[Opensim-dev] Legal Issues was RFC Profiles

[Dahlia Trimble]

Agreed that there should be a way to attach a license to an asset. Prim
assets can have a notecard included which might be useful as a way to convey
license, but other assets such as textures, animations, and even closed
source scripts are unable to have any additional attributes associated with
them using this method.
I'm not sure I would support having Creative Commons be the default
though... while it is an excellent option for some work and I have used it
for some content I have developed, it does reduce the creator's rights that
are normally assumed by the Berne convention or US copyright laws. I think
it would be nice to have a few boilerplate licenses such as Creative Commons
of GPL or BSD or whatever available, but only as an addition to the ability
to add free-form license text.

Then again, I really think we need some kind of asset metadata storage
capability, and license could be one metadata attribute.

On Mon, Mar 30, 2009 at 8:30 AM, Michael Cortez <mcortez at gmail.com> wrote:

> 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
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