[Opensim-dev] Thoughts....

[Dalien Talbot]

On Mon, Mar 3, 2008 at 7:12 PM, The Burnman <theburnman at gmail.com> wrote:

> Well, one thing is for sure.  Watching the whole scenario unfold will
> certainly be interesting.
>

Indeed :)

I actually wrote a very long mail with the comment, but actually it could
have been interpreted as a "rant of a geek who do not respect the IP" (which
would be totally incorrect). I will probably write up something on my blog
about this.

Instead, within the context of "IP protection", I'd like to offer a simple
real-world scenario - and if someone will provide a compelling and possible
to implement method of solving that problem, I will suppose that the problem
of the "IP protection" can be solved and someone could implement it within
opensim.

The situation:

After a few years of research on the topic of finding the Answer To Life,
The Universe, And Everything, I come to a profoundly novel answer of "42",
and decide to make the business out of it by selling this answer to the
interested parties - granted, everyone knows to know that answer, so given
the importance of it, I am charging $10000 for a leaflet with the "42"
written on it.

The problem:

Since I am the first one to come to this conclusion (let's assume it is not
something taken from  Douglas Adams' book :-) - I indeed want to protect my
years of hard work, and ensure that all of those interested in knowing this
Answer, will obtain it only from the only legitimate source - me, and
consequently pay me the fee that I charge.

While simple, this scenario, I believe, models the "immaterial goods" (aka,
the IP) pretty well - and the fact that it is in the familiar "real life"
realm, means for thinking about this, one would not require any special
knowledge.

Oh, for the sake of the simplicity, let's assume the problem of identity in
the heterogeneous environments (i.e. ascertaining the fact that "me" is
indeed me, and not some miscreant pretending to be me - in the case of the
absence of the central authority aka government which would serve as the
final point of truth), is solved - otherwise the impossibility to find the
solution will double :-)

/d
-------------- next part --------------
An HTML attachment was scrubbed...
URL: <http://opensimulator.org/pipermail/opensim-dev/attachments/20080303/5bbe26d0/attachment-0001.html>