Yes, I also hate the “stop blogging” thing; so many interesting ideas to talk about, and we should wait until saturday when people will be wondering tomorrow?

Even more, if the initiative hopes to recruit as many customers as possible, it is a bit silly to skip the possibility to brag and say how well things are going, attracting more users to the cause!

Some people needs to read The Prince ;-)

To ensure selling multiple copies, an item can be copy/no-transfer, so you can copy it for different outfits and also edit a copy without worrying about messing it, but you can’t give it away; or it can be no-copy/transfer, where you can give it away, but you can have only one, and if it is broken, it is broken.

I’ve always accepted that dichotomy, even if it is annoying, and never thought too much about it.

But you know? That is something we should ask to LL; adding a new kind of permission, so items can be copy while you keep them, but that can be converted into no-copy/transfer versions by deleting all copies in your inventario, so you can give it away without keeping it.

There are more urgent problems, but it is probably worth a Jira :-)

There has been a lot of talk about blocking the access of unauthorized clients to the net; that would help a lot to avoid content theft if it could be done, since there wouldn’t be a rogue client thieving textures… but I doubt it would work.

Since clients are open source, the encoding software is accesible, and it is possible to create an aplication to listen to the traffic, capturing textures and inventory definitions.

LL also has strenghtened and speeded its answer when somebody is denounced as a thief, usually freezing the account until an investigation is made… which has brought very unfair situations, with innocent people losing their parcels because they can’t pay the rent.

So it isn’t as if LL isn’t doing anything… until now nobody has done the right thing, and we (or at least, I) have no idea of what the right thing can be.

Content theft? There had been rivers of ink about it, but the main point is about people using specific software (like copybot or some open source SL viewers) to take a copy of textures and item definition, duplicating and selling them.

OF course this unnerve content creators and they try to fight it, in many, useless ways (I say “they” because my own speciality, scripts, is reasonabily safe from content theft).

There are the anti-copybot scripts, that doesn’t work, but annoy customers.

There is making prim items no-mod, and loading them with resize scripts… but the information about them is still downloaded to the client, even if it isn’t visible, so a modified SL browser can thieve it. So the protection doesn’t work, and now trying to set a prim skirt annoyes the hell of us.

There is also dennouncing thieves to LL, but even if an account gets closed, its RL pupeteer will soon take a copy from another avatar, and set a new pirate shop. And now too many blogs are brimming with false theft accusations.

Artist’s Voice boycott tries to make a palpable dent in sales, so LL notices there is a true problem and act about it… even if there isn’t a clear way to do it, there will probably be little effect on SL economy and, yes, you are right and customers are being annoyed again.

In fact, many sellers are scaring away their customer with those harsh measures, while pirate shops remain user friendly, and that is one of the main arguments against those two days of silence, and that was one of my motives to not join it, until I slipped and messed the dates (sheer social laziness had a lot to do, too :-p).

There are also members of Artist’s Voice that are more interested in educating customers than in showy boycotts, and I approve that, at least up to a point, but I must admit that even myself, as an “educated” customer, would have a hard time distinguishing between a pirate store and a cheap one.

Since there is little creators (and customers) can do to end theft, the responsability falls over LL, and so the protest is yet another try to call LL attention, even if I doubt they would be able to solve anything; after all, we have been suffering database issues and inventory loses for ages.