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Second Life Copybot

by paul bambury at 08:48PM (EST) on November 22, 2006 | Permanent Link | Cosmos

This story is about the illicit use of copybot to copy virtual objects in the Second Life virtual world. Please see this cnet report.

The relevance of this to recent debates on Long Tail about the economics of abundance is worth considering. It reflects current issues around the disruptive influence of replication tech in the real world and the internet. There is a nice fractal re-iteration of the same patterns in the real world, the net and the virtual Second Life world. These have all involved a disruption of business models dependant on certain types of scarcity, which threaten the economic status quo.

It is also interesting that the creators of copybot are open source developers. Comparisons with the development of Linux, and other open source software, spring to mind. Sci-fi scenarios of cornicopia machines also arise.

What I find most significant about the copybot story is that it suggests that the structure of the human economy is hard-wired or at least sufficiently culturally ingrained to be amenable to complete virtualisation.

We have a sense that the economy is an external, immutable reality. The copybot story suggests that the economy is actually an emanation of human behaviour.

If this is true, it may be possible to re-engineer the human economy.

Keywords: economics, ecommerce, DRM, CNet

Technorati Tags: economics, ecommerce, DRM, CNet

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Re: Second Life Copybot

by Chris Gilbey on Thu 23 Nov 2006 05:34 AM EST | Profile | Permanent Link

Amazing how much of the technological environment was predicted in the early 90;s by Neal Stephenson in his book, "Snow Crash"

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