[Opensim-dev] Legal Issues was RFC Profiles

[Michael Cortez]

Tom Willans wrote:
> Who are you giving permissions to the Avatar or the owner of the Avatar?
This is the rudimentary issue at the bottom of this, and is IMHO the 
cause of most of the confusion.

You can't make a legal agreement with an Avatar -- in all likelyhood, 
the only legal standings an avatar is going to have in court is as an 
alias for an actual human.

Therefore you are always making an agreement with the owner.

Now you may be making an agreement that the owner is being licensed to 
use an object within the confines of a specific grid, t the owner is 
permitted to make digital copies of said object within the regions of 
that grid, is restricted to using those copies with a single specific 
avatar and is not allowed to provide those copies to other people.  This 
is what some creators and users believe is happening when you mark 
something as No Transfer, Copy, No Mod.

Now others believe, for the same permissions that you are:

Selling the owner a digital copy of the item.  Since they now own it, 
they are legally entitled to fair rights usage including backing it up.  
They believe they have agreed to some terms of usage during the 
purchase, which includes the fact that they will not modify the item or 
provide it to others.  However since they (the human) own it, they feel 
they can use said item anywhere, any grid, or any purpose including 
importing it into their own 3D applications and creating 3D meshes that 
they may render to jpeg and use to decorate their personal website.

And then there are lots of shades of gray between those two points.

> The permissions based system regardless of security issues does 
> address this however imperfectly.
IMHO the permissions system, as envisioned by LL fails utterly to convey 
in a manor that is clear and concise as to what you are actually buying 
or licensing when you spend L$ within SL, to "purchase" an object.

For more fun, one can always try to decode the LL Terms of Service:

Section 1.3: 
... "You acknowledge that Linden Lab and other Content Providers have 
rights in their respective Content under copyright and other applicable 
laws and treaty provisions, and that except as described in this 
Agreement, such rights are not licensed or otherwise transferred by mere 
use of the Service." ...

Section 3.2
..."Notwithstanding the foregoing, you understand and agree that by 
submitting your Content to any area of the service, you automatically 
grant (and you represent and warrant that you have the right to grant) 
to Linden Lab:"...  (a) a royalty-free, worldwide, fully paid-up, 
perpetual, irrevocable, non-exclusive right and license to (i) use, 
reproduce and distribute your Content within the Service as permitted by 
you through your interactions on the Service

Many of these sections have been misread and misquoted, I myself have 
done so. 

However at this point, I am fairly certain the intent of the only 
license users of Second Life are agreeing to by merely using the system, 
and buying/selling content in a normal fashion (no included license 
notecards and such) -- is the right to use LL's SL.  You never have any 
legal rights at all to the items you "buy" in the system.  A license is 
never established between the content creators and the buyers -- instead 
the license creators have licensed the content to Linden Labs, and under 
the Terms of Service, Linden Labs allows other users to utilize the 
content within the system.  I'm not even sure you can argue quid pro quo 
has granted you a license or ownership, because LL makes it quite clear 
that "Linden Dollars" have no intrinsic value, and all you have is a 
license to move around some bits on their database servers that are 
labeled as "Linden Dollars"

I highly doubt this is the intent of the vast mast majority of OpenSim 
developers and potential users for this to be the case on any grid they 
provide or visit. 

--
Michael Cortez