Linden Lab's announcement of more legal action against content theft, and what it could mean for OpenSim

This will be interesting. Especially for OpenSimulator.



For about a decade, the greater OpenSim community has largely been relying on Second Life content that was illegally exported and then offered all over the Hypergrid as freebies, sometimes even declared original creations by the importers. While some people nowadays buy content from the Marketplace and then use copybot viewers to export it, others still can't even be bothered to do that and do what was the standard in the second half of the 2010s: copybot the stuff in-world. Some Second Life creators' works are available as full-perm freebies in OpenSim in huge numbers because their entire in-world stores were copybotted wholesale when they still deemed it safe to have the actual items in in-world sales boxes.

I guess over 95% of all content in OpenSim are stolen from Second Life, as are at least 98% of all items offered in freebie stores. If a new freebie store appears in OpenSim, you can be certain that not only absolutely all content in it was stolen from Second Life, but that the only legal item on the entire sim is the OpenSimWorld beacon. In fact, this applies to the vast majority of all new sims created nowadays, also because it's so bloody easy and convenient to get all the premium Second Life stuff you need from R. Lion and/or Darkhearts.

Many people who come to OpenSim never get in touch with legal content at all, other than happening to come by legal items installed on sims. Some go as far as staunchly insisting that legal content made in and for OpenSim does not exist, full stop. Others say that legal content only exists in the shape of Linda Kellie's non-mesh works from up until 2013.

Generally, those who acknowledge the existence of legal content in OpenSim also consider it vastly sub-par in comparison with the expensive premium luxury content that's being copybotted in Second Life. And that's even though this copybotted content is often slapped back together in a haphazard way with not nearly all the bells and whistles of the Second Life originals. Originally scripted content isn't re-scripted unless it's either a mesh body or furniture with AVsitter. Buildings are tossed into boxes with static, unscripted doors. Blinn-Phong is almost never supported. Before there was PBR, the importers couldn't be bothered to add normal and specular maps to save time and churn out more content in the same time. Now that there is PBR, I guess many won't add Blinn-Phong textures at all.

The main differences between the 2010s and today are that there were only few entryways for copybotted content in the 2010s, the copybotters didn't import the content themselves, all copybotted content was full-perm, and "Sharing is Caring" meant that freebie store owners were expected to pick up boxes of copybotted content from these few entryways and put it into their own stores to obscure how the content got into OpenSim. Also, "Stuff" boxes with copybotting by-catch are no longer a thing.

Nowadays, the copybotter, the importer and the store owner is one and the same person. Everything is no-transfer because the freebie stores are in direct competition with each other for the top "popularity" ranks on OpenSimWorld. The Legacy female body must have stolen and imported at least ten times already due to how many freebie dealers wanted to have their own copy of it next to their Legacy clothes. And that doesn't count those who have god-moded and reboxed already imported no-transfer bodies.

I dare say that much more content is copybotted in Second Life to be offered as freebies in OpenSim than to be sold by the thieves in Second Life for money. This may make the various OpenSim grids a more likely target for legal action than other Second Life users, maybe even than other virtual worlds.

In 2015 already, when the copybotting craze had really picked up after it had become possible to copybot mesh, and OpenSim's own creativity was almost entirely killed off because it couldn't compete with the copybotted content, legal action against targets in OpenSim was already considered. But it was difficult to hold the copybotters themselves liable. They didn't run their own grids. At best, they had sims on other grids. Some even only had free stores on other people's freebie sims. And it wasn't possible to hold these sim owners liable either.

So the legal action was to be targetted at the grids because grid owners can be identified outside of OpenSim, especially the owners of big grids. And in early 2015, all big grids had users who imported copybotted Second Life content and offered it as freebies. OSgrid, Kitely, Metropolis (shut down in 2022) and so forth.

The idea was to tell grid owners to have at least certain illegal content removed from in-world stores, otherwise their entire grids with thousands of active users would be shut down by the authorities. Again, I'm talking about all the biggest and most important grids. The grid owners would then have to tell the sim owners on whose sims this illegal content was offered to remove it or have it removed, otherwise their sims would be deleted. In turn, freebie sim owners who rented stores to importers or resellers of copybotted content threatened these store owners to throw them out if they don't remove any and all illegal content from their stores.

Copybotters were chased off the big grids. But they found a new home at Sacrarium, a grid run by a Kazakh admin on a machine in his flat at home, but registered in Russia. This would make legal action against copybotters and against the spread of illegal content more difficult in several ways. Also, imported content was now renamed, and all Second Life brand names were removed. Besides, the copybotters no longer imported the stolen content themselves anymore. They just sent the exported assets to someone else who imported, re-assembled and boxed them. Lastly, everything was first offered on the same sim, and so "Sharing is Caring" became more important than ever.

Alas, none of the threats ever led to anything. It would have involved Second Life creators and Linden Lab taking legal action together. Most importantly, however, it would have involved legal action by each creator involved against quite a number of grids.

Nowadays, names are only changed if whoever offers stolen content can get away with making clueless people believe they've created it themselves. Big, famous brand names, especially those of certain avatar suppliers, remain unchanged. Maitreya Lara is "Athena" in OpenSim, but LaraX is "LaraX". OpenSim freebie store owners steal and often actually copybot their own store content and import it directly onto grids hosted in the USA or the EU. They brazenly offer Legacy, Signature and eBody mesh bodies, LeLutka heads, Doux hair etc. under their original brand names, so certain are they that they've got nothing to fear.

The freebie store owners are in a perpetual race for having the most, the best and the newest exclusive content before everyone else. Even freebie sims that don't operate on the classic "I've found all this stuff on the Hypergrid, no idea where it comes from" have tens of thousands of Euros worth of Second Life content available as no-transfer freebies, and that doesn't include the sim decoration which, more often than not, is entirely copybotted, too, with the sole exception of the inevitable OpenSimWorld beacon. They all feel like they've got nothing to fear.

Now, the question is whether Linden Lab will now target OpenSim as well. They'd certainly find plenty of targets.

The one line that makes this questionable is, "Collaboration with external platforms to address cross-platform content theft." Whom would they collaborate with on OpenSim's side?

OpenSim itself? There is no company or corporation behind OpenSim, only four or five spare-time hobbyist developers who struggle with keeping up with the development of Second Life in order to stay compatible with third-party Second Life viewers. There isn't any money involved in OpenSim, there is no business behind OpenSim.

The grids? Well, if anything, most grids would not be collaborators, but targets of said legal action.

Only very few grids would collaborate. The major commercial grids certainly would. Kitely, DigiWorldz, the Utopia Skye Grid, probably also @Lone Wolf's Wolf Territories Grid, just to name four. So would OSgrid. As far as I know, they all don't tolerate the import and offering of stolen Second Life assets anyway.

At least the former three don't allow the offering of stolen Second Life content found on other grids either. So all this would only matter to these three if Linden Lab even decided to go against illegal decoration on sims and illegal body parts, clothes and accessories worn by avatars. What makes matters more complicated is that it's often unknown whether something is legal or not, and that it's almost impossible to deck out avatars with only legal content, especially without making them look like 2010.

But many non-commercial grids feel safer from the law. There are big, well-known grids hosted in Western countries which offer avatar accessories stolen from Second Life on their official landing sims, gathered somewhere on the Hypergrid and placed there by official grid staff. Sure, ZetaWorlds wouldn't tolerate another big entryway for stolen Second Life assets like Port ShenZhen which gave the grid a reputation of being a pirate den in the early 2020s. But stolen Second Life content that someone brought in from the Hypergrid seems to be okay.

I'm seriously wondering if these grids were interested in collaborating with Linden Lab in even wiping out the "found somewhere on the Hypergrid" content from the various big and small freebie stores. Granted, I'm wondering if Linden Lab is actually interested in the effort of going that far, also seeing as a lot of stolen sim decoration can be copied straight from where it's placed, too.

My guess is that, when it comes to illegal content that has been in-world for years already, both freebie merchants and grid owners will come with the same excuses:

• "We haven't stolen anything, we've found all this as full-perm freebies on the Hypergrid." Hahaha. Nice try.
• "As long as you don't come up with rock-solid proof for every single one of these items that it was stolen from Second Life, we'll consider them all legal and your accusations false."
• "Athena is not Maitreya Lara. It wasn't taken from Second Life. It's an original OpenSim creation." Well, then how come Onyx LeShelle has asked all freebie merchants in OpenSim to delete all her creations and derivatives thereof from their stores, explicitly including all current and past versions of Athena, effective immediately, in an open letter back in 2015?
• "Athena has been modified from the original Maitreya Lara so much that it has become an original OpenSim creation."
• "Onyx LeShelle has stolen Maitreya Lara herself." Cue the same freebie store owners whining about other people stealing their stolen no-transfer stuff.
• "SLink is out of business, and so Adonis and Decadence-HG are legal now." Yeah, but Maitreya, Signature, Belleza, Catwa, LeLutka etc. are still in business as far as I know.
• "I've bought this myself on the Second Life Marketplace. It's mine, and I can do with it whatever I want." How about no?
• "Linden Lab can't do anything as long as I don't make any real money with this stuff."
• "There literally isn't any other content in OpenSim. OpenSim depends on this."
• "We don't tolerate 'drama' here," followed by a kick and permanent ban.

Well, and then there are the most egregious offenders. The young but immensely popular freebie sims whose owners and merchants steal and import Second Life content themselves. As this is no longer tolerated on most of the bigger grids, all this happens on small grids with sometimes not even half a dozen sims. These grids are usually DreamGrids that run on a Windows computer at the grid owner's home. The grid owner is either friends with the copybotters who run stores on their grid, or they are copybotters and store owners themselves.

There's no way they'll collaborate with Linden Lab. Content theft and piracy is what their grids are living on, maybe with the grid owners' and merchants' private sims and an event location as side-projects. Linden Lab could just as well have the authorities of wherever the grids are hosted send a Cease & Desist letter to the grid owners that force them to shut down these grids. But even then they'll be back half an hour later with a new grid, but with the same sims on it. Or with the exact same grid under a new name. And I wouldn't count on Linden Lab going as far as having e.g. German or Italian police forces raid these grid owners' dwelling-places and seize all digital devices and then going into international lawsuits against them.

Then again, if popular freebie sims on tiny grids do disappear, OpenSimWorld suddenly reports them as offline, and it turns out that the rozzers have come and seized the grid server, and the grid owner as well as all freebie merchants on the grid are facing criminal investigations, all just for copybotting Second Life content, if this happens, I think the OpenSim community will get quite nervous again.

Addendum: Ava Delaney has published a blog post on her blog that gives some more details.

Let's just say that OpenSim can only hope that going after thousands of grids and their owners as well as thousands of freebie sims and their owners is too much of an effort for both the Lab and the authorities, considering there's no money involved in this. For one thing is certain: If it turns out that the Lab does actually take real-life legal action against all kinds of people in OpenSim who have to do with illegal content in this or that way, then OpenSim users will use the new support ticket category as a weapon against other OpenSim users and against entire grids. Wars between grids will likely end in the total destruction both of all grids on at least one side and their entire staff. Especially if it also turns out that the Lab has the power to have such action taken not only in the USA, but also in the EU.

#Long #LongPost #CWLong #CWLongPost #SecondLife #OpenSim #OpenSimulator #Metaverse #VirtualWorlds #Copybotting #Piracy