[Opensim-dev] Legal Issues was RFC Profiles

[Michael Cortez]

James Stallings II wrote:
> Perhaps So Mel, But....
> ....Where is the similar licensing or release from obligation under 
> license for the OS grid content?
>
> It seems to me there's a double standard in the offing here, whereby 
> content from the Linden Grid is hands-off for legal reasons, but not 
> so much as a tip of the hat in that direction when it comes to content 
> from an OS grid.
Depending on your interpretation of Linden Lab's legal documents 
including their ToS, one may come to the conclusion that the only person 
who is being granted a copyright license (regardless of what permissions 
check boxes you click) is Linden Labs, who is being granted a right to 
use a creators content as intended by the creator within their system.

Now of course this is just one interpretation, and I'm sure if you get 
two different lawyers in the same room looking at those documents you 
may get two completely different answers as well.

This in my humble opinion is a good reason why I believe the asset 
system should be extended in such a way that every asset can have a text 
blob attached to it that includes actual licensing terms -- perhaps with 
the default check box permissions being assigned to various creative 
commons licensing attributes.  Or allow the user to decide what those 
check boxes mean for themselves and when they encounter an item where 
they're different, they're informed via blue message box (for legacy 
integration) -- but even better would be to talk to the Hippo and other 
alternative viewer creators, to see if something can be integrated to 
display the creators licensing terms directly.

Just a few random thoughts,
--
Michael Cortez