[Opensim-dev] Legal Issues was RFC Profiles

[Michael Cortez]

Frisby, Adam 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).
>
> 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?)
>   

I think this would make only a good first step.

It leaves things entirely in too much limbo if said URI goes down, 
especially if the creator had no desire to use an "open source" license, 
or any license provided by a 3rd party and choose to instead use a 
license of their making.  The user may not even have a web site.

One intriguing way of doing it via a Region Module, would basically be 
to have an in-world "/license" command -- which is used to both view and 
attach a license.  You create your license using a notecard and do 
/license <item> <notecard> to "attach" the license.  Then you use 
/license <item> to retrieve the license.  Of course you would allow 
expose capabilities to allow viewers to access these licenses directly 
and retrieve them with dialogs or other mechanisms that are a bit 
cleaner then a chat interface.

I'd like to see things go a step farther, and actually have the author 
specify along with their license a bit of xml or other configuration, 
that specifies what/how they want their license expressed as permissions 
within the system.  This makes things much more complicated, but would 
allow future things such as "Allow export" which could specifically flag 
and enable users to easily save their content via their viewer for use 
elsewhere.

Heck, there's even the legal mess that a creator may choose specifically 
to limit an item to a single grid.  Which creates all kinds of 
interesting issues with hypergrid scenarios, for example the grid owner 
may be violating the rights of the creator by providing a script binary 
to a client (see various bittorrent, file sharing cases) - so that the 
client can upload it to another grid.

Fun food for thought,
--
Michael Cortez