Kitely Forums

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Hi Brian,

I'm not sure what you expect us to do. If you have a specific copyright violation you'd like to report then please do so. We can't really do much with suspicions.

I'm sorry to hear that Brian,

As I said, if you can't point us to someone who is copying your content inside Kitely then there isn't anything we can do about it. But please keep in mind that anything you place anywhere publicly accessible online can be copied, it isn't a virtual-world specific problem. It's a digital content problem that all content creators need to deal with (or accept as an unfortunate reality). If you enjoy building then I suggest you don't let people who would like to copy your work also rob you of that.

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You have nothing to apologize for Brian, I completely understand your frustration. We do out best to help protect people's IP in Kitely with the policies we enforce, but even with those we can't stop most copy violations from happening, only respond to them after they've already occurred.

If there are things that you wish to sell, doing it in Kitely Market can help limit people's access to those items until they've actually paid to have them delivered. If you limit access to your world so that only the people you trust can enter it (which you can do via the Access tab of the world's Manage World dialog) then people you haven't granted access to that world won't be able to enter it with copybotting tools. This won't prevent them from copying your content from other places where it was rezzed (e.g. by your customers) but it will give you some protection against would be copyright violators.

One way to somewhat protect a creation-in-progress is to build it in a place where most people would not find it. Items above 1024m don't show up on the main map. Working inside a closed high-skybox with invisiprim walls (if those are still around) can go a long way toward protecting a work from prying eyes. Then as Ilan states, once you're ready to market it, Kitely does all it can to protect your item.

The reality is though, there is no way to stop copybotters. This has been a reality for years, since early times in Second Life. First, identifying the copybotter is near impossible. If they're identified and banned they simply create another alt.

The way most merchants have come to deal with this is by making their items as copybot-proof as possible. Functional scripts, special features, etc can be very elusive to copybot systems. And some merchants just go with the flow, counting on the number of honest sales to make the creation time worth it.

Some creators make significant profit from their creations. The vast majority do not. I build music instruments in real life; I can earn more profit on the sale of one custom-built guitar than I can in a year of virtual sales, and have found that creating virtual items requires much more time and frustration overall. So if I was in it strictly for the money, I'd be outta luck. That is the experience of the majority of merchants on virtual worlds... which is why our building / selling is primarily for the fun and challenge of it.

Many creators have decided to defeat copybotters entirely by giving their items away, making them full transfer and export... enjoying the reputation built from doing so. Does anyone not know of Arcadia Asylum's library of work? She understood the copybotter situation early on. Many other creators have taken the same road. It doesn't make sense to copybot something that's free and full perm already. But if one decides to sell, it's understood there may be enough people willing to purchase the item to make the creation worth it. Or not. It's always a roll of the dice. : )

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