[Opensim-dev] Legal Issues was RFC Profiles

Tue Mar 31 09:34:34 UTC 2009

Something needs to be done and having a mechanism to provide a  
consistent identify across worlds needs to be part of the solution.

By default creators have all rights reserved copyright to their own  
creations, without having to explicitly declare it.  Having a  
creative commons licence by default could mean creators loosing these  
rights inadvertently.  International agreements over digital rights  
and software patents i.e. scripts are far from agreed between nations.

I think that there are issues regarding "buying" items as there can  
be a big divide between the general perception of what you can do  
with a bought product. In the virtual world there is not the same  
sense of say a digital download. The permissions based system  
regardless of security issues does address this however imperfectly.

There is also the issue of moving assets between virtual worlds and  
platforms and issues of how to give variants of the this copyright to  
enable any other hosting agents the rights to make copies for  
technical reasons. I use the same Avatar name across all worlds and  
that is my virtual identity regardless of the platform. The UUID is  
just a technical bit and need not even be the same everywhere. Who  
are you giving permissions to the Avatar or the owner of the Avatar?

A notecard is useful regardless of any DRM that may need to be applied.

On 31 Mar 2009, at 09:25, Andrew Yourtchenko wrote:

> 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
>>> _______________________________________________
>>> Opensim-dev mailing list
>>> Opensim-dev at lists.berlios.de
>>> https://lists.berlios.de/mailman/listinfo/opensim-dev
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