Inter-grid permissions discussion

This is getting to be just like DRM schemes for audio and video: I, as a customer, am assumed to be evil, and things that seem reasonable to me are being forbidden.

What happened to Fair Use, or the First Sale doctrine?

In RL, would you put up with being told that to take a vacation to another country, you would have to strip naked at the border and buy all new clothing that you could only use there?

If content creators want to be able to forbid their work to cross between SL and another grid, so be it--but they'd better provide full disclosure of permissions before sale, and those who do forbid it will have to get along without my business, and with word of mouth spreading as quickly as I can push it that they don't trust you as a customer. As a non-pirate who spends way too many L$ on things I think deserve it, I think I deserve to be able to take things I legitimately buy with me.

Well, did you buy the right to make unlimited copies of your favorite CD and give them away to all the people who visit your house?


That's basically what you are claiming you have the right to do.

Nonsense! That is an utterly bogus analogy. I have no intention of giving things away in violation of the constraints the seller places on them, any more than I do here within SL. There's only one of me, so I can only use an object on one grid at any one time. (It will take a far more efficient system than exists now to make it practical for me to run multiple instances of the client.) I should have the right to take stuff I've bought with me wherever I go, and I won't do business with any vendor who refuses to permit it.

If other grids copy my stuff behind my back, that is not my doing; take it up with the people who run them.

I think customer power will happen pretty quick when customers who travel from grid to grid decide not to purchase "One Grid Only" limited items when "World Grid" items are available. I challenge any retailer to start advertising their items are exclusive to SL grid only.
After all as you say if I my hair, sunglasses and shoes keep dissapearing everytime I hop across a grid line then I am going to ditch them for items that will stay on.
As many in this world probably are, I am a creator and customer, I build so why am I going to much around for hours in Gimp making clothing for free when I can buy it from someone good at that. So I see both sides of this, I want the option to mark my creations as "TrustedWorldGrid" enabled and I resent any attempt to label my content as limited to the SL grid.
And if some of my stuff gets copied? Bugger it, I'm not going to waste my time flying from Austrailia to drag some guy in backwater country into a USA court, presuming I or LL could actually find their identity with the Unlimited Anoymous Unverified Accounts option SL has, I'll just drop the price under what they are selling it for. It costs me nothing in materials for sales, the people less affected by this will be those selling products that get updated regularly.

No actually what you are proposing is the CD we buy at the shop will only work in one CD player, we have to buy other copies to listen to in our walkman, car or at a friends place. And if that CD player dies bad luck our music is gone with it.
And if I buy a music CD and rip it onto MP3 on my hard drive and mix it on a disc for my car and drop it into my MP3 player and play it on my computer, big deal, the original sits in the CD rack and will possibly never spin again in my lifetime, I don't sell or give away copies of it across the internet. If content were to not be able to be copied for private use, it better drop in price a lot if it wants to sell multiple copies to repeat customers.

There is a couple problems with your argument. First off, People don't want their creations going to other grids because they don't trust the grids, not because they don't trust the customer.

An item is SL isn't like anything in the real world, it contains 100% of everything needed to make a perfect copy. A Car doesn't have that, neither does a CD. All it takes is one person teleporting to a rogue grid for the grid owner to make infinite copies of the item they take from their asset server. I trust the customers 1000 times more than these so-called Grid operators.

Secondly, to make a Real World parallel, it's like finding there was suddenly a planet in the 9th dimension you could go visit. Do you really expect people would have considered that possible and put "can't take to the 9th dimension" into their perms?

It's very unfair to creators to have something dumped on them like this out of the blue. Either we piss off some customers, or we lose our creations to the void. We lose either way.

I bet certain groups of people are just salivating at the opportunity to take stolen skins, clothes, etc. from one grid to the other.

In reality there's nothing going to happen to products taken to other grids that isn't running rampant on SL's grid now anyway, I suggest we also have an option not to allow our stuff to enter the SL grid too

We talked about this already .

If you trust any random untrusted client that connects to the grid then it's just plain silly to distrust alternate grids/third party sims.

Prims, clothing layers, skins, animations, sounds, particles, etc are all sent to any client connecting to the grid and can be recreated at will by malicious clients back to SL or anywhere else.

There really is no "but....": the ability to copy/steal 99% of all grid content is already a reality today and it's ridiculous to send everything to untrusted viewers but be concerned about sending things to trusted grids and have additional restrictions imposed by the creator *after* the purchase. It won't stop anyone who wants to steal/copy/export, all it does is keep honest people from using what they paid for.

There would be additional problem for scripts, but there are solutions for that so it just isn't an argument to keep from sending to trusted grids by default.

Yes, well I think we will just have to agree to disagree. A rouge grid is 1000 times more harmful than any one thief. They maybe can put in the efforts to rip off a few things. But a grid can rip of tens of thousands of things, scripts included, with no effort. Push a button and it's a new library item.

Sure. I'm not against people who reside on other grids restricting their products to ther own grid. Everyone has that right, and it should be enforceable.

Scripts aren't a reason not to export anything at all. You can either find solutions or restrictions to solve that problem.

How about an actual concrete example of "a grid is more harmful"? There's no reason a copybot needs a human operator, it could be programmed to do what the sheepbot did, but instead of merely roaming the grid to collect data it could write every last prim on every last sim to disk, complete with textures, animations, etc to be recreated at will.

Please do point out how it can get "1000 times more harmful" than that because I just don't see it (scripts don't count, see 1st paragraph). And the issue is *exporting* content, not importing it. Allowing content from third party grid to come into the main LL grid (whether on LL's asset servers or hosted on third party ones) would be indeed be stupid for various reasons.

Not when it's done *after* the purchase. If you want absolute control over anything you create simply do not sell it. If you sell something you trade away absolute control over your creation for money and do not get to arbitrarily put further restrictions on it.

Would you want the want the money you cash out of SL to come with the catch that it'll be worthless under certain circumstances you can't foresee right now? I'm going to guess: no, that would be unacceptable.

Actually I meant for the safety of our creations we should not let them on any grid, SL included, just keep them in your standalone, if people want to see your creations they have to come to your sim to buy it and stay in your sim to use them. Then you can rest happily knowwing your content is secure, though, I'd probably make sure you unplugged the sim from the server and dropped it into a gunsafe buried in the basement when you're not home just in case.
I really can't see people ponying up purchase and running costs for a 40 sim grid, leasing it out to people then risking other grids banning them access by pirating everything that comes into their servers.
Sure the operator with less than 4 or 5 sims could be rogue and flagged as untrusted grid just in case, but bigger companies like IBM & Openlife, many people trust them enough to have accounts with them and create content there that could be pirated just as easily as from SL.

I stated clearly why it would be 1000 time more harmful. Tens of thousands of items versus one or two stolen.

And I'm afraid saying "scripts don't count" is one of the most retarded statements i've ever seen anyone say, ever. They do count, a lot. if you don't export your items from SL, your scripts are by far safer than if they are on some kid's grid.

In many ways I agree what what you wrote. That is what some are advocating, having your assets come from your own servers, and take LL and the other grids out of the equation. I think it's a sound concept.

I also agree, larger grids have more to lose than a single sim running on someone's PC. But trust is something that is earned, not given. Linden Lab has earned my trust, Nobody else has, yet. That doesn't mean they never will. But ultimately, the choice of who I trust to handle my Intellectual Property is up to me.

Agreed to that. Right now, scripts and animations are 2 most secured items in SL. In the future, animations might not be so secured, but scripts remain secured no matter what -- as you seen in today's websites. Simple HTML can be easily copied, even flashes and videos can be hacked. However, none but the programmer and the server's owner can copy your server-side scripts that are the core of the website. Scripts should be remained completely secured, or SL growth will be sharply dropped. It should be scripter's right to decide which grid can be trusted, the same way programmers trust their server.

That's not included security vulnerability that would occur should banking and accounting type scripts get leaked into rough grid, and get analyzed and hacked by hackers. They can hacked the script and use it to attack SLExchange and all other networked vendor systems in no time. Objects should be defaulted to SL-Grid only.

I don't see anything stupid in importing contents from other grids, provided the content creators allowed them to be imported. You can't just allow export of goods but bar a great wall from import goods from neighbor grids, the same way you can't expect RL countries to just buy your goods without your country buying some from them in exchange. It's the economic.