[Opensim-dev] Thoughts....

[Brian Wolfe]

On Mon, 2008-03-03 at 12:41 -0500, The Burnman wrote:
> 
> 
> 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.  ;)

Thanks. :)

>  
>         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.

People feel entitled because there is a cultural shift being forced from
works of art belonging to society in the past to works of art belonging
to a single person in modern society. I believe that this shift is
completely artificial in nature and is being forced upon us by the few.
If you look back to tribal times  music and literature was never owned
by a single artist. It was the fabric of the tribe and belonged to
everyone in the tribe. Granted that there was a preferred storyteller or
musician, but that was decided by skill of reenacting and presentation
than through ownership.

I also believe that an artists creativity is a direct result of their
social environment, never somethign that was a pure invention. Anyone
that pretends that music, literature, art etc comes from 100% within is
blind to the fact that what is within was generated by the culture
around them. I personally do not see how can one claim ownership of such
a circular flow. 

Keep in mind that I do heartilly agree that artists must be supported
due to their gifts of interpretation. In the past the artists were paid
not for their music but for their performance. In tribes the artists
were supported by their tribe so that they were free to pursue art. 

>  
>         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.

No, my argument is that we stop trying to add bodyguards, and big
brother 24x7 monitoring and instead return to enforcing consequences. I
think you misunderstood what I was saying. I could have worded this much
better. ;-P 

>  
>         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.

I think you missed my point here. Were they paranoid about it enough to
be wearing full battle armour just because they were exposed to the
outside world? No. They were not. Instead they trusted the outside world
and something bad happened to them. That is life. To believe that there
is such a thing as perfect safety is willfull ignorance of reality.

Our protection exists NOT from a DRM like response to the dangers, but
through the enforcement of consequences of actions.  Artists keep saying
"there's no way to protect other than DRM" is akin to saying "there's no
way to protect against murder other than everyone wearing full body
armour and being watched 24x7".  Instead, artists need to realize that
the only way to protect themselves is through repairing the chain of
trust that used to exist. I believe that in order to repair that trust,
artists must abandon this "modern" idea of ownership and go back to the
symbiotic relationship of the old ways. 

We are already seeing the first results of some artists that are going
back to symbiosis of trust. So far I see good results that warrant an
even stronger push to go back to the old ways. I would love to go into a
detailed analysis, but others have already done so many times over. 


>  
>         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.

There's an interesting phenomenon in society. The more physical and
legal restriction you place on somethign the more people justify
breakign those restrictions.  We can look back at the Prohibition era
for a good example of this in action. More people drank under
Prohibition than before or after. Prohibition spurred heavy increases of
40% to 60% in crimes that were already criminal before prohibition (and
after). When prohibition was lifted, these related crimes dropped back
to their pre-prohibition levels.

As a side note, to me, law serves as a guide of the collective belief in
what is right and wrong, not the other way around. You can't enact law
to change society. The creation and enforcement of DRM has had the exact
same result that Prohibition did. Both were enactments of law in order
to change social beliefs. Neither has suceeded because of the natural
order of law vs societal belief.

> 
> 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.

Content can't come into being without a society. A society can't grow
and evolve without content. It's a symbiotic relationship that will
never cease to exist no matter how much restriction you place on art.

DRM and rights management pre-enforcement through fences does nothing
but destroy that symbiotic circle in my mind. You might get a brief
(brief in relation to all of history) surge of income and reward,
however this surge quickly reverts into loss of the fedback and becomes
self destructive. This is why I refer to DRM as the ultimate weapon of
mass destruction.

> 
> 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.

*nod* The flexibility does allow us to try the different tactics to get
a comparable situation result. :) I have no problem at all with people
building DRM in so long as it is optional, and disabled by default. It's
up to each operator and content creator to choose how they interact with
the world. I just firmly believe that putting up electronic fences is a
self destructive act. I believe enough in self will that I detest these
anti-darwinism laws that prevent us as a society from choosing for
ourselves the level of protection vs fredom. 

I think that eventually DRM and this whole idea of "intellectual
ownership" will fade away just as Prohibition has. Most places will go
for the open model because that is what society thrives on.

A few will retain the DRM model and will stay small isolated islands of
like minded individuals. They are most welcome to have this mini
society. I however will not be amongst them because I value the
creativity that art sparks in everyone when it is allowed to flow
freely.

> 
> 

Hopefully I have done much better this go around than with my first in
clairity of ideas. ;-P I really should learn to speak after my brain is
more awake rather than right away.

Aside from that, this has been a most enjoyable debate. :)