Would commerce continue in SL if Permissions were Abandoned?

If the permission system in SL was abandoned would commerce continue?

Could the residents be trusted not to give away free copies of everything they buy to their friends?

Rock

Kind of an odd question, but I'll play.

In a word...NO. While the majority of the population is honest, the balance are either borderline or flat out dishonest. All it would take is one person to create a snowball.

Easy answer. No it wouldn't.

Candidly, no.

Well the way things are for type of creating I do anyone one with their cache
could probably snatch all my textures if they choose too regardless of permissions.
It would bother me since things money wise is hard for me, if someone took what I spend endless hours on and was making more profit then I ever seen from my own work.
Way things are there is large majority that think full permissions means it's mine I can do whatever I want with them. It would probably just get worse.
Either way I would continue to create and do my art work because I am artist regardless of what permissions existed in SL, profit or no profit.
Profit and having others appreciate my or other Artist content regardless of permissions is very nice thing but reality is this doesn't always work out.

Interesting question, Rock

I agree with everyone above - permissions & commerce are intertwined. Likewise, when there are issues with permissions (and there are), it affects commerce.

Unless SL is to become communist. Then all bets are off

The reason I asked is that other grids plan on introducing commerce. However, although they have the same permission system in place as SL, each region and grid owner, who has direct access to the database, can then just change the permissions at will. For example, with the new HyperGrid system, where anyone can teleport from any opensim to any other opensim, and have their entire inventory available to them, they could tp to the OSGrid, buy stuff, with permissions, tp back to their own grid, open the database and set all the perms on the item they bought to full.

I was wondering how they hope commerce can flourish if there isn't a rigourous permission system in place.

Some there pointed out that despite the number of piracy sites on the web, where you can download any mp3 you like, legal sites, such as iTunes still flourish.

It will be interesting to see how this, and other business models on other grids, pan out.

Rock

lol @ "Communist"...that actually strikes a chord with me; commerce w/ no perms in SL would work about as good as Anarchism in RL. It wouldn't. You can't trust people to give back out of the goodness of thier hearts...that's *such* a ridiculous thought that I can't even laugh at it. No offense, it just is.

With .mp3s, some people are scared enough of reprisals like jail time, that they buy the music instead. In SL, nobody's scared to steal your builds, so the way things are now, I would think the bottom would fall out of the economy right off the bat.

Well, some of us don't steal music for other reasons, but we're a small niche really...

I wouldn't even give away something I created if I couldn't ensure some bastard wouldn't try to sell for profit. The permission system is vital for that.

It would probably continue, but under different business models, and probably with less volume (and thus less choice).

For example, the "ransom" model - where somebody builds something and advertises it, and then announces, I will release this with full perms once I have been paid a total of (let's say) L$20000. Anyone who contributes to that total will get it first and will also get their name engraved on it.

Also, security would be a big deal. With no permissions, anything could be modified, too, which would mean you'd need to be sure you were getting your scripted vendors from the real creator - otherwise, anyone could have put a pickpocket script in there. Just the same as how you should all be checking the signatures on your Firefoxes, folks. (Yes, with modify permissions you could inspect the script for this yourself, but not everyone wants to do that.)

It would seem that a better way of doing transferable content would be to try to break the link between the region server and the asset server completely, so that the client would be the only place where positional data from the region server and the graphical data from the asset server were combined. Running scripts is the only obstacle to this (so for non-scripted objects it could already be done), but that might be avoidable too. A sim doesn't need to know what a prim is in order to know that a script just turned it ninety degrees to the left. Collisions would have to be client-side, but this isn't an FPS, so that shouldn't be much of a problem.

Total misconception of the system...

HG doesn't carry your inventory because your inventory server is still the one you are using, not the one attached to the sim you are visiting.

SM

and what about hard disk crash, or user deleting their stuff ?

viewerside physics need a good pc with a very good griphic cards, that means only "fews" could eventually afford them.

I won't mention the licence's cost for such physics engine too.

My guess is, yes it would.

Based upon the RL situation where anything digital media, music, movies, CDs, DVDs etc. can be freely copied and distributed (from a technical point of view - not a legal !)

And we all know this is done to a huge extent in RL.

And even though the media companies and corporations are frequently crying 'The sky is falling', new media is still being pumped out onto the market at a continously increasing volume.

So, yes, I think the same would apply to SL.

(Please remember I'm not condoning illegal copying etc, I'm just commenting on the de facto situation in RL)

Yep, only not just "would be": Will be. All it takes is one untrustworthy grid connected for a few minutes, and everything is up for grabs forever more. That XStreetSL or OnRez kiosk with the right creator? Might be real; might be phishing. No way of knowing.

Seriously, any scripter with a reputation worth preserving simply cannot afford the liability of releasing content onto a HyperGrid-connected sim. That sim must have the script asset to run it, and that sim could be compromised at any time.

Overall, the "no permissions" thing is not just a question of honesty, but also of bookkeeping. Without DRM I can still pretty much tell which MP3s and movies are free to distribute and which aren't. But without some set of standard permissions, nobody is going to be able to track creator intent for every asset in Inventory, and without enforcement of that permissions system, new entrants won't even know anything was intended at all.

During the HG tests I teleported to OSGrid, created content, took it into inventory, and on my return to my own grid it was still in my inventory, and I found it in my database.

Are you saying that if I HG to OSGrid, buy content (rather than create it), it would NOT go into my inventory, and be there on my return to my own grid?

Please read this, and tell me if I got it wrong:

http://opensimulator.org/wiki/Hypergrid#Piracy

Rock

Only if IP rights were still able to be defended.

Look at the texture market in SL. The vast majority of textures sold in SL are sold full-perms, but most have a terms of use agreement, and LL does enforce DMCA claims when someone steals rather than buying. Texture artists have a high rate of "loss" due to content theft, yet a texture artist that is constantly producing newer and better textures can still make a good income at it. It's much like the Music industry in RL. Copying is rampant, yet the majority do purchase, rather than steal, because there are stiff penalties if you get caught stealing.

But in a situation like un-policed grids where any content was free to copy/alter without repercssions? No, that will not work. If content creators are faced with a thieve's paradise where anyone can copy and resell with impunity, they won't bother with trying to create and sell there.

No it wouldn't, and no they could not be.

The thing is this already happens now with anything that is full permission.
Be it visible i.e freebie resellers, Joeblow buys several dollarbies that transferable items resells for higher price, PumpkinNewbie head buys modify or gets a full permission freebie cranks it through copybot devices thinking it is legal turns around sells item with new owner and creator as him, Texturedoodler McKenzie makes a texture collections is required to sell full permissions or no one will buy even if its freebie Paul and Sue Turtlespew take the textures share it with friends, give it way as way to promote their land and get traffic, or turn around and sell it as high as they can. If any of them complain, especially with textures LL may tell them to take items down and might spank their hands but they mean while hundreds already have the textures and aren't going to have textures purged from database or refunded.
System is already flawed even with the permission system and filing DCMA is pretty much a joke unless you're some big company with lot of money behind you.
Only persons who concerned about fraud or their copyright and can enforce it are the one's with lot of money already or own the servers and that is only if it hurts their own profit.

That's like asking "would human society survive a nuclear war". The answer is "yes, but it wouldn't resemble human society as we know it now". I think you can see the parallel.

Yes, but not as it's commonly practiced today. See below.



No, not necessarily. However, one could easily work this to their advantage. Since nothing in the digital world has intrinsic scarcity, the way to make money would be charge for what does have intrinsic scarcity: builder time. Such a model isn't a bad idea already, given that it's not impossible to overrun the permissions in place now.

Of course it would.

Pep (Why do you think that commerce excludes services?)

The physics engine in OpenSimulator's actually not bad, and it's totally open.

I've had that happen on a regular basis, but the fact is that I always got more profit from the work than not doing the work would have got me, so I didn't quit my day job in disgust.

Yes, I know what you mean, but the fact is that most people never receive most of the profit from their work. In fact in a market economy the feedback effect of uncompensated positive externalities (that's economist for 'side effects of things you do that other people benefit from without paying you for them') is the grease that keeps the wheels of commerce moving, from saying "please" and "thank you" on up through someone paying you X to build a building they make 100X profit from, to people hearing the concert in that building as they walk by on the street beside it. Even when it's more obvious, like someone selling a freebie I make for 10 times what I ever sold it for... it's just too much pain to let it bother me when I can't ever stop it.

On the other hand, we need compensated positive externalities, and we don't want too many uncompensated negative externalities (things other people do that hurt you and you don't get anything for it). Any kind of property rights system is an attempt to balance all this stuff. The Linden permissions system is flawed and funky, but it works pretty well, so I think we're better off with it than without. A libertarian would probably argue, an objectivist certainly would, but I'm not an ismist and I think it's better than not having it.

Actually, there is no penalty for downloading music. The RIAA goes after people for 'making available', not for 'downloading'.

It would settle at a new level. I don't use the SL protection system for quite a lot of my products, but people still buy them, in fact the open scripts are the most popular ones. I often make the bulk of my income from them.

But, OK, I suspect that it would be with a significantly weaker Linden and lower prices, but we'll see... in the case of the OpenSim grids, they're starting from no economy at all, so any economy is an improvement...

I don't think this would work. With the current permission system in place allot of content creators already feel they spend too much time filing DMCA's and protecting IP rights. Get rid of the permissions system and protecting IP rights would become a full time job in my opinion, there would be no time left to create new content in order to stay ahead of the game. And the better the content and the bigger the business then the more time spent protecting your content. Not only would you have the existing community of thieves in operation but also a good percentage of noobs who walked through the door would probably start unintentionally stealing and selling people's stuff because they don’t know any better and have no grasp of IP rights. I personally think the result would be mayhem and the economy as we know it today would collapse as any decent content creator would give up creating stuff to sell.