At Freedom to Tinker, Ed Felten gives a good overview of the threat the CopyBot application poses to the economy of Second Life. If you’re not familiar with the Second Life metaverse, but you do recall the “World of Warcraft”-themed season premiere of “South Park” this fall, then the situation Felten describes might ring a bell:
If you’re not familiar with virtual worlds, you might think the word “economy” is a stretch. But really it’s not. SecondLife has about 1.5 million residents. Residents are given a sophisticated toolset they can use to design complex objects, specifying the objects’ shape, appearance, and behavior. Objects can be sold for a currency called Linden Dollars. Linden Dollars are real money — they can be traded for U.S. dollars on currency exchange markets. Quite a few people make their living in SecondLife, running businesses that make Linden-Dollar profits, which are then cashed in for U.S. dollars. Most days, the SecondLife economy sees transactions worth a total of between $500,000 and $1,000,000 (real U.S. dollars). This is clearly a real economy. To understand the possible impact of CopyBot, imagine such a thing existed in real life. Point this CopyGadget at any real-world object, push a button, and you get a perfect copy of that object. Want a new Lambourghini sportscar? Just find one in a parking lot and copy it. Like the lime sorbet at the local ice cream parlor? Buy a cup, take it home, and fill your freezer with copies. When you get down to the last cup in the freezer, just copy it again. You get the idea.
I’ve been getting to know Second Life for a few weeks now, and even though political uses of the virtual world are not directly susceptible to this kind of chicanery, it certainly poses an indirect threat. Sure, Second Life is big now — but so were Napster and Friendster.
If there is nothing else to be learned here, do not name your company anything ending in “-ster.” If there is something else to be learned from this, it’s that Second Life creator Linden Labs must settle this quickly and definitively. According to New World Notes, the actual damage so far is very limited, but that’s no reason to sigh with relief. As that business with John Seigenthaler goes to show, even a minor problem can be magnified many times in the media’s perception — especially if you’re doing something new and unproven, like a user-written encyclopedia or user-built virtual world.
P.S. Because I can never resist using an available screen grab, here’s the Second Life version of yours truly chilling out on the seaside balcony of a Japanese-themed luxury home:
Yes, I am sitting fully-clothed in an operational hot tub. Considering that I’m also trespassing, that’s probably for the better.
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