By Prokofy Neva, Virtualtor
So that was a very long post because I think out loud and publish my reflections. I thought it would be interesting to think of all the experiences I have had with Contraption over the years, such as they are, as someone totally on the fringe of what I now see is a fiercely-tight-knit and loyalist posse. That is, there are likely hundreds -- thousands -- of Contraption customers who don't read the forums or social media or follow any of these issues, and are just busy trying to figure out now why that funny bird they bought broke when that man at the store seemed so nice.
But on Twitter, there are all kinds of furries available to pounce, and it's hard to walk around the robots.
So I want to summarize this unfortunately wrangle because it really is important not due to the personalities involved but the issue of how you deal with IP protection in virtual worlds -- through the edicts of top creator gods and their notions of life, or tools within the viewer that may not work, or control of third-party viewers with Copybot capacity that log on with the rest of the majority of the population.
None of these topics are taboo, outdated, or not allowed to be discussed by non-technical people, because we all have a stake in the world.
Walton Wainright issued what he perceived as a "public service announcement" although it had the curt and annoyed tone of an edict. He urged people to stop using anti-rez scripts in their no-mod clothing because such scripts didn't protect against Copybot, as is rumoured, and they only add excess script time and cripple sims and RP choices.
So with this edict, he impugned that creators of clothing -- and many are women -- are stupid. They believe in a myth. They don't know any better and use totemic icons to ward off the evil spirit of IP theft. Worse, they bring down the wrath of content kings like himself because they forced him to buy a new RP outfit -- he couldn't open up the no-mod item and reduce its script usage.
Oh, possibly he meant only NEW creators who didn't know any better. He didn't say that until much later. I will be contacting every user of these scripts simply to hear what they think. I like to check stories.
I don't go to RP sims or at least very rarely but I got to live music and DJ events and art gallery openings and I get it about the need to reduce script time, which is usually done by removing attachments, as a kind of common courtesy in SL. I have no idea if Walton Wainright ever goes to live music or art gallery openings, I never see him. SL is such a small world that every time I go to a shopping event or any event at all, I will see if not a friend or acquaintance, a tenant. I can walk along the mall at Shop 'n Hop and see many people I know. And I'm not famous, and I'm nobody compared to Walton.
So when Walton, who is famous, and the top content creator of SL in my view (not necessarily MY favourite, but the recognized King), I worry when he basically tells everyone to take out IP theft protection scripts, they don't work.
I don't like that, because I know they do work -- when we are talking about certain use cases, and that means givers of food and full perm mesh, among others.
And that's because the problem MOST creators face isn't Copybot, which isn't as ubiquitous as imagined or we wouldn't have the world we have, but theft by conscious human beings taking full perm models and violating the TOS that went with them. Or taking full perm items meant as freebies for the community, and selling them.
It took a great deal of persistence, and stamina in getting past all the goons that clustered around Walton (I'm going to credit him with not having whistled for them) to keep explaining why he was being so destructive in his pronouncements and get him to climb down.
He then conceded there were other use cases, conceded that for full perm items that were temp-rez, copyright protection scripts made sense, or for certain other uses like HUDs in a game and felt chuffed that he had repeated himself three times -- but I only repeated myself because he still wouldn't see the larger picture.
For one, I don't think he covered all the use cases -- he never acknowledged that some creators just want to make sure people are driven to "add" or "wear" and don't start rezzing things out. He didn't acknowledged that the close perusal of a rezzed-out dress doesn't need Copybot -- it can mean a person is "inspired" to make a similar item, so similar it leads to vicious catfights on the forums, inworld, and on Discord. My God, it's Hair Fair right now. Do you think there isn't a diva weeping into her pillow somewhere that her hair has been stolen?
The regrettable affair might have ended there, but then I began to see Walton in his sub-tweets, and realized I had granted him too much the benefit of the doubt.
Walton styled himself to his posse as someone patiently repeating himself, and even offered a paw of sympathy to a skunk who claimed entirely falsely that I had harassed him, based on his garbled reading of my time line, and claimed I even come into another conversation to harass him. So because I merely responded to a tweet I can see in my feed, this skunk felt his safe space was invaded. The enormous thin-skinned nature of these geeks and designers! They have this provincial belief that they talk only among themselves in their posse when online, and no one else can comment! Why don't they go on Discord and filter the door? I often find these people don't realize they are on the Internet, on Twitter, where anyone who sees a RT of them, or who looks up a topic (I seldom do that) can talk to them. They can always use the mute button. None of them do because they are endlessly primed for drama and curiosity about what you will say.
Of course, if that other convo involves the transgender topic and the debate around "pregnant people" from PaulaNYT, and you happen to disagree about that term, even if you support transgender people and acknowledge their authenticity, i.e. opposing Macy, then you will be prima facie a TERF or a Trumpkin. So that skunk can then run whining to Walton, who is gay, that someone is mean about LGBT. All of that is utterly false and you just have to read my tweets.
Add to that the utterly insane goon who appeared with my vandalized Wikipedia -- I assure you that a) I don't think Black people put bugs in Romney's apps or that b) because a Democrat shop had a Black coder in it that they deliberately made Romney's apps fail. You can go and read my blog instead of the insanity of Wikipedia and anonymous idiots on Twitter.
Yes, if SL weren't bad enough, with its totally screechy and unjust forums, Twitter is even worse with these personas.
Now why did I mix in with this? And I'd do it again in a heartbeat because I don't need to be popular and loved the way these people do.
Because I don't think Walton should tell people their efforts to stop Copybot are empty and worthless -- and indeed they are -- without providing an alternative.
He hastens to tell you that the alternative is him being nice and helping designers with DMCA takedown notices. Sorry, that doesn't scale. He wants now every creator who uses anti-rez -- and there are thousands of them -- to come to his door now? Because Copybot is everywhere, right?
This haughtly dismissal of people's home remedies and admonition to go file DMCAs aren't just condescending, they're absurd -- because we live in a regime that has permissions supplied by a company that claims it provides acknowledgement and protection of user IP, unlike other tech companies.
Once having put in those permissions, they need to be challenged FOR SURE when they are breached by third-party viewers. The end. This is not hard to understand for those who aren't immersed in the open source cult.
If you think copyright can only be protected by DMCA notices, why have permissions? They are pointless then. Let's remove "transfer" and be done with it.
After all, Contraption has another very important weapon in the war on Copybot -- the posse. You can be sure that if someone rips Contraption's lovely frock coat with the alchemist symbols, which I wore myself for weeks, that an entire goon squad of his loyal customers and pals will descend on that ripper's head. That's always the social quotient around Copybot incidents.
There might not necessarily be any finding of facts as in a court of law. But if the fake coat isn't removed from the thief's store, then LL might step in, especially if you have a hotline to Lindens as a top creator in their Shop 'n Hop, doing their builds. I would think not 24 hours would pass before a DMCA notice, an alert to LL, before that creep is pulverized and removed from SL, with only red mist where he once stood.
Meanwhile, someone like me will need NINE MONTHS to get grief cubes on physics tumbling up and down a nearby lot with a no-show neighbour removed by Governance.
I can discover something I bought on the MP is in fact a famous cartoon on iphones that I just didn't realize; I can try to send a protest or a complaint somewhere -- but the Lindens don't take complaints -- there is no space on the AR sheet. I can only use the posse method as well, telling people in groups not to buy it, deleting it from my inventory, posting a blog about it.
LL would have to wait for that famous cartoonist to take an interest in Second Life and send a takedown notice to some fly-by-night operation hawking bad copies of her cartoon on the MP for 10L.
Where is this going to lead? Increasing stratification between top designers with LL's ear who have the resources -- and RL businesses -- to file DMCA takedowns to Copybot wranglers -- and the rest of us who don't. Between people with the loyal posses to fan out and bring retribution to Copybot fencers -- and those of us who don't.
But there are other solutions, about which I will post soon.
Comments