{"id":4903,"date":"2014-08-04T09:41:26","date_gmt":"2014-08-04T15:41:26","guid":{"rendered":"https:\/\/www.roughtype.com\/?p=4903"},"modified":"2014-08-04T15:58:39","modified_gmt":"2014-08-04T21:58:39","slug":"a-storm-in-second-life","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/www.roughtype.com\/?p=4903","title":{"rendered":"A storm in Second Life"},"content":{"rendered":"

\"2ndlifesmall\"Remember Second Life? It’s still around, apparently<\/a>. Ten years ago, it was the thing, the ultimate reality disrupter. We were all going to shed our skins, turn into glamorous, or at least skanky, avatars, and flit about Second Life’s\u00a0transplendent\u00a0virtual reality. Liberated\u00a0from our workaday lives, we would fulfill our destiny as\u00a0. . . merchants and consumers.\u00a0<\/em><\/p>\n

“In one important way, this virtual stuff isn’t imaginary at all,” reported <\/em>Business Week in a\u00a02006\u00a0cover story. “Second Life residents [can]\u00a0retain full ownership of their virtual creations. The inception of property rights in the virtual world made for a thriving market economy. …\u00a0<\/span>In January inside Second Life alone, people spent nearly $5 million in some 4.2 million transactions buying or selling clothes, buildings, and the like.\u00a0That can add up to serious change.”<\/em><\/p>\n

But then, in November of 2006, the CopyBot invaded Second Life, and suddenly virtual reality found itself embroiled in a very down-to-earth controversy about copyright and piracy. The incident seemed to reveal something of ontological importance about us and the worlds we create. At the very least, it was funny. I reported on the CopyBot attack in two posts: “Knockoffs Roil Second Life” and “The Dingo Stole My Avatar.” I reprint the posts here.<\/em><\/p>\n

November 15, 2006:<\/strong><\/p>\n

The commercialization of Second Life has hit a speed bump. A new software program, called CopyBot, allows residents of the virtual world to make exact copies of other residents\u2019 creations. The knockoffs threaten the livelihoods of the many entrepreneurs, as well as big companies, that have set up shop selling clothes, trinkets, and other goods in the popular fairy land. As an irate Caliandras Pendragon\u00a0writes<\/a>\u00a0at Second Life Insider, \u201cThose people who are living the dream that is promoted in every article, of earning a RL [real life] income from SL creations, are now living a nightmare in which their source of income may soon be worthless. That\u2019s not to speak of big commercial companies who have paid anything up to 1,000,000 dollars to have their product reproduced in loving detail, who will discover that every Tom, Dick or Harriet may rip off their creation for nothing \u2013 and then sell it as their own \u2026 If someone wanted to destroy the economy of SL I don\u2019t think they could have found a better way.\u201d<\/p>\n

The furor took an ugly turn late last night when,\u00a0according to<\/a>\u00a0the Second Life Herald, a \u201cseething mob\u201d surrounded a CopyBot operation run by Second Life resident GeForce Go. The mob shouted that Go was \u201cruining their Second Life.\u201d Fearing for her safety, Go closed down her shop and sold her land. In a subsequent \u201ctumultous meeting with dozens of angry and fearful residents all talking at once,\u201d Second Life official Robin Linden \u201csought to allay fears of any further concern about mass copyright violations.\u201d<\/p>\n

Now officially\u00a0banned<\/a>\u00a0by Linden Lab, the company that operates Second Life, CopyBot was,\u00a0according to<\/a>\u00a0reporter Adam Reuters of Reuters\u2019 Second Life bureau, \u201coriginally created by libsecondlife, a Linden Lab-supported open source project to reverse engineer the Second Life software \u2026 Amid increasing criticism, the group moved to pull the CopyBot source code, but on Monday evening CopyBot was put up for sale on the online marketplace SLExchange, raising the prospect that it could become widespread.\u201d The resident who is selling the bot, Prim Revolution, demonstrated the machine\u2019s ability by making a precise\u00a0clone<\/a>\u00a0of Adam Reuters himself. Revolution defended the use of CopyBot, saying, \u201cI think the idea of clones and bots is very cool, and I\u2019ll be adding more new features for things like automated go-go dancers at clubs.\u201d<\/p>\n

Second Life watcher Kevin Lim, of the University of Buffalo\u2019s School of Informatics,\u00a0compares<\/a>\u00a0CopyBot to the revolutionary Replicator in Star Trek, which \u201ccan create any inanimate matter, as long as the desired molecular structure is on file, but it cannot create antimatter, dilithium, or a living organism of any kind.\u201d Lim notes that \u201cafter such a machine was invented, currency as we knew it ceased to function. Since everyone had the capability to create (replicate) anything they desire, capitalism as we knew it died, and the new dawn of perfect Marxian philosophy was adopted by the Federation.\u201d<\/p>\n

The CopyBot controversy seems to herald a deeper crisis in Second Life, a struggle over the identity, the very essence, of the virtual land. Will it remain a freewheeling utopian community operating by its own rules, or will it follow the pattern of the web itself and become an essentially commercial operation, a virtual shopping mall filled with advertisements and staged\u00a0PR<\/a>\u00a0events? Is CopyBot a ripoff machine that threatens to destroy Second Life, or is it a sharing machine that would save the community\u2019s soul?<\/p>\n

November 16, 2006:<\/strong><\/p>\n

An uneasy calm hangs over Second Life this morning after two days of protests over the appearance of the\u00a0CopyBot replicator<\/a>. Yesterday, as many as 600 shopkeepers closed their stores in protest, demanding that the online world\u2019s owner, Linden Lab, take action to protect the integrity of their virtual property. The striking merchants,\u00a0according<\/a>\u00a0to Information Week<\/em>, waved signs scrawled with slogans like \u201cStop Buying. Stop Selling. Start Protesting\u201d and \u201cLinden Lab once again did hurt our world.\u201d<\/p>\n

Meanwhile, outside agitator Cory Doctorow, of Boing Boing, raised the specter of an outright revolution in which residents would seize control of Second Life from Linden Lab. \u201cSecond Life\u2019s management is doing an exemplary job of coping with this,\u201d\u00a0wrote<\/a>\u00a0Doctorow, \u201cbut benevolent dictatorships aren\u2019t the same thing as democracies. If a game is going to declare that its players are citizens who own property, can the company go on \u2018owning\u2019 the game?\u201d<\/p>\n

Raph Koster, too,\u00a0sees<\/a>\u00a0the CopyBot dispute as signaling a larger struggle: \u201cwhat\u2019s happening is a small-scale social crisis that brings into sharp relief the split between the hacker-ethic-libertarian-info-must-be-free ethos that underpins much of the technology of virtual worlds, and the rampant commercialism that has actually enabled its embodiment. What we have here is a case of bone fighting blood.\u201d He concludes, darkly:<\/p>\n

\n

As long as Second Life creators are relying on creating content like textures and models \u2026 they will continue to face the same dilemmas as any other content industry. They will be copied. They will be ripped off. They will find their market prices falling. They will agitate for DRM. They will form lobbies with the analogue to a government, and argue that they are in fact the primary cultural contributors in the system. They will, in the end, come to embody everything about the broader, commercial Web that they fled to Second Life in order to escape.<\/p>\n<\/blockquote>\n

But the arrival in Second Life of the CopyBot replicator hasn\u2019t just produced a commercial and a political crisis. It\u2019s brought an existential crisis as well. Because CopyBot can clone entire avatars as well as their possessions, people fear losing their virtual selves. Their sense of what I\u2019ve termed \u201cavatar anxiety<\/a>\u201d is deepening. Writes resident Harle Armistice in a\u00a0comment<\/a>\u00a0on the official Second Life blog:<\/p>\n

\n

I\u2019m sorry, but this isn\u2019t just about sales \u2026 I have a unique av that I made for myself. It\u2019s me, it\u2019s my work, it\u2019s part of my persona. I\u2019ve been wearing it for ages and I will be wearing it likely until the day SL either goes down or I can\u2019t log in anymore. Or I would be, under normal circumstances \u2026 I am terrified to wear my own content because there\u2019s a script out there that any random user can run to steal my stuff if I do.<\/p>\n<\/blockquote>\n

Business Week<\/em> is\u00a0reporting<\/a>\u00a0that \u201csavvy CEOs\u201d are beginning to \u201chang out in Second Life,\u201d \u201corienting themselves around what could emerge as the corporate environment of the future.\u201d IBM chief Sam Palmisano, for instance, proudly declares, \u201cI have my own avatar.\u201d In fact, the magazine\u00a0notes<\/a>, Palmisano has two Second Life avatars, \u201ca casual Sam and a buttoned-down one.\u201d<\/p>\n

What\u2019s going to happen, one wonders, when a CopyBot-armed anarchist comes up to one of the \u201creal\u201d fake Sams and replicates him? It may be a dream of CEOs to be able to clone themselves for posterity, but would they be happy about being cloned by someone else, someone who might then inhabit their virtual identity and use it to spread mischief and confusion? I can\u2019t imagine a captain of industry being sanguine about seeing a copy of himself flying through the air wearing only a g-string or emerging from a virtual\u00a0sex shop<\/a>\u00a0bearing a mammoth Steely Dan. I would recommend that, until the situation becomes clearer, any CEO entering Second Life bring along bodyguard avatars to fend off any possible replicator attack. No company wants to find itself saying, \u201cAn imposter avatar did hurt our world.\u201d<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"

Remember Second Life? It’s still around, apparently. Ten years ago, it was the thing, the ultimate reality disrupter. We were all going to shed our skins, turn into glamorous, or at least skanky, avatars, and flit about Second Life’s\u00a0transplendent\u00a0virtual reality. Liberated\u00a0from our workaday lives, we would fulfill our destiny as\u00a0. . . merchants and consumers.\u00a0 […]<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":1,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"closed","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"_jetpack_newsletter_access":"","_jetpack_dont_email_post_to_subs":false,"_jetpack_newsletter_tier_id":0,"_jetpack_memberships_contains_paywalled_content":false,"_jetpack_feature_clip_id":0,"_jetpack_memberships_contains_paid_content":false,"footnotes":"","jetpack_publicize_message":"","jetpack_publicize_feature_enabled":true,"jetpack_social_post_already_shared":true,"jetpack_social_options":{"image_generator_settings":{"template":"highway","default_image_id":0,"font":"","enabled":false},"version":2},"jetpack_post_was_ever_published":false},"categories":[1],"tags":[],"class_list":["post-4903","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","hentry","category-uncategorized"],"jetpack_publicize_connections":[],"jetpack_sharing_enabled":true,"jetpack_featured_media_url":"","_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.roughtype.com\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/4903","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.roughtype.com\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.roughtype.com\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.roughtype.com\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/users\/1"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.roughtype.com\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fcomments&post=4903"}],"version-history":[{"count":10,"href":"https:\/\/www.roughtype.com\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/4903\/revisions"}],"predecessor-version":[{"id":4917,"href":"https:\/\/www.roughtype.com\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/4903\/revisions\/4917"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.roughtype.com\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fmedia&parent=4903"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.roughtype.com\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fcategories&post=4903"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.roughtype.com\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Ftags&post=4903"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}