The unofficial new permissions system discussion thread...

I just posted this comment to the Blog



This means, a very good system, well as good as we can get that is, has just been destroyed. I don't understand why we have to water down the copyrights....

(blog crosspost again)

Okay... this feels like it's turning into a rubik's cube that someone's arranged the stickers on so that it can't be solved.

Quote: Cory --------------
Regarding getPrimitiveParams, we can block it from working on objects that have broken wrappers.
--------------------------

Okay - but - I was under the impression that half the purpose of this wrapper concept was so that people could break the wrapper and have as many copies as they want as long as they are keeping them for their own use (no plans to give away or resell). If this isn't true, ignore the rest of this.

That being said, what about objects that have legitimate uses of the llGetPrimitiveParams()? We would have to include a warning notecard or something in any object that contains a script using this function that says "You can't break the wrapper on this item because it will no longer work right." Now we're back to people not being able to choose what permissions they want and/or not knowing what permissions they're going to get with certain objects.

-Meiyo

(Crosspost. *sigh* I hate this blog thing, but Cory seems unflexable.)



That doesn't solve a damn thing. It just means that instead of getting a copy in 5sec/prim, they're getting one in 1min/prim by copying the numbers into a new prim. Hell, *I've* copied works that way (but only objects that were given to me as examples when I asked for them). The only way to stop someone getting ripped off is to remove the modability of objects. But hey, that completely obliterates the entire reason you're doing this, right?

Cubey gave me a pipe that said "Ceci n'est pas une pipe." So I got the idea to draw something...

OK, I have a cup of coffee, let's discuss - "Is a SL pipe a RL pipe?".

As Cubey pointed out, everything we create in SL is just digital art. LL is portraying a SL pipe as a RL pipe. LL says when you buy an SL pipe you should get all the same rights you would with a RL pipe. They contend that you should be able to take it apart, inspect it, measure it, paint it. They also contend you should be able to copy it but not distribute the copies. And most of that would be correct if a SL pipe were real (you still couldn't copy it legally - but that falls under patent law which doesn't apply since it is not real).

A SL pipe is digital art. It is subject solely to US Copyright laws. Those laws specifically state that the creator of the SL pipe owns a Copyright to it as soon as he creates it. That Copyright entitles him to many things but specific to this discussion the creator gets:
1. reproduction right -- the right to make copies of a protected work
2. distribution right -- the right to sell or otherwise distribute copies to the public
3. right to create adaptations (called derivative works) -- the right to prepare new works based on the protected work
4. performance and display rights -- the rights to perform a protected work (such as a stageplay) or to display a work in public.

Now what is imporant to note is that when I sell you a SL pipe, I am not relinquishing any of my Copyrights on that pipe. I still have exclusive rights to copy it and modify it. I also still have the right to create derivative works. So, the new owner does not have the right to "tinker" with my pipe so he can create new works based on it.

I contend that a SL pipe is NOT a RL pipe. Therefore someone who buys a SL pipe does not have the right to break the wrapper, modify it, copy it or "tinker" with it to learn how to create similar visual art.

Yeah, threatening Linden Lab is such a great way to give constructive feedback on an IDEA. Go ahead and contact them on a feature proposal, not an actual implemented license, and see how far you get with your idle, counterproductive threats. If you disagree with the idea, fine, post that, but without the useless hyperbole that will bring no good to this situation. This entire thing is open for discussion, not pompous threats because little Moleculor doesn't like something.

As a separate point, I see that a well know "very innovative" script has just been duplicated here in SL and released as Open Source (announced this morning in these forums). I don't know the original creator, but how do you think they feel about having their work stolen and given away? This person came up with an original idea and was making a fair profit from it. Now they won't be able to sell a single copy. Do you believe this will inspire them to create more innovative objects?

The reason I bring this up is to point out an example of how making items easier to duplicate will not inspire new innovators. By implementing a permission system that allows people to more easily duplicate objects, you will only make duplication like the one above more frequent. You may gain an object that is slightly better, but you lose the person coming up with the truly original work. What you end up with is a bunch of copy cats with nobody to copy.

Since you insisted I reply, here ya go...

Then perhaps you had better withdraw all your creations right now, because they can be reversed engineered already.

While you're spewing FUD in the form of political allusions which are not applicable to a virtual society which has no real literal *needs* you should also note that the closed nature of creations in SL as they are currently is far more authoritarian and socialistic than capitalistic. At least in RL you can buy something and take it apart or modify it to your needs. So really the involvment of polical allusions here is irrelevant either way, except for if you like spreading FUD.

Can already be done. Next?

Point two is the same as point one. Guess the foundation of your arguments are weak so you felt the need to create more points?

Same reverse-engineering point again, round three.

BTW, do you realize the wav files for your precious synthed sounds are sitting there plain and in the open in the Application Data/Second Life/cache directory for anyone who received them?

You should get into record production. They think the same way you do.

Tell me this then, what if, instead of overhauling the permissions system, LL decided to add a new permissions checkbox which introduces some knew concept, but it will be added with a default that comes into conflict with your preference?

It's naive to think that the permissions you set at the time you decided to sell or give away something will always be *EXACTLY* the same for all eternity, espeically in a dynamic place like SL.

That gets complicated. You think newbies think SL is complex now, just wait until they have to deal with an array of checkboxes and radio buttons to let them know "if this and this, then not this, except when this".

I agree with this. I can't think of any reason why this could harm anybody.

And what about when this asset has been used in derivative works? Let's say it's a texture, and the owner has already used the texture on many builds, some of which she's even sold. Now she transfer the ownership of that texture to someone else. Does that mean all the builds she used it on now revert back to plywood? What about her customers?

Again with the irrelevant fear-mongering poltical allusions. It's just as easy (and false) for me to say it's socialistic to tie everyone's hands and gouge out their eyes so they can't customize or examine something they bought.

Nice straw man. Your analogy is the equivalent to me taking something, unwrapping it, and then setting it Free to Copy. That's not how the permissions are proposed to work. Nice try.

My biggest problem with the current system is that it is very rare to see someone offer both sales options: nocopy/trans or copy/notrans on their items.

Personally, I often want a copy/notrans version of the things I buy, but people usually sell things as nocopy/trans because they want their customers to have the ability to give their product away as a gift, or return it to them if there is a problem.

The proposed permissions system would do away with the seller making this decision. Sure it's a loss of power, which is why we see so many content creators here scrambling to preserve the status quo. But the majority of SL residents are consumers, and they want the right to choose. The content providers have failed the consumers by not offering them the choice.

Yeah it will correct itself: the dinosaurs will go extinct.

You should try Live Help sometime.

By who? Have you seen that many building or scripting classes lately? I remember when they were in the events nearly every day.

Agreed. The current system is relativiely simple. But everyone keeps begging for more permissions for various things. Some people want to break transfer and sell into separate permissions. Some people want a "make permanantely free to copy" flag.

Eventually all of these are going to add up to a matrix of complicated options. Some permission combinations won't be able to be selected with others (like you can't currently set something both nocopy and notransfer). Just imagine the expoential increase in complexity as more of our wishes are fulfilled with new permissions options.

No, simplicity is going from *seven* permission options that the customer must verify at the time of sale, to three.

You've obviously never done professional software development. Sometimes when you've stuck something together with enough duct tape and bubble gum, you have to rip it all out and build a new abstract foundation. Read my post earlier about the elegance of OO design in the permission object class ("license" concept.

Actually, I don't get what all the hoopla is about creative commons. The only way the proposed system even relates to creative commons is by one option, and even then it doesn't strictly adhere to it.

So if you're anti-LL's-new-permissions-proposal, you'd be more apt with a new forum avatar, since it really has very little to do with creative commons.

And how will they do this exactly? It seems like all your fears are founded on this one concept.

I'm curious, would you revoke your opposition to all of this if the modify provision were taken out?

Are you aware that things can be xeroxed now? I know one person in particular who created a "mirror" script, and is reluctant to share it because it can also be used to xerox object geometry.

And by the way, did you spend those 100+ hours on scripting and/or building? You really should subtract the scripting time in your argument because they will remain completely closed if you choose so.

This sounds like me waiting for Sony to come along and make a region-free DVD player, or for Nokia to have a service where I can trade faceplates for free.

Sorry, but many content creators have a racket in customization. I've seen a few vehicles which are customizable by script, but I've also seen a lot which aren't. Want another color? Buy another copy. It should not be up to the content creator to tell me I can't change the color of something I bought.

No. You have a strange sense of logic. "It will make it more clear if you give us more options." Huh? Since when does adding more customizability make something simpler to use?

Well thank you for coming around to see things our way.

Full-copyright items would be able to be 'unwrapped' and set to Modify by ANY user. Setting an object to modify gives the end user FULL BLOWN ACCESS to EVERY SINGLE OTHER SETTING within the object. Meaning all they have to do is copy down the numbers, make an exact replica, and poof, they've got something indistinguishable from the original, with their name on it, that they now have full permissions to. Sounds like Free to Copy to me.



By ME. Any time I've seen someone asking how to build or script in these forums, I've bent myself backwards trying to help them. Sometimes others get to them first, but if I make it first, I teach them what I know.

I'm sorry the mentor group or whomever it was that was running those classes isn't doing it as often any more, but do creators have to pay the price for that?

If you don't like the number of classes running, you have every right and option available to you to run some yourself. Or, if you don't have the time, and simply see a need for it with your "much vaunted" position as one of the Live Help Elite, perhaps you could come down into these forums once and a while and share what meager bits of ideas you feel we're worthy of knowing. If you're getting a lot of questions about how to build in Live Help, mention it in the forums and suggest more classes should be run. I'm fairly certain someone will probably step up to the plate.



And? Those are great suggestions. I don't see them anywhere in the proposed system. I see less options, not more, in the proposed system. Innovation is about making things BETTER, not dumbing them down by providing fewer options.



You make it sound like permission options are going to end up being written in Greek. Yes, some of the more precise options may be technical, but quite honestly anyone who wants to use those options will know what the hell they're doing. Or they can ask.

Or hell, here's an idea. LL can spend the time documenting the damn options in a help file inside the client, rather than recoding a system and taking options away from us.



No, that's called dumbing things down. That's called removing options. That's called making it harder for those of us who have uses for the present permission system as it is. Want to know how complicated the proposed system would make my life concerning my fireflies? In order to function in the same manner I have with my donated visual effects of fireflies, I would have several options, some of which would require LL implimenting even more functionality in LSL. I'm not deluded enough to think that they'll actually get around to new functions in LSL any time soon.

One, I could simply do things like I do in Seacliff. No one but I would own a single firefly anywhere in the world. If someone wanted some on their land, I would have to go out, place swarms where I saw fit, and maintain them as I saw fit, making sure to keep a listing of plot locations, and making sure that land purchases didn't end up with a bunch of my invisible objects on land owned by someone who didn't want them. My life within SL would become non-stop maintence of other people's firefly swarms. On top of that, those users would either be entirely unable to turn on auto return OR return any foreign objects on their land, or they would have to join a group for firefly users that I could set my swarms to, and then they'd have to set and keep their land set to that group, limiting who else could build there. I COULD (and actually started this way back in the initial build of my fireflies) code in controls that would allow land owners stunted controls over the swarms, giving them the ability to reposition, create, and delete swarms, but now that groups can own land, I'd need an LSL call to see if the person using the commands in question was an officer of the group.

Two, I could sell the swarms in a nomod/nocopy/notrans format. This would require buying a single object and/or script for every swarm they wanted to own. Since there are almost seventy swarms in Seacliff alone, you can see how many some people with nature builds would have to buy. While this would be simpler for me than option one, it would make the enduser's life a living hell because they'd have to buy one swarm at a time until they had enough, and if they happened to lose one, or have one deleted on accident, they'd have to get another from me. They'd also probably end up carting around a dozen or two identical objects.

I don't see THOSE as being "simpler" at all. Simplification of the permission system just means handing those "complications" down to the creators and users.



Then they shouldn't be using the name. The use of modified versions of Creative Commons licenses is permitted, but said licenses can not be called Creative Commons licenses. Or so say the CC people.



I wouldn't have as much of a problem with it, and I dare say most others wouldn't either. That part is the lynchpin of the whole insane scheme. Take it out, no one risks having their works copied by someone number for number any more than they do now.

I'd still be pissed at the idea of LL making my life more complicated by the fact that they were taking away the nomod/copy/notrans permission for the reasons I've listed above, and I'd still be against the changes since they remove options I use a great deal, but what everyone here has been threatening to leave over is the modify permission suggestion.



As far as I understand it, they can only be 'xeroxed' if the modify permission is turned on. In which case I say "It's been that way since I joined SL." Because it has.



Scripting. But that doesn't make my (and everyone else's) arguments any less valid. LL is still promoting the idea of allowing any user to EASILY and PERFECTLY copy work in SL. It may be "just" prims, but it's people's hard work.



Aw. Boo hoo. So you either ask the original creator to make the change for you, or you stop buying non-customizable work, and start suggesting to creators you buy from that they should start adding in customization options. Just because SOME creators don't provide the option doesn't mean that MY rights should be infringed on.



I'm sorry, did I ask for something simpler to use? I seem to recall asking for more complex options. Not simplicity.

Hmmm, here's something I didn't consider. . .

We can actually leave items on other people's property as long as they allow it. . .so let's go with the much used chair example.

Foo Avatar makes an absolutely gorgeous complex chair, and sells it to me for L$1000.

I get it, break the wrapper, and can now freely make copies of this absolutely complex chair.

I decide to sell my services as a chair installer for L$100. Fufu Avatar wants these chairs and can pay me L$100 and I'll come to her property and setup as many copies (these would be legal copies in the new system, not knockoffs as everyone is concerned about) of this gorgeous chair as Fufu wants.

Within the new system, this would be completely legal and supported.

Suddenly, Foo Avatar has no business, and there's nothing he can complain about since I had every right to make as many copies as I want. I didn't make knockoff one.

In the real world, this kind of thing happens as well (read: interior designers) BUT, it is limited by the fact that you'd have to buy a copy of each couch you wanted to install.

So, as a legitimate SL interior designer, I go around and buy all the best the world has to offer in way of furniture and accoutrements, then I have an infinite catalog at my disposal for putting together living room sets.

Am I wrong about this?

Yes, I think the idea is that after breaking the wrapper you have zero transfer rights. So you couldn't copy and in fact if you did you could theoretically lose your account. However, you could borrow the smartest ideas.

Cory (or someone) thinks that this ability to break apart chairs and borrow the smartest ideas has helped and not hindered the chair design industry.

Whoever thinks this is terribly wrong.

It has hindered the industry painfully. It has also hindered innovation when it comes to vehicles. Why do you think everything is going digital in cars? A big part of the reason is because they can finally start hiding their ideas and their innovation.

The problem before was that anything you did in a vehicle rapidly got copied so innovation was not valued at all. You were not promoted in a car company because you came up with someone that everyone copied. Neat, but not profitable.

It was valued on the product line, where things got built (cause that couldn't be copied) but the actual vehicle itself .. there was no juice in being clever.

Software has innovated so well because of closed source. There was a real margin in being smart when it come to design cool things in software.

However, I agree that closed source is a step too far in the wrong direction because in some circumstances (accent SOME), you want people to see what you are doing.

Open source licenses such as GPL, BSD, etc have stepped in to help out. However, no one (except Stallman, and apparently now Cory) was under the impression that strong copyright should be replaced by these licenses.

(warning: this isn't entirely fair as he thinks code and prims are seperate .. not sure why. maybe because he thinks you can hack prims and not code? this is false..)

If you can't stay on the saddle, stay in the bleachers. *waves*

Enjoy! The Mona Lisa has been in the public domain for quite some time!

This new proposal will *NOT* make everything free and open. Authors can still choose to make scripts closed source, with unreadable text. Other content can be set as Full Copyright, which retains more or less the same permissions as nomod/nocopy/trans (wrapper intact) or mod/copy/notrans (wrapper opened).

Just to clarify, this is *NOT* going to cause everything in the world to be set mod/copy/trans/free to copy, as the opponents try to imply.

The train wreck is the current system. It has had numerous bugs and loopholes in the past, does not grant basic rights to owners, and has received constant pressure to become more robust, yet paradoxically remain simple at the same time.

Really? A "large majority"? I'd assume since a majority is >50%, that a large majority would probably be (conservatively) somewhere in the realm of 60% or more?

If that were the case, I certianly would expect to see a *lot* more posts. All I see is a few of the same people over and over again spreading Fear, Uncertianty, and Doubt instead of working constructively on ironing out their concerns and coming up with practical solutions to those concerns which are feasable under the proposed system.

There is a human tendency to think that most other people think the same way we do. I think you've gone overboard in this illusion by saying "large majority". I predict that not only will a very tiny minority leave as a result of this, but at least 20 times as many new content creators will set up shop in their vacancy.

This is what I keep saying. I agree that the #1 concern (the ease of duplication via broken-wrapper modify-grantedness) needs SERIOUS attention.

I just wish people would stop slinging around completely unrelated analogies in order to ignore the fact that the rest of this system has merit.

If you have a concern, clearly state the concern, don't go hiding it behind "socialism" or try to confuse everyone to think that "Everything's Going to be Free to Copy in Just TWO Point Versions OMG!!!!111".

Gwyneth, your post is an example of exactly what should be going on here. I hope once the reflexive fear instinct settles down that we will all be able to discuss this as rationally as you have.

I'm afraid you've fallen victim to the FUD. Your customers will be able to customize the things they buy from you, but they will *not* be able to resell them once they do so.

Yeah, you know what? A lot of people called 1.2 a move to socialism too (everyone gets a fair share of prims). I don't hear the content creators complaining about the 1.2 model now that they're raking in the L$/$US...

I don't get how the proposed system makes this a new problem. People can look at the contents of your objects now and see the names of the scripts. How is this any different?

Fair Use or not, I still know of no law which prohibits me from customizing my car, or any right of the manufacturer to forbid me from doing so.

Oh, and BTW, how does my dying my shirt blue deprive the creator of income?

How do you do this fairly without people crying favoritsm or popularity contest? You can't have people vote, or it turns into a popularity contest. But if you keep it close and select them yourself then people cry favoritsm.

If you can solve this problem, I know some Lindens who would be *very* glad to hear from you.

You know why it's broke? Because it's crufty. Adding more junk on top of cruft isn't going to help. The permissions system probably needs a complete re-write before it can be expanded.

There used to be Linden classes nearly every day. It's just not worth it anymore to wake up to an alarm clock so you can teach people something for US$2. The people who have the skill to teach those classes would do a lot better with an hour of their time making sellable content.

There's no incentive to teach these classes except if you're very altruistic and maybe a little masochistic (griefers are magnetically drawn to classes).

Agreed, but then someone will argue that LL should invest developer efforts into giving us another tool instead of another trampoline... They can't win either way.

I doubt LL has people tied to chairs and giving them lashes when they slow down writing scripts and building objects. Your use of the word "forcing" here does not fit the situation.

"Usually a person has more faith in their fear than faith in their future. "

--Doug Firebaugh

You've just demonstrated ignorance of patent law. You are always free to copy something tangible for personal use in RL. However, once you try to sell it, it becomes illegal.

All this proves is that hard restrictions do nothing to prevent counterfeiting to someone who is properly motivated. Security through obscurity is useless as a deterrent to counterfeiting.

If your only worry is the ability to easily copy things due to having modify rights, what will be your argument when someone writes a program that sniffs the network stream and gives them a nice feed of data to dump into a notecard and feed a rezzer? How about a memory scanner for texture data? These are ticking "bombs" too.

The best course of action is to prepare the SL society and economy by getting it into a shape where we figure out how to deal with counterfeiters. This is a proactive action, rather than passively waiting for the day someone tours the world to gather up all of the geometry via a packet sniffer, and then creates copies of everything to "collapse the economy", as you all suggest will happen.

However, I certianly agree that on top of it all, effort should still be made to make it difficult to outright copy things. There is a lot of exposure even in the current system, and the instability of the current permissions system over the past 11 months that I've been here doesn't give me confidence that it is sitting on top of a good foundation.

I think most of us are really all on the same page here, just that some of us are a bit more fearful than others and would rather reject the whole thing than try to work out a compromise.

Let's look for solutions to this concern instead of assuming the whole thing is bad because one detail has a loophole in the current proposal.

i have been reading and i keep hearing much of the same, this system isnt in place and hasnt been developed -yet- so calm down and discuss it. basically its obvious that object creators need and want to have control over permissions. there needs to be a more open method of viewing what permissions are set (for the buyer) like someone mentioned, it needs to have layers of modify or copy options allowing the creator to set permission when unwrapped. the main thing cory is trying to accomplish is allow more of the world to enjoy their experience. i am not saying thery should have full permissions but they should be able to change textures and have slight rights. its only fair to let someone customize their belongings, but shouldnt be allowed to unlink unless permission given. same with scripts, if someone wants to change the trigger words for commands they should be allowed to, but still not be allowedto view the entire script for ripping, yes this does add to the complexity of the game but its nessessary,. and if your making stuff to sell just like any reasonableperson in the RL market you should know what your doing,. if thats read or tinker. people need to be able to have 1 back up item for any non-copyable item allowing them loose their vehicle or object and not be at a total loss,.any time they rez the item it deletes the first instance of it,. or something. maybe even add a ammount of rezzable copy option,. if you sella saet of 4 chairs or what have you only allow 4 rezzes at any time before the first instances are deleted.

also for those of you who are taking your FREE stuff away after finding people selling it is crazy all you are doing is making the only copy avaliable COST MONEY the opposite of your intent. instead you should put out MORE free copies all over so as to make it avaliable or take transfer rights away!

i understand the feelings of everyone here and i feel the same way, but we do need changes and we do need to ease the purchasing market i personally do not buy anything unless i am able to contact the creator to ask about permissions and such so i dont get screwed- i shouldnt have to contact someone if i want to not get screwed nor should the rest of the people who's whole experience is shopping and interacting not shop owning scripting or building

pardon all the spelling

dont freak out over things that havent come take a breath count to ten and talk about it!

Actually Kex, I build a lot of things that are linked and have scripts in each prim. . .

So, to answer your question, it's vastly different in that, now, they can only look at the names of the scripts in the parent object (AFAIK). As I typed that, I relised I may be wrong about this, what with Select Individual. . . going off to check.

blaze, if you were responding to my post, I wasn't talking about making transferrables copies in the interior designer example. . .

I was talking about someone setting up their legally made copies of said chair at someone else's property, and the property owner allowing those items to remain there. The interior designer would never transfer ownership to the new person, so would have to be called back (for a modest fee of course ;p ) if the person they installed for wanted their livingroom rearranged.

Kex, thanks so much for all the responses Could you address this issue please? Thanks.

Yeah, how's that for supporting creators and innovation?



Mod == Mod/Copy/Trans/Free.



You quoted and argued with eight seperate people in this post. All I see is you, and maybe Cienna Rand in support of this proposal as it stands. I'd say that 80%-88% is a nice majority. Anyone else who isn't posting probably just doesn't understand the complexity of the new system. Most have said exactly as much in another thread on these forums.



And how does the proposed system fix that?

More on this on the blog (http://secondlife.blogs.com/prompt) but while folks are still posting in both places I wanted this here as well:

So, another good idea worth building into the next verison of the proposal is that several folks have mentioned the idea of time delayed wrappers. Specifically, allow the creator to say that this wrapper can't be broken for 1 month or 1 week or whatever. That seems like a really good refinement, as it ensures that knowledge eventually moves into the system (which is important) but temporarily rewards creators. Exactly the kind of balance that copyright law is supposed to include.

My question to the creators, then, is what time frames would you want? And if everyone says "the longest you can provide" would it just be better to set the time at some fixed value (say, 2 months?)? I prefer the ability to set the time (since this allows folks to test different approaches).

Kex, you make a lot of good points. But what we have here is not a faith in our fear, but a misunderstanding, as moleculor has pointed out, a misunderstanding of the intent of creative commons.

We all have intellectual property that is of little or no benefit to us but may be of benefit to the commons at large. What to do with it? Shame to just throw it away at not share it.

GPL, BSD, CC, etc were developed to leverage this IP and for very good reasons.

However - the people who make people off of a scenario where everything is put into the CC is the people who have either very expensive manufacturing processes (or other processes which are *not* put into the CC) or are completely service oriented (everything is one off - which is really the former, if you think about it).

Few people think we need to go to a pure CC / GPL whatever type system. Richard Stallman is amongst these inviduals. Apparently, Cory wants to be in that group as well.

This sounds like a good idea; like the patent system, it allows the inventor to reap benefits for a period of time, before allowing others to use it freely.

(It's awkward that the only RL law applicable to SL intellectual property is copyright law, because the patent law model seems clearly better suited.)

If the idea is worth keeping out of the commons, then 2 months is not enough.

It should be a year at a minimum.

You are really mixing up Copyright law and Patent law. And Patent law does not apply here. But, if you want an answer to 'how long should a wrapper be unbreakable?' I would say it should be what the Copyright law already states: until I die + 70 years.

Read it for yourself at the United States Copyright Office:
How Long Does Copyright Protection Last?

A couple other points:

In his blog, Cory mentions that fair use already applies to all content in SL, but the system currently doesn't allow people to exercise their fair use rights. This is probably true. However, re-use for commercial purposes is, I believe, NOT usually considered fair use, and the proposed system makes re-use for commercial purposes easier; this is the primary concern I see expressed on this thread.

Another thing I find interesting is that Cory mentions the intrinsic flaw in all DRM systems: the fact that the computer your SL client is running on is receiving sufficient information to render the object, and there's no way of blocking that (as he says, "someone pulling the data from the AGP bus is going to be really hard to detect".

This highlights the long-term ambitions of the Lindens. Right now, I doubt anyone would write a program to decipher the data that the AGP bus is receiving, solely to copy items being sold in SL. The effort far exceeds any gain; it'd be easier and cheaper to just buy the stuff in SL. But that won't always be the case, in the Lindens' view. Eventually, items in SL will become sufficiently valuable that it will be worth someone's time to write an AGP spy application that enables duplication of any item you see on your SL client, and in the same way that people used Napster rather than pay for CDs, people will use the AGP spy application rather than buy the items in SL. The Lindens anticipate that, eventually, a comparable amount of effort may be spent cracking SL as is currently spent cracking music and movie copy-protection schemes.

One that says never expires.....

I'm thinking thats a step in the right direction. But would that apply to scripts as well? I'm hoping not - as I can see the ability to modify an item in terms of color, texture, as something that falls into fair use - But the scripts? Depends on whether you see them as the spring in your toaster or the software driving the object.

I like the idea of fair use, but having seen what actually happens in world when you start opening things up - can you blame me for being dubious - or erring on the side of caution?

If I'm reading correctly - then a time set on the wrapper, after it's broken it becomes no transfer.. and (if enabled by the creator) the scripts (if any) are still protected?

If that's the case than I think it's moving in a better direction. As with anything I realise that a compromise must be reached - one that allows the creators to retain some control over their creations, while allowing the freedoms that the new owners *should* have.

The reason that the various open source movements work is because they have a community in place - for example the linux community - a gathering of like minded people with similar interests and doctrines... Trying to put that same philosophy into a communtiy that doesn't understand or respect it won't lead to innovation, it leads to the opposite - stagnation, and indignation.
This is what was more or less proven in Davenport.

Althought the permissions systems NEED to be overhauled, and I think that the talks here are going in the right direction - I think that nurturing innovation is something that must be done at a community building level. I don't think it can be 'codified' and I know well in hindsight that introducing a concept isn't enough either.

Siggy.

(Repost from blog again)

Okay some quick points that I hope don't get lost here.
1) I think the time delayed wrapper is a step in the right direction
2) What happens with the "Share with group" option when a wrapper is broken? I see problems with the ability to copy an item with a broken wrapper when it's set to share with group
3) Right now, if ppl want objects, they go to stores and malls. If I want to make my objects available, I pay to rent a place in those malls. I then charge money for my objects to offset those costs. If LL wants to make the sharing of knowledge more prevalent, might I suggest you consider a LL supported venue for people that want to make their free to copy/modify/xfer whatever objects more public?

-Meiyo