Copybot Herald III

Anti-Copybot for creators, merchants and landholders

See my prior Copybot posts for more general information.

The short answer:

• Put a watermark on your original textures, especially skin, clothing, and hair textures.
• Put your prim-builds in vendor prims or boxes for sale.
• Put your model avatars in a bot-proof viewer.
• If you sell full-perm items, license and register your buyers.
  
• Use inexpensive bot-suppression security, and encourage other land-owners to do so, too.
• File DCMA claims and AR's.
  

The Long answer:

Linden Lab opines that copying viewers (like CopyBot and a dozen others) provide a valuable tool backing up content offline for Residents, so should not be banned outright. Thus, they can be used and abused.

For now, Copybot can only copy:

• Rezzed prims: parameters, textures, floating text and particles.
• Worn avatar: shape and one "baked appearance" of skin and clothing combined.

When Copybot re-creates the a prim texture, it uploads the texture by UUID directly to the prim. The texture itself never goes to the rogue copybotter, it's not in his inventory, and he cannot distribute the texture as a texture. The apparent texture is the same one the creator uploaded. This violation is indistinguishable from a prim that had the texture applied to it in the normal edit screen.

A full-perm texture can be saved to a computer and re-uploaded with a new apparent "creator", with or without a Copybot-like viewer. Most texture sellers specifically prohibit this activity in their sales materials, and register their buyers by having them acknowledge they've seen your terms of use for the sale.

Copybot does not separate clothing layers form skin layers when it "clones" another avatar. It only renders the baked texture to a whole skin when imported inworld. The copybot is listed as the skin creator. Unless a skin has a watermark or identifying design (say, a tiny shape behind the ear), the original maker cannot be certain it was theirs. With that mark there, a DCMA complaint will stick, have the copybotted skin or build destroyed and the copybotter banned.

Emerald Viewer and other viewers have a method of scrambling the baked appearance output so current copybots cannot read it, for now. Use it for your clothing shop model, or leave out nice advertising photos, or have demo versions of your work.

For now, copybot cannot copy:

• Notecards
• Scripts
• Sounds
  
• Animations and poses
  
• Avatar Attachments
• Prim contents

Anyone can copy notecards and scripts with a simple select all with copy/paste wherever you wish, including another SL notecard or LSL script. To prevent this, scripts are almost always "no-mod" (thus not editable) and notecards rarely carry salable information.

Sounds can be captured using mechanima techniques, but will suffer pollution from other inworld noises. I've not seen a way to copy animations or poses from SL to a computer.

Prim contents and attachments can be copybotted when they are rezzed inworld. When worn or still in display or sales prims, they are utterly safe from stealing. If you are a specific target for a rogue copybotter, he might buy your stuff, copybot it and attempt to undercut you. In this case, if you've watermarked your textures, they can be protected as outlined above.


In short, almost all SL content can be captured and re-created bypassing SL permissions parameters now. However, taking extreme or expensive anti-bot measures in your shop areas are unwarranted. The rogue copybotters cannot get at your boxed stuff there.

Scripter SweetNWild Magic offers some interesting security tools on XSteetSL. What impressed me most is this analysis:

Every region gets a lag spurt when an avatar arrives. The lag intensity is variant depending on a number of factors such as attachments an arriving avatar is wearing and texture resolution in their cloths and skins etc. (Such avatars have a very low render cost ARC) Copybots come into regions/sims close to ruth and generate little to no lag spurts. Several seconds later a region will begin to experience lag spikes and heavy drain. This is signature of a copybot downloading, stealing, & pirating objects, textures, skins, etc. from the sim. [However] some avatars who are not bots can generate little lag upon arrival, hence, the system method of detection is about 95-99% accurate.

I've not tested SweetNWild's stuff, but it looks quite good in the security script market.

Odd fact: The oldest copybot programs require two avatars. One avatar is the actual bot that only has a text interface to the user... The other is the controlling avatar who observes and commands the bot thru his console and/or IM or IRC. This video from 2008 shows this at work. If one-avatar copybots don't exist already, they will soon, I bet.

If you hear of or find your stuff out where it shouldn't be, here's instructions and guides on how to get the Lab to stop it for you.:
DCMA filing
Abuse Reports
Incident Results

Love, Arth.