Mo Hax

So I’m not above putting porn in a post just to generate traffic. (Wait, I forgot to slather my blog with Google ads, dag nabit.)

Put aside your opinion of the specific items rampantly being stolen in the virtual world for a moment, yes some are sexual. While you are at it ignore the Hax-name bigotry in Serpentine’s post.  (I have almost been banned from sims just for having the Hax name.) And let’s consider how all this affects you, just another avatar.

People will pay over $1 billion for virtual goods in 2009

Yep, over 1 billion for pixels and electrons this year with a lot of that exchanging between Second Life avatars. Compare that to the $1.7 billion Americans spent on movies, a 17.5% increase, or even the $13.3 billion Americans spend on porn, or the $13.8 billion we yanks spend on ice cream:

Thank goodness there are more ice cream eaters than—no wait, that doesn’t work because you could have ice cream while—oh nevermind. <Insert your own bad pie joke here.>

Still, none of this holds a shoestring to the $38 billion spent on footwear and the ungodly $401.6 billion spend on sports in the United States alone.

So what is the difference and why do I care?

The difference is theft—specifically how stuff is stolen—and what that means to the industries involved. All of these industries have stuff ripped, but the ease with which virtual stuff is stolen and redistributed puts Second Life and any virtual world economy at greater risk. World of Warcraft has been dealing with similar issues for years. If you like having your virtual world around and having decent stuff in it, beyond the legitimate freebies you can find around, then this should matter to you. Second Life content creators are leaving for other things because of this.

Ripping virtual goods (digital content) is easy

Script kiddies with the right viewers steal and redistribute Second Life content as easily as they can get any music they want. This reality is not going to change no matter how much anyone does technically to prevent it. In fact, no security is fool-proof, everything can be cracked, it’s just a matter of making more of a hassle than those wanting to steal it care to take. Then again, in the online world, one determined hacker can open the door for everyone else, and always likely will. But how does this different from ’save image’ from any image on the Internet?

Easy theft does not make it right

Just because my 6-year-old could steal content off just about any web site does not make it right. Just because you could copy any full-perms content out of Second Life into  your own sims even though you don’t have permission from the original creator to do so does not make it right. Just because you can run a viewer that lets you leverage a Linden bug to create identical duplicates down to the asset IDs doesn’t make it right. Just because you can ’sample’ any music from the internet without paying a dime does not make it right.

The world runs on trust and ethics. They come from universal communal values and have been around since Lucy or before. Every living thing in the observable Cosmos functions by playing a part in some community. Stealing will get you shunned or eaten in most all of them. *grin*

Where there is money there are thieves

And where the crime involves digital assets there is rampant piracy. I know a person or two who works with those agencies interested in this stuff. To quote this person in effect,

“There is no way they have the resources to ever chase that stuff down, not with people being killed for drugs and other violent crimes. That warning at the beginning of every movie just makes me laugh. There is no way we could ever go after anyone for that.”

There will always be thieves and digital thieves will probably always have the upper-hand, sad but true.

Don’t put all your virtual eggs in one basket

Even though Linden Labs is really putting an effort up to get a handle on this content theft stuff, the fact is, they have a nearly impossible battle ahead. The music industry has taught us that.  It is not surprising to see Linden Labs attacking this on policy grounds as opposed to technical grounds. Imagine the technical changes required to change the very encoding of the trillions of assets in Second Life only to have that encoding eventually cracked. No sane business leader would undertake that kind of risky effort, hence the policy-based approach we see.

The reality shaping up is that  content creators have to find ways to make a living that don’t involve that rather sweet create-once-sell-millions model. That model is very addicting, no doubt, no overhead, no staff, no raw materials, no overstock or inventory run-out. Content creators do put a lot into what they make and sell, but not nearly what a physical-world product vendor does. Does that sound like I am hinting that digital content creators are acting a little spoiled? Nah. But perhaps these challenges are the trade-off that comes from working with purely virtual goods.

Do content creators just have to be faster?

Some have suggested to play in the digital content world market you just have to be fast, real fast. Mr. Serpentine’s stuff was ripped in under three months. That is three months to make a profit before losing it to the knowing thieves and unknowing public accomplices. This roll-over-and-play-dead-but-fast-developer approach infuriates many since it just accepts that people will be thieves and somehow justifies it. It also emphasizes another idea that drives content-developers insane (myself included) that creating this stuff is easy, so easy we should just give it all away for free and make money some other way. [Disclaimer: I make practically nothing for stuff I sell in SL, just not that good yet.]

Digital content creation is  indeed a fun, fast growing industry but contains unique challenges requiring quick development skills. Just know what you are getting yourself into before you start.