I see a lot of rants about in-world copy tools, copy bots, and why Linden Labs® aren’t doing anything about it. I see a lot of people (quite rightly) upset to see products they’ve poured hours/days of work into being copied and resold. I’m here to tell you it’s all backwards. I see LSL functions held back by absurd claims that they’ll remove some sort of security that never existed in the first place.
Lets get something straight; if I can perceive it, I can copy it. DRM does nothing except slow this down. Blu-Ray came closest to succeeding in stopping copying, with controlled hardware sold by licensed vendors and running custom DRM schemes in a virtual machine. It didn’t last.
So what can content creators do about unlicensed copying? Well, first of all, answer the following question:
“Why is unlicensed copying bad?”
Intuitively, any copy of a product someone has, for which the owner did not get their slice, is a lost sale. Given the insanely low prices on everything in SL (by my estimations, it will take me two years to make back the time invested in any product I sell, for example), that’s money that merchants can ill afford to lose.
Except, would these people really buy your stuff anyway? To me, there are people who understand the intrinsic value of digital content, and there are people who want everything for free. The latter will fight every step of the way, while the former will happily pay for good quality work. The problem then becomes how do we convert the non-payers into customers.
Oh, and we’re back to DRM (or C/M/T if you prefer). Except, it’s a technical solution. It restricts customers and copies alike. If I buy something no-trans, and want to transfer it to alt, why can’t I? If I want to backup content I’ve legitimately paid for (I’ll do a post about ownership in SL another time), why can’t I?
To me, I think the best thing to do is encourage everyone to build, script, animate, or generally spend time making stuff in SL. Not until they produce something and realise they too want money for it, will it sink in that others deserve money for their creations. The problem is society’s lack of perception of copying digital media as involving someone losing something (earned income). This covers not just SL, but music, video, computer games, and anything else you can stick on a CD/DVD.
Personally, everything I sell (apart from demos) in my shop is scripts with mod-enabled, which makes them trivially copiable. Many of the scripts are shipped full perms. My experiences so far are increased sales over time, and recurring custom. I’m particularly seeing a lot of people who want to have all the scripts from me, because they know they don’t have to worry about passing it to alts, or modifying it to taste.
DRM free; give it a go, you might just like it.
#1 written by Kate Miranda May 19th, 2009 at 16:27
Wow! Commonsense.