Well, it seems that the artificial scarcity bubble has burst in Second Life.

The people working on libsecondlife created a library that was then used to make a program called CopyBot, which can and will duplicate pretty much anything a user sees in SecondLife, regardless of how many LindenBucks they were trying to sell it to you for.

Well, now that the cat is out of the bag, vendors in SecondLife are closing up shop right and left because if they display their products for purchase, they can then be quickly and exactingly copied.

This is pretty much a disaster for the people who've been trying (for whatever reason) to make a living by selling what amounts to crude virtual artwork by creating entirely artificial scarcity. Now evil "thieves" can rip off "their designs" without them having any control over it whatsoever.

But you know what... I really couldn't give a rat's ass.

I might be inspired to give a (copied) rat's ass if I could go 100 yards in any direction in the system without seeing knockoff clothing taken from Poser demos, lingerie straight out of the pages of Victoria's Secret cataclogs, sunglasses which are very obviously detailed copies of Oakley designs, avatars of very copyrighted and trademarked things like Bart Simpson, Space Ghost, and characters from Naruto, uselessly non-functional things like Motorola cell phones and iPods had their designs cloned. ...even Mario the Italian plumber and the yellow AIM "running guy" (I even own a copy of this one because I was interested in the cell-shading trick done) wasn't safe from these people.

Frankly, I think it's just a shame that a group of people that refused to police itself (and by this I mean people who were stealing the majority of their content in the first place) didn't get what was coming to it sooner.

CopyBot finally makes it big in SecondLife