[Opensim-dev] Thoughts....

[The Burnman]

On Mon, Mar 3, 2008 at 12:10 PM, Brian Wolfe <brianw at terrabox.com> wrote:

> (warning, written 15 minutes after waking up and before first coffee was
> downed.)


Noted.  ;)


> Your arguments are spot on. :) I would add that having DRM or attempting
> to curtail end users fredom of use is pushing society to being
> untrustable. There is an old saying. Say something often enough and it
> becomes true. Say people WILL steal content at times, be paranoid about
> it and far more people WILL steal your content due to lack of respect ,
> which is earned by the creator's lack of trust in others.


There is no paranoia in the valid concern that people will attempt to rip
you off.  It happens all the time.  It will never cease to amaze me how
entitled people feel to other people's Intellectual Property.  THAT is where
the lack of respect and trust comes into play.  An artist or author who
wishes to protect their work from those who are low enough to steal from
them should not be looked on as paranoid, they are simply trying to enforce
their rights under law.  Theft is where the lack of respect and trust come
from.


> However if you as a creator can bring yourself to see the good in
> others, most will respect you enough to not steal your work. You will
> still have some minor theft happening, but not nearly enough to stop you
> from creating and profiting from your creations. This is just life and
> society in general and unavoidable.


By your argument, we should do away with police and trust people to behave
themselves.  Simply because it is impossible to prevent all theft, does not
mean we should just give up in our attempts to make it difficult.


> Here's another parallel to the whole DRM debate. We trust each other to
> not run around killing people. We don't walk around wearing 100%
> protective body armour because, well, it's impossibly expensive, and no
> one will trust you due to your obvious paranoia. ;) Instead, we walk
> around with no armour at all, yet the threat of serious bodily harm is
> still there, and we manage to survive just fine.


Tell that to the two teenagers who were shot to death across town here last
week.  They were in their driveway playing basketball.  Or the elderly man
who was gunned down in his driveway a few towns away the week before that.
The danger is there, and it would certainly be far worse if there were no
police to keep it relatively in check.  While there is no such thing as 100%
safe, we are more safe due to the protections in place.  This analogy works
just as well for asset protection in a metaverse environment.


> There are bad apples, just don't let one bad apple ruin your
> relationship with the rest of the apples.


There are bad apples, that we agree on.  The question is what to do about
it.  Do we attempt to curb the bulk of content theft, or do we simply force
content creators to deal with a lack of protection for their work?  If you
were to poll the vast majority of content creators in Second Life what they
would prefer...  no protection for their work, or some protection... what do
you think their response would be?  And let's face it...  as it stands...
the majority of people who will be designing content for a metaverse based
on OpenSim will come from Second Life.

I can understand that from a developers perspective, Intellectual Property
Rights protection is a nasty bear to wrestle in the development of the
metaverse, but I do not see how the metaverse project benefits from
alienating the people who will make the metaverse interesting.  Think about
it...  what would you have without content?  Lots of empty space.

I believe that the first metaverse platform to successfully solve the IP
Rights issue will end up on the top of the pile.  And with the concept that
Charles and I were discussing here last night, I think OpenSim could well be
that platform.
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