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

[Kyle Hamilton]

Hmmm... *pondering*

Watermarking content (such as was done by the MPAA, to determine which
'screener' copies were being ripped and released onto the internet
ahead of theatrical release) allows one to figure out which authorized
copy is being copied.  However, with portable assets, it's entirely
possible that a user is going to want to upload an instance of their
authorized copy onto another assetserver for the benefit of sharing
space and experience on that particular grid.  Alone, that should not
necessarily be grounds for filing a lawsuit on such notification.  The
downside to this is that the watermark changes the actual bitstring,
so multiple watermarks will appear as separate asset-contents and thus
not trigger notification.

It should be noted that my idea would also provide a very valuable
metric to content producers -- particularly, how many people are
seeing their work, and which works are being seen.  This is a metric
which most content producers of my acquaintence would very much like
to have.  (Why do you think 'individual impressions' are such a hot
commodity for webspaces?)  Combined with watermarking, it could also
be used as a metric to see how useful individual channels of
distribution are, be they paid (hiring someone to distribute), free
(self-distribution), or revenue-generating (storefront or
ad-supported).

Trust networks are a different story, though (unless I'm
misunderstanding what you mean -- please forgive me, it's a bit late,
and I'm tired).  The idea of "whitelisting" other asset servers which
are allowed to request your content is an attempt to pre-screen
assetservers which will respect copyright.  However, this is very much
like saying "I believe that anyone I do not choose to trust is going
to violate my copyright", which is very much a
"guilty-until-proven-innocent" viewpoint.  I don't know about you, but
I've grown up in the US, where "innocent until proven guilty" -- i.e.,
the US State Department's List of Specially Designated Nationals (a
list of people of the US which are not allowed to buy US arms or
encryption technology, aka a "blacklist") -- is the rule enshrined in
both civil and criminal matters.  This is why I can't really support
building a system which will by default presume that everyone is
guilty, built into anything that provides a function as fundamental as
"how to share information between cooperating parties".

As well, I don't really like any system which will allow a certain
threshold of people to 'vote down' a given party simply because they
don't like some of the speech that that party makes, or some of the
ideas that that party espouses, or for some associations that that
party makes.  In the past, we used to have small communities where
people could be run out of town for unpopular speech or ideas (for an
example, search for the lyrics to "Not In Our Town", a song written by
the Reverend Fred Small -- which is a truly excellent song, and I
recommend you listen to it if you can at all manage it).  These same
expressions of moral outrage and attendant silencing of speech or
ideas cannot truly exist, though, in a community which cannot be
escaped.  Not if we want to be free of intellectual shackles.  Not if
we want to exist in a truly free environment where differing
ideologies and civil discourse thereof are embraced instead of
vilified.

And as an aside: I don't like Lars Ulrich's stand on digital music.  I
also do not listen to Metallica.  However, these phenomena are
unrelated. :D

-Kyle H

On Sun, May 25, 2008 at 8:10 AM, dan miller <danbmil99 at yahoo.com> wrote:
> I agree with everything you've said.  We talked about some stuff like this last year -- trust networks, watermarking, etc.  The basic idea is that if most of the folks in a community *voluntarily* agree not to abuse legitimate copyrights, then abusers will find there aren't many places to hang out, content owners can make money, and so on.
>
> If you think about it, it's much like the RL issue of civil society.  You can't make a society safe by adding cops -- it's completely reactive.  You have to start with the fundamental concept of mutual respect, as opposed to mutual suspicion.  The occasional malefactor needs to be quickly rebuked, so that it is clear that you do not tolerate bad behavior.
>
> The alternative is a police state where everyone walks around in intellectual shackles.  We don't want that, do we?  So we have to support civility.  That means actually respecting things like copyright, rather than bitching that everything should be free and freely copyable/distributable.  There will be plenty of creative commons content, but some will not be.  That should be the creator's choice, and the community needs to respect that choice.
>
> As I've said before, if you don't like Lars Ulrich's stand on digital music, don't listen to Metallica.  Copying their MP3's and saying they suck because they disapprove of free copying is oxymoronic.  (Musically, they jumped the shark decades ago anyway)
>
> -danx0r
>
>
> Daniel B. Miller
> Vice President of Engineering
> Anybots, Inc.
>
>
> --- On Fri, 5/23/08, Kyle Hamilton <aerowolf at gmail.com> wrote:
>
>> From: Kyle Hamilton <aerowolf at gmail.com>
>> Subject: Re: [Opensim-dev] Interrelated difficult problems related to asset portability
>> To: opensim-dev at lists.berlios.de
>> Date: Friday, May 23, 2008, 5:46 PM
>> DRM doesn't work.  Period.  I'm not trying to find
>> any kind of way to
>> prevent things from being copied -- I'm trying to find
>> a way for
>> people who own things that are copied to find out about it.
>>
>> (There are two concepts here, related but not identical.
>> The
>> difference between "classic copyright" and
>> "DMCA copyright" is this:
>> In classic copyright, you have to trust that the law
>> provides enough
>> deterrent for anything that isn't fair use.  'fair
>> use' is a very
>> slippery concept to define, and an even more slippery
>> concept to try
>> to encode.  The content creator trusts that its stuff
>> won't be misused
>> -- or if it is, that it would be more expensive to litigate
>> it than
>> would be awarded for damages.  It has always relied on the
>> copyright
>> owner/content creator becoming aware of the misuse of its
>> property,
>> and has always relied on the copyright owner itself
>> initiating a legal
>> action to stop any given misuse.
>>
>> DMCA copyright, on the other hand, reaches out the
>> Technological Hand
>> of God to prevent it from being used in ways that
>> aren't preapproved.
>> This generally means "no frame-stills, no clips, no
>> text-copy, no
>> audio-copy, no video-copy, no copy at all because you COULD
>> be
>> attempting to misuse it"... but which prevents things
>> like 'lending a
>> book to a friend', 'copying a portion of a song
>> into an audio
>> presentation to compare or critique it', etc.  It's
>> like having
>> someone constantly looking over your shoulder and saying
>> "you can't do
>> that", regardless of what the purpose for
>> "that" is.  In effect, it
>> removes the judicial review process -- and then, to add
>> insult to
>> injury, the DMCA makes it a felony to bypass, explain how
>> to bypass,
>> or create tools used to bypass the Technological Protection
>> Measure.)
>>
>> The reason I started thinking about this was related to the
>> Stroker
>> Serpentine US District Court case seeking a restraining
>> order
>> preventing his animations from being sold by someone who
>> claimed he
>> was an authorized reseller.  I started thinking about two
>> interrelated
>> issues:  1) the viewer must have access to the data at some
>> point, and
>> 2) the viewer already copies the data.  Anyone can -- with
>> a little
>> bit of C++ hackery -- redirect the copies to an
>> easily-accessible
>> datastore, or even write code to pull stuff out of the
>> LLVFS caches
>> directly.  DRM would require that the viewer never store
>> the data, or
>> never see any kind of unencrypted version of it (which is
>> impossible,
>> since the viewer is released under GPL) -- so I started
>> thinking about
>> how things work.
>>
>> All I could come up with was a realization that computers
>> are already
>> extremely good at, among other things, data comparisons,
>> and there's
>> already a common codebase which is run everywhere -- the
>> Linden
>> Viewer.  The Linden Viewer is used to stress-test OpenSim,
>> among other
>> things -- which means that it already sees content that
>> it's exposed
>> to on the main grid, as well as seeing the assets from the
>> asset
>> servers on the private grids that it connects to.
>>
>> DRM can't work in this environment.  If nothing else,
>> this is simply a
>> proposal for something which has a chance of working more
>> than
>> minimally.
>>
>> Now, I'm noticing that you're completely ignoring a
>> fourth class of
>> content producer: those who make their money solely from
>> the license
>> fees they receive in exchange for right-to-use that
>> content.  With
>> some of the stuff that's going on in Linden's
>> grids, I can only see
>> that smaller realms will be the norm and not the exception.
>>  This
>> means that these splinter realms will have their own view
>> of their
>> assets, their own assetservers, and no means of knowing
>> that the
>> assets that are uploaded to them are not
>> authorized-under-copyright.
>> Without any kind of means for people who create content and
>> sell
>> licenses to use that content to learn about these copyright
>> violations
>> I fear that nobody will want to create premium content for
>> use in
>> these grids.
>>
>> I had mentioned that there were social problems involved...
>> well, this
>> is one of them.
>>
>> -Kyle H
>>
>> On Fri, May 23, 2008 at 8:30 AM, Diva Canto
>> <diva at metaverseink.com> wrote:
>> > 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.
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