Third Party Viewer Policy coming soon

https://blogs.secondlife.com/community/community/blog/2009/10/20/third-party-viewer-policy

Interesting, largely empty of any detail right now but seems to be a step in the right direction.

Do you think they'll be able to give this policy real teeth?

Giving this policy real teeth would probably involve sufficient restrictions on viewer development to have a chilling effect on legitimate 3rd party developers.

For the past couple of weeks, I have wondered if this imminent policy is behind Emerald's premature release of features that were not quite baked ... trying to get functionality in under a 'grandfathered feature' wire.

I can kind of see why you would think this; but I don't think it'll come down to that. From reading that, it appears that, while there will be guidelines that developers will be expected to follow, that the onus of responsibility will be on the users to use their viewers in a non-infringing manner, that it will ultimately be the infringing resident who suffers the consequences of abuse.

It will be interesting to see exactly how they plan to add teeth to this policy. Given the way other "policies" have gone in recent past, this will need to be watched *very* closely.

Emerald has always been a "bleeding-edge" viewer, so it doesn't surprise me that this last version had so many prototype and proof-of-concept features. It could be that Emerald's developers are trying to show LL that these things are possible, that the demand is there, and these things are worth doing.

Can LL ever really win this arms race? Won't a little slproxy (or whatever) work make any registration thing LL does totally useless?

No, but they can cause all kinds of pain discovering that.

Didn't LL say that they weren't going to get into this arms race, years ago?

Guess times change and this could be why Phil stepped down even further.

I like Emerald. It will be a great viewer, once I figure out why it takes textures 50 forevers to rez.

Since when does LL do what they say they will and not do what they say they won't?

Yes. That's exactly what they said.

/me think this project smells more like marketing than engineering.

I guess the threat of getting sued out of business over content theft changed someone's mind.

I think this is great, now I want to see them actually ban ppl perm that use the viewers that they do to copybot.

Philip and T Linden (Tom Hale, VP Products) also got beat up rather brutally in chat over content theft at the Metanomics season opener on Content Creation/Virtual Goods.

This was more visible than it usually would be as it was a joint event with the Engage! Expo. Hale was overwhelmed, and Philip was clearly annoyed over being forced to derail the positive message with responses to what could only be termed rage among some attendees.

/me looks at her tier bill and suddenly has a hard time feeling bad that these two were so inconvenienced by irate customers.

I can't wait to see how they frack this one up.

They'll kill off some good, legitimate viewers because the authors find the requirements too burdensome. Users who were following the rules in the first place will pay for it.

Users & authors of content theft viewers will continue to ignore the rules.

Enforcement of the policy will be arbitrary, infrequent and ineffective.

No, no.. it's more like it will only be the crooked ones able to get on. For some reason, I can actually see LL banning their own viewers!

From Blondin's comments on the blog, *exactly* the same way they did adult content, starting with brown bag meetings

*has flashbacks to March and April*

I don't get it... The only way I can see this working is if the SL login servers scanned every line of code from the viewers and made sure they are right. Otherwise whats to say one viewer is bad as opposed to the official viewers? The only way to verify would be to scan every line of code and they would have to do it with all the registered viewers. That would not be very practical. I guess they could only scan certain parts that may cause issues but still...

What I am not sure about is why they don't disable options serverside they don't want exploited? Then it wouldn't matter what viewer is used... Maybe a technical impossibility.

Just seems like a pointless idea to raise PR a bit..

Even if you ignore the problem of being able to identify the viewer in the first place "options that people don't want exploited" would include downloading prim data, animations and textures and a viewer that doesn't have anything to render isn't going to be of much appeal to anyone .

As an aside: it's relatively 'easy' for a proggie that runs independent of the viewer to extract everything it needs to copy content directly from the network data the sim sends to the viewer (encryption wouldn't be of any use since the viewer needs to decrypt it at some point to use it). So even if you can guarantee that only the official viewer can connect to the grid, you still won't have accomplished anything.

Setting out a "code of conduct" third-party viewers have to adhere to is a positive thing, but thinking that it's possible to only allow "white-listed" viewers or that it's going to stop content theft dead is an illusion.

I'd guess this is really no different than why they came up with IDV: they know it won't work in practice but it looks good on paper to have *something*, however ineffective it might be (particularly in light of the upcoming lawsuit). And it's a wonderful added bonus if it keeps people from shouting at them for a few weeks; after that they can come up with something new and equally ineffective and people will buy it and on and on.

Or by patching the viewer in memory after it's started up and checksummed itself, or by looking into the graphic card's memory. There are already applications that use both of these techniques.

That is what I was thinking... PR stunt at best.

I can't see any lawsuit against LL working though. If it did every ISP and webhost in the world could be sued.

Because.....?

My thoughts exactly and I posted a new comment in the officious blog to that effect.

Because you can rip any content off any website and use it on your own for personal gain... Just like they rip content from SL and use it as their own for personal gain... No difference (sl servers are just webservers). The ISP and the webhost can't be held liable as their is no technical way to prevent it from happening. Ever right click and saved a picture form a website? That is no different than taking something from someone in SL. Are they going to sue the webhost becuase their content was ripped? Sue the ISP because they allowed the connection to the website that has ripped content? lol

The only thing I see LL can be sued over is not handling DMCA's properly.