Lindens, give us a public domain!

Unfortunatly I just don't think thats the point any more Eggy.

Linden Lab has said that we retain the copyrights to our work on their servers. That means it only belongs to SL for hosting purposes, and to use for advertising probably. It specifically doesn't give them the right to decide when your works are no longer protected by copyright, and thus when your inventory should be emptied into the public domain.

I do fully support an official public domain repository, I don't think it is anylonger Linden Lab's place to force material into their though. Maybe before the TOS changes, but not now.

What about people who alrady left? They didn't expect anything of the sort to happen. I don't see why you should have the right to pry open an object someone sold you, when they deliberately locked it before the sale. They had the expectation that it would stay locked, but now you want to unlock it so you can "fix it." Take their source is more like it. Even if you have totally inoccuous goals in mind, others won't, but they'll be able to steal from others and profit from their works all the same.

As a person who has sold things and had them unlocked and passed out surreptitiously due to an in-game exploit, I can tell you that I do not appreciate this at all. If I create it, and I make it clear at the time of sale that I want it to stay locked... why do you even argue against that? Make your own or contract someone to make it for you.

I think this whole dichotomy stems from the fact that you are something of a socialist, whereas most of the rest of us are not. If I go on sabbatical, I don't want to have to nuke & pave my inventory in order to make sure no one gets a free ride off something I spent 30 hours making. Especially since I can't get it back.

Eggy, that's all quite irrelevant. Under the current system, a player has copyright on all the SL content he's made in the world. Under United States law, that means that Linden Labs is not allowed to arbitrarily place it in the public domain. Unless you're advocating that Linden Labs engage in massive copyright infringement, I suggest you re-think your position.

I fear your understanding of public domain is seriously skewed. While copyright to expire, allowing the material to become public domain, the Lindens has no right to speed that process just because the creator left Second Life. (See below for more.)






This is wrong, and essentially is a granting permission to steal without consulting the copyright owner. If the Lindens are true to their statement about respecting copyrights, they have no authority to enable "Next Owner" permissions, nor offer copies, or even the original versions, of their undistributed inventory to the public. After all, it is called "copyright" because only the author has the rights to grant copy/usage privledges.

That said, if the owner had already granted righted right to sell, copy, or modify, then there is no reason those privledges cannot stand. Unfortunately, this creates both a logistical and legal nightmare for the Lindens. They must continue to provide the owner the ability to revoke copy privledges at a later date. I suppose they could, demote the account to basic status for the length of the use of their creations.


Meek

The Lindens can do whatever they want. Modify the TOS to add something along the lines of 'allowing your SL account to lapse for more than two months constitutes a forefiture of your copyright and an implied agreement to allow copyrighted material to lapse into SL's public domain.'

ALL rights can be modified through contract.

Having read pretty carefully through this thread, here's a new and, I think, major objection to your position on pubic property, Eggy.

It has been argued back and forth that a creator ought to make her intellectual property public within reason. I'll grant this for the sake of argument. There is something rewarding in contributing to a universal body of knowledge and seeing it appreciated and built upon. HOWEVER, even given that such contribution is RIGHT does not prove it ought to be OBLIGATORY.

To remove from me my choice to be a bastard and keep my intellectual property to myself is to make a moral decision on my behalf. This is patronizing, and the highest form of disrespect for me as an intelligent decision-maker. It presumes that I am so likely to make the WRONG choice that I don't deserve the opportunity to make a choice at all.

I guess this makes me a Kantian, but I hold strongly to the notion that the element of choice, not the ultimate outcome, gives a decision its value; without the opportunity to make the WRONG choice, making the RIGHT choice loses its significance entirely.

If you were the only person in this system making decisions, Eggy, you'd be 100% right. But you aren't the only person here responsible for making decisions about releasing material. The fact that we are surrounded by others who deserve our respect demands that we trust them to make the right decisions on their own. If we make acting for the benefit of the community mandatory, we really are no better than good ol' fashioned Soviet Russia!

Formally,

P1. It is for the good of the community to contribute your intellectual property.
P2. It is right to do a thing if it is for the good of the community.
P3. It is always morally obligatory to do a right thing.
P4. If a thing is morally obligatory, we as a community must make it mandatory.
Conclusion: We as a community must make it mandatory for individuals to contribute their intellectual property.

Objection - Even allowing premises 1,2, and 3, premise 4 neither follows nor obtains. We cannot accept the conclusion.

Wow! Have I timewarped back to Philosophy class???



Yeah I doubt it too, I just remembered something about the Beetles music having a copyright controversy around it, but I think it has something to do with the fact that *Michael Jackson* owns the right to their music. Not cool to have someone else own the copyright to something you created.

http://www.fan-sites.org/the-beatles/multimedia/videos/beatles4.wmv
Yet another reason to hate MJ....

Anyway, I can't agree with Eggy here either, RL copyright law has to precede LL's preference in copyrights because of the TOS. I guess it's one of the negatives we have to put up with.

But here's a scenario to play with:

Say I sell someone or many people an inworld object for a sizeable $L fee, no-copy, no-mod. But they can use it and it works fine. Then I quit...

Then ten days later 1.3 comes out and breaks the object they paid L$500 or L$1000 for, so they bascially now have a POS 3D object that does nothing. Even if it's just a simple fix like adding llSetAnimTexture(FALSE, 0, 0, blah blah); (real example of a fix I needed since 1.2)... it can't be done. Now what?

I like the public library idea. It could be like a global inventory, part of the inventory. Anyone could put their creations in there, and others could get them and use them as they see fit. By putting an object in the library you're putting it in the public domain, so all items would be made possible to modify.
For this to work there would need to be people taking care of the library, catogizing, throwing out bad stuff, etc. etc. Kind of like the Wikipedia.

Only problem with it might be that it could get hard to sell stuff, when lots is available for free.

Little

That is a really snazzy idea! We could do that now, but we'd have to load all the stuff into a prim. Hmm... I forget, can you have a folder within the contents folder of the inventory for a prim? We would have to have a librarian, of course, but we could have free vending machines around that simply dispensed these libraries ^_^ I got stuff to donate to it:

a public-land detector (soon to be almost useless)
avatar fuego (spontaneous combustion attachment)
a few notecards on prim-efficient building.

A global inventory sounds cool, IF it were organized in some decent way.

A Library of Congress type deal would be great.