[Opensim-dev] Interrelated difficult problems related to asset portability

[Diva Canto]

Dr Scofield Wrote:
> > be people willing to pay. Maybe. There's certainly a [small] market
> for
> > clone detection in source code and other artifacts that are time-
> consuming to produce.
> >
> i think there's a huge market out there. and it will grow with the
> growth of VWs.

Very possible.

People have different needs when it comes to asset protection, and one model
doesn't fit all. This should be configurable at server init time. Here are
three of the most prevalent models, the third one being a hybrid.

1 - People want all their inworld assets protected from being copied. This
means that there should be a lot of guards upfront. It's conceivable that
someone might develop a DRM module for OpenSim; but I don't think that
should be in the OpenSim core, because this kind of protection, besides
being a conceptual quagmire, is not a universal need. A more lightweight
manner of addressing this need is to use the walled-garden model of grids,
which somewhat restricts who has access to the inworld assets, and then have
people sign a very strict ToS, and enforce that with severe real-world
penalties. Example on the Web: facebook.

2 - People don't care much about their inworld assets being copied by
hackers, what they care most is to attract lots of visitors to their sites,
or even just expressing themselves in public. So free access to images, etc,
are a tool for traffic, it puts their message out there; not just people
traffic but all sorts of backend info gathering traffic, for example
crawlers for search engines. In this scenario, there is no need for backend
asset copy-protection mechanisms, just front-end protection and declarations
of copyrights. This is the prevalent model of the [public] Web.

3 - People care somewhat about their inworld assets being copied, while at
the same time caring to attract visitors, therefore benefiting from
operating in open grids and open sims. A lot of web sites fall on this
category. This is the model that would benefit from having open access to
assets along with a monitoring system for detecting copyright violations. As
Dr. Scofield said, some people care to do this on the public web too.

Note that all of these models can work with the techniques that we were
talking on this thread -- REST access, pulling UAI out of the OpenSim core.
For walled-gardens, it's "just" a matter of authenticating the callers. This
kind of ACL is routine on the Web, session keys, etc., so it should be
feasible in OpenSim too. I think this is possible without having to change
the viewer. 

(As an important aside, assets and inventory are not the same thing.
Inventory should always be private and protected. My use of the word asset
means inworld object.)