Would commerce continue in SL if Permissions were Abandoned?

Argent,
There are people who get cash too I knew one guy who got 15,000 usd for developing 4 islands.
The thing is maybe there will be more of us who can't pay all that for content developing or one on one training but there may be others who will.
There always going to be someone who doesn't want what is in the market and something customized and is willing to pay for it.
Hard part of it is finding them.
I haven't met anyone who wants what I can do on regular basis who willing to pay for what I am good at doing yet but I keep improving my skills and work on improving my attitude, increasing my confidence, and other important areas maybe just maybe if it's meant to be I will find a job I love to do if not in SL somewhere else where these skills can transfer.
There are other content and world developers who I have never heard of who literally put up website out there, some basic placement and information out there in web, in sl that I have seen get contracts on developing content for other virtual worlds.
So it is possible if you can get your foot through the door and get noticed by the right people if this is something you truly want.
For me I have got a ways to go before I am truly would feel ready for this.

No, only trolls would NOT ask the question. It is being asked because, whether people are ready or not, it is going to be a reality in the next few months.

Rock isn't the first to ask, this question has been mulled over by the best and brightest in LL, sldev,the Open Architecture Work Group, and even some of the Microsoft Dev community for the last year. It is possible to have an economy of which creators are a part of, it is just that no one has a good idea exactly what the final form is going to be.

EDIT: This part reposted

This is a bit like saying the value in the automotive industry is PowerPoint slides because some highly paid people in that industry sit around in boardrooms looking at PowerPoint slides, when in fact the actual revenue comes the old fashioned way: folks paying real money for real hunks of metal, glass, and rubber.

In SL (as with Free Open Source software), there are people willing to pay for developer time, but they do so because other people, far removed from these ethereal heights in the value chain, are willing to spend real money for real goods or services the prices of which *are* driven by "scarcity" of a kind.

A huge share of the RL funds that fuel the whole SL economy originate from micropayments for copy-protected texture clothing, for example. If all clothing were free (one arguable outcome of removing copy permission enforcement), all those funds would disappear. And people who used to pay for time spent developing sims to sell clothing would not.

In that scenario, there may remain some folks willing to pay for time spent developing stuff for their own use, with no intention of selling it on. Would that be enough to keep any grid running at all? Maybe, but I very much doubt it.

It would hurt things but I think commerce would continue.
Thing is, if someone wanted something like say a black dress of a specific style, it would be unlikely they would know someone who had it so they would either have to ask everyone in sight or just buy the thing.
If they could just give it away on sites like xstreetsl, then no, commerce would crash.

The likelyhood of a major gridrunner ripping peoples creations off is much less than someone just using copybot to do exactly the same thing on SL grid with one of the infinite anomyous alts LL allow people to have.
What will the gridowners commerce work like when his grids creators findout he is giving all their stuff away for free or selling it elsewhere full perms?

If the content maker has money they can afford to take legal action, have their internet
service shut down their grid for DCMA violations.
Most internet service providers have some type of regulations around DCMA and ip right violations.
The issue is they can always go to another website host.
The hard part is forcing them to disable the theft access, by terminating their dsl, cable
service so they can't get on web to commit theft.
The only way that can be done is if you got the way to force termination at the source of the theft.
Some luck has been done on those who intentionally created and distributed virus.
One guy he wasn't allowed to be near a computer as part of his punishment.

Yeah, but is someone likely to set up a 20,50,100 sim grid over 6 months then take this risk?

If one had the resources to develop set up numerous private sims you would think they could afford legal advise and afford, make some type of agreements with content creator i.e free sim in return for content development or something of value to content creator.
Some one on my budget, who living on disability and just artist most I can do is contact
the service provider host to have them shut down and hope I can prove they stole from me or stop providing content publicly.
If there was threat to have your service shut down down to source i.e your isp service and your name release to any isp service to not provide you services I bet pretty penny they think twice before selling or distributing products they don't have the rights too.
The Sims community never had permission system when it started out, and far as I know still doesn't. Content was distributed via files and it was all downloaded from websites, private yahoo groups and best content developers had loyal following and when
theft happen they knew who it was and who to avoid, the only people who went to those sites were newbies. Majority did it for free, and would never think of charging.
Only it was years later pay for content subscriptions or content providers asked for donations came to be but majority still didn't charge.
Places like TSR and 7 deadly sins started to charge subscriptions they also were most successful and had high traffic in the late 1990's, and still are around I think now from last time I looked.
They could have found another way to pay for traffic and hosting services with advertisements but they choose to charge subscriptions to cover cost.
I was involved in it in the 1990's but left due to burn out after TSO went public.
Most they did to enforce content theft was having sites shut down or informing the users of the content who stole what and asked them not to go to those sites.
The thefts didn't always just steal content, they literally went to websites and stole the entire look of the website. Some of these sites the content makers were talented website
developers and produced truly unique websites and were easy to spot.
Anyone around for while who actively collected content knew who did what, what content creators had content out, who to avoid most did.
The thing is there tons of content developers on the web who do numerous things with no permission system, and take this risk every day.
Most website host and service providers have TOS policy on content theft and do shut down sites that violate others content rights.
We are very lucky to have permission system most places don't have that.
Not saying its 100 % safe from theft though.

All that is fine but are we expecting the opreators of grids like 3rd Rock, OL, OS etc, to steal theur residents content and risk the shutdoen of their grids?
To me I suspect the risk is rather small, grids smaller than that aren't likely to actually be able to attract storeowners, because there won't be enough commerce to be profitable. If a gridlord starts ripping off the stock from their tennants, I suspect their grid won't last real long due to resident creators leaving.
I mean why go to the trouble of setting up servers and making a huge RL paper trail just to steal content, when you can just stroll around SL or any other grid using an anomymous alt and copybot.

My answer to the OP's question:-

Commerce as we have it now would end. There would still be people who make things, and even put them up for sale at small prices, simply because they enjoy doing it, but the sort of stores we have now would disappear very quickly. For instance, I would keep my store going during the short time it would take for sales to plummet, and then I'd close down.

Certain types of commerce would continue, such as land, home rentals, and services, because they are not dependant on permissions.

Over here you can be dumped by your ISP for downloading illegal content.

http://news.bbc.co.uk/newsbeat/hi/technology/newsid_7439000/7439685.stm

But how would that be done? Would it be a back connection to the original grid you signed up with to use their asset servers?

Well what would happen I think is places like Xstreet or Onrezz or some other content distribution system would take over charging content developers for hosting space to sell or share items, and selling content subscriptions to include private sim content use licenses of some type to those operating smaller grid bases.
I can't imagine though the people using smaller grid worlds wouldn't want to have their own unique content, if there is market or money to made for sure there would be something regardless of where it is.
Shockingly maybe there still would be core group of creative people who want to do their own customization and learn to develop their own unique content that is only available in smaller grids and no where else.
But some one will see a market in developing and selling tools for those who are creative and want unique things in their own grids even then or special packages for Private Worlds be it private hard drive based or smaller to mid size web based worlds with smaller budgets.
Fan based content ran off websites or private groups like yahoo and google before, content was downloaded.
If it happens the content distribution won't be in world based but website based most likely.
I actually hope that it will be based on private hard drives for personal use, and bigger grids well you have to use their free or subscribed content in community asset servers.

OK, let's try this again. Posting before bedtime may be hazardous to your health.

First off. SL will not abandon the permissions system anywhere in the foreseeable future. This would be like saying "Thanks for your efforts, been nice to know you, now we are going to make all of your creations Open Source". There would be no more SL in a case like this and doubt it would even be legal.

Now let's look at Open Sim and Real Xtend (Moderators. Open Sim and Real Xtend are free, open source and not competitors to Second Life. They are not forbidden topics of discussion in the SL Forums. Please see the Architecture Working Group (AWG) or consult the Lindens working with AWG) neither have direct access to the SL asset servers. There are 3 methods of egress to these simulators at this time that I know of. Here is how 2 of them work:

Open Inventory allows you to copy inventory items for which you have full permissions to your hard drive and you can import these into other grids.

Prim Composer allows you to copy objects to your hard drive but you need to not only have full permissions but also need to be the creator. It will not export textures for example even if you have copy, mod, transfer permission unless you created the textures.

There is always the possibility that LL will allow other grids to ASK for items at some point. If this were to happen, I am sure it would follow how one of the above are doing it at the present time(Hopefully the Open Inventory model). But no matter how it ends up working, there will still be no net change in what we can already do between grids in SL and hence would have no effect on the SL economy.

The way it works in the hypergrid model would be that objects are cached on the local sim's asset server from the asset server you originally came from.

LOLOLOLOL

This is not true. Any sensible grid will arrange to be a DMCA Safe Harbor. It's perfectly possible - read the rules as given at http://www.law.cornell.edu/uscode/html/uscode17/usc_sec_17_00000512----000-.html .

You can't sue LL because one of SL's customers stole content using SL. I don't know that it's ever been tried, but it seems unlikely that you can leapfrog the Safe Harbor rules by suing an upstream provider. You can't, for example, sue Sprint (who is upstream of practically everyone in the USA), saying that its "customer", LL, is violating the DMCA and thus according to the Safe Harbor rules it must remove that customer's content (ie, disconnect the whole SL grid). The blame has to stay with the person who commits the crime, not someone who provides the channels.

(Edit: in fact the DMCA Safe Harbor rules effectively names 4 types of site that can obtain immunity:
a) upstream service providers
b) caches
c) stores of user provided content
d) search engines)

You could argue that anyone who puts up a grid with no permissions system MUST be complicit in IP infringement because without stolen content there would be nothing on the grid. But this would be hard to argue, as many existing worlds don't have hard enforcement of permissions. These kind of lawsuits have been tried before and they usually don't work (the most infamous being the music industry suing the manufacturers of 10gb+ MP3 players on the grounds that anyone who had that much music must have stolen some of it)

Mainly I was saying if there was away to shut down the theft from the source i.e cut of services then maybe there would be better enforcement this isn't done yet.
If anywhere else you were using certain things to steal or commit act of fraud or crime
they would cease the items involved to stop the person committing the criminal acts but
online there is limited things like hoping the service provider has TOS that protects others
content.
At this point most people online who create content have is those website providers or host with TOS that say they will shut down a site for DCMA violations or copyright theft. I would assume other server and host services have some type of similar clause to prevent copyright or other types of theft to be permitted other then LL.
But it's been while since I looked into all this so maybe I am wrong.
LL we know doesn't enforce things unless they are court order too. People have taken LL to court for right to go after those reselling products of theirs. I can think of only one time they actually removed content and that with the situation with Excite.
Most SL business wouldn't have the same right because they can't afford to go court to force this to occur.

Yes. However, the operator of an OpenGrid can argue that they are also a "host", put a similar clause in their own TOS, and enjoy the same protection. And, again, I don't think you can leapfrog that by suing THEIR host (so that their entire grid is a single "customer" of their ISP, and thus can be shut down), because that's the same as suing Sprint to shut down SL (or Youtube or Google or or or..).

If the grid operator actually ran a grid for the purpose of allowing themselves to steal content then that would be a different matter, but such a grid almost certainly wouldn't be public.

In cases I usually heard of they go after the biggest part of front that they have legal access to the contact information.
If Google or Youtube was run by anonymous company where there was no contact information and some cable or movie company found that they were distributing movies or programs they legally owned they would go after the host aka Sprint for example
to get access to information of who is doing what to force the company in charge to do something or be sued.
In same way Excite have to go after LL to get information about the guy reselling unauthorized Sexgen stuff that was own and made by Excite.
If there is no way to legally contact the person doing the activity and person suing has the means, money and personal clout to follow through they go after whomever they can to make sure something happens.
But they go after someone like me to steal what I create, I am not going to have the means to do very much about it because I am not making as much as Excite is and I am not as well known for my content.
But if I downloaded tons of music the music company would immediately be able to get access to every address and contact information of anyone who downloaded tons of songs
including me.
Luckily I don't download much.

That's a Subpoena, just to get the information about who to sue. It's not the same as them being able to order Sprint to shut Google/Youtube down.



That depends a lot upon the system they use.

Way I see it working is this.

Internet Provider Giant Corp has 0.0000001% of its income from Wee William's OpenSource Grid.

Just like it has 0.0000001% of its income from any given website.

Nearly every day, it gets a message from this or that legal staff that Undesirable Content X is on one of its hosted website.

So it does what it always does. It shuts off the website in question and sends a message to the website operator: dump the content and we'll restore services. Sure there are other recourses involving Big Legal Fight Options A, B, C, D, whatever.

But Internet Provider Giant Corp would rather that the website in question just piss off and take its troubles over to the competitors. Too many customers out there who don't waste it's time and money; no way to make money off a customer who is constant strain on resources anyway. They aren't looking to back you in a fight. They are looking to take your 10 or 30 or 50 bucks a month without even the slightest question, and are looking for ways to shave margin from even that.

So there's Wee William's Opensource Grid, which has now generated 37 complaints in one day from the legal counsel of one digital content creator (Ed Etchasketch), who spotted 37 instances of uploaded unlawful content.

Didn't help matters that the legal counsel was Ed's retired brother, who was bored and decided to help in exchange for an old Starbucks gift card and a custom-created forum signature piccy of their Warcraft character.

So back at Internet Provider Giant Corp, the customer service rep (Donna Dontcare) squints, tries to figure out what this grid thing is, cuts the service and sends the usual email. Not even knowing what the grid is, just... do it. If more than 5 minutes were spent on this, it looks like she is wasting time from her boss's perspective.

So the battle between Ed and the content theft continues. Wee William, being an honest sort, tries to cool Ed off. "This stuff isn't allowed here! People keep thinking I won't notice, it keeps showing up!" Fred is nonplussed. "I don't care, wipe your grid of it or I'm going to keep taking you down."

Wee William makes his case to Internet Provider Giant Corp. Donna Dontcare has been handling this case, and has run up two hours and 43 minutes dealing with the issue since Monday. In frustration, and trying to do the right thing, she passes the problem up to her superviser, John Justmakeitgoaway.

John looks at the whole thing, kind of gets the idea, and realises that Wee William's 200 bucks a month is more trouble than it is worth. There is no law that says they *have* to take Wee William's money, so they let the issue fester. Donna is told not to stay on the phone too much with that guy. She gets another takedown notice from Ed's counsel; seems there is stolen content on Wee William's grid again. She hits the takedown button and goes on to the blinking button on line 2.

Sound cynical? Maybe. But this is what happens to 'the little guy' in business. As a lifelong 'little guy' I've learned this the hard way in a number of industries. Crusades generally fail.

Eventually there may be a few businesses that let people run rampant - perhaps grids will find some ISP's that will let them get away with it. For instance, a business was recently busted in Silicon Valley; it had been going for years allowing its customers to generate 80% of all internet spam. But at the end of the day, unless you are big money to an ISP they are going to do very, very little sticking up for you.

If there's any money in this, of course, Joe Spammer will set up Spammergrid on a "Pink Ticket" using a semi-legal class C he got from a reseller who sliced it off the edge of Big Corporation. After about 6 months, the bent sales associate who set up the pink ticket for him pulls the plug, and he takes his Class C over to another ISP on another pink ticket, and gets another 6 months of action on the same IP address, and the users don't even know he's moved... he just makes an excuse for being down a couple of days...

That's if there's ever any real money in this stuff. Because that's what Joe Spammer's already doing to keep his spamming operation running.

Technically, the way it ought to work is this:

a) IP holder files DMCA complaint against Wee William with ISP.
b) ISP takes down Wee William's grid.
c) Wee William challenges DMCA filing.
d) Content, ie grid, has to be put back up again. (If ISP refuses to do this, they lose their own Safe Harbor status, because they have started to filter/select on their own IP-related decisions)
e) In response to the DMCA challenge, IP rights holder is now able to sue Wee William.
f) IP rights holder tries to sue Wee William.
g) Lawsuit is dismissed as William is also within a DMCA Safe Harbor.

But I think it goes further than that. Youtube is the topic of resentment by many movie and music industry people, because it can use Safe Harbor so effectively. If a video violates IP, Youtube will take it down, but they won't ban the user or anything similar - the DMCA doesn't force them to - so a similar video can go straight back up again. And to further tweak their noses, Youtube actually includes tools for IP owners to track inclusion of their IP in videos - but to get access to them, you have to give Youtube a _license_ to use your IP. Youtube's argument - if you scratch their back they'll scratch yours, but if you don't, they'll do nothing more than the law forces them to.

If there was EVER any precedent that somebody could say "Well, the law only says that you can't be sued if your customers break IP, but you have to take down the customers' content. Wee William's grid follows those rules, but that isn't enough for me. Instead I'll go to Wee William's ISP on the ground that Wee William is a 'customer' to them, and the fact that the 'customer' is a Safe Harbor provider themselves makes no difference, the ISP have to take down Wee William's entire grid in response to a single DMCA allegation" then half the industry would be eyeing their watches for the moment when the RIAA filed a DMCA to Sprint against Youtube. And if they lose the lawsuit, who cares? They can have YouTube taken down any time a Hollywood movie clip is posted!

The wonderful thing is we don't *have* to let those sims attach. If universal hypergridding was ever envisioned, the pink sims will keep it from ever happening on a widespread basis.