I wanted to take a few moments to publically reply to Linden Lab’s recent changes to content management policy. I think overall it is a step in the right direction; however one subsection of the policy leaves me with grave reservations – the suggested standards for backup utilities. To quote from the original posting on this subject:
To those developing copying tools, we urge the simultaneous development of standard industry practices that protect against intellectual property infringement. For example, consider the following standard practices for tools copying content from Second Life:
- Check that the user of the tool is the Second Life “creator” of the content;
- Do not facilitate the export of an entire Second Life inventory; and
- Preserve the Second Life “creator” name and information that the content was originally created in the Second Life virtual world.
To summarise in other words, “You may only export content you created, and only if you label them as something you created in Second Life first, with your second life avatar name; and you cannot back up your whole inventory at once – you must do so piecemeal.” – every single one of these restrictions eliminates a large swathe of legitimate users and uses. Let’s go into them in detail.
Check that the user of the tool is the Second Life “creator” of the content
You have now eliminated all the content that is explicitly marked as compatible off-grid; everything licensed under creative commons or Open Source licenses, everything in the public domain. While I concur with ‘Full Permission != Permission to Export’; there is no way right now of programmatically indicating whether you want to allow content to be exported — however there are ways of legally indicating it, such as license files, README notecards, et al.
While Full Permissions are not an ideal situation – the overlap between content allowed off-grid, and full permission freebies is significant enough that a full permission check is a acceptable compromise. I personally would say ‘Full Permission OR Creator’; as both indicate a high level of permissiveness with the content itself (and the creator should always be able to export their own content). It is worth noting that Second Inventory (the popular backup tool) has been using ‘Full Permission’ as its own metric for over a year now; with I believe mostly acceptable results (it is not used as an infringement tool – the infringement part is always done by a illegitimate tool first).
Do not facilitate the export of an entire Second Life inventory
Hello.
The only possible reasoning for this I imagine is simply to prevent competition – by allowing full inventory export; you make it easy to translate content you developed from Second Life, to the numerous third party grids. If someone high profile wants to leave for one of these, these tools definetely help streamline the process. With 50,000+ downloads of the OpenSimulator software since December – I suspect there is an alterior motive for this ’standard’ that is not related at all to helping content creators; infact I cannot see a reason at all where this helps Content Creators.
The unintentional targets of this are now people who perform inventory backups – the Second Life Inventory server is about 99.99% reliable – which means 1 in 10,000 users can expect to lose their whole inventory, and 1 in 10,000 items will mysteriously vanish over the course of a year. There are reasons why Second Inventory market themselves as a backup tool for the unreliable asset & inventory services – and it is distinctly related to deficiencies in the platform itself.
As far as I can tell, this rule makes backups harder – which hurts content creators, because legitimate backup tools are now out of the question. It’s also saying something about the supposed ‘You own your IP’ line Linden Lab has been stating for the last 7 years. If we own our IP, how can you state what we can do with it?
which brings us to…
Preserve the Second Life “creator” name and information that the content was originally created in the Second Life virtual world.
Many probably want to be able to do this optionally; but it is not a mandatory feature. Mandating this indicates that you do not have control over your IP – because Linden Lab is going to demand attribution to Second Life. We at DeepThink developed a whole bunch of content over the last 2 years for use in both Second Life and OpenSim – I dont want that attributed to our content creation account, I want that attributed to:
DeepThink Pty Ltd. <www.deepthinklabs.com> – Copyright©2008, See attached license for licensing information
and not…
Adam Zaius – Second Life
Forcing the latter is stupid, and less effective than the former. The latter does not hold any form of copyright, it does not imply any license – and it does not imply any contact information for the creator or copyright holding entity [especially if they leave SL]. The tools should include the capability to add attribution metadata, and maybe they can default to showing a Second Life name (eg ‘Adam Zaius inSL’) – but ultimately, *I* want freeform legal attribution – which carries a lot more weight in the real world, where copyright matters.
This personally reeks of an disingenous alterior motive – particularly the last bit (Created in SL) – I’m very skeptical that Linden Lab would be able to legally enforce this; Textures and other assets have no ‘creative’ input by Linden Lab. The procedural primitive modelling may have some effect, but since a process is not legally creative – I dont believe the procedural algorithms themselves contribute creatively to the final work significantly enough to give Linden Lab joint copyright — although a legal experts opinion is definetely required here.
Ultimately, I think this is a counterproductive effort.
While I think this came from a earnest and honest discussion internally at Linden Lab – I dont believe it has any real world capacity to solve any real problems. Second Life needs a permission system that is capable of indicating an export permission. It should be clearly marked ‘Allow Export’; and be tied hand-in-hand with full permissions (so you can only check ‘Allow Export’ on existing full permission content — this way people are under no pretenses)
It’s not an ideal solution to the permission model’s deficiencies – but it would be a much better start than the three listed above. Since permissions are implemented as a 32-bit bitflags on the backend, and 28 bits are currently unused, implementing this would require no significant database or architectural modifications to Linden Lab’s backend (if anything it is just a viewer modification.) – it would be a very simple modification to make.
As a administrator on the most popular alternate grid – I dont want content on the grid that doesn’t belong. Infact we do spend a great deal of time making sure that our freebie locations and newbie content is all legitimately licensed (tell us if you find something that isn’t!), and the original creator intended the content to be there; anything that simplifies that process has my wholehearted approval.
Illegitimate content is not just irritating to deal with, it is also a legal minefield – we do have a DMCA process for OSGrid, and we’ve got some pretty sophisticated ways of removing every instance of an asset off the core servers, but it is a painful and annoying process. DMCA takedowns require certain legal procedures to be followed to the letter – which makes things a liability if they are done wrong; and there are significant extra considerations for non-US residents and servers.
Speaking with four hats on – that of a Grid Admin, Software Developer, Copyright Holder and Consumer – my firm response to this proposal is ‘go back, and try again.’ – because it’s not satisfying the requirements; and won’t do squat to solve the problem of content piracy; infact it will likely have the opposite effect where legitimate tools are handcuffed, and users favour of ones of illegitimate design.
There are good solutions to this problem, and I’ve got a proposal of my own in the works (one that I have been working on for a number of weeks already) – but these ‘Standards and Practices’ are complete hogwash; and degrate creator rights by imposing restrictions on what creators can do with their own content.
If you read closely, those three items are suggestions. They’re exhorting someone else to come up with a code “Sort of like [these three things]” and also to implement/gather buy-in for it.
They’re not actually mandating any rules there at all. Just a warning that they’ll spank people if things get out of hand somehow.
Tateru Nino
5 Aug 09 at 2:19 pm
See also: http://www.massively.com/2009/08/05/a-second-life-roadmap-content-management-intellectual-property/
Tateru Nino
5 Aug 09 at 2:20 pm
Maybe an interoperability standards group needs to be formed so that a reasonable list of guidelines can be created that are acceptable to all parties.
That way platforms can be members of say the ‘Content Interoperability Organization’ which allows:
a) legal copyright attribution fields(always visible, defaulted to date created on that platform and username of that user on that platform but changeable
b) copy/mod/transfer/export flags for programmable checking (others if needed)
And any others the group decided were necessary to make it less a minefield for platform operators.
Tony
5 Aug 09 at 5:16 pm
Huh.
It’s not a “change” in Linden Lab’s “content management policy”. It’s a reiteration and clarification. Linden Lab has been saying these exact same things since I can remember, and I can remember back as far as Spring, 2006.
It is enough to prevent pirates plagiarizing creators’ work on any grid? No. Is it enough as much as a can be reasonably expected? I think so.
Linden Lab has control of Linden Lab assets and nothing else. All tools and methods employed by Linden Lab can and will only work on Linden lab grids. The simple fact of the matter is that plagiarism (sorry, I cannot ’swallow’ the “theft” word with regard to digital works) is going to happen no matter what because when someone wants to plagiarize, they will find a way to do it.
However, at least Linden Lab is making a good-faith effort to curb this as much as possible; which does two things: first, it help keep honest people honest and second is that it shows Linden Lab is serious about this stuff; within the confines of what they are able.
Ari Blackthorne
6 Aug 09 at 8:31 pm
@Tateru: I partly suspected it was more proposal than actual change, but the way it was written, and the fact that I know Linden has asked the Meerkat developers to implement those three already, seems to imply it is closer to policy than proposal.
@Ari: No, this isn’t old policy – those three standards/suggestions are very very new. Second Inventory was built using its current IP mechanism because LL wouldnt provide any clarification – ultimately, I think they did a good job.
As far as copyright infringement goes, yes – I agree I think it will continue; but I do think there are practical ways of stopping it – just many will be unconscionable to the majority of smaller content creators.
Adam Frisby
6 Aug 09 at 11:11 pm
As a content creator in both Second Life and OSgrid, I wasn’t particularly thrilled about this Content Roadmap. Their brainstorming meetings must be mired in trivia and confusion.
I suspect that tagging content with the grid on which it was created is an attempt to address intergrid licensing. But it’s a lame one, and your suggestion of an explicit export permission is an excellent one. Linden Lab’s solution requires eyeballs and manual work on behalf of grid/simulator operators. An export permission can simply be implemented in software. It also effectively nulls the debate about export checks on full permission objects versus creator owned ones.
As for the inventory thing, I didn’t get the impression that Linden Labs intends to bar mass inventory export. If they do, they’re being damn silly. What they say on the blog post is, “most of us are not the intellectual property owners of **all** [emphasis mine] content in our inventory,” meaning that exporters simply ought to check permissions in an inventory export. Why they could not just say this is beyond me; it seems blindingly obvious.
I do *like* the idea of my content having my user name preserved as the creator. Although I routinely give stuff away, the one and only thing I ever request is an attribution as the originator of the work. Very BSD/MIT license-like.
Marcus Llewellyn
7 Aug 09 at 7:10 pm
Sadly the Lab has a bit of a history of making a proposal, asking for feedback, saying very little in the face of huge Resident outcry, and then implementing the original proposal with a few small tweaks, without addressing the biggest concerns that people had (see Zindra, for instance). We can hope that in this case they’re actually a bit less wedded to this particular proposal, and open to major suggestions. Hope springs eternal.
Dale Innis
7 Aug 09 at 8:47 pm
Good write up Adam. I couldn’t agree more.
Tracy Welles
21 Aug 09 at 6:20 am