we’re very interested in your tool (read in your blog: http://www.adamfrisby.com/blog/2009/06/the-impersistence-of-memory/), we’re a company and we’re planing to move our sim (FieraSL) on opensim, can we help you with testing procedure?
The whole project has been designed by three builders of ours (we have their accounts) and 99% of objects has been made by us. Let us know please.
Thanks in advance

thanks for your kind and fast reply, we’re very interested in this tool; can we help you with testing procedure?
We have a SIM in SL (FieraSL) that should be moved in opensim, the project has been designed by three builders of us (we have their accounts) and 99% of objects has been made by us.
Thanks in advance

I still need to do a lot of testing with the permissions side of the tool, so right now I am running it manually for people on a case-by-case basis – email me if that interests you. (adam@deepthink.com.au)

Great! My compliments to you Adam, it is very interesting!
We’re a company and we’re planing to place our islands on opensim, when do you think this tool will be available?

At that point, it’s where we are today with Second Life – there are countless ways to infringe content in Second Life. Copybot and glIntercept are just two (of many); the key that allows Second Life commerce to succeed is that they are specialised tools that the majority of customers are not interested in.

Going above the ‘needs specialised tool’ has seriously diminishing returns – it leads to erosion of consumer rights (see service-locked DRM on music for a good example); and it overall does not work. (see my post last year on the topic: http://www.adamfrisby.com/blog/2008/07/virtual-worlds-why-drm-cannot-protect-you-for-long/ )

The larger concerns in Second Life, et al – is the principle of commercial copyright infringement, while we can assume a fixed percentage of the population is fine with pirating content; the other 95% can be tricked into purchasing illegitimate content unknowingly. I personally feel there should be ways of pursuing those people for commercial copyright infringement to put greater dissuasion on the practice. (this forms into a larger topic which I want to write a post on later)

You can make a basic effort to reduce infringement by the average user – by say, not encouraging infringement in the basic tools and requiring more specialised utilities to proceed; but as I’ve mentioned repeatably before – trying to fight those specialised utilities is futile; the fortunes have been spent on things such as DeCSS, BD+, and every single one has been cracked quickly and without remorse.

Which leads me onto another topic – the importance that there is also truth in advertising – there’s a lot of OpenSim grids out there who claim to have ‘Copybot protections’ – but do not advertise how easily they are defeated. (and I will quickly edit in here – this isnt a personal attack on your operations, since I do know you do this; but rather to comment and say that it should be part of a wider broader solution.)

A number of grids do things such as block LLSD logins, or redirect clients to try block ‘copybot’ logins; without realising how easy it is to bypass those restrictions. There are other techniques being employed too; but while they may work in the short term while there is zero demand for clients adapted to that grid, if the grid ever got popular; it would be a simple case of adjusting the login methods to be indistinguishable from the mainline clients.

Adjustments which are made easier by the GPL license on the main client — making it impossible to distinguish between a legitimate and fraudulent client, because you can always request the source. [I'll add onto that - you can do it without the source, but it does require a more specialised programmer to dissasemble or reverse engineer your methods]

Not advertising the ease of bypassing accurately burns the operator/creator relationship in the long term – because they cannot trust what you say to be the fact. This is one of the reasons I prefer OpenSim developer communications to be leaning towards the ‘you can do anything’ angle; because it means that when something goes wrong – no-one is caught unaware of the possibility.

To pretend there are magic bullets, or even effective countermeasures is disingenous; and while it may soothe the souls of creators in the short term – it is equivilent to sitting on a powderkeg when someone releases the first adapted tool.

* Content protection is impossible
* Content Providers are a fool to think they can make a living out of making content.
* All content should be free and open source like the OpenSim software.

The reality is we need to have a system that allows the flexibility of a BuilderBot program with the security of say a Flash document. Sure, the very savvy coders and web dev folks of the world can hack at Flash assets, but on the whole its not profitable to do so and time consuming. And its simply not generally known how to by the casual user. BuilderBot and other such programs are so simplistic as to make it easy for a very younger child to execute.

What is needed is something that recognizes the person’s rights who made that content has a say in how it can be reused to a certain extent, yet allows their clients the freedom to use those same assets with reasonable mobility. Here’s why, seeing some folks just don’t understand the echo effect mass ripping of content can bring to bare.

* Corporations who purchase work should be able to move their content around, but not resell/give away to other persons or grids. They also DEMAND IP protection from random spoofing and competition copying their ideas and marketing materials. That’s why they spend millions every year on original content to artist like the content providers in SL.

*As much as we all hate the legal wrangling of business, its not going away and without reasonable security of these assets its a hard sell to their legal departments to give the green light. Without their approve a spending voucher just is not forthcoming.

* It should not be so easy for a 8 year old blooming coder to pick up the code for such a tool and go around copied assets from private and corporate entities at will and without any means to detect and prevent.

* The individual content creator should have a right to review any grid that their content is able to go into and give an approval for that grid and the specific region even that its going into – a sorta permission to rez on a certain grid or region or not.
This is very doable and if you’d like to hear how, just drop me a line at tkinneyjohnson@gmail.com.

There are three ways to accomplish this, that if done in unison would make for not only happier content providers, but a far more reputable OpenSim grid community. Without these reasonable restraints there is no incentive to produce high grade game quality content at low affordable pricing. Artist will have to up their prices to compensate for the loss of revenue that frankly they do deserve. Making great content is NOT a simple thing and takes real talent and expertise. In Summary, yes its impossible to get 100% protection. What we strive for is to replicate the success of real world product security for content providers. Retail outlets regularly sustain a 10-20% theft rate. How they manage that is by making it higher risk and more tedious work to complete the act of theft. That’s all most content providers are asking for

1.) Require real world info in exchange for the purchase of such a program. This can easily be done without being intrusive by requiring it to be purchase with a VERIFIED PayPal account.

2.) Make the price high enough that the average casual user will pass, but low enough that a serious developer or corp entity can afford. This is usually in the $150-$500. After all, why should such a powerful tool cost less than the hard drive it would be stored on? We see that hardware as a very affordable and necessary expense when backing up our content, yes? Is this really any different in value?

3.) Once this tool is able to grab scripts and animations and nested content, I think we’ll start seeing the coders of our industry get a bit more concerned over content protection, because up till now there work was immune from theft. In that vein maybe what needs to be added to these programs is a reporting tool that detects the creators and sends out notices of who is running the software and what they’ve grabbed. This would require a centralized DB of content providers to check for, but I’m sure most designers would have no problems signing up for that in exchange for more security on their assets. And when you couple this with the verification of real world ID through the purchase using PayPal I think anyone intent on ripping content, either for person or profit, would have second thoughts. It sets a precedence for accountability.

And that’s what this is really about – tugging a bit on our conscious. The ethical part of our humanity knows its wrong to steal stuff we have no rights to, but where there are no checks and balances to make us THINK before we ACT, then that’s where we get in trouble as individuals and as a society. Its really all about respect …. of other’s livelihood in many cases, AND OUR OWN SELF-RESPECT.

I have to ask, though: are they orbital *mind control* lasers?

Linking to GPL libraries is okay, but if any of the code is inside your binary, and not dynamically linked, then that becomes a GPL violation.