Who's minding AWG and does any of it matter?

and if I decide to emigrate to another country .. I have to arrive naked because I can't take my clothes with me?.

pathetic.

I said: "and that - referring to scripts - is something that can be worked out."

Not necessarily although it would take a full permission prim (or other asset) with the original creator's name as creator.

If I cross the county line .. do I have to arrive naked?

Or ..

Can a manufacturer determine what countries I can visit while wearing their clothes?.

If I owned a county, that would be the only requirement

Surty ..

lol.

Seriously though .. the OP's question is a no brainer.

If you purchase an item on "grid A" and arrive at "grid B" .. wheres the problem?

The creator still got payed for the item.

The problem is that the owner of grid B can make an infinite number of copies and sell them on grid A, B, and all other grids. It completely destroys the creator's business.

That problem lies with the local government and licensing.

I guess this comes down to whether SL is just another AOL, or whether SL really is the future. AOL was all about looking inward, what LL are trying to do is look outward. That idea might hurt if you are a content (including script) creator - initially. But if you factor in a massively expanded consumer base, then ...

These are early days, I guess - the creative ones amongst you will do very, very well, I think

Surty ..

I don't believe "Fast Eddie's Bargain Grid" is going to be connected to the Linden operated login, asset and currency systems.

My thinking on this has been, since talk first started about this a year and a half ago or whenever that was, that operating simulator grids connected to Second Life would be a fairly costly endeavor, with a long list of requirements, contractual obligations and responsibilities on the part of the 3rd party operator. It would likely involve monthly connection and service fees to boot. (not to mention a farm of colocated servers on at least a tier 2 connection) At this level, asset and other transactions should be no less secure than they are now on agni. The stake for the operators would be too high, and frankly, "Fast Eddie" probably wouldn't have the financial wherewithal to even do it.

There's a place for Fast Eddie in the metaverse I would guess, but for the foreseeable future, he won't be playing with the big boys.

My stuff will be licenced for other grids and I resent an attempts to prevent my content being shared, I made it, I'll take it where I want. if I wanted to keep it 100% safe I would create it on standalone and make people come in there to buy and use it
If you think putting "SLGrid Limited" on your advertising for products is going to make sales, go for it.

There seems to be a fair bit of wishful thinking going on here. There are really two problems that I see: one is the risk of a "trusted" grid being (or, more likely, *becoming*) untrustworthy, at which point the cat is out of the bag and all content that ever visited that grid is, wholesale, free to all forever and always. Even "pure consumers" might understand why content creators would find this disconcerting.

But in fact, that's the lesser of the two problems. The much worse one is the incomplete semantics of giving permissions on other "grids." This is because LL--and others--envision this show to be Teh 3D Intarwebz, and interconnection to a bunch of fly-by-night OpenSim runners is only the tip of the iceberg.

I wasn't being facetious with my Flickr example, and it wasn't an analogy--it was an example. If LL gets what it envisions, the entire 2D internet will become just that which fits neatly on one face of a cube. So, we need to assume that content licensed to other trusted "grids" is licensed for any purpose anywhere on the internet, unless the creator (somehow) specifies otherwise.

It's not like having one's CD able to play in multiple CD players. It's like licensing DB2 for use on a machine, and suddenly discovering that the definition of that "machine" is--presto-change-o--any CPU anywhere in the galaxy. Even IBM might have some problem with that.

The issue there is the owner of grid B, surely the issue is distribution, I see no reason why distribution channels can't be protected as they are in RL.

Once you put items up for sale, you lose a lot of your rights as to what can be done with that item afterwards.

My point exactly.

LL recently experimented cross grid operations with IBM.

A license to allow "Fast Eddie" is going to come at a price.

Anyone could potentially run a server or two .. if they could afford the license.

So? That happens on grid A too without even leaving, the owner of grid B can run copybot and steal your stuff in SL without you entering grid B, There's a difference between them selling stolen content because they stole it from grid A instead?

What are we going to do? Never sell our products on the other 70% of the WorldGrid, let the opposition sell theirs there instead?
We better limit all our stuff to our own private standalone grids so it's really safe. And we should make it illegal to bring our creations from our standalone grids to SL too?

"We're selling you this mobile phone but you can't take it out of the country incase some other companiy in another country gets it off you and copies it................."

Perfect example.

This kind of thing happens all the time. There are export-controlled goods.

* * * * *

I'm beginning to think this will all come down to one checkbox permission.

"This grid only" versus "Any grid anywhere/no copy" - like a physical object.

Not that I think that is 100% the right thing to do. But that is where I see it going.

Yep, you are right, checkbox permission will allow content creators to vote with their feet, those who don't want their content to leave SL can indicate so as well as those that do. But to restrict everyone's creations to SL because of some peoples choice is wrong.

And those who refuse to allow their content to leave SL will only be motivating their competition to move competitive product on other grids. Hrmm..Jack Feaver doesn't want his houses on other grids? Fantastic. "Houses that Zaphod Built"

If I had a big stake in SL, I'd be seriously looking for ways to move my product into other grids as they come about. Instead of sitting on the bench, worrying about theft.

That sums it up but it's not quite what's happening since there was never any mention of the fact that you can't take the phone out of the country, that's something you only find out after the purchase.

(Still waiting for an excerpt of copyright law that backs up the claim in the OP that transferring content across grids violates anything)

I've been following this thread with some interest, as I am a small content creator here. I don't have an opinion at the moment either way on this; I don't have enough information yet.

The only thing I'm chiming in on is the analogy that if you wanted to travel to another country, you'd have to do it bald and naked. I feel this is a flawed analogy, comparing virtual intergrid travel to RL travel.

The comparison only works if you accept that in the real world, rogue nations owned replicators where, as you pass through customs, they have the option of making an exact duplicate of everything you have in your luggage - clothes, books, your kids' nintendo, your ipod and all the music on it. If such technology existed in RL, then you can be darn sure that the government and anyone who owned intellectual property would be publishing a list of where you could and could not travel while carrying stuff they had made.

As such things are impossible, it is easy to say that since Levis or Apple don't tell you where you can't go while wearing jeans and an iPod, so shall content creators in SL not tell you where you can't go inter-grid. In the virtual realm however, exact replication exists and therefore is a concern.

As I said, I have not yet formed an opinion, but I am following it with interest.

-Atashi

I think the reason some are so concerned about the inter-grid transportability - is that theres no way to control the infitely copyable and transferable nature of electronic data.

Basically it is a simple matter to copy/steal and effectively make all their IP "freebies"

And with those "freebies" scattered on a hundred different grids, they lose effective control of their IP.

The Technology to steal the content far exceeds the technology to secure it.

I think everyone knows that eventually the content is going to migrate to the different grids,

But I think creators would rather it happened in a controlled, careful pace that took the ability for creators to enforce their IP rights seriously.

-----

So in many ways,

For next year it does NOT make sense for content to get a free pass onto other grids,

But someday it might.

Same here .. enjoy open borders and the freedom they offer rather than worry some urchin will steal your product.

LL will have to license/vet 3rd party grids to connect to the asset cluster and I susspect the cost of this will make tier payments pale in comparison.

I think that we need to think about what OpenGrids would actually be used for. I also think, that we need to think about the criteria Linden Lab would use for allowing a new grid to connect.

I doubt very much that, if an OpenGrid produced an SL clone, that the Lindens would agree to trust it. They would basically be helping a competitor enter the market. If an SL clone OpenGrid was to start up, but offering cheap land, and then ask LL to connect to the asset server - LL would probably deny them, or at least, set their price so high that the OpenGrid had to increase their land cost back up again. To do otherwise would be suicide.

I also doubt very much that any connected OpenGrids will be allowed to have economies. There's potential for all kinds of mess if they do.

Probably, most of the connected OpenGrids will be owned by corporations, or possibly connected groups of residents, as their own private islands for mainly display purposes. The majority of the "asset transfer" will be for moving people's avatars around. It may not even be necessary to move scripts - after all, many areas are "no script" already.

Levi's and Apple don't tell you, but governments do.

You can't take high end computers into a number of countries from the western world, due to export restrictions. Not kidding in the least.

Try taking a saleable amount of Levi's into Cuba, or North Korea from the United States. Meh, you can't even legally take your own body into those countries without jumping through major hoops.

People seriously don't get it. The real world can, and does, and enforces such restrictions with government-authorised force.

Even money doesn't fly. Ever have more than ten thousand USD and fly out of the country?

I think the tech/interopability world is going to be in for a rude shock. It's *not* an egalitarian world.

Try googling Tibet from China, for instance.

That's the real world.

* * * * *

Mark my words, if there is an offshore grid based in a place out of reach of copyright law, every last scrap of anyone's content that sells will be ripped and resold for pennies.

Worst of all, in that environment the real creators look just like ripoff resellers too - just how can the average customer tell?

I offshore manufacture and do import/export trade in my first life. I left my all my illusions of honourable trade behind at Kai Tak airport many, many years ago.