It’s been a problem for a long time – content theft for resale on XStreetSL.

There are many losers in content theft. The original artists, yes of course. But this time it’s not about them.

Other losers I came face to face with very recently. The buyers of stolen textures aimed at Second Life builders, and the estates who rent land to builders who consume these textures unknowingly. The real risk of the banhammer is over their heads, and they are in fact victims. The only winner is the texture thief. Well, and Linden Lab who skims the transactions, even those which are fraudulent.

The sad fact is, there is no good way for an estate owner or an SL builder to be sure where a texture is from, unless they make all the content themselves, as LL is in control of the backend.

Another complicating factor is that we don’t even know for sure if the person who is complaining about the theft is *actually* the original artist. It is far too easy to roll up a character, and attack someone who is using a texture and pretend it is theirs, cutting down competition for a competing content thief so they can pad their sales.

It is far too easy to AR an innocent victim, the builder who bought the textures in good faith, when you cannot ID the avatar who uploaded the textures seen inworld.

I have often had thoughts about how we can extend the model of selling content beyond Second Life, to the burgeoning grids that are founded on OpenSimulator. It is growing clearer to me that a site that sells across grids is going to have to ask for real life identity information from resellers and hold them accountable when theft occurs with full bans. Linden Lab surely has displayed that they are completely unconcerned about it. Well sure! They’re profiting from it, so why not. :/

It’s not perfect, nothing is. But I have seen sites like Daz3d and Renderosity make it for years by pulling vendor accounts who steal and resell content – by making a vendor account a little harder to get. In the case of DAZ, it is *very* hard to get. For content aimed at the grid operator level – which would by necessity have to be full permissions – we may have to start asking a bit more information about sellers and holding them accountable for their actions.

Somehow we have to make it harder for people to sell into grids unscreened content, reselling anything they find on Google search with complete impunity.