Human CopyBots

Raph Koster applies the impact of CopyBot on SecondLife's intellectual property economy as a broad lesson for the industry.

In the last decades, we have seen the content business have to adapt to a frightening new reality: The cost to create a minute of content has risen exponentially, but the fair market value of a minute of content has plummeted. In our brave new world of digital assets and user contributions, we tend to forget that this will be hitting not just media companies in the pocketbook, but also all those Web users who are merrily uploading their creations to platforms that by their very nature are fundamentally defenseless against copying.

While I believe this is generally true, there are notable exceptions for more open systems.  And all systems trend towards open.  The gaming industry is bifurcating into content creation and game engines.  A split driven both by the cost of content creation, but mostly the complexity and cost of creating the game engines that power it.  SecondLife is one of the most open virtual worlds, but the tools for creating content within it are still limited.  Especially when compared with the diversity and accessibility of our standards-based web.

In some areas of the media sector, the cost for creating content is plummeting.  It may still be expensive for a single user to create quality content, be it amateur or professional.  But it is getting cheaper:

• create crappy content
• sift through said crap to discover gems

How?  Well, its made of people, silly.

In more closed virtual worlds, such as World of Warcraft, content creation is largely the burden of the toolmaker.  And copying is expressly forbidden.  So what happens?  The arbitrage condition is so strong that people are applied to the problem.  Chinese gold farmers are human CopyBots.

Comments

[Raph]

I was specifically referring to the content industry, not end-users, when I referenced rising costs. Content industries have been engaged in an arms race for higher resolution, nicer CGI, better graphics, etc etc, for a long time.

Amateurs, of course, bypass this and go for cheap and fast. However, even among the end-user community, we're seeing a very rapid rise in costs to create content good enough to stand out amidst the noise (which I think is unsurprising). The totally amateur clips still make it to the top of YouTube, but so do some expertly packaged and produced clips.

The real point, however, is that end-users are starting to ask for DRM. Just today BoingBoing linked a case of PSP hackers wanting DRM for their homebrew, which exists only becase DRM was cracked in the first place. And this dilemma is what the SL case of CopyBot is illustrative of.

Chinese gold farmers are not CopyBots in that they are not actually copying IP; they are copying "actual" goods. The value to the purchaser lies in the fact that it's a genuine item, not a knockoff. The SL case (and others) are about IP rights.

For more on my take on the future of content as a business, check out this post on my blog.

[Taran Rampersad]

The perspective needs to be revisited in the context of the abandonment of DRM by major labels, the Library of Congress giving new rights, and so on.

Plenty of stuff happening right now in the real world which requires the re-evaluation of how we think of things.

Reference: http://www.knowprose.com/node/16746
http://www.knowprose.com/node/16740