The unofficial new permissions system discussion thread...

Gee, it only took, what, five days of screaming to get Cory to start CONSIDERING the permission system changes we've all been asking for for months now?

Mole, do you always have to be sarcastic?

Honestly, I've been reading multiple threads... can you please lose the chip on your shoulder? No one forces you to participate in these threads.

Sarcasm makes the world go 'round.

I'm serious, Mole, your attitude really is a downer, is condescending, and is evident in almost every post of yours. Why can't you learn to talk to the rest of us, including Linden Lab, like equal human beings?

Do you feel your sarcasm is needed to make your point heard? Seriously, I've seen your builds; you do good stuff. You can speak and your work will back you; you don't need this sarcasm.

Okay. Cory suggested that creators might be able to decide IF a wrapper is broken.

That's spectacular.

Oh, and I wouldn't mind seeing a push to more game oriented content. . . that's all I've ever done in SL. Haven't sold one thing in game, excepting a Under Construction Kit I put up for sale for L$1 so that I could track who bought/wanted it.

But, I don't think pushing in this direction would be fair to a huge number of people in game.

Also, I'd like to note that I've NEVER made any money being a game designer. True, this is probably due to lack of marketing, but I really get the sense that if I even put maximum effort into marketing, I wouldn't make any money.

Entertainment in SL just doesn't make consistent money in SL.

Now, if you use that entertainment to get people to see your items for sale. . . well, that's the direction I'm now considering

Damn, I'm always long winded. . . final thing - I know some clubs in SL do make money, but this tends to be from dwell, doesn't come from the players in game, and, frankly, I don't know of any clubs that count as entertainment if there aren't 50 other people there.

If my frustration with LL is evident in my posts in a highly negative way, I am sorry. I've just spent the past two months weighing in my mind whether or not I want to be charged again come my next billing period. This was looking like the final straw. I've stopped development on everything in world for the past month while I've weighed my options, and this was most certainly looking like my worst nightmares come true. I've spent less and less time in SL, to the point where now all I do is log in twice a week to check my private messages.

As far as my builds, I really don't know what you're talking about. I've only ever had two builds, and one got as far as sixteen untextured grey prims that looked remarkably like a giant sized pizza cooling board, and was an obvious eyesore in what was otherwise a rather decent looking sim. That got deleted once I finally faced the fact that I wasn't skilled enough to do what I was trying to do.

What stands there now only looks decent because of the purchase of high quality textures from Arito Cotton. Without them, my build would look like s*** again. I undeniably suck at building within SL, and my only half-decent contributions have been script related. If you're refering to the MJ project, I certainly didn't do the build there, merely code. Strife Onizuka and others were responsible for the construction of that build.

I'm not, at the moment, a creator in SL and I must confess that I don't understand everything in this thread. But, it is obvious by the posts made by the creative people here that this new permissions system is only designed to make it more difficult for you to control what happens to your builds, scripts, or clothes after they have been sold.

If these changes go ahead I will seriously think twice before starting to create items, only for them to be ripped off by some purchasers.

Lindens - I would have thought if the creators get fed up with this, they will just stop making anything and the SL world will be a very empty place, not to mention leaving SL altogether. I just don't understand why you are proposing this.

There are other issues on these forums where people feel equally strongly, about land barons, only dwellopers receiving 'development awards' and now this. Why don't you come on the forums to tell us what's going on?

Thank you

Latonia

sorry, it's late at night and my mind is fuzzy. by "building" I was referring to coding stuff @ MJ.

I think we all have this gut instinct to rant and rave in this forum ... except there's a primary difference between this forum and another game's:
the developers actually read the forum

I spent 3 years in Everquest, my suggestions sent into the wind never to be read by Sony Online Entertainment / Verant.

Here, Lindens read just about every popular thread, if not all, even if it's just a forum moderator, who then can alert other Lindens.

I see Cory trolling online now. *chuckles*

If you want to vent, vent in IMs, but if we're gonna post in these forums and expect change, well...

... have you ever worked retail? I know I have had to. If a customer needs help, and is nice about asking, I would help them in a snap. If a customer was sarcastic and frustrated, well...

... okay, so I'm the kind of dork that would try and calm them down, but then again in retail I only had to deal with a handful of customers at a time, not thousands. I imagine I would quickly ignore the suggestions of the sarcastic customers, and focus on the ones that seem to have a positive attitude, and are more likely to stay and help business.

These are good points. They should be addressed. It's unproductive to just tear up the proposal and discard it entirely instead of suggesting a solution that can work in a modified version of the proposal.

The argument of ease is a valid, but weak one. Eventually as SL's economy grows and there is more financial incentive to copy something, people will overcome the barriers of difficulty.

We all certianly prefer it be later rather than sooner, and we all prefer as much obscurity as possible to keep this from happening. However, I don't think this is a strong argument point for completely forgoing a new permissions system with a framework roughly like the one proposed (with changes to address concerns).

I don't believe there is a "need" per se, but an inherent right to be able to copy or customize something which now belongs to you. I agree that the fact that it makes it easy to counterfeit the objects as well is a serious concern. I hope we would spend more time here discussing solutions to this concern that would fit within the proposed framework instead of discarding the whole concept.

My point was that the political allusions are all false, including mine. I made an example to demonstrate that either system could be twisted to fit some hypothetical political mold just to point out the absurdity of attempting to do so.

I still stand firm that it's highly manipulative to use scare tactics to draw people to accept your argument rather than stick with the concerns and discuss reasonable solutions to how we might address them.

They both have a root in the same concern -- the mod bit will make it free to copy to counterfeiters.

The reputation concern has a direct dependency upon the mod-counterfeit concern, and therefore is moot if the mod-counterfeit concern is addressed. A better way to present the argument would have been to give three examples of how the mod-counterfeit problem would have cascading consequences.

The point is that you can go out and buy a CD, rip it, remix it, and make a copy for your car or your office workstation.

The RIAA will tell you this behavior is illegal and wants to adjust the law to make it clearly illegal. They're also working hard to implement various technical (hardware) restrictions that prevent you from being able to do this anyway--or at least make it more difficult. This sounds exactly like the current permissions system in SL.

The use of the ad-hominem demonstrates that your decorum is no better than my own (I'll admit the dinosaur stab was irrational and spontaneous). Besides, what you quoted and responded to here belonged with the quote that followed.

Why is it your presumption that we can't do the same thing in a modified version of the proposed system? The objective for us here is to come up with a compromise where we can do this without tossing out the whole proposal.

Your criticism doesn't even seem to allow for compromise. All of your arguments seem to be completely against the entire proposal without any hint or suggestion for how to modify the proposal to address your concerns.

The problem I see with that is for those who have a lot of experience with SL, this will be very easy to understand. Of course we'll learn to adapt to additional permission flags and all of their various combinations and exceptions will seem easy to us. However, it won't be easy for the new resident to understand. SL is already intimidating enough as it is, and the current permissions system still has a signficant number of bugs.

Would you argue with my assertion that the current permissions system is most likely not elegantly implemented (as demonstrated by the loopholes and bugs), and is most likely in need of a rewrite?

This was an example of highly complex unforeseen consequences causing someone to be left out in the cold. However, this issue is not the primary concern here, as it is dwarfed by the mod-counterfeiting concern, let's come back to this when the greater concern is resolved.

No, it's not socialistic. Socialism and other social structures are frameworks for the distribution of scarce resources. In SL, it costs nothing to create more resources, so nothing is scarce (unless you're talking about land, which we're not) and therefore it's not accurate to compare a virtual economy to a RL social structure.

Here's a question for you: If the system can be engineered such that the content can be taken apart to the extent that such modifications do not significantly increase the ease to countefeiting, should owners be inherently granted those rights? If they do no harm, then why not?

Obviously this isn't the case with the current proposal, but if it were possible, what would you say to that? Would you still stand firm with your "right" to deny your customers the ability to harmlessly customize?

I agree that content creators deserve protection, but there needs to be a compromise that is fair to both parties. I agree the currently proposed system in no way meets these requirements and needs adjustment. But going in circles about how bad this is, over and over again like a broken record is not making progress.

That's correct. But it's also a very poor attitude.

What if you do like it, but it has a minor quirk that you wish you could change, but some arbitrary and unfair DRM scheme is preventing you from doing so? What if the creator refuses to customize it for you for free or for a reasonable cost. What if she no longer even exists in SL?

I'll agree the ability to customize takes a back burner to safeguarding your creations, however if your creations can be safeguarded with the ability to customize, why not inherently grant that right to all owners?

My argument is that content creators are failing consumer choice by not offering objects for sale in both forms, either nocopy/trans or copy/notrans. I know in some instances it's not rational to sell them a certian way (ie vehicles should not be sold nocopy/trans), but in most cases it is quite reasonable to give the customer the option to choose which option she wants. Yet few retailers bother to offer their customers this choice.

In a limited fashion, this may be not a bad idea. My only concern with such a proposal is that I could wind up with an untextured, unmodifyable vehicle becuase the owner decided to leave SL and sell all of his assets to someone else.

However, this doesn't address the #1 concern of mod-counterfeiting, so I don't see much point on focusing on it at the moment.


I'd like to apologize for some of my spontaneous comments. I'm refactoring how I conduct my debate arguments, and look forward to keeping this discussion as rational and produtive as possible from here forward.

Actually, it's conservation of angular momentum.

Yes, and I've seen the results of LL reading threads. And with a larger frequency than some other online services, they do listen.

However, to take our requests for a more detailed permissions system with more options for a creator, and to twist it into a proposal that is less detailed and takes away options from creators; that sounds like reading comprehension difficulties. They read, but they don't understand.

Granted, in the five day rant-a-thon over the recent permissions proposal, I can only ACTUALLY recall the permission system requested by SL's content creators (us) being described in relative detail only twice or three times, out of a five day, 300+ post gorefest. Perhaps the problem was that many people were complaining about the state of the permission system as it is now, and not enough people were making it clear that it's the bugs and LACK of control we hate, not that we hate the control we have. But whatever the case, somewhere, somehow, we said one thing, and LL heard the ENTIRE and COMPLETE opposite. What good is reading when it results in something like that? Certainly, in the end, it seems as if creators will be retaining their rights, but be honest, it DID look like it was going to be a close call there for a while, didn't it?

I just became aware of this thread and have read it (and the blog). I am still somewhat puzzled and miss some major thoughts about the whole issue. So I just throw them in:

1) What is the main reason behind the change in policies?
A thinkeable motivation could be, that LL is concerned about RW economic gains from designs which might develop, not in summa, but in growth, more dynamic than the growth of product (SL) sales. Another could be that with increasing sales, there is an increasing danger of lawsuits between customer and LL and/or between customers, which, regradless of the outcome, could damage the "name" of the product. And a third motivation could be that LL recognizes the development of SL, at least for the time being and in the context of the current customers, going into a wrong direction by, in the medium run already, becoming rather a market place for designs than a social community of virtual individuals.

2) What terms of copyright?
One poster stated that the US law of copyright is the base of everything - which is simply not correct. The law of a country is recognized in another country only to the extend of bilateral treaties and further restricted by overriding national laws. So, for example, even when a copyright of country A forbids any change in a mechanism, the law of country B can allow changes for the reason to make the thing work as intended (which was in some countries a way to make copies of copyrighted software, since a "backup copy" was judged a way to make sure the intended use of a software product could be ensured continually, even when the original data media was destroyed).
Other posters wrote about making similar items by reviewing the code/geometry data and developing an own product on that base. In fact, the spirit of the international copyright treaties support and encourage this, since it has been recognized a long time ago already that so-called progress cannot take place when monopoly structures in knowledge are maintained. Just think what happened when famous inventors and scientists of our past would would have been confined to the actual desires of the industry - without a doubt, we would still travel on horsebacks ((c/r/tm) horse breeders union), think that the universe revolves around the earth ((c/r/tm) catholic church) and the best treatment against any illness would be the voodoo doll ((c/r/tm) medicneman assocation).

3) Second LIFE (?)
Reading through the whole thread, and even walking around in many places in SL, I have a strong deja-vu experience of a fictional "1st capitalistic school inc". Most posters are just concerned that they cannot make money anymore - or not as much as they had hoped/projected for ... which means, in other words, that you are concerned about the impact on your very personal economic situation rather than the increased fun of the general public by a better and easier access to designs and a bigger variety of available things in a wide spectrum of price and quality (and, yes, even modified copies and copies of copies will occur and add to it).
In the heads of too many people SL is already a sort of moneymaking machine and not a place of fun and community share. I recently gave some textures to another avatar who liked them. I was then asked whether it can use them to apply to own items and what happens when they are sold. Well, for one, when I give something away, I am willing to share and why would I want to earn money for something that I made in the first place for my own pleasure? It served its purpose aready (by me using it) - and when other want to use it too, it is a _compliment_ for my skills that I receive as an added value - and a compliment derives from an inner respect and immediate emotional evaluation, in this regard, it lasts longer and will suit an individuum more than a satisfaction in a form of a trade valuta (eg. money).
I have spent years in a virtual world where there is almost no commercial aspect in designs and ten of thousands of items and tens of thousands of textures are freely available (which does actually not withstand the existance of people who design things and sell them, well knowing that it can well be copied thereafter). This environment is in existance since 1995, almost 10 years, and the number of artists who add to the public resources has never been as high as today - a clear indication that there are environments that can well evolve on public domain and fair use. However, such an environment needs to be built first, and to achieve a common sense, the "common" must be developed first, whereas in SL, the product design was apparently following another agenda by skipping the long and winding road to build the community first and jumping right to the distinct capitalistic elements (but, LL, consider this - capitalism cannot exist in a vacuum, even the most capitalistic economy has regulatory and social, communistic, elements that form the base of the society, you cannot just instate this form of economy by hanging it into the air and hope it will float well).

Well, I am going to cut this post short - having not even said a fraction of what is on my mind - by saying what form of change I would look forward to:

a) Each designer has the sole copyright for his design. Each designer is encouraged to make his work available in a copyable form. -> A designer can still sell his item to people who want to buy from him, get actual updates and notifications about the availablity of variations etc., he also can sell an item to a specific person as ordered. This will lead, for items that require high qualifications or time efforts, to higher prices, which people, who want an item first and right away, will be happy to pay. All others have to wait until sooner or later (sometimes maybe never) it becomes available in a copied form.
Designers who want to design solely for themselves, can still do so and not make their work available to anyone else, thus keeping it unique.

b) To enforce the recognition of intellectual efforts, each item will carry a designer ID which is unique (which is basically a copyright information tag). Such a designer ID will be granted to each citizen of SL for free and on request. Any copies of an item inherit the original designer ID. Since copies are encouraged, the number of poorly re-designed items will be low and, in absolute numbers, original items (and along with it the name of the designer) will become widely known and establish trust and fame. Once trust and fame are established, more people will be willing to buy an original item to value the efforts of a famous designer.

This will of course, lead to massive protest on the designer front and to big numbers of people threatening to stop designing - however, a big number of those were either not really committed to the community (how can one be when he is spending most of his time designing and the least time socializing), or viewed SL as an easy way to earn money in a protected environment (which it is by due to the limitation of competition, which will become even more obvious the longer it lasts). The question is, though, by what intentions LL is driven, technology provider, VW host, platform provider, etc. - and this leads us back to the intial questions. If those were answered, maybe it would become also much easier to contribute some ideas - without it, everybody discussing here merely pokes with a stick in the fog and hopes to achieve some effect...

Well, I think it's further proof that communication is not as simple as read-and-understand perfectly, is it? Factor in dozen and dozens of responses, and I imagine it's a lot to sort out

It's this kind of discussion, where developers provide a gamut of perspectives, that are the most helpful for implementing features. It's a HELLUVA lot easier than implementing something in test, changing it a dozen times, releasing something that's quirky because they refused to go back the drawing board.

In English - this squabbling, when kept polite, is so very valuable.

I think it's important to recognize that LL is a small company, and those who make these kinds of decisions have a lot on their minds and must ration the time they spend here in discussions where they could be using their skills to be improving other aspects of SL.

This is why it is critical that we be as concise, on topic, and rational as possible in discussions where we work with them to iron out our concerns. Let's try to make these our goals so that we maximize the signal:noise ratio so that our concerns are clearly understood by the decision makers.

We also should keep in mind that we are fortunate that they approached us openly with this so far ahead of time, rather than just serving it to us spontaneously at the last hour like they did with the changes in 1.2.

The ability to break the wrapper and get the prim parameters of all the component prims represents a substantial threat to those of us who work in and sell prim-based avatars.

True, it's possible for someone to duplicate our work, but it requires quite a bit of time and effort to meticulously align and shape the prims.

The new system would make it VERY easy to clone our work in a few minutes' time.

However, I am somewhat comforted by Cory's mention of perhaps allowing creators to select *if* someone may break the wrapper on an item. I would be willing to allow this permission on some of my older avatars, but I wouldn't want someone to be able to clone an avatar I just spent multiple hours designing.

And that's all I have to say for now.

Hammerund, I think you've got the wrong idea about the entire SL community.

I spend 99.9% of my time creating, and not socializing. (Yes, that time is significantly reduced over the last few months, directly through my choice, but back when I was creating and socializing, it was almost entirely creating).

What I create, for the most part, I donated to those who wanted it. For example, I made a drag and drop, auto-configuring sit-teleport script that worked for distances up to 100m, and for approximately up to a little over 2,000,000 teleporter pairs. I freely offered copies to any who wanted them.

Admittedly, not many wanted them, as I didn't spend time advertising them in world, and only mentioned them a few times in the forums.

I also spent the last seven months working on creating a visual effect resembling fireflies. I have freely donated these to several people and every landowner within Seacliff. I think MAYBE one or two people have paid me any money for their use, and what they did pay me was what they felt was fair, and not a price I set. This is the only thing I've ever built that I've considered charging for, but as I am not happy with their current look (I've only got them labeled as v0.59, after seven months of work), I won't be selling them any time soon. If and when I do, it'll probably be for half of what I've ever recieved in any one donation for their use, and I will continue to provide patches free of charge for any and all who own them.

Another project I'm attempting to work on was an in game sim FPS map. Use was (and is) going to be free of charge, and, in fact, the project was planned to require no external support of any kind. No one would have to host objects or scripts, all information would be gathered by objects I created. Unfortunately fundamental difficulties in the structure of SL prevented me from succeeding in that goal, so I had to rethink the entire project (and when I feel I can create safely within SL again, I'll get back to it), but I will still gladly provide the service free of charge, despite the fact that it will exist and eat up all my available land and prims.

My objections to the proposed system were not related to money in any way, but were more related to the fact that the proposed system could potentially allow someone to copy my work and put their name on it. Like plagiarizing a poem and putting their own name on it. Yes, scripts would not have been affected, but prims would have, and I don't like to see any creator get stomped on because his work is deemed "less valuable" by The Powers That Be.



Bah. Rational? I tried that once. Got bored.

(repost from the blog of course)

I've made this suggestion once or twice before but haven't seen any comments on it one way or another so I'm going to resub it. Regarding the Fair Use concept... what if creators were able in some way to grant restricted modify permissions. I know there are times that I, and others I assume, have to decide whether they want the people who buy our creation to be able to tweak it or if we want to stay safe from it being easily duplicated. Why not have a method of granting the next owner the ability to change texture and color.. and possibly scale.. but not break the linkage. Say I build a beautiful 200 prim fountain (not going to happen but humor me). I want to let whoever buys it be able to change the color to match where they're going to plant it. However, I'm worried that someone is going to easily duplicate it if I set it to modify by plopping in scripts or just copying down the numbers or whatever. Wouldn't it be great if I could have a little security and also give my customers their 'Fair Use' rights?

Okay... now lets say that someone that is sick and twisted replaces the original color and textures on the fountain with a bunch of Nazi symbols or something else that someone might find offensive. Joe Av comes walking along sees it and thinks "OMG who made that hiddeous thing". This is the moral rights issue that several ppl have mentioned. So again, all we need is another field that says who the object was last modified by when someone hovers over the object or opens the edit window on it. That way it's easy to see that's not how the original creator had made that particular item.

Would this be a good balance of Moral Rights, First Use, and Creators Rights? If my logic is flawed or I missed something please let me know. There's a couple of issues with this idea I can think of already... like should the end user have a "revert" button to put the object back how they first got it when they decide they like the original textures better?

-Meiyo

Hi Moleculor,

well, I was talking in general and it is not withstanding that some people would, like you or me, not think about money in this whole issue - but many, if not the most do.

It is, as Cory pointed out, though, not possible to effectively prohibit any copying by all means - it might be possible to make it harder, but this will then create a group of "magicians" who can do it and start some race between them and LL (I have seen that before in other worlds).
So, I think, the better way would be in fact to encourage copying and maintain an inheritable creator tag instead - this way, things will be spread fast and widely and the creator still can be recognized.

Ah, but see, I'm not unique. If I had to guess, I'd have to say most of the people posting in this thread offer at least some of their content completely for free.

Likewise. Some of my stuff I earn cash for, some I give for free.

I understand that you can't prevent a truly determined person who wants to find a way to rip the textures, but I think giving people the ability to view it full screen where all they need to do is hit printscreen is like handing it to them on a platter. The ONLY way someone should be able to see the textures on a skin is on their avatar while they're wearing it, even if it's set to be modifiable. Modifiable should only mean they can use the sliders in appearance, not examine the textures in a dialogue box stretched to full screen. That's like putting a "please steal me" sign on it, and it's why I no longer sell modifiable skins.

Indeed. I offer some of my content for free and at bargain prices so that there are things everyone can enjoy regardless of their L$ balance. I also spend a lot of time answering questions in the design forum, explaining my techniques, and even give away custom templates I spent an enormous amount of time on, all to help new designers have an easier time getting started. I'm currently replicating the 3d avatar mesh in 3ds max and plan to release it to the community so someone can code an offline clothing and skin previewer for everyone to use, and provide people the opportunity to avail themselves of a broader range of tools when creating content. You don't have to force people to be altruists. Those who want to, will. Those that don't want to shouldn't have to.

I strongly disagree with the notion that opening up our content to everyone so that it can be picked apart will foster innovation. Why innovate when it's so easy to take the shortcut of borrowing someone else's labor without their consent? You don't learn anything that way except how to take the easy way out and to expect something for nothing. A sense of entitlement has never been a catalyst for innovation.

We all already own the copyright to our work we create in SL. SL is just a tool we use to create these things. LL is just the service provider running SL. The blue prints (prim specificiations) for our items are housed by SL as a service. Since when does any service provider have to right to share my blue prints without my permission? I would have to specifically transfer a portion of my copyright to LL for them to be able to do this.

I am not objecting to the new permissions systems. What I am saying is that LL does not have the legal right to give away specifications on how we create our work. By implementing a system where a wrapper may be broken (at any time, now or after some waiting period) and the specifications on how we have created our digital art are then visible to the public, you are infringing on our copyrights. Specifically you are infringing on this part of our copyrights:



Simply put I believe "Linden Labs does not have the right to give away our copyrighted material".

Meiyo I agree with you on the point concerning modification and the name associated with such works. And I believe you already have that right. It is part of your copyright that applies specifically to visual art (which is what any object in SL is). It is called the rights of Attribution and Integrity.

Read about it in full here.

But the highlights are:

On another note, since LL believes that objects sold in SL are somehow real and that the purchaser has a right to view the object in detail and modify it, let's discuss how that should be achieved. Shouldn't the new owner measure the object in-world? Shouldn't they have to create a pair of virtual calipers to obtain these measurements? That is directly comparable to how I would have to do it in RL. I can't buy a new Ford and look inside of it to get the exact measurements of every body panel down to the 0.0001m. I must pull out a tool and measure it.

What about modification? Can I just will my new Ford to be blue instead of red? No. I must purchase paint and brush and then paint it myself. So how should you do this in SL? You should create/buy virtual paint and a virtual paint brush. Don't think it can be done? Sure it can - "Your World Your Imagination".

My point is that LL is mixing their virtual metaphors. And that is fine until it infringes on your real copyrights.