CopyBot

Okay, lots of speculation and uncertainty about the libsecondlife’s (link) CopyBot. I don’t wish to add to the speculation but would like to collate some links I’ve found to be useful or informative so here you go:

From libsecondlife’s own website:

CopyBot is not a product that we sell or distribute. It’s a debugging tool and silly demo with a [now] obviously bad choice of name. Hopefully you won’t be seeing copy bot on SLex any time soon..

The issue at hand with copy bot seems HUGE!

“Oh my god why would they do something like that?!”

But our reason for showing this application around was partly we were proud of or achievement, and then on the other hand, if it’s this easy, we should tell people that relying on the Second Life systems to protect content is not feasible any longer.

For a while now we’ve had this project on the back burner that has been asked for so many times by content developers, an ability to back up content to your hard drive and restore it in Second Life. Basically import and export functions.

That’s the basis of CopyBot as well excepting the permission check. The problem is the difference between CopyBot and and import export tool is little more than 1 line of code that is easily commented out by even novice programmers.

What you see in CopyBot is the same capabilities that any import/export tool would have.

It’s not something easy to deal with, and we’re struggling ourselves with the issues that CopyBot has brought. It’s caused many personal conflicts as well between developers and their friends who do not see the merit in what we do.

Robin Linden responded to the issue with a post on the Linden Blog here.  [ Edit: New Linden post here. ]
Also, Ordinal Malaprop has dedicated half a blog post to this subject which you can read on her blog, An Engine Fit For My Proceeding, here.

Finally, for those of you with a strong stomach you could wade through the Second Life Forum, specifically you might find the script “Short Term CopyBot countermeasure” useful or informative which Ethan Cinquetti posted in the Script Library.