[Opensim-dev] Thoughts....

[dr scofield]

The Burnman wrote:
>
>
> On Mon, Mar 3, 2008 at 12:10 PM, Brian Wolfe <brianw at terrabox.com 
> <mailto: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.
>
my belief is that we can only resolve that via contracts between 
grid/sim operators and content creators. basically, we'll have open 
source content that will have BSD-style permissions or even GPL-style 
permission attached and we will have closed-source content where the 
content creator includes a list of trusted grid/sims (or grid/sims 
certification authorities) to which her content can be exported. all 
those sim/grids not on the list will not get the asset handed over from 
a "trusted" sim/grid.

that pretty much is all we can do, i think. the users will then decide 
what content they like, what content (and its restrictions) they don't 
like.

    cheers,
    dr scofield

-- 
dr dirk husemann, mathmatics and computer science, ibm zurich research lab
SL: dr scofield ---- drscofield at xyzzyxyzzy.net ---- http://xyzzyxyzzy.net/
RL: hud at zurich.ibm.com - +41 44 724 8573 - http://www.zurich.ibm.com/~hud/

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