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

[Melanie]

Hi,

On 18/11/2012 19:26, Snowcrash Short wrote:
> On Sun, Nov 18, 2012 at 6:19 PM, Melanie <melanie at t-data.com> wrote:
> Nope, as a licensee I am per default allowed to use the licensed material
> in any way I see fit, as long as I do not violate the copyright of the
> copyright holder. This includes backing up, migrating to other media, and
> modifying for personal use. Said rights are available to me, unless I have
> entered into an agreement with the copyright holder not to do so.

This would be true for material distributed in a way that provides a
means for the actual data to ever be in the possession of the
licensee. With grid content, this is not so. Grid technology was
designed for possession of the actual data files to remain with the
grid operator, allowing the user only viewing rights. This is true
for almost all server based games out there, btw.

> Where have I at any point rejected the concept of intellectual property? or
> claimed that the licensees are unrestricted in their uses? never!, you are
> claims are even beyond misrepresenting what I have said.

I made no claims, I merely observe and everything I said is very
carefully worded to explicitly express perceptions and opinions.
Nothing I said about my observations was in any way worded as a
statement of fact about you, or as an insult, or as an allegation.

>> Please take a moment to consider - digital items _are_ property.
>> They belong to someone and that someone is not the owner of the
>> inventory. It's the creator.
> 
> And the license grant purchased from the copyright holder is property too!

It is restricted to the grid the item is purchased on. Every grid I
am aware of that has a currency system also has this restriction in
their TOS. Download and backup are not permitted by such TOS.

> And which is why I have offered to enable protection to those grids by
> implementing either the same policy as governs LL's grids or any other
> policy which can feasibly be implemented.

And then negated that protection by planning an open source release
so all and sundry can remove the protection at will.

> Only assets rez'ed and left by the user needs to remain, they do not need
> to be stored in any inventory, since they are visible in the region, as
> such there is no real technical need for a huge asset server held by the
> grid

The amount of assets required for rezzed objects is till tremendous.
Asset servers will need to remain.

> Are you too fine to touch GPL code? Admittedly the build process of the
> viewer is quite intricate, but the source is out there. Besides, who says
> that the URL returned in response for a CAPS request needs to reside on the
> server responding to the CAPS request?

IBM's lawyers have determined that working with GPL code copyrighted
by Linden Lab leaves OpenSim developers open to litigation and
endangers the codebase. Therefore the GPL versions of the viewer
were off limits. This is not true for the LGPL versions.

>> Creators have the expectation that the grid they upload their items
>> to protects their IP rights. They don't expect the user to be aware
>> of the law or follow it - they expect the grids to do that with
>> their TOS and their legal teams.
>>
> If that was the case, I pity the hobbiest grid operators, because putting
> the onus of protecting content creators assets on individual grid operators
> is leaving them wide open to litigation!

That is why commercial creators don't upload to hobby grids and
don't allow their creations to be taken off the secure grids.

>> SecondInventory has respected this by disallowing the download of
>> items the user has not created. They made that impossible to change
>> by keeping their tool closed source. Their tool has become the
>> accepted means of moving creations between worlds.
>>
>> As open source, your tool can be trivially modified by the less
>> morally inclined. I would expect the community to shun your too like
>> copybot is shunned. I would expect the reputation of copies of your
>> tool that have been illegally modified to reflect on the original,
>> unmodified tool and thereby cause grids, over time, to detect and
>> ban the use of any tool descended from it, ban the users using it
>> and confiscate inventories from these users. Is it really your
>> desire to become the author of super copybot?
>>
> You seem to have great respect for my coding skills "super copybot", the
> source code for everything is already out there, all I have done is combine
> what already exists and wrap it in a user interface.

The lack of an easy user interface is what prevents the masses from
using the existing tools.

>> Your standard response of "closed source is security by obscurity"
>> doesn't wash either. If there were a tool out there that is easy to
>> use and allows trivially copying complete items on a large scale and
>> that tool were just hard to find, I'd have to agree. However, there
>> is no such tool.
> 
> Yes there is, libomv, backup command line tool!

That falls under "difficult to use and broken".

>> All existing tools are complex or broken, often
>> both. Releasing your tool as open source can be extremely harmful to
>> the continuum of grids commonly known as the "metaverse".
>>
>> A significant portion of the metaverse relies on commerce and
>> commerce cannot be sustained in the presence of wholesale theft.
>>
> great piece of demagoguery, are you by any chance rhetorically trained?  so
> now releasing a legitimate tool is the same as performing wholesale theft?

Releasing a tool that can be trivially modified to perform large
scale theft as open source is, in my opinion, highly controversial
and the community considers it irresponsible, judging by the other
emails in this thread.

> Since you are going beyond misrepresentation and resorting to demagoguery I
> can only surmise that you still oppose the tool but lack additional
> rational arguments against it.

I oppose the uses the tool can be put to, once illegally modified,
and am of the opinion that an open source release enables these uses
in a way that will harm the metaverse. As far as I see it, I have
not misrepresented anything and I don't consider it demagoguery to
stress the importance of commerce and point to creator's
expectations and legal facts.

- Melanie