Raph Koster has a fascinating VentureBeat piece about the Second Life copybot. Raph observes that using the data stream to duplicate objects is analogous to the analog hole that lets people copy movies as they’re converted to display on an analog screen. Raph’s conclusion is that infinite copying should be accepted as part of the online world and products can’t be businesses, only services.
Also, as Raph and others have pointed out, it’s a glimpse into a future where 3D replicators exist. They’re still a long way off, but 3D printers are high on the O’Reilly Radar watch list (sadly, because we used the same software as the TSA, “3d pruning”, “hp printers”, and “jaws 3d” are also high on the watchlist and we can’t figure out how to get them off). As Simon Wardley from Fotango pointed out at EuroFoo, 3D printers are not only within arm’s reach (a rich arm at the moment, because they cost in the tens of thousands of dollars price range) they’re capable of huge changes to the way we think about our world. We’re seeing these challenges play out in Second Life, and if SL is anything to go by then the reaction in First Life to a 3d printing copybot will be to outlaw its use, lock up people caught with copied artifacts, and generally try to deny its existence rather than work with it. Memo to early adopters: first thing to copy is the copybot …