripping alone. * Getting the UUIDs of the textures used and deleted these textures from the asset server, would delete al of the illegal copies at once, so a shop owner would not have to file hundreds of DMCAs against all people reseling their skins and start hundreds of law suits against all of those people (most resellers do not even knowing they are selling stolen items). It's impossible to sue all resellers too. The ripper may be the one that caused the problem, but the resellers that are spreading items for bottom prices that hurt the original creators most and should be stopped too. Also, it would save the lindens a lot of time, not having to go through hundreds DMCAs for copies of the same rip. * In many cases it may be impossible to track down the original ripper, this person could create/have a basic membership which does not have any info about who they are in real life. Who are you going to sue then? Since texture theft is now getting very common it seems reasonable to expect LL to take proactive steps to discourage the rippers.
Even just assigning one person to go through registered texture theft complaints and ban people / withhold bank balances seems reasonable and might discourage others from ripping textures for profit. The only downside is false positives. I'd hate someone to get banned because they bought or took a freebie without knowing it was ripped in the first place. It gets my vote for requiring human intervention. I'm not sure there is an IT solution to this one. I assume most resellers of the stolen goods didn't upload them themselves, and probably some of the more dense ones even have no idea they're stolen.
Given that, along with a simple UUID asset deletion of the stolen texture, going after the creator of the texture will lead straight to the person who stole it. The creator of textures, clothing etc..basically anything non-prim, cannot be faked. Of course it is to be assumed that the one who stole it simply used an alt account. Going after the people who -sell- the thing or buy it is bad..as Fluf said, many false positives. Bad bad bad. Removal of the uuid-grabber in the client is senseless..it can simply be reapplied via patch, and you cannot redistribute a texture via its mere uuid anyways. 3rd party programs cannot be blocked out due to the same process...apply patch, and it's circumvented. The only solution on the LL side would indeed be a better way to report stolen goods...the main problem here is...it's hard not to make that abusable. A new texture store opens, mischievous person comes along, steals all textures, uploads and claims to be the real creator. Depending on how much of a smooth talker the thief is, things might not go well for the original creator. Never underestimate the cruelty of the corrupted to get what they want. The only way to reduce that possibility is to have LL check the creation date. I am however not sure if that gets stored internally for textures. I really hope it is. Given the fact that abuse reports already suffer a huge delay and are usually considered useless already if a single person complaints, the question remains if this new process would be done in an effective manner in the first place. Also fake or revenge-driven complaints come to mind that just would stress and overload the team handling those. Meh. This is just hard to handle, all in all. Here's the facts as I see them:
1. Ripping textures is trivial. I won't explain how for obvious reasons, just telling you that it's very easy and Linden Labs has no control over this. No amount of technical magic Linden Labs can do will stop this, short of letting the GPU burn cycles (and even than it probably wouldn't be to hard for the rippers to adjust). 2. Folllowing from the above, blocking at upload is the only way to ensure copyright compliance. Any technical solution must therefore be able to make comparisons, know about rights for original texture and the newly uploaded texture, and somehow magically know that the uploaded texture is in fact created (imagine a texture taken from images.google.com) by the uploader and the original uploader has any rights to claim copyright at all. In short; a technical solution would either be too lax, overly strict or just straight from 2000 years into the future. 3. Determining copyright is hard for many textures. Skins are specific to the Second Life game engine, and as such somewhat more easy (assuming they aren't mangled beyond recognition), but other types of textures can be much harder to assess. 4. Therefore, the only way to effectively and fairly deal with these issues, is by human processes. Luckily, there's one in place already; the DMCA! Which brings us to... 5. For some odd reason, LL seems to ignore pretty much all DMCA notices from in-game companies. Why they do this is beyond me as they are taking a huge legal and financial risk by not following DMCA notices. LL claims DMCA notices are the only way to handle copyright disputes yet ignores most, whilst many would be very easy to validate and even blindly following DMCA notices is legally completely save for LL. Quite frankly I'm just waiting for somebody to sue LL over an ignored DMCA notice. If the notice was valid, LL would be in deep shit, but that's a different matter. 6. Deleting (or more likely, replacing) textures can be a massive problem for the social structure of SL. Imagine a basic texture which is ripped and then sold, then bought by an unsuspecting builder and used in some object which is then sold to another person. That person would suddenly have a crippled object which she paid for, and for which she did no wrong. Obviously there's a guilty party somewhere, but it could be buried deep between layers of perfectly honest and unsuspecting vendors and builders. Imagine the impact it would have on the SL world if textures would be deleted. Obviously LL has incentive to NOT do anything about DMCA complaints for textures. Make your own conclusions. Personally, I think this is something LL needs to sort out for itself. Does it want to increase the scale of economy or does it want to milk the current economy. Currently they seem to prefer the status quo. I have just added two new skins to the stolen list which are freebie now. There are several more skin of which I know they have been stolen, but to protect the creator I won't post them here untill they have been massively spread. Two more skins ruined, and nothing is beeing done about it.
It's not just the ripper that should be stopped, but *even more* the reselling of items. Rippers are already beeing deleted. This topic is about stopping the *spread* of stolen items which is killing business, about stopping the reselling of items from -people who rely on teir creations for a real life job- from becoming freebie, destroying their business. Its about stopping the massive violation of DMCAs which linden labs does virtually nothing about. Having every popular item for free may sounds nice to newcomers but will destroy skin business in secondlife on the longer term. Who still wants to create a skin knowing it's only a matter of time till it will be stolen? Linden Labs halfhearted way of 'reporting DMCAs but leaving the stolen items inworld' is doing *nothing* to stop items from beeing sold. The spreading should be stopped and that's what this topic is about. Let's stay on topic. A ripper has been caught red handed:
Durilka Voom is selling stolen X2 skins at Royier (105, 106, 95) listing her as the CREATOR meaning she is the ripper too. She has her payment info on her file, so Secondlife *knows who she is* I have reported it to the X2 creator, and hope my message arrived now we finally can see what SL really does with rippers. This ripper deserves a permanent ban! No it doesn't mean she is the ripper. You're kind of putting two and two together and making five. If she bought the skins wholesale full perms with no idea that they were stolen (there are plenty of full perm skins knocking about in wholesale shops), then surely is she quite entitled to do what she wishes with them even to take the textures, mess around a bit with them if she wants then upload them in which case she would be shown as creator.
@sandie ...and there's the problem in a nutshell.
Linden Labs has two options. 1. Act fast and hard upon DMCA complaints. Immediately scan for and remove/mangle all copies of infringing textures and upsetting innocent buyers who'll loose money and whose only recourse would be with the person they bought the stolen texture from. Block the account of the thief and rebursing customers and/or copyright owner with the account's funds if the thief does not file a DCMA counter-complaint within the allotted time. Though most likely the account won't hold sufficient funds. 2. Not act and end up seeing all the best content providers and builders leave SL. Even if they won't leave SL immediately, they'll leave as soon as an alternative comes along and at the very least will probably stop making new content, possibly risk the negative media attention that SL is effectively a copyright thief's paradise, thus discouraging new content providers to start and eventually marginalizing the skin texture market and losing money. It's a long term vs. short term scenario. If SL wants to keep profitting from the skin texture creators, it needs to act as described in 1 (which is normal in real-life) and start handling DMCA complaints as DMCA regulations require them to do. I'm not sure if this is even remotely possible but here's an idea. I was wondering if secondlife would be able create its own watermarking feature. (not for DMCA purposes but perhaps to block any pre-uploaded/SLwatermaked image from be re-uploaded again by non-approved creators)
Option A: A creator watermarks his/her textures upon upload or in-game (optional). If this texture were hacked, and the hacker tried to re-upload the texture into his/her SL, the feature would be able to read and recognize that this texture was already uploaded and watermarked, and either crash the game or fail the upload. Creators could have lists of approved up-loaders (in case they would like to share their watermarked textures with another resident or alternate account.) Any resident would also be able to re-upload their own textures at any point. If option A is too complicated, option B would be: LL creates a system where any chosen uploaded texture could be marked, never to be uploaded again by anyone. It would prevent anyone from hacking an in-game texture, but unlike Ina's idea still allow users to upload similar/same images, (say two users found a free one online) and take far less time to recognize. The option to protect your texture from being re-uploaded would be optional. Uploading a watermark-free texture would still be possible for those wishing to give them out on full perms for people to modify and use.) Again, I have no clue about how any of this could work. It's an idea. | |||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||
Meta Issue
Reopened
Major
Stopping texture theft and stop spreading of stolen items
Every uploaded texture should have a pixel-by-pixel comparison with existing textures. Given the optimistic assumption that the vast majority of textures uploaded are varied and different, the "first pass" algo can be just a general "rough scan-thru" of the pixel contents. In the rare case of an exact duplicate, perhaps provide the second-hand-uploader with the name of the person who first uploaded the texture.
On a tangent issue, full-mod builds often have their creators nullified, when the next owner links his own prim as the root prim. The system should also be modified so that creator does not change after transfer.