With the growth of secondlife, texture theft is becoming more and more of a problem. Textures of several major brand skins have beeing stolen, and the skins are beeing resold full permission, making them turn into freebies in no time.
Several Naughty Designs skins, X2 skins and some other major skin brands have already been the victim of this, making their items lose value when they spread. Most popular stores items already have been ripped and are sold in many stores. (I wont name the stores here to protect the creators but the lindens can contact me to get a list.. if they ever will reply to this issue)

Although the DMCA can be used to stop stolen textures from beeing sold or given away, its hardly possible to stop them before they already have spread to hundreds of inventories of residents that may start selling/giving away that same item themselves (and not even know it's stolen).

It's very hard for the creators of popular items to on the long term to stop them from spreading through secondlife. On the longer term the DMCA alone has not enough impact.
There are stolen copies out there of almost every big brand now

Any help on this issue will be welcome.

List of ideas:

• When a succesfull DMCA is filed for a stolen item (in cases where the stolen item has a different UUID from the original, ripped by an outside program and reuploaded), get the UUIDs of the textures used and delete these textures from the asset server, so all spread copies won't work anymore (and will show "texture missing", or could be replaced with a "stolen item" texture) This will limit the wide spread of stolen items. Why isn't this done?

• Give creators of textures when uploading the option to only allow objects which list them as the creator use the textures. This would prevent the copying of UUIDs.
  This idea has its own topic where it is explained and can be discussed: https://jira.secondlife.com/browse/VWR-4970

• DMCA response should be to block all instances of stolen goods from SL, not just close vendors.
  This issue has its own topic: http://jira.secondlife.com/browse/SVC-1446

• There should be some kind of database for people who like to register their textures as theirs, so in case they get stolen they don't have to file a single DMCA for every thief. Sueing people with a DMCA is risky, since the rippers can get their private info when they counterfile. When you are the creator of a skin it's not hard to prove you created it, since skins are made in many stepts that rippers can't reproduce. That way will make it easier to get rid of thieves and resellers.

• Items which are stolen could be deleted from the inventory of those that resell them in their shops and are filed with a DMCA or be made no transfer so they can't put them back in their shops anymore. Now rippers can just put back the items in another shop around the corner and keep selling them or send them to an alt. (after all, most people reselling stolen items are not the rippers themselves, so they don't have the textures on their harddrive. most of them are (full permission) resellers or newbies in malls.)

• People who have uploaded stolen textures should be banned from SL completely. In several cases the ripper had payment info on file, so they know who it is. This person should not be allowed back.

• Suggestion by Mallory Cowen:
  "Banning thieves is useless as they just keep coming back with new alt accounts, there are even ways around IP/hardware bans. We need to bring back the system where everyone have to verify their identity when joining Second Life, for example by providing their credit card number. If someone breaks the ToS, they get banned by their credit card. As long as it's easy to create new accounts, it will always be easy to sell stolen items."

After all the wide spreading of stolen items is a huge problem, maybe even more than the ripping itself. The ripper may be the one that caused the problem, but the resellers that are spreading items for bottom prices and should be stopped too, because they hurt the original creators the most. They hurt other shops too, because who can compete with secondlife most popular items beeing sold for just 5$? Also, it would save the lindens a lot of time, not having to go through hundreds DMCAs for copies of the same rip.

On the long term, a way to make it harder to rip the textures themselves could be invented too, because now even totally unskilled people rip textures easily. Although its impossible to make this 100% failproof, the amount of people that could rip would be much smaller, and the amount of stolen items would be much less if only skilled people could steal them and not everyone.
Even though making ripping 100% failproof isn't possible, why not try and limit the damage it does and stop the spreading as much as possible?
The DMCA and current methods are failing MISERABLY, ANY improvement on the system of stolen items would be welcome, suggestions and ideas are very welcome too.

What use is it to say people have copyright of their items when nothing is done to prevent stealing or spreading?

I just found an old linden blog about this, (february 2006)

http://blog.secondlife.com/2006/02/14/opengl-copying-and-stealing/

" One example is the concept of first use. Linden Lab is currently making changes to
make it easier to determine who originally created an asset and its creation
date. While much of this data currently
exists, it isn't displayed in the UI. By
exposing this data, it will be much easier for residents in a conflict to be
able to clearly determine which texture or object was created first,
simplifying conflict resolution for all parties involved."

Almost 2 years ago linden lab was working on this, and thinking about other options for this problem (read full post). I would like to know if there has been progress in this?

And: http://blog.secondlife.com/2006/11/13/copyrights-and-content-creation-in-second-life/
(november 2006) has many ideas from the Lindens themselves. Why weren't they implemented? What was the reason for it?

• You may have heard us talk about "first use metadata", that is a time stamp that is attached to your creations, including uploaded textures, that shows first use. First use is an important part of being able to claim copyright ownership. This work is started, and we are committed to completing it quickly.

• We could work to reduce how much avatar/clothing data is downloaded, so that a copy can be made of the baked texture and shape but not the pieces. We're interested in your thoughts on that option.

• We can reduce incentives to copying content within the system, by preserving the creator attribution such as with creative commons licensing.

• We could create hover text which would act like a garment label does, exposing both the first use metadata and also a brand name, reducing the incentive to copy by making it obvious that copying is occurring. If your work is "signed", and clearly you developed it first, then the person who purchases the copy is not unlike the person who buys the fake Rolex off the back of a truck. Plus the signature becomes a recognizable asset and could be coupled with a landmark as a form of advertising.