[Opensim-users] Announcement of inventory tool (MyInventory), mostly of interest to grid operators/grid nauts

Thu Nov 15 12:19:32 UTC 2012

Melanie speaks sense. Consult a lawyer before someone else's lawyer 
contacts you. If you're willing to brave the legal worries this could 
cause you, the only sound policy to default to is one that respects how 
the content is licensed. This includes OSGrid, which respects user's 
copyrights.

Right now, there is no export permission. There easily could be, but it 
would require support from both the server and viewer side. Support for 
it would need to be virtually (heh) universal, or have a default that 
was agreed upon. A mantis for this feature request on the server side of 
things exists [1]. Supporting this on the viewer side would take a great 
deal more effort. You'd at least want those viewers with specific 
support for OpenSimulator on board (Kokua, Zen, Firestorm, Teapot, 
Singularity, Cool VL, and Radegast all come to mind). There will of 
course be legacy viewers (like Imprudence and Phoenix) hanging around 
that may not ever get patched for it, necessitating the need for the 
legally safest export flag default.

Things can get even messier. Even with an export flag, will this 
software preserve the creator name when the content is exported to 
another grid? More than a few licenses require attribution to be 
preserved. Will it allow upload to a grid or standalone where 
permissions have been disabled? I'm sure many content creators would be 
unhappy to hear they could be. With more caffeine in me, I might think 
of a few more important questions, and I have no doubt that others who 
follow this list will be able to supply them.

I don't want to give the impression here than I'm against the idea that 
a user should be able to backup their inventory. I would opine that most 
users would love this ability, and that many would respect creator's 
rights. But many of those same users want their copyrights and licenses 
respected as the law requires, and steps taken by software like this to 
ensure this was so.

Marcus

[1] http://opensimulator.org/mantis/view.php?id=5892

On 11/15/2012 5:03 AM, Melanie wrote:
> The reason StoredInventory is closed source and very restrictive is
> that exporting/importing of items that are not compatibly licensed
> is, in effect, copybotting.
>
> The risks in making such a tool open source is that any restrictions
> can be trivially removed by the knowledgeable user, creating what is
> in effect the ultimate copybot.
>
> The people who made StoredInventory were particularly worried about
> SecondLife, since open sourcing the project would have allowed
> people to remove the protections that were placed to enforce SL
> compliance.
>
> This may result in SL suing the program creators as well as the
> program users and also may result in users of the program, whether
> these individuals infringe SL TOS or not, being banned from SL,
> possibly permanently.
>
> Exporting content not licensed for export, or protected by a grid's
> TOS, is theft. Uploading it to another or even the same grid is
> copybotting, which legally is plagiarism. Profiting from it by
> selling the copies may also be fraud in some legislations.
>
> My advice is to consult a lawyer at your place of residence, as in
> some jurisdictions producing software capable of performing these
> actions is a criminal offense.
>
> IMHO, open source is a very bad idea for this type of software.
>
> Best regards,
>
> Melanie
>
> On 15/11/2012 10:44, Snowcrash Short wrote:
>> Hi
>>
>> I've been working on a client side tool for decentralizing user
>> inventories, which I will release as an open source tool in two weeks, some
>> of the features may be relevant to grid operators.
>>
>> The basic premise of the tool is that the inventory and the backing assets
>> of the inventory items really should be controlled by the user. The tool is
>> born out of a frustration of having visited a number of grids. Each visit
>> to a new grid presents me with an empty inventory, and I can then spend
>> time searching for suitable item, clothing, attachments and
>> other accessories.
>>
>> For this purpose I have created a tool which will allow me to backup my
>> inventory to a local cache and then upload the contents to another grid.
>>
>> If my tool becomes popular, both the upload and download mechanisms may
>> have some impact on the grid-operators, hence this email to serve as a
>> notice.
>>
>> The basic architecture is pretty simple, consisting of a number of import
>> agents, which can import the users inventory and backing assets to a local
>> database, and a number of upload agents which can upload inventory content
>> to a specific account.
>>
>> Backup/Import
>> There are two import agents, one which will import .iar files and one which
>> works very much like I believe "Stored Inventory" works, which can backup
>> the inventory of an avatars inventory. Avatar backup/Import is governed by
>> a policy. Currently there are two policies, one complying with a very
>> restrictive interpretation of the Linden Labs policy on backups, and a
>> completely unrestricted policy, where anything that can be downloaded will
>> be downloaded.
>>
>> When a new account is registered in MyInventory it checks if the account is
>> for a Linden Lab grid and limits the choices of policies to policies
>> suitable for LL's TOS, I cannot and do not know if other grids have similar
>> policies, I can well imagine that Avination has a similar restrictions, and
>> would like similar logic implemented to restrict the download. Any grid
>> operator which would like to have backup governed by a more restrictive
>> policy are invited to notify me and I will attempt to implement the policy
>> prior to the first release of the source code. or supply patches at a later
>> time.
>>
>> Upload/Export
>> MyInventory supports two mechanisms for uploading inventory
>> content, traditional upload using UDP/CAPS and direct access to the
>> inventory and asset web-services.
>> Due to limitations in the UDP/CAPS protocol each upload will create new
>> assets, and as of my latest read of the Open Simulator code the asset store
>> does not support "single instance assets", i.e. it does not use a checksum
>> to verify if the asset already exists, for this reason MyInventory prefers
>> to upload using direct access to asset and inventory web-services.
>>
>> I would propose that the grids which chooses to support MyInventory augment
>> their "GridInfoService" entries with the url's for the asset and inventory
>> web-services, e.g.
>>
>> [GridInfoService]
>>      assets = http://assets.osgrid.org
>>      inventory = http://inventory.osgrid.org
>>
>> Best regards
>> Snowcrash
>>
>>
>>
>>
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