Most hyperbolic title of the morning thus far goes to Wired declaring that Second Life Will Save Copyright. Enough already, people. Second Life is a lot of things to many different people, but copyright savior is not one of them.

The company plans to develop an infrastructure to enable Second Life residents and landowners to enforce IP-related covenants within certain areas, or as a prerequisite for joining certain groups. In effect, Second Life’s inhabitants will self-police their world, according to rules and social norms they develop themselves.

This is exciting, because it turns Second Life into a laboratory for trying out alternatives to prevailing real world copyright rules.

Exciting? Hmm, rather I think this puts more red tape on something that was supposed to be open and free (as in free to roam, not free in $$).

To bring readers up to speed who aren’t spending any time in their second life (can’t blame you there), there is an object running around the world called CopyBot creating copyright havoc which can copy other objects at will and without the copyright holder’s permission, including textures and prims and perhaps even the accompanying scripts. These digital copies can be given away, used or sold without compensating the creator.

I’ve spent nearly a year now in Second Life (Dec 31, 2005), owned land, created an alternate avatar, run a business inside SL as well as participated in a group blog which covers MMO with a primary focus on SL. You can find me logged into SL daily and can buy objects and scripts I’ve created in world that CopyBot may have already copied without my permission. Hopefully this gives me enough direct knowledge in what’s going on in world to offer some experienced commentary.

First my thoughts on the CopyBot saga are simple: Linden Labs can’t have the dreamworld open platform they’d like to have and also be our copyright saviors. If Linden Labs steps aside I certainly don’t want government to step in and muck up the world. In terms of who created what and when, there already exists plenty of ways to prove I’m the copyright owner of something. From the article, I understand Linden Labs is going to work on some better way of identifying when an object is first created by whom, but I’m sure that will be hacked too.

Let’s use this blog for an example. Every time I write something, pings go out and notify dozens of other services. Thousands of bots hit this site regularly. In a nutshell, timestamps are going off all over the world shortly after I press the publish button. That’s my creation date with the text you’re reading and it would be almost impossible to take that publish date away from me everywhere.

In the case of Copybot and the business owners concerned about being ripped off and wanting Linden Labs or some government organization to help them? Please, no. I don’t want any more political and/or governmental intervention into our businesses. Yes, even if this means our creations will become prey for Copybot and its ilk. A copy is never the original. It doesn’t have the soul of the work, even if it has the virtually identical artificial appearance of the work. CopyBot isn’t going to make new versions, it’s only going to attempt to steal the bits.

Upgrades are one way creators can keep a step ahead of piracy. Another way is to create an online component (hint, hint) as part of objects. If the business is only in Second Life and doesn’t try to connect to the web beyond SL an opportunity exists there to combat CopyBot.

I’m not happy about CopyBot stealing my work, but there are ways to deal with these programs — both socially and directly — without needing government or other organizations. These SL merchants closing their businesses in form of protest are only hurting their own pockets. Linden Labs is flooding the world with new recruits — many of which might not even be 18 thanks to not requiring credit card verification — and if these new citizens are armed with tools like CopyBot the market will correct itself.

For years the music industry was taking advantage of its customers and artists. The RIAA has desperately been trying to hold onto an old model that made them rich, but the artists have embraced the internet to go direct to the people. CopyBot might enable others to steal the music of some famous artist, but the person who sells the songs isn’t the artist and it will become clear through other social means that no program can ever duplicate.

Of course when someone make CreateBot that is able to perfectly emulate and create new objects as we would have, than I’ll be much more concerned. Since the part of that word “perfect” insinuates something human beings aren’t, I don’t see that happening anytime soon in our first life, much less our second lives.

Why Linden Labs won’t be the copyright savior
As I write this, the sign on screen indicates there are some 1,544,736 “total residents” with 616,479 logging on within the last 60 days and 6,940 online right now. Almost weekly you can depend on some sort of exploit that taking down the grid and leaving some weird message from a Linden (the last name used in world by the company Linden Labs). The media loves to report on all the happenings like SL is some revolutionary thing and while the 3D world is cool and has taken the MMO non-game to business applications, it isn’t going to save anything while it keeps having trouble saving itself on a weekly basis.

The bigger problems Linden Labs seems unconcerned, unable or unwilling to solve are attrition and scaling. With the former, consider residents like Kent Newsome:

But I have grown bored with my personal Second Life experience. I’m not big on chatting with strangers, and there is no Second Life collective for tech bloggers- at least not one that I have been invited to participate in. I have been thinking for months about canceling my account.

Kent’s frustrations are familiar to the most popular type of SL resident, I think, which helps explain why such a small number of people registered are actually using the service (the number has since increased to over 14,000 while writing this piece). When creators come to SL they look to build and share like Amazon technical evangelist, Jeff Barr and Hipcast guru Eric Rice. I came to SL not to chat with strangers or join with other tech bloggers, but was interested in building a virtual world expansion for my existing programming business. I’ve been teaching myself Linden Scripting Language and exploring how I might utilyze SL as an additional business opportunity over the last year. If I had been looking for what Kent was interested in, I would have been gone after the first month.

(BTW Kent, if you are reading, feel free to drop me a line in world sometime, if you like. Maybe I can point you to something of interest.)

Linden Labs should recognize that the resident attrition is clearly tied to attracting different kinds of goal-oriented people and help these people better experience SL. The consumer/traveler/reporter wants to do stuff, get involved, report on the happenings and enrich their life somehow, perhaps even expand their interests in a new, different and exciting way. The business owner wants to setup shop, extend their business, promote their brand and turn a profit. The creator wants to build something cool for themselves and/or share with others either for free or maybe someday a profit (cross to business owner). Instead of drawing more red tape over how intellectual property is handled, Linden Labs should be focusing on how to cater, educate and enrich the resident experience based upon these goals and criteria.

As a business owner, creator and minor consumer in SL, I have one major concern that trumps all others including copyright. It’s the dealbreaker for me.

Scaling.

If I can’t rely on Second Life to keep my store up and running because they were taken down by CopyBot or a teen or prepubescent griefer in an allegedly adult area or whatever than that negatively impacts my business. There is some degree of downtime expected when doing business online, but it should be extremely minimal (like 99%+ uptime). Downtime online is the equivalent of a closed shop offline. When you are closed the cash register isn’t ringing. Over the last 11 months, I’ve experienced a completely unacceptable amount of downtime and zero compensation from LL for the downtime. If they don’t fix this very business-oriented issue that will make me close shop and abandon my second life.

Some might attribute these problems to growing pains, but even when all systems are go the minute more than 75 avatars assemble in a single server (sim), things start to go bonky. It’s a well known problem among regular residents and something I’m surprised more reporters don’t put in bold type in every Second Life article. From a business perspective, seriously, tell me in what other world than our Second Life people will pay hundreds of dollars per month (up from $195/month to $295/month for a server) for a service which starts buckling under the load of 75 people simultaneously active?

From a business owner perspective, scaling is a much worse problem than copyright. Yes, even with CopyBot running rampant, flaunting the weakness of both issues.

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