Such an attempt was made on Redgrave skins - this attempt failed as Redgrave is still very much in business. More commonly, copied assets will be used personally, shared with friends or, as a form of harassment intended to drive a SL business out of business by giving away the copied objects as freebies. Doing so exposes their actions and quickly gets them removed from Second life.

A get rich quick schemeĬontent thieves will very rarely, if ever, attempt to sell assets they have acquired. Such users are usually much more interested in targeted theft, also called copyboting when using such tools. Because the original Copybots had little control over what they saw and where they went, they were mostly useless for content thieves. While the original Copybot could do this, Linden Labs took steps to cripple it. The word “bot”, in this case, refers to a program running on a computer which drives an avatar unattended. Other things that Copybot is not include: An actual ‘bot There are several means by which this “asset nabbing” may occur, from the simple unencrypted export to the pulling of texture data directly from the memory in your graphics card.īecause of the various techniques Copybots use, you should understand that “Copybot” is a broad term covering a myriad of content theft tools, and not a specific product or viewer. It is at this point that the Copybot viewer is in violation of Terms of service and the TPV policy. Copybot viewers omit this encryption and allow, either automatically or on demand, export of the asset to storage to the disk for later import or copying. Normally an asset’s information is only held in encrypted form while it is needed and then discarded. It is at this point in the process that Copybot-capable viewers differ. This is normal viewer behavior, and is in fact needed for the viewer to function at all. When an asset is ’seen ‘ by the viewer most of the information about that asset, be it a shirt, sound, prim, or other item, is downloaded by the viewer. Often it is built on the LibSL library or adapted from Linden Labs own open source. The goal of this article is to clarify and educate on three facets of the Copybot phenomenon: What is Copybot? What isn’t Copybot? And last, what can be done about it?Ĭopybot, is a a popular term for a viewer or tool that does not recognize or respect SLs permission systems. This paranoia cripples content creators, closing Second Life businesses and damaging its reputation - this is what griefers want. According to some ‘the sky is falling’ stories there’s a Copybot round every corner lurking to nab your stuff, format your hard drive, and shave your house cat. Accusations ranging from the reasonable to the outlandish fly around like so much debris in a windstorm, and often it is hard to tell fact from fiction. In recent times, especially with the upcoming enforcement of Linden Labs ™ Third Party Viewer policy on May 1, 2010, there has been much ado about Copybot.

Second life copybot textures