Would commerce continue in SL if Permissions were Abandoned?

That's what people used to say about abusive sites on Usenet. Please, you folks working on the hypergrid, think about how you're going to keep unsound sites off your virtual network BEFORE it becomes a problem. Usenet II was "too little, too late".

My opinion is that the economy certainly wouldn't work in any way that we can relate to.

If you don't have some sort of IP protection built in to the environment (rather than relying on lawyers through a TOS) then you're not going to attract the really talented people who can make their valuable time turn into money (and get some sort of financial reward for their time). This means that you get the "Open Source" builders and those that build for their own pleasure. I would suggest that this is a very small part of the "content providers" in SL.

So in a model of cost being proportional to supply and demand, if the supply essentially becomes infinite, then no matter what the demand is, people will be willing to pay zero for it.

How does the supply become infinite? Well, if objects have no permissions (i.e. are open for all) then all some enterprising person needs to do is come up with a website where people can "post their finds" and people can use that to run there and get everything they want for free.... Why on earth would anybody pay anybody for anything in that sort of scenario?

I see the other VR worlds without permissions as nice toys, but not viable worlds, if you count having an economy as a pre-requisite for being viable.

SL is already too easy to rip-off people - we have seen that with our business, and all other successful business owners have seen the same thing, I'm sure. Make it more open, and even LESS people are going to be willing to spend their valuable time building anything but what they personally need.

I am not sure about this. It is consistently stated that many content providers only really make enough to pay their tier. Certainly some fairly well-known ones have claimed, at various times, that this is the only reason they cash out. Now, this doesn't mean that "if there were no tier fees then they would be happy to work for free" because even paying land tier is _some_ reward, but it's only using money as the means to an end, not an end to itself.



That can be worked around too though, for example, on IMVU you can't upload anything unless you put it on public sale. You can't make things just for yourself. This might seem rather harsh but it does solve a problem that SL suffered from a little while back - that of non-creators being unwilling to spend money because they could only ever be second-class citizens compared to the creators who could have everything exactly the way they wanted. That was worked out by the market and the rise of professional creation though.

Umm...no, I'll stay in SL with its perm system TY.

I'm a scripter and do a lot of HTTP data transfers and I put a lot of faith in LL to keep my protocol scripts secure.

If someone got into my data transfer scripts and figures out the encoding of the data transfer, private keys or passwords my whole web sever and DB could be compromised.

I think it would break down at c)

Would anyone be foolish enough to take direct responsibility for all the stolen items on their grid? You can't be both responsible, and not responsible (Safe Harbor).

He would, likely, be challenging on the grounds that, as he was a Safe harbor, the original lawsuit was invalid.

As IANAL I can't really say how this would work, but I am positive that the intent is not that a backbone provider can be sued to shut down an entire network spur that contains some pirated content somewhere.

This is only true if your time is worthless.

It is my opinion that in such a circumstance the hobbiest creators would rise and many who previously did not realise they had such talents would begin the process of honing their abilites.
These would very quickly rise to a very proficient level imo.

The reason I think this?
Not all creative people are aware of their talents and are capitalising on them in the real world. Think artists, and how many stick to painting/drawing for their own pleasure and are: -

a) Unaware that their talent is marketable
b) Unwilling to take the risk in a highly competetive market place in RL.
c) Just doing it for fun as a pasttime/hobby.

Many are very talented and do not realise it, they just need a new creative area to play in and time to shape their skills.
If that place is SL and was suddenly bereft of professional creative types I would only say that increases the likelihood of new people starting from scratch with talents they did not know they had or never had an outlet for before.

I believe that talent fills a void when there is need for such talents. SL has had such a need in the past and there is no reason to think that will stop as long as SL remains a viable platform.

The scenario of professional creatives leaving SL and SL having a void could also result in SL creativity being taken back to it's grass roots where much content is provided for fun and kudos rather than money. In my opinion it is an often and wrongly held belief that only people who create professionally are capable of producing professional quality creations.

Of course the question is whether LL would absorb the loss of income that would come from all the land paid for by creative types being abandoned. That's a better question than whether a new viable economy would develop at a lower level.

SL certainly would be a different place that it is today though I think that these people would be eventually replaced by those rising new creative types who would start by using their disposable incomes for entertainment. Of course that is if any has any disposable income left due to the RL economy

Though reading Jack Linden's comments that have been recently published on Prokofy's blog, it seems that the effect to LL of the abandonment has been fairly marginal so far as many have opted for the conversion to full sims.
I encourage you to go read it, I certainly found it very informative.

Yeah, I read that recently myself, and I was pleasantly surprised to have a Linden back up my point that the SoS folks are a vocal minority who don't like the clarification of the openspace rules and creation of the Homestead class by popular demand.

Not full permissions! The creator should be able to protect their intellectual property. However if one buys something they should be able to sell it or a least give it away! This is if modify is tuned off.

I agree. Bit like what happened with the spam botnet servers a while ago. Their upstream bandwidth providers just turned them off.

Edit: you already said that further down =)

I know I'm reviving an old thread but I've only just read it

Many of the posts on here seem to take a very simplistic view of what is actually going on right now.

Hypergrid is here and I bellieve it it just going to become more popular. It is not a structured grid, there is no central control. Anyone can HG enable there sims and they do not need to be part of any grid, they can be a standalone simulator running in your own bedroom indeed many are. If we assume these standalones are also individual grids, which I believe they technically are then their numbers will increase rapidly. Why join a grid when you can get all the benefits of being a part of a grid whilst still retaining control of your own asset servers, etc.

With regard to objects, I won't call them assets here, this is what seems to be happening at the moment.

I on simA hypergrid to simB where I pick up a full perm freebie which has been illegally copied from SL. My home userserver checks for the existence of the creator on my userserver, finds no matching UUID and assigns me as the creator and owner. I then take the freebie back to my sim and make it available as a freebie. Very soon this could be on many tens or even hundreds of grids, in the future maybe thousands. Each of these will have a different creator.

Who do you sue? Everyone except the person who first brought this from SL has done it in good faith.

I can also see content reappearing on SL in the future but brought by people who completely believe they are doing nothing wrong.

Some sims on Opensim grids use an IRC bridge and any conversation is relayed to an IRC chat channel. On one occasion, even before hypergrid, I saw two people talking about setting up a server on OSGrid purely to take the content and import it into SL.

To me it all seems more of a reason why content creators should already be selling their stuff on the bigger OS based grids. Any of the 'walled garden' variety now have a similar permissions system to SL.

Granted, on the open grids the server owners could circumvent permissions but certainly for non scripted objects the damage would be limited to the same as using copybot on SL.

It will be interesting to see others views on this.

Daz

1: Sell it for what? Prim clamshells and beads? Not one of the wanna-be grids has a functioning currency that I can cash out into real money. One that I know of will let you use real money or L$ to buy their in-world currency, but it is a one-way street into their world. They haven't gotten around to implementing a currency exchange that allows cashing out.

2: As a content creator, why in the word would I be willing to place anything I hoped to sell onto a grid where rampant piracy was as easy as breathing? Why should I spend hours and hours creating something nice that I hope to sell, if any bozo with a desktop PC, an Internet connection, and the grid software can connect to the grid where I have my store, make a copy of my item to their asset server database, hack the perms, and turn it into a freebie on hundreds of grids? Where each illegal copy has a different creator, as you attest?

Your description of hypergrid sounds like the virtual worlds version of Port Royal in the worst days of piracy on the high seas. Great if you want to give away all your work for free and just play around like a communne hippie. Worse than worthless if you actually value the time and effort that you spend and hope to gain financially.

As a content creator, my answer is simple. Those grids won't get one picosecond of my time and effort spent there.

Well that told him!.

My two cents on this issue. Permissions are needed.

However, you content creators take us for a ride with how you use them. It's just not right.

For example, I have a $2000L castle I no longer use. However, I can't give it to a friend that needs it because it is NO TRANSFER. WHY?

Why do you merchants have this one copy per avatar rule? In the real world, if I buy something and don't like it, I can give it away. You merchants make this so god damn impossible and infuriating!!!!

Why can't you all include two copies of each product you sell? One that is TRANSFER/NO COPY and another that is NO TRANSFER/COPY. This satisfies the need to make backups and leaves an extra copy to give away or personally resell if I feel the need to do it. I bought it. I own it. I should be able to give it away or resell it. You guys are WORSE than the RIAA and other copyright bullies.

I have so much crap in my inventory that I know friends or other people can use. But, the stupid NO TRANSFER option just leaves a lot of stuff rotting away in an already bloated inventory.

Because it was copyable instead. So you wouldn't lose it forever if the asset servers glitched, or you accidentally unlinked the whole thing, or you retextured the whole thing with a grass texture by mistake... or... If something went wrong with the first copy, *shrug* Delete that one and rez a fresh copy. No big deal.

If you had "One that is TRANSFER/NO COPY and another that is NO TRANSFER/COPY.", then you have the full expected use of the no-transfer one, which is what the maker intended. And you could also at any time give the other one to a friend, free, or sell it. But that friend would NOT be able to copy it, so if SHE ever lost it to an asset glitch, unlinked it all, retextured it or otherwese "broke" it, it's useless. And since she has no record of having bought her own copy, she can't even ask the maker for help, and expect to get free support.

And if the content creator gave it to you as copy OK, Transfer OK, there's nothing stopping you from reselling infinite copies of it, or turning it into a freebie. So much for the maker's hopes to sell more than one or two of them...

Well that told him!

Hacking the perms is not quite as easy for the average use as you think. Many more advanced users will not go near the databases. The ones that can will find easier ways than that to copy your content.

The point was, on the emerging larger grids, if your content originated there then at least you are down as the creator, it becomes a little more difficult within that grid.

How you conduct your business on there? I haven't a clue. I do know that some SL content creators are expressing an interest though.

On a "walled garden" grid, your content is as safe as on SL.

Prim clamshells and beads would be more than you are getting now.

I'm getting enough to pay tier and buy a variety of really cool stuff that's not available in catch-22-sim.

lol, I meant from other grids

I can't even visit other grids in any of my preferred avatars, so I can't even get prim clamshells and beads from them.

I actually have an account on Legend City Online, as Ceera Murakami. It is one of the few alternate grids to at least get a currency system running. But that is the one I mentioned where you can't cash out their currency, yet.

I got the account because I considered at least trying to have a legal presence in LCO, to sell my textures at the TRU store that somewhat abortively tried to set up there. But... what's the point? I could earn millions in their in-world currency, but it's useless to me if I don't live there and spend it there. I can't cash it out... And uploading the textures there, at my expense, and selling them there with no one in-world to keep an eye out for theft and misuse... I may as well put it all out on a table in Central Park with a tip jar, and a note saying "Help yourself, pay what you feel is fair", and then trusting that no one will steal the tip jar.

If the alternative grids want lots of creative, talented people to spend lots of time and effort creating cool content for their mini-grids, they have to get currency and permissions systems and scripting and physics all working properly, and they have to provide some means of assuring that any content added to their world doesn't instantly get propigated to untrusted grids that have less ethics than a cockroach. Because while hacking permissions isn't something a lot of grid owners would stoop to or bother with, it's still trivial when you own and maintain the asset database. And it only takes a few "pirate havens" to turn all the valued content to worthless full-perms freebies.

Mind you, I'd LIKE to see some other grids getting up to speed and managing to equal or surpass what Linden Lab offers today. But what I have seen so far looks no better than a high school student's science fair project, as compared to a commercial corporate product. The alternative grids have a LOT of technical and ethical challenges to face before they will even come close to the buggy, troublesome state that SL is in now. They are a great place for pioneers who are thrilled at the challenge of playing with minimal tools and refining what can be done with them. But they aren't "competition" for SL yet, any more than a kid building scratch-built computers in his garage with mail-order parts is "competition" for IBM.

Sure, an Open Source project like Linux will attract a certain number of developers who will make great stuff just for the challenge of doing it. Likewise, the new virtual worlds will find a small pool of talented, creative people who won't care if they make a dime, and who will dump countless hours into developing the project. But there is a far larger pool of talented, creative people who won't, or can't, give away their efforts for free.

The demand for scripters would be substantially lower, since the majority of "custom scripting" is done for products. Direct services to end consumer wouldn't decrease, but I believe that scripting for products is a substantial portion of the demand for scripting in SL.

IMHO, there would be a log list of things that *could be done* but aren't because there's no profit incentive for people to do the arduous work to develop them.

The cost of developing anything significant is far too high to be cost justified as a service to the end user. I mean, nobody's going to pay someone to design and build a TV set from scratch, so that they can watch TV. The "ransom" method would help, but isn't a very efficient market method.