CopyBot furor roils Second Life currency
By Adam Reuters
SECOND LIFE, Nov 16 (Reuters) - The CopyBot saga has taken its toll on Second Life’s economy as concerned business people shuttered their stores and sold off Linden dollars, pushing down the value of the currency against the U.S. dollar.
As concerns about the avatar and object cloning tool’s impact on Second Life businesses spread, the Linden broke out of the narrow trading band of L$270-280 to the U.S. dollar that it had mostly inhabited since early September.
The Linden plummeted to a two-month low of L$291 on Tuesday, down nearly 9 percent, before returning to more a more typical level of L$274 on Wednesday. It was down about 2 percent to L$279.3 by 0530 PST, according to data and a graph (right) provided by Linden Lab.
A higher number of Lindens to the dollar means that the Linden’s value has declined.
Business owners and content creators feared that the now-banned CopyBot could lead to widespread illicit copying and selling of valuable clothing designs, skins, textures and other objects. Many closed their stores in protest, and to protect their wares.
The closures were not readily apparent in Linden Lab’s daily inter-resident transaction data, although the veracity of that data has been called into question after a user artificially inflated the statistic by more than US$1 million last week via a series of “round trip transactions.”
The volume of transactions actually increased after the emergence of CopyBot, climbing to more than US$700,000 on Nov. 15, but as of Thursday at 0900 PST it had since fallen below US$500,000 for the first time since Nov. 8.
The total Second Life money supply stood at L$1.03 billion, up 15 percent from a month ago. Month-to-date, the ratio of sources to sinks in the Second Life economy was about 1.13:1, compared with 4.3:1 in October.
Separately on Thursday libsecondlife, the open source software project which initially created the CopyBot code, said it had expelled developer Baba Yamamoto after a chat transcript showed that he and another Second Life resident “were both aware of and flaunting the misuse potential” of CopyBot.
“In light of this betrayal of our trust and reckless attitude toward intellectual property concerns, we will not permit them to stand alongside us,” libsecondlife member said in a statement on the group’s blog. “We, the libsecondlife developers, recognize that we must be more vigilant about controlling our creations — we are deeply sorry for any part in the damage which may have been caused.”
