In some ways, this is very similar to what people do do get around copy protection on any other digital media. Such as, for example, feeding it back into something else (as in the fabject example), converting it to a different format (taking an SL model and importing it into Maya, perhaps), or even feeding it right back into the system where it originated - and this latter is what CopyBot does. Everyone finds this fascinating and wonderful when we’re talking about using it to fab objects, but the fact is that once you have the secret code, you can use this data for absolutely anything. Much like HTML, if you know how to parse this protocol, you can recreate what the client is describing. In Second Life, a protocol is used that fully describes an object. Here’s the issue with streams: you can capture them. Non-streaming games are (to use a phrase that seems to get me in trouble a lot) a historical aberration, a transitional technological hack to get around bandwidth limitations and the idiosyncrasies of embryonic delivery systems. Text was the original streaming technology. Tokens are used to minimize bandwidth during play, but these days we see more and more worlds returning to the older practice of sending down the descriptions of objects, and not just their lookups, with titles such as Second Life but also games like Dofus or Runescape, which “stream” off the web. When you connect to a graphical MMORPG, instead you are sent an index number, a token that lets you look up on your local client install the description of that chair (which these days, is likely to be a 3d model).Ī client install is nothing more than an elaborate caching scheme. When you connect to a MUD and it attempts to inform you of the presence of an object, say a chair, it actually sends the definition of that chair down: the words that make up its description.
The real difference between the MUDs of yore and the modern MMORPG client isn’t the sim on the backend it’s the fact that the datastream is tokenized. In the post discussing this, I noted that I have talked before about what exactly MUDs and MMOs are, and why they all deserve to fall under the rubric of “virtual world.” Much of it boils down to the fact that client is a representation of a server simulation, and that therefore any given server could have many possible representations. What we have here is a case of bone fighting blood.
In short, what’s happening is a small-scale social crisis that brings into sharp relief the split between the hacker-ethic-libertarian-info-must-be-free ethos that underpins much of the technology of virtual worlds, and the rampant commercialism that has actually enabled its embodiment. Both Cory and Robin have had their say, Second Lifers are organizing boycotts and ‘legislation’, and the original authors of the code that led to CopyBot seem slightly flummoxed by the whole thing.
It certainly seems like everyone is talking about this issue.
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