Challenge: Binding Apprentices to Keep Trade Secrets

An interesting SL problem for study by the Law Society. If we could demonstrate an effective solution to this problem, those who work in a profession in SL might be able to use the results to expand their enterprises. New people who are fast learners and understand quality would have an opportunity to work on interesting projects more quickly than would be the case if they had to build up a presence in the marketplace on their own.

Disclaimers: I work as an architect in SL. Finding a workable solution would benefit me financially, and would make my SL experience more fun. I think of SL as a platform and architecture in SL as a game. Does that mean 'it's just a game', so who cares about ethics? Obviously not; consider the way cheat hacks destroy first-rate online combat games like Counter-Strike. If something analogous happens to SL I'm gone.

Practical experience: I have experience with a would-be apprentice and with subcontractors and would-be subcontractors. Every one of the individuals was a friend at the time we discussed working together. In those cases where the professional relationship never materialized that was because creative people get lots of ideas, and want to work on their own ideas. It never affected the friendship. But I don't have time to become friends with every individual who might turn out to be a good apprentice, subcontractor or project partner.


Frank Lardner framed the issue as follows:


My initial post specified a slightly different practical problem, but they both map to the same research problem as far as I can tell. Here's a restatement:

A professional in SL should be able to take on apprentices and subcontractors in a partnership arrangement to complete large projects. By partnership I mean profit-splitting and asset-sharing rather than a hierarchical employer/employee arrangement.

The idea is:
1. to work with rather than against people's desire to be free of bosses in their second life.
2. to leverage the value of assets such as textures and standardized building sub-assemblies accumulated by an experienced professional who does not have time to do all the work on all jobs being offered.

Right now there's a huge risk for the senior partner who is most likely the one who brings in the work, and is most likely the one who has an inventory full of high quality standardized components from past projects (one reason why more jobs are on offer). If the senior partner gives access to components and textures in order to collaborate on a job, what prevents the junior partner from leaving the partnership, and walking away with these assets free of charge?

Ferren Xia and I discussed this a while back, and he had some suggestions, but they still needed a legal framework to protect the senior partner. So I continued as before, exchanging free stuff now and then with a few trusted friends. It's more like, 'look what I made' than a process of leveraging the value in those assets.

I'd like to think that in SL good behavior in this type of partnership would be enforced by the non legal means outlined in Order without Law, the first book on your reading list. However, I've seen blatant copiers continue in business despite the victim's entreaties to LL and the community. This seems to be a case where SL would benefit from having a body of laws available for study and adoption. By adoption I mean an individual chooses to be bound by a set of one or more laws from which standard contract language is derived, and a particular contract drawn up, agreed to and notarized, for example by Zarf's notary. I do not mean LL should surprise us one day by obliging us to agree to a revised TOS that makes those laws binding on all residents.

For enforcement all I can think of is the SL equivalent of posting a bond. Totally inadequate for my case. If somebody walks away with the assets I have in my inventory they can build crap with my name on it as creator.

This is fascinating to me because I've been following the Master+Appprentice thing in SL for awhile now.

One of the root problems is that SL shows "Creator" and "Owner", but does NOT display chains of who modified an object. I understand this could get rather complicated (and lengthy), but it's nice to know who got their hands on something, not to mention the historical lineage of one variant of an item vs. another.

Kind of like a personal family tree for an object.

A related thing is that great textures, which are helpful with architecture, do not show have the Creator's (or in many cases, the uploader's) name in view if you apply them to a work of your own choosing. There isn't an easier way to say, "Well, I made these prims, but so-and-so provided the textures" and verify it.

I would hate if an Apprentice went to the "dark side" (to use a Star Wars analogy) and ran off with lots of assets as you describe.

Good points, Torley. Apparently it's a nightmare for legitimate retailers who supply textures. They have a big store to maintain -- lots of tier -- but they have to sell their textures with full perms so people can use them in products. Surprise -- the textures get stolen, show up for sale in the thief's store, and LL says they can't do anything about it.

Textures are incredibly time consuming to make, so they should have a property field for creator name, just like prims. I guess the grey area is when people download some image from the net, and convert it into a texture, although apparently that can take a lot of work too. I make textures from scratch to enhance specific structures whenever a photorealistic texture would overwhelm subtle detail such as stepped curves framing an entrance.

Your idea of a personal family tree for an object is like what antique dealers call the provenance of an object. The origin and history are part of the story, and contribute to the value of the item. It would be fun to give full perms on an object to someone who is just plain good so they could modify the object as they choose, in their own style, and resell a limited number of them or just a single copy as an antique in the making.

If the antique-making game could supply enough high end items to stock a jointly owned retail enterprise we'd be able to start a new thread on this forum all about the interesting problem of retail partnerships in SL. : )

In his "Virtual Worlds as Comparative Law" article (see the Law Society recommended reading list for the citation and link), James Grimmelmann addresses the problem of virtual crime and punishment and the emerging role of guilds.

He recommended Hunter and Lastowska's "Virtual Crimes" piece for the 2003 State of Play symposium at NY Law School (http://www.nyls.edu/pdfs/lastowka.pdf), which he says has "not only defined the the field of substantive virtual criminal law, but has also largely sewn up the doctrinal outlines." Grimmelman, op cit. at 167 I'm about to read that, but Jim's recommendations are usually worth following up.

Jim himself acknowledges that in consumer oriented games, even the threat of expelling players is "largely ineffectual," but that "the wider the range of responses available to players, the more effective community self-regulation will be." Id. at 170. He poses a theory that may be useful to the present Challenge, that understanding the nature of guilds is the key to understanding community and enforcement of community norms in virtual worlds. "I suspect," he wrote, "that we are witnessing the bottom-up emergence of governing institutions in games, as catalyzed by whatever code-level features the games offer for guild formation." Id. at 173.

Historical role of Guilds in a chaotic world

When addressing the questions of "What punishments are available, and what institutions decide when to use these punishments?" Id. at 174, Jim suggests that the answers lie in player guilds. For those interested in reading more, he has also published less formal musings on player guilds in postings in LawMeme, the multi-author weblog at Yale Law. (http://research.yale.edu/lawmeme)

I'm not an historian, but my recollection from the docent's talk at the London Guild Hall many years ago is that the medieval merchant and artisans guilds were formed by the leading practitioners as a way of establishing and enforcing common standards in the absence of representative government. Guilds could even combine and grow into the merchant city-states of medieval Europe.

Those accepted in the guild could mark their products as such, and such guild marks came to be a sign of quality. Guild members agreed to fix prices and divide markets and to maintain minimum standards for the acceptance and training of apprentices. In this way, they combined their purchasing, marketing and pricing power in order to counterbalance the whims of the sovereign and the chaos of the time. In so doing, they stabilized and governed markets, protected members' trade secrets and markets and made themselves financially and politically powerful.

Being excluded from or cast out of the guild meant being cut off from the significant financial and political power it generated. Being accepted and kept on as an apprentice meant years of poor wages but the prospect of someday joining the guild as a Master. Being rejected, disgraced, discharged and/or blackballed as an apprentice meant that one was condemned to a life of common labor, theft or starvation. In either case, these were significant incentives to follow the guild rules and maintain good relationships with guild members and leaders.

In Second Life, LL has provided some imperfect tools for the formation and operation of guilds, through the Group tools. I suspect that there may be an imperfect, partial solution to this Challenge in the creative use of groups as guilds.

What if?

What if, for example, there was a Guild of Merchants, Builders and Artists who agreed to certain professional standards, including the mutual respect of each other's rights in authorship of original works, and the regulation and certification of Apprentices? Entry to the Guild would be difficult and ejection for cause would be a serious financial and political blow. How much could such a Guild do to address the Challenge before us in this thread?

Agreements crafted with words will bind actions when sealed with the heart.

Nothing new under the sun.