Back in the summer of 2009 a new menace appeared to be on the horizon in the shape and form of BuilderBot. The tool itself in some ways had noble aims, it was designed to assist a sim owner in making the move from Second Life to the Opensim world. Rezzable were the team wanting to make the move from Second Life to their own virtual world, they had owned some very popular sims such as Greenies and Black Swan. The problem was that initial reports suggested BuilderBot would also take with it content not owned by the sim owner. This was explained in a now archived blog post by the Rezzable team :
Our intention is to make tools for serious builders. So now someone can more easily take a copy of their build off SL and archive, keep it safe. Taking stuff linkset by linkset is really slow and painful. BuilderBot allows for a significantly better way to handle content. You can then save versions of builds to make a sorta library and then use these versions to make new iterations. It is your stuff, so now you can take care of it. The risk is that rippers can also use the tool to take unauthorized copies.
Rippers don’t seem to care much about DRM and already they can use copybot to take (and sell usually) illegal copies of content. In fact there is really no way to stop this technically. It is more about not giving content thieves safe haven to sell and benefit from their theft. I don’t think this is any different that issues with music being copied or dvd films. It is just a reality of creating digital content and virtual content creators need a better way to address rather than just filing DMCA protests.
BuilderBot will grab a copy of everything on sim–so you need to be careful on what is rezzed. You can of course delete stuff that you do not have rights to. But it is possible to grab stuff that you were not intending to have in your OAR file–and accidents do happen.
Unsurprisingly Second Life content creators were not impressed. Rezzable changed their mind and decided not to release the product as originally intended. Shopping Cart Disco reported on the issue, as did New World Notes. In the Second Life forums concerned residents were trying to get the then Linden Lab CEO Mark Kingdon to intervene. Eventually matters settled down, but this did open a wider discussion about virtual worlds other than Second Life and the rights people have to content. Some Second Life content creators started to stipulate their content could not be used outside of Second Life, others were happy for their content to go to other grids. This was unchartered territory because prior to this it really hadn’t been much of a concern.
Opensim worlds have grasped this nettle to a degree. Kitely’s market for example has permissions for export, which means someone can export the content outside of Kitely. Second Life is not part of the Hypergrid and so has not had a need to set such permissions. However there still seems to be some confusion as to what rights people have to their content.