Kim | PuppetWorks

🚨Live2D has been cracked🚨 Recently, a tool has been circulating within the Chinese Live2D community that can reverse-engineer Live2D .moc3 files back into .cmo3 files. It can take Live2D works that were originally meant only for display, not editing, and reconstruct their original hierarchy and deformation structures. Based on my preliminary tracing, the earliest publication I have found dates back to Bilibili in April this year, after which the tool appears to have been gradually refined within the Live2DHub community. This means that digital assets published online by Live2D riggers may no longer be safe. Artists may not be safe either, because .psd files can potentially be reconstructed and exported from the recovered .cmo3 files. Someone with malicious intent could use this tool to reverse-engineer your Live2D work, analyze it, reproduce it, and republish it. For example, they could replace the textures in your Live2D model with their own character, then republish or even sell it while claiming they made it themselves. And infringements like this may become extremely difficult to prove, because there is already considerable legal ambiguity around how much protection applies to things such as topology, vertex placement, polygon structure, and rigging methods. Or, if you have some private technique or implementation method that you have deliberately kept secret, they could simply reverse-engineer your work and take a look inside. Live2D may no longer have any secrets. So if you are selling works on a platform whose implementation methods you do not want made public, or template-based assets designed for repeated production, I would seriously consider taking them down—or at the very least, making it explicitly clear to your clients whether your terms of use prohibit reverse-engineering, cracking, reconstruction, and reproduction of the work. Hmm…… To be honest, for the past year, I’ve been worrying about AI replacing humans. But looking at this now, humans really are a little scarier than AI after all. If Live2D Inc. is aware of this, please strengthen the data encryption and anti-reverse-engineering protection. Please. 🙏 #Live2D #Live2DCubism