Third Party Viewer Policy coming soon

Well sadly it isn't just with computers or engineering, just look at politics, i never understood why it is so hard to put a doctor in the health ministry, military in defence ministry, and teachers in the education ministry (we have those here)



Oh right... that WOULD MAKE SENSE... and they are "small ones" you don't give decision power to peoples who don't wear suit, aren't invited to cocktails with industry giants and do not earn in one month what the average joe earn in a lifetime.

Yep instead of experienced people working up the ranks to management positions, they are retenched and university bred managers or managers mates from completely unrelated industrys are drop into a seat controlling a business when they couldn't tell their own product from the opposition.

We have one national manager who on the floor refuses ouright to know anything about or even touch the product, but then quite happily demands you write a 10 page report on every problem that no-one including him bothers reading. We all want to vote him off the island, just haven't worked out how to get it to happen yet.

I don't want you to give in; I just want you to educate yourself as to why these things are either "not good ideas", or why they simply are either not possible, or not effective. That's all I have been attempting to do.

Once you get to that point, we all together can look for solutions that are what our initial ideas (all of us, not just you, have had similar kinds of ideas in the past, so you're in good company) intended, but failed to deliver.

Right now, LL doesn't need any more in the "failed to deliver" department.

YOU'VE REINSPIRED ME! It's the best idea ever damnit!

Ready for another 2 or 3 days?

That's what my proposal is. It does THAT job just as well as something more elaborate.

It's like, when you get to a tollbooth, the arm in front of you isn't strong enough to keep you from driving through, but you'd be breaking the law just as much as if it was reinforced concrete, even if you're in a Hummer H1.

That might be a long and arduous path. See, for example, http://www.law.duke.edu/journals/dltr/articles/2009dltr003.html , a law journal article that raises some significant issues. I don't know if there are other analyses or whether the article is correct, but it seems likely that applying the anti-circumvention provisions of the DMCA will be an expensive legal battle.

I don't think DMCA anti-circumvention would work, would it? The problem being that it's the creator, not LL, who has to sue under the DMCA; and the creator _isn't_ the one whose DRM was circumvented (it's LL's DRM). But I'm not sure...

There _are_ actually technical ways to make content theft impossible, but they'd be a radical change to how things are created on SL and probably wouldn't be acceptable. I fear that the changes needed to make it less acceptable amongst users would be, too..

Kidd: good point. It's still unauthorized access, though, and that's still criminal.

There isn't exactly anything that is circumvented...

To use an image... it's a bit like saying you're circumventing the protection of a tape because you attached a tape recorder to the sound output of your tape player.

If I wasn't, I wouldn't have said anything.

Well i have learnt a lot from this particular thread. I now know there are no technical solutions to prevent copy theft....although I would like further explanations from Boy Lane's earlier comments regarding LL plugging of holes on Server side!

I guess the only thing that's left is for LL to enforce these TOS breaches and make the penalty stiffer......other than that, not sure what could be ever done!



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Dunno if that's all Boy was chatting about but there recently was an issue with notecards where SL sorta left the permissions enforcement in the hands of the client. Something about being if you stuffed a no-transfer object into a notecard, SL would let you pass that notecard to other people and they could get the object... (edit: and this wasn't something you could do with the regular viewer, or any viewer not specifically coded to exploit this bug).

According to that article, no, suing under the anti-circumvention part isn't limited to the copyright owner. But there are other issues.

Really? Who is it limited to? Does that mean that (for instance) Macrovision could sue anyone who analog copies a DVD?

As for the technical solutions - basically, what makes content theft in SL so tempting isn't that the content can be stolen, it's that once stolen it can be used to such great advantage. The technical solution is to make uploading and downloading asymettric, so that it can't be used that way anymore.

For example, suppose that every prim build, before being sent to the client, was coded into a single 3D mesh (which contains the final look of the build, including all prims) and the mesh was sent to the client. The client could then display it just as it does now, and the mesh could be stolen - but it would be useless to the thief, because meshes can't be uploaded. Even if they made it into a sculptie, the resolution would be wrong, it would be limited to 10m (remember that it was originally a multi-prim object so this wouldn't apply to the original - 3D meshes can be any size) and it wouldn't collide properly. To upload it they would have to manually divide the mesh into prims and recover the prim properties for each, and if they can do that, they should probably just be building themselves. Now, unfortunately LL can't do this, because meshes are too large to send and because SL needs to do some dynamic processing on the prim data to display them properly (ie, LOD). But it shows there is potential there. Even just sending every prim in a build as a sculptie (even if it was originally a regular parameterised prim) would help, as it would mean stolen builds would not collide properly.

Or, for example, for textures SL could integrate a procedural texture generator (along the lines of Genetica or Filter Forge). Instead of uploading a bitmap, you would build your texture with the procedural generator by connecting and configuring modules. But what SL sends to the client would still be a bitmap - so again, the thief can steal the bitmap, but it would be useless because they can't upload it; they'd have to reverse engineer the method by which you generated the texture.

That's quite an interesting idea..

What about scripted stuff that changes parts of a link set, though? Like changing the texture of one face of one prim or rotating one prim in the set?

Not the people making the copies, but people making the programs that bypass their copy protection. See http://www.thefreelibrary.com/Macrovision+Files+Lawsuit+Against+Sima+and+Interburn%27s+DVD+Copying+...-a0133253391 .

Edit: Here's a link that may be easier to use: http://constitutionalcode.blogspot.com/2005/06/macrovision-dmca-lawsuit-targets-dvd.html .

Discussion with emerald devs re import and export feature allowing full perms items to be recreated in world with different creator credentials.

Eg, Get free hair made by person A, export, import, Now you have hair that shows you as creator.

http://modularsystems.sl/index.php?option=com_agora&task=topic&id=1262&Itemid=2