It’s lynch mob time in Second Life again, and boy are those Virtualfolk angry this time! While the hyperactive PR landslide continues, with all manner of Hip Cool Trendy Real People discovering this cutting edge ‘Life 2 Thing’, and promptly annoying the hell out of everyone by claiming to be the first company to have an online shop, EVER!!1!, and also the first online newspaper EVER!!1!, the more long time residents have a new and quite apocalyptic threat to worry about than massively out of control PR pushing the platform well beyond it’s capabilities and everyone else's indulgence. It’s those wacky open-source communists again, with a project called ‘libsecondlife’.

www.libsecondlife.org

Now I’m not terribly technical, but as far as I can make out, libsecondlife is an open source collaborative development project, aimed at providing all sorts of interfaces between the essentially closed world of SL, and The Outside – various desktop applications for editing things, websites, databases, and so on. The project seems to have some degree of official support, approval and backing by Linden Lab themselves, and has all the hallmarks of being one of those instances where naïve Scientists start banging bits of Uranium together, ‘to see what will happen’, and then see only that the ensuing result could provide cheap clean electricity for everyone!

Rambling analogy aside, what seems to have happened is that one of their debugging tools, created in the exact above spirit, seems to have been tweaked, and stolen/leaked/released in to the wild. Called ‘CopyBot’, it does exactly what it says on the tin, and is a third party application capable of almost completely circumventing the SL in-built copy-permissions system on just about every ‘thing’ in the game world, save compiled scripts.

I think it was Raph Koster who notoriously posted the observation:

“Never trust the client.
Never put anything on the client. The client is in the hands of the enemy. Never ever ever forget this.”

I seem to remember him getting a lot of flak for this glaring PR own-goal at the time, but it doesn’t make it any less true, and in the case of SL, pretty much everything is in the hand of the enemy. Only a few months ago, 11m+ cubes started turning up on the various online SL shop websites, for silly amounts of made-up-money, simply because ordinarily, the maximum sized cube you can make, is 10m. But some bright spark managed to hack the client, where the size limitation resided, and started making huge huge prims, unchecked by the server.

LL’s response to the CopyBot epidemic has been pretty harsh, declaring the application to be a ToS Violation:

Official Linden Blog: Use of CopyBot and Similar Tools a ToS Violation

This is a quite desperate kind of last resort, suggesting that a technical solution is not immediately feasible, and fear of the legal ban-stick is all they can muster for the time being. It’s doubly surprising in SL’s case, as the whole world exists on a very lassiez faire footing, and normally, pretty much anything goes in there. Certainly, in any other MMO, this would be called ‘Duping’, and you’d expect no less, but in SL things are less clear-cut – it’s perfectly all right to dupe objects you’ve made yourself, for example.

Virtual property protection has always been rather haphazard and flaky in there. One particular tool has been causing rumblings of discontent and taking its toll on skin and clothing designers for some time. It lifts viewed, and potentially copy-protected, textures directly from the graphics card memory, allowing one to re-upload them as your own, free of copy protection, and on the face of it, is almost impossible to do anything about.

This current episode is very serious however, as many people are in there to build things, and then sell them for money, imaginary AND real, and the arrival of this CopyBot on the scene, with it’s reputedly simple one-click interface, has significantly rocked most Content Creators' faith in the system, making them less likely to bother in the first place. And clearly, without people to actually make the fox costumes, sex poses, SLingo games and cutting edge revolutions in online retail, far less of the consumers are likely to stick around and spend their money. Why bother paying when you can download a tool and go on a help-yourself spree? It's not as if the stuff is real, afterall...

Obviously CopyBot will be stopped and dealt with, but what about the next one? And the next one? And behind these occasional malicious and intentional threats to their world, are the seemingly constant rumbles of accidental bugs, technical issues, teething troubles and system overloads. The problem here seems to be twofold.

Firstly LL seem to have a very cool and groovy attitude to the whole project. For them, SL really is destined to be the zOMGMetaverse!!1! They do indeed seem the somewhat bewildered crazy-haired scientists of the piece, perhaps thinking a little too much of how much people can experience, grow, learn and achieve with their platform, and too little of how much people can lie, cheat, steal and hurt others with it. Perhaps a more draconian approach, such as we usually see form the Blizzards and SOEs of the world, might help here? An open source project built largely around packet-sniffing and deconstructing your file internal file formats would never be allowed to exist in any other MMO, and it's only a matter of time before we see a SL Emulator come out of it all.

The second problem is that the whole endeavour seems to have become far too popular for it’s own good. Their current mission of getting as many people along for the ride as possible, and accompanying media frenzy, is indeed working – hundreds of thousands of people are coming to have a look. Trouble is, not all of them are friendly, committed to the Cause, or that invested in its success. Lower and lower barriers to entry also lower how much value people place on it, and how difficult it is to get back in to cause more mischief if you’re thrown out.

As for me, I’ve always found the idea of trying to make a primary income from what amounts to little more than ‘LEGO Online’ somewhat dubious. I like building in there, certainly, but do so for its own sake, and not with giddy dreams of 'Step 3: Profit!!!' It’s with some small sense of smugness then, that I seem to be vindicated in my cynicism once more.

Second Life really is shaping up to be a monumental train-wreck waiting to happen. I'll miss it when it's gone, and be sad, but the fascinating part of it all for me, is trying to work out how it’s going to happen, rather than if…

(One of the ways this apocalypse might come about, is if LL, under pressure, or not, start seriously cracking down on Copyright. You see there is an essential hypocrisy involved at the core of this whole DMCA Intellectual Property Theft issue in Second Life. It's one thing to bitch and moan that that evil bad-men are 'in ur shop, steelin ur textures', but just where exactly did YOU get that texture from in the first place, hmm? I wonder... Swords generally cuts both ways, I find, and surprisingly few top-notch graphic artists inhabit SL...)

Edit: Am I wrong to ridicule SL's future so frequently? Perhaps:

BBC News, Technology: Second hype or second life?

The BBC's Digital Pundit, Bill Thompson, with a somewhat different and less cynical, but refreshingly pragmatic positive take on it all.

Last Edit, I promise: Those interested in further analysis and discussion by somewhat more informed minds than mind could go to Raph's Website, for the current Analysis In Progress there:

Raph's Website: CopyBot

and Hamlet has In-World reaction at New World Notes, including actual store closure protests:

New World Notes: Copying A Controversy