[Opensim-dev] Thoughts....

[Diva Canto]

Dear fellow technologists who understand quite well what technology can 
and can't do:

The Burnman's message illustrates quite well that the fear of bad things 
happening is difficult to eradicate from people's minds. Dan Miller's 
message placed it under a wonderful historical perspective. The fear 
won't go away, ever. What can a poor technologist do in the face of such 
fears?

a) Tell people, very rationally, that their fears are irrational.
b) Take their fears seriously and develop a policing-centric system.
c) Be sympathetic and develop technology that is generic enough to allow 
for policing-centric systems to emerge, in parallel with more tolerant 
systems.

 From my experience, a) is a very ineffective way of addressing the 
problem. It's actually counter-productive, as people, being irrational 
agents in general, will simply hear the message "you're nuts", and will 
come back again with more arguments for why they are not being 
irrational. It's a dead-end conversation.

Option b) is one that most technologists don't believe, because they 
know quite well that such policing cannot be done with the technology, 
but with an aggressive costumer protection department. Some 
technologists may very well follow it, because they know that there is 
some short-term cash to be made -- until it eventually dissolves when 
they realize that the costs of keeping the police and prosecution 
departments far outweigh the revenue, at least in a situation where 
there is no monopoly and people have choices (history shows that people 
tend to be attracted by tolerance).

My favorite is option c), and I think that OpenSim is general enough to 
account for several service models to emerge. People who want extra 
protection should only produce content on grids that offer that kind of 
protection, and not on the other, more tolerant, ones. I personally 
believe that such policing-heavy grids will not have a chance of 
surviving, unless, besides the protection, they offer some really cool 
things that attract people to them in the first place; but hey! - the 
point is that people will have choices.

Diva / Crista

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.
>
> ------------------------------------------------------------------------
>
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