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:

1. Check that the user of the tool is the Second Life “creator” of the content;
2. Do not facilitate the export of an entire Second Life inventory; and
3. 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.