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The Second Life Herald's Primjackers Trash LL's Digital Rights Management caught my eye. The title was supposed to, of course, but I've seen prim copying scripts work more than once and have never truly seen them as a threat. All they actually do is copy prims by infesting themselves in a modifiable object and copying the dimensions and relative locations of the prims - then rezzing the copies of the prims a distance away.

Lets dispel a myth. It works only on modifiable objects. Therefore, it does not break the de facto DRM of Second Life, the permissions system. People can - and have - done the same thing manually for years. And to modify something that is modifiable, guess what? You have to own it.

That, you see, is not rocket science. In fact, I'd been considering the same thing in the context of backing up builds offline and transferring them between grids - for my own builds.

Take a look at the video.

Where this could pose a problem for people is when they make things that are modifiable. I make most of my work modifiable, though my builds these days are done mainly as custom work for specific clients (who get full permissions on my builds, scripts, etc). Some people have different reasons for allowing things to be modifiable. I can't speak to every reason why people would allow their creations to be modifiable - but there it is.

The texture aspect does interest me, though the person would seem to have permissions to the textures to make an exact replica. The motorcycle in the demo, a well known freebie, doesn't really have custom textures. If the script can take actually bypass the textures permission system, then we have a true bypass of the permissions system. The same, of course, would apply to scripts.

And when it is all said and done, there is the DMCA system coupled with abuse reports - something which hasn't been demonstrated effectively, but perhaps this is because they haven't been visibly used.

So is the prim copier bad? Only if you sensationalize one aspect of it. It has legitimate uses for builders, and it has a down side for creators that allow their content to be modifiable. And 'fixing' this is definitely problematic - but the comments on the Second Life Herald article are all sensible about it. If you sell items and are worried about them being copied like this, simply do not allow them to be modified.

Business as usual. Next.