Copy protection for Notecards (authors/writers/publishing)

First of all, griefers problem could be solved (though maybe not 100%) with more manpower. LL doesn't make it so, because it costs money.

Second, if you worry about copying, it's not the about the one person who distributes it to their friends. You worry about people illegally selling your stuff in mass quantities. And these latter can be potentially caught. There's a law in place for that, too, it's called DMCA (in the US). Additionally, Linden Labs could have a 'copyright violation' unit, with enough people, and it would be in LL's interest to do so, if they really want to be a platform which creators can trust.

There's also other cases of copying: objects, textures are being copied and resold (forfeited). These are also valid causes to have more people looking after copyright in SL.



How does it get around the copy protection? Maybe you're thinking someone will print the ebook and then snail mail it to 1000 persons?



Check the law. It allows certail cases of copying. Whether it's a legal or illegal case is for the courts to decide, NOT you and some dumb DRM.

I'd love to be able to grant people the rights to print/save/etc my work. Unfortunately I know that if I do it'll get stolen, given out to other people who haven't bought the privilige of reading it.
I don't like the idea of my content not being protected by DRM, because :
1) it means I lose out on sales of a product that depends on sales to survive.
2) it annoys me on an ethical level that people are getting away with stealing.
3) it stops me knowing things I want to know, like who is interested in my work. It stops me even knowing how many people read my work, which, when you're forging new ground in terms of what you write, is *vital* to knowing if there is a market for it or not.



The problem of people copying works they lack the privilige of copying could also be solved if LL did some very simple code changes, like requiring permissions (minimum +copy,+transfer, but hopefully also +modify) to copy text from a notecard.



Actually, a lot of people distributing copies to their friends has exactly the same damaging effect as one person selling it in mass quantities. More, in fact - as free copies tend to spread faster.
The latter kind, actually, cannot be adequately caught. AFAIK, LL's DCMA takedown notice proceedure applies only to content which is rezzed inworld and which is still inworld when the Lindens arrive to check it. So if someone started selling copies of my work at a vendor, and I found out about it, I could get their vendor/etc deleted but I couldn't recover the lost sales or customer data. The *most* I could do in this case would be to temporarily halt the flow of illegal copies.
More likely, someone selling pirated works won't do so from a vendor, they will do so, for, say, 5L, with a little note in their profile saying "pay me 5L for BDSM information, money back if you're not happy with what you get" - after all it costs them nothing to copy the information, and nothing to make it.... unlike myself where I spend many hours on writing it.
So... actually, we need copy-protection to stop people just 'giving a copy' to their friends, too. Lots of people doing that are just as damaging as one person selling vast numbers of pirate copies, are a lot harder to catch or stop.



Copyright law, IIRC, allows what is called 'fair use' which has a specific legal meaning. It, IIRC, translates into clauses such as :
* you can quote small sections from the work for the purpose of journalism, comedy, critical review, academic use.
* non-profit educational institutions which are legally recognised non-profits can use the work as a solely educational tool (with some restrictions)

Copyright law, AFAIK, does *not* allow you to do any of the following without the author/creator's permission :
1) make a copy of the work and give it to someone else
2) re-sell the work
3) translate the work into another form for the purpose of getting around copy-protection.

#1 and #3 would cover giving a copy to a friend, and #2 would cover resale of the work.
I'm not sure of the exact details of copyright law, but AFAIK, as far as SL goes, copying someone's work in whole, without their permission, and giving it to another person is a clear case of copyright violation.
What would be really nice is if a lawyer came along and summarised what the rights content producers/consumers actually have over original written works on the internet.



Ultimately, however, all discussions of copyright law are moot for one simple reason.



I write in SL because I enjoy doing something that helps the community. I demand money for my work :
1) to make people appreciate that the information is actually very valuable,
2) to get some feedback when people enjoy my work (in the form of a notice I've been paid),
3) to encourage people to be bolder about suggesting improvements to my work and giving me feedback (customers who pay for something always feel somewhat empowered in dealing with the maker, in a way that those who get free stuff don't).

If people copy my work without my permission, then :
1) people fail to respect the value of my work, or demonstrate that they do not respect me.
2/3) I don't get feedback when they read it - because they usually aren't dumb enough to contact me and give me feedback when they know that I can look up their record and know they never paid for my product.

So, effectively, people copying my work completely destroys my reason for making it in the first place.

Now, as I don't make substantial money on my work, my willingness to build upon it and improve it closer to perfection depends primarily on my goodwill.

People who copy my work destroy my goodwill towards the community which is the very source of my motivation for writing in the first place. Further, since I don't make substantial money on the work, I have no other reason to continue making it if my goodwill is gone.

Thus, if people copy my work without my permission, it will ultimately result in me taking my product off the market and *everyone* will be without it in future.

I'm not being harsh to consumers here. In fact, were it not for my desire to help out, my works wouldn't exist or be public at all! I did originally make them solely for my own, exclusive use, after all. I only decided to put them up for sale as I realised they might help a lot of people.

If I ever leave SL, to avoid making them useless after I leave, I will probably release them under the by-nc-sa CC licence. I'm actually quite kind to consumers, I have great respect for them as they, like me, are seeking ways to learn new things and develop as people.

My liking for people who want to learn, however, won't stop me simply taking my product off the public market if I feel that the community is treating it with disrespect. I have no time to waste on giving stuff to people who have no respect for the work involved in creating it.

So, to put it simply : if we had copy-protection as an optional feature of notecards, I'd be happy and I'd put a lot more work into creating quality content. Without it, I feel irked and nervous, and it saps my motivation sometimes.

Without decent copy-protection.... people can pirate my work. This is bad, because if lots of people do it I will find out, and when I find out I will probably elect to take my work off the market completely. If lots of people copy it and I don't find out I might discontinue it anyway due to lack of interest (as I gague interest by sales). I measure interest by sales - as I find that you can ask many people "would you be interested in X?" and many of them will instinctively say "yes" even when they're not - yet if you ask "would you pay money for X?" you *really* find out how much they value X.


Ultimately, all discussions of 'consumer rights' or copyright law are futile. I keep my works on the market because I want to help out the community. If the community treats me badly by pirating my works, I will simply remove my products from the market, and close my business.
Understand, you're dealing with a person who has the freedom to sell or not sell their works, and who is NOT motivated by money. The main reason I make my works for public sale *at all* is because of a trust and desire to help I have for the community. If the community breaks that trust by violating my licence, I will stop selling my works.

Sure, some people may want DRM to extract lots of money from consumers. I don't care about money - if I did, I would be spending my time working at something that earnt FAR more money then I make in SL from selling my work. I want basic copy-protection for notecards because :
1) it makes no sense that you can't copy a -copy texture in SL, but you CAN copy a -copy notecard.
2) for struggling authors, copy-protection may make the differenc between them continuing to write and giving up
3) it is fundamentally wrong for someone to buy something with a licence (and hence, agree to abide by rules which place restrictions on copying it) - and then to break those rules, for it is a serious breach of contract - it is dishonest, harmful and morally wrong.

Why do I support copy-protection for notecards? Because, ultimately, I think it will be good for everyone in SL (except of course, thieves who take what is not rightfully theirs) - because it will encourage the creation of new, good content. It also stops a few individuals erroding the trust that content producers place in the community they choose to offer their content to.

Lindens : Allowing content creators to stop people copying their work has created new markets in SL and resulted in content that draws a lot of people into SL. Examples include protecting objects and scripts, which meant that builders and scripters could make money in SL. Even scripts, which are simply notecards parsed by the server, have copy-protection in that modify functions as a 'can read' permission, thus preventing copying. Why do you treat notecards so differently? You can't say that notecards can always be copied using packet sniffing or such - textures can be copied using a screen capture program, yet you DO protect textures by stopping people transferring 'no transfer' textures. Why do you treat notecards so differently? For the sake of fairness to authors, consistency in how permissions work, the creation of improved content in SL and lastly the encouragement of currently inhibited markets in SL.... please disable copy/paste on notecards which the owner does not have +modify/+copy/+transfer rights. It would enable people who wish to copy-protect their work to do so, whilst still allowing creators to make free-transfer notecards if they wished to do so. It would, bluntly, be fair, consistent, encouraging for the economy, and of course honour the principle already enshrined in SL's code that content creators do have some control over what the next owner does with their work.

Good luck with this. I fear that anything involving copyright will be ignored by LL just like everything else on that subject. But you've got my vote.

Yes. The needs and intent of the content provider are paramount when gaurenteeing their creations are safe. You will either want EXACTLY what they are selling for EXACTLY the terms offered or you can 'ask' for special circumstances or you can go elsewhere.

If a given content provider doesnt fulfill your needs you SHOULD go somewhere else. But if you CHOOSE to purchase something that contains restrictions you should be castrated, drawn and quartered for contemplating violating those terms. After all you agreed to those terms by the mere act of purchase.

NOW I DO HAVE AN ISSUE:

in general in how permissions are VISIBLE to consumers. We have to trust that a content provider has f ully and accurately described their limitations. There needs to be some means of seeing all permissions on every prim and inventory item within an object you would recieve in a transaction.

A vender who chooses to place restrictions on what they sell has every right. And you have every right to voice your opinion of that choice by YOU choosing not to purchase.

Make YOUR OWN decisions. Dont try to make the decisions for vendors.

You're that sure that your work is that good eh?



Correct, and DRM defeats that law, which is one of the many reasons it's such a hot debate.


There's another issue here as well, which goes back to being able to print out the notecards onto real paper. How many people log into SL, A VIDEO GAME, to sit and read? When I want to read, I don't waste time in front of a video game. I kick back with a book.

Somewhere else? If I don't like Rowling's license for the (let's suppose electronic) book Harry Potter, where else can I go? I think there's nowhere else to go.



That doesn't really matter. Let's suppose I write a license agreement saying that if you use my software/read my electronic text, you have to give me your house for free if I wish so.

Would that stand up in court? No.
Even though you agreed to the license, it has non-reasonable terms that can't be applied/enforced.

Also, if I write in the license that you can't use any excerpt of the text even for educational use, it doesn't matter: the law gives you the right to use excepts from copyrighted works in certain situations, and the law has higher priority, nullifying your clause.



Well, maybe what you propose would help. I would settle for no less, than a message, like:
'Warning: this notecard has extra protections applied which limit your lawful right to copy excepts from it, and also limit your option of printing it out, giving it to a friend.'



Easy to say, lol.

As I see it, the way copyright started was something like this:
1. Books, texts were blatantly copied, and there was no law to help the content provider
2. So, the law was being made, which looked at BOTH the consumers (society's) needs and the publishers needs. So it says, hey, publisher, we'll give you a TEMPORARY monopoly to get rich from your creative work, but the society can only advance, grow richer if that right expires after 17 years. (Yes, originally this was 17 years, not the nonsense 75 years.) After those 17 years, anyone's free to build freely upon the once copyrighted work.

But what's DRM is doing, is:
3. We don't care about the consumers. We want OUR rights, and ONLY our rights, and we want it FOREVER. We don't care about society, we just want to maximize our profit. We wont give our work to the society not after 17 years, not after 75 or any years.

That's why DRM is evil.

Angel, while this conversation is interesting in a way for me, I do feel we're just going around in circles an circles by now

I don't agree with your views and motivations, but hey, I'm not you, and we're different, with different views, so that's okay.

I do think that customers could do with more trust. Even thought much of SL is very poor people (in SL, L$-wise), that does increase the likelyness of piracy (there are even pirate ships in SL , I still think they're not as bad as you think.

If I were you, I'd try an experiment, releasing a few (4-5) notecards with a big copyright notice in the foreword, that's just a short, easily understandable text, not the legal mumbo-jumbo.

Release these notecards, price them not high, so price is not an obstacle, also mention in the text the place where one can get more copies, or landmark that can be given to a friend, whatever...

Then... advertise it, and wait. And after a while, try to check how many people have bought it, and how many copied it (though this part is hard, I admit). It'd be interesting to see the results.

But again, the fact that an internet radio (www.radioparadise.com) can survive on PURELY listener support and NO advertisements makes me think things aren't so bad as you think. There's no DRM in that radio stream, no login user/password, yet it still works.

You go read a different book?



Personally, I'm not sure... I see many flaws in it but I'm working hard to improve my work all the time. Given the number of people who buy my work, however, and the comments they give me on it afterwards being so positive, and that the other day someone openly admitted to me they copied my work because they knew I couldn't stop them or even get LL to punish them for it.... I do think about this issue.



The law is pretty much unenforcable anyway. If you can make a copy for personal use, then you can make a copy for 'a friend'. The law is almost unenforcable. DRM provides a new set of laws which *are* practically enforcable. Ok, they *can be* more restrictive, but at least they're practical.

Considering that it's easy to obtain electronic copies of RL books in SL, conveniently and for very little money, and that you can read them whilst also dipping into IM conversations with your friends? Also, considering the fact that there are many informational books in SL that relate to SL itself and which you can't buy in RL?
I think quite a few people read book in SL.


Applying copy-protection to prevent widespread piracy is reasonable and enforcable.


The clause is legally nullified, yes.


You really expect people to READ warning tags? Most people just ignore anything that looks like a legal warning and is over 2 lines long, and the pirates will certainly ignore it. I doubt that'll do anything to stop piracy - we need a technical limit imposed by the software to make any difference.




Personally I quite like this system - as I said I do plan to make my work public if I ever leave SL.



What's wrong with demanding what you have a right to? Nothing at all. Oh and we're not trying to strip customers of their rights - some customer rights are essential to the economy. It's just that when you find that people are choosing NOT to produce content AT ALL because they don't think they'd have enough rights over their own creations, you know that maybe talk of 'customer rights' has gone too far.



I agree.


I don't need to assert that piracy is actually happening, for my argument to work. I need only assert that :
1) piracy is trivially easy, and thus there is wide scope for it to happen without other people knowing about it
2) the mere fact of #1 means that publishers/writers won't create the good content they would otherwise create,
3) the mere fact of #2 means that the economy and the whole of SL are worse off as a result.



That's what I do now. I have my work as notecards with a clear "This work is copyrighted - copying it is illegal, immoral, and will result in this product ceasing to exist for everyone in future." warning. It also comes with a landmark that can be given to a friend. I also charge a modest fee for it.


I can see how many people bought it (unless they opt to opt out of my records, via declining my request to include their name in my customer list).
But I can't see how many pirate it - I'm the last person to find out about that!
So, sorry, but the two figures can never be compared.


Anyone with bandwidth, a music collection, and a free streaming program can broadcast a free radio. Given the amount of people with servers who have spare bandwidth, if you wanted to have a completely free station I doubt it'd be that hard, you'd just need one person to host your stream and some DJ software. That's not much work... compared to the many hours of work involved in writing a long, thought out piece. There is no computer I'm aware of that can churn out written work hour after hour of the same quality that authors can write... whereas there are DJ programs that can serve up tunes for hour after hour. The difference is - there is very little original work in the radio station - they don't produce the content, they just mix up large section of pre-existing content others have made. I on the other hand write original, new content with my own hands. I don't just remix existing works. I use existing works as free addons to expand my points at times, but I don't charge more for using these. What I charge for is the large amount of hours and effort I have put into making my original written works.

Well i had a host of arguments and rebuttals but Angel covered them all.

(Insert Angel's entire reply here for agreement purposes)

I will not reply more to most what you have wrote, because yes, it would be and endless loop But I read it all, of course.



It's actually funny that you seem to nullify other's work just because you don't know how much work and money is needed to do such. Like writing, an internet radio station can be done fast and sloppy with not much work and it can be right.

If done right (like Radio Paradise), it takes:
- Bandwidth, server fees (several hundred USD/month? a guess)
- Have to manage the servers, if something breaks, call up the people to fix it, etc
- RIAA/whatever copyright royalties - several hundred to thousand or more USD/month
- A website, listing all music, news, actual playlist
- Software made for the website (customized open source software to fit specific needs)
- A listener review channel, which has to be fed with new stuff which has to be screened
- The main channel, which uses 'blocks' of half an hour. While the scheduling is automatic, there is a human voice speaking just a bit between each block, about the bands that have played, speaking of the actions, asking for support, etc
- These blocks of music have to be put together. It doesn't take much to put up a random playlist and use that for an internet radio. But that wouldn't really be popular: who wants to hear a fast Metallica song next to really slow new age song? The songs have to revolve around similar styles, they have to transition well, etc.
- If the blocks would be all the same, listeners would be bored in the longterm. So songs have to be rotated in and out of the blocks, this takes much listening... overall, knowing which song goes where, and processing all the new songs takes much time and effort

So I do think the above do mean a one or two person full-time job.

These DJ's didn't write the songs, they don't sing, etc. But they invest substantial time and effort into the 'compilation' of the works. And they sure TRUST their 'customers' (the audience) financially.

The customers are happy, the DJ is happy... and if there are a few freeriders? Well, maybe they're poor, or maybe not, but whatever the case, it's the freerider's problem. Overall the radio is very successful, nonethless.

Radio Paradise also didnt grow to those levels overnight. It started out with much smaller investments and much lower resources. Everyone starts at the bottom. Angels reference was in this regard. She is still building UP her customer base. So her references were to someone in the example you gave but at the point in the business of still starting. Take that into consideration.

Copying net radio to net books is a bad example. The amount of bandwidth needed to make decent audio is several orders of magnitude higher than that needed to copy books.

I'm not trying to 'nullify' anything. I'm pointing out that :
1) Internet radio stations involve a continual listening and vareity in that listening. This makes them both harder to copy and also more likely to work on a donation model, because you can remind people repeatedly to donate to support you.
2) Internet radio stations can be automated in many ways that writing cannot. There is no program that will help you decide what order to put some paragraphs in, whereas there are programs that will count the beats per minitue and group, say, fast music seperately from slow music.
3) I admit I don't know how much work goes into maintaining an internet radio station. But nevertheless, internet radio stations are very different, economics wise, to books - because they're a continual service that requires continual use to get the most out of, and they're not so easy to copy because you never know what the DJ will play next.


For example :


Books are more easy to copy then internet radio is. Therefore books are more in need of protection from illegal copying.

*sigh*

Look, I'm not saying "anyone should be allowed to rip you off".

I'm saying "there's plenty of evidence that strong security isn't necessary for profitably selling books online".

I listed three services (the Free Library, Webscriptions, and Fictionwise), not just one.

I'll admit I've never actually bought books from those three services you name. Could you tell me, is copying one of their books as easy as pressing CTRL-A, CTRL-C, ALT-TAB, CTRL-V? Because that's the level of security in SL right now for books.

No, it's easier. Like I said, it's just a plain HTML file or PDF. There's NO protection at all. Same as the music I buy from eMusic.

For me, DRM is a demand-killer. I have only bought one DRMed eBook in my life and that's because it was the ONLY way to get the hypertext version of _A Fire Upon the Deep_. It's not because I want to rip it off, it's because I want to be able to read or listen to it the way I prefer. In SL, I'm really reluctant to buy stuff that's no-mod and no-copy... even if it's no-transfer.

But other people differ, and if there's demand for the product then I'm all for you having the option of selling it the way you want... I just won't be a customer.

I'm just not sure there is the demand, though. I can't see people logging in to SL to read a text file.

And thats all Angel is asking for and why i'm fully supporting her request. Choice. Each content creator in first life or second should be able to choose how their creations are used. Each consumer can express their choice by being willing to purchase the product under those restrictions or they can go elsewhere.

I'm not sure I understand one point of the request though.

If I was to pick a permission that would prevent copying the content of a notecard, I'd have thought that it would be "copy" that limited it. But Angel seems to be asking for "Transfer" to be the one that limits it. I don't understand the reasoning.

She also admitted that by the nature of notecards no single permission makes sense and altered her statement so that only if you have all THREE permissions (full perms) should cut/paste be enabled.

Personally i think having a book that you cant cut/paste but that you can loan (give) to a friend is useful so trans would not be fair.

For people who may collect a LOT of reading material and have mutliple organizational methods having the ability to drop a copy of the book into each folder that is labeled by category could be useful (without giving cut/paste of the text itself).

And for certain issues in helping to write up a contract or for someone to easily amend a log file kept in a notecard by typing an entry without being able to easily copy the whole thing mod privledges without cut/paste would be useful.

So with the current system only having full perms really makes sense as the switch that turns on cut/paste. But i still think LL should take my advice on 'adv permissions' options based on item type. Id like to have seperate check boxes for many tasks. Issue been mentioned before so wont go into further detail on it now.

Sorry, but I just don't believe you. Look at the net in general - most young people now simply won't pay for content that they can get for free illegally. Trusting content users simply does not work in an age when most people consider it morally OK to download illegal music off the net and copy DVDs.



I like the idea of fine-grained permissions. I like the idea of having a book you can't copy from but can loan to friends - so long as the content creator allows this.
I also like the idea of seperating 'copy within card' from 'copy card itself'. That is also a very good idea.
Similarly, write without full copy would be useful in some cases.

I agree with you - we need more flexible permissions on items, notecards in particular, then the wishes of content creators have more chance of being respected.

ARR!! beaches!!

want me to stop learning too??

go eat a can.... *evil laughter*

I'm pro-education. Having said that, I think that the best way to ensure that good quality ebooks get written in SL is to ensure that they're not so trivial to pirate that a 8 year old could do it by just copying and pasting from notecards.
I think that if we gave notecards the bare minimum of protection we give textures (actually honouring the intentions of the creator in as far as no-transfer/no-copy permissions go... by requiring at least those permissions to copy text out of the cards)... then it would be more consistent and better at encouraging quality written works in SL.

What don't you believe? That Webscriptions and Fictionwise exist? That they're profitable? What?