[Opensim-dev] Legal Issues was RFC Profiles

[Andrew Yourtchenko]

My 1.5 eurocents:

On Tue, Mar 31, 2009 at 5:33 AM, Frisby, Adam <adam at deepthink.com.au> wrote:
> I suggest using a URI here for the licenses, with major license links hosted at sites owned by major organisations unlikely to go down (CC, FSF, etc).

Watching the discussion, I thought having a "License library set" of
notecards with the predefined UUIDs might make it possible to have a
complete set of licenses. However, this all has one interesting aspect
- what if the license changes at some point in time ? Does the new
edition have a new URL or the old one ? It's an interesting single
point of failure if the latter. At least with UUIDs, the asset system
is working against it (and, technically the UUIDs for those very
specific items could be based on the hash of the content. RFC4122
allows the SHA-1-based generation of the UUID based on namespace ID
and name - in this case the "name" could be the entire license text.

I'm not a cryptographer, but I think making a SHA-1 collision *and*
keeping the entirety of the text legaleze should be reasonably hard :)
So, as a result we get the unique UUID for each license which will
protect the text from accidental or malicious modification.

>
> For plain SL-viewers, perhaps we could show the licenses as the 'description' of the inventory item or something? (maybe a '/license <item>' command inworld with the inventory item name returns license information?)

Another idea - if UUID is being used as a license id - would be to
force-feed the user with the license notecard for the first time, when
they select the item with the license not yet accepted, and request to
assign "their friendly name" to this license if they accept it.

Subsequently send a one-liner into their messages from a
pseudo-account named "License Reminder" when they select the other
items for the first time in their inventory (or if they double click
it?)

(Of course, overloading a description is nice, but then where does one
store the description ?)

A totally out of the blue thought for the textures is to use the
steganography to embed the license ID + creator name into the texture
itself, my perception is that the size of the textures that the folks
would care about would be big enough to allow this. Then this could be
checked on import and the exceptions reported to the user themselves
and the sim/grid owner.

cheers,
andrew

>
> Adam
>
>> -----Original Message-----
>> From: opensim-dev-bounces at lists.berlios.de [mailto:opensim-dev-
>> bounces at lists.berlios.de] On Behalf Of Michael Cortez
>> Sent: Monday, 30 March 2009 5:32 PM
>> To: opensim-dev at lists.berlios.de
>> Subject: Re: [Opensim-dev] Legal Issues was RFC Profiles
>>
>>  >> 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.
>>
>> This is true.
>>
>> With the four component options available for CC, many scenarios are
>> covered:
>>
>> http://creativecommons.org/about/licenses/
>>
>> But not all.
>>
>> All of the CC options assume you allow redistribution, but aside from
>> that in most cases "Copy-No Mod" would be equivalent to something like
>> "Attribution No Derivatives" and "Copy-Mod" would essentially be
>> "Attribution Share-Alike" or "Attribution Non-Commercial."
>>
>> What's missing is a "No Distribution" clause.  If the organizers had
>> the
>> foresight to be complete, rather then altruistic, the addition of a
>> non-redistribution clause IMHO would have made for the ultimate
>> mix/match license.
>>
>> An "All rights reserved, you are licensed to use this for personal use"
>> type clause for "No Perms" would be good.
>>
>> Lots of ideas, and there will be lots of complexity -- and of course we
>> don't want to start handing out legal advice -- but as others have
>> mentioned, if we start with some way of adding asset meta data -- we
>> can
>> then grow from there.
>>
>> Now of course, for specific grids like say <cough>OSGrid</cough> --
>> where I suspect the admin's aren't really in this to be  IP rights
>> cops,  and probably don't want people coming after them with  lawyers
>> because some bug  exposed  an exploitable asset copy mechanism, or
>> because someone connected a hacked region to the grid to suck assets
>> out
>> -- perhaps having the default licensing be something like CC -- which
>> always guarantees redistribution isn't such a bad thing?
>>
>> --
>> Michael Cortez
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