Second Life, the virtual world that gets hyped ceaselessly in the press, has been facing some major issues this week. In a story that sounds like a sci-fi plot, a script called CopyBot was released that enables users to replicate items in-world. That spells trouble for those who make a living, or at least a second income, selling clothes, cars, furniture and other goods in the virtual world - why buy something when you can clone it for free? As plenty of newspaper articles have pointed out, the SL economy is fairly large - they did $491,989 USD in transactions in the last 24 hours, which is likely lower than the daily average.
Even worse, Copybot was created by libsecondlife, an open source project supported by Second Life owner Linden Labs to reverse engineer the SL software - although it has a wide range of applications, the one that’s causing problems is the ability to clone any object or avatar in-game, even those marked as “no copy”. The code has since been pulled from the libsecondlife website, but not before it was dispersed widely.
Yesterday, a group of shop owners closed their stores in protest, and anti-CopyBot t-shirts and flags appeared. The group claim that there were 600 stores closed, although it’s hard to confirm that figure. It seems that CopyBot may have been modified by someone outside of libsecondlife to be used in this way, but that hasn’t stopped residents blaming Linden Labs, with banners reading: “Linden Lab once again did hurt our world (sic?)”. Shopkeepers also threatened a lawsuit against Linden yesterday, while Linden said in their official blog this week (seems to be offline at the time of writing) that anyone using CopyBot to steal objects would be held responsible for copyright infringement.
Linden Labs have made their in-world economy a massive selling point, and successfully hyped their numbers in the press, with an endless stream of articles about how entrepreneurs are making a living in-world, not to mention the size of the SL economy and neverending stories of companies setting up offices there. More recently, the arrival of a Second Life Reuters correspondent attracted attention. As a result of all this coverage, they’ve got to handle the backlash when that economy is threatened, especially when the company itself is being blamed.
