[Opensim-users] Animations

[Robin Turner]

On 16 October 2011 21:47, Mike Chase <mike.chase at alternatemetaverse.com> wrote:

> Did you get them as a work for hire?  Have a contract that says you can
> reuse them?  This is no different than software or other intellectual
> property.  Ownership vests in the person that *created* them.  You paid for
> a right to use. And in that case, only in the context of SL; A given since
> there's no way to export them legitimately.  People who create textures
> often include terms of use to address this because textures are more easily
> moved around.  But if you "buy" textures in SL you get them with a right to
> use them, possibly spelled out in a license.  Ownership is still only the
> creator.

At the risk of getting OT here, virtual worlds highlight the probles
with the whole concept of intellectual property. Physical property is
a convention we are relatively comfortable with by virtue of using it
for millenia. Some people (e.g. anarcho-communists) may hate the idea,
but even then it doesn't _confuse_ them. If the law says an object is
mine, I can do what I like with it, including selling, lending or
giving to another person, at which point it may or may not become
theirs according to our agreement. Intellectual property is a
metaphorical extension of physical property and it _is_ confusing
because (a) as a society we are not used to treating ideas as if they
were objects and (b) treating them as though they actually were
objects is impractical. We thus have a legal system (or rather, a
plethora of systems, as V pointed out) which treats ideas as though
they were objects in some ways but not others. In a virtual world,
this gets more confusing because the ideas look like and are treated
as objects in that world. If a buy a physical chair, I can put it in
any home that I own, so I expect to do the same with a virtual chair
and my virtual homes. OTOH, the content creator thinks they own the
chair they created in the same way they would own a chair they made
physically. Both are making reasonable - but incorrect - assumptions
based on the conventions of property in our culture.

Robin

-- 
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Robin Turner
IDMYO
Bilkent Üniversitesi
Ankara, Turkey

http://about.me/robinturner