Usual disclaimer: This is a personal opinion piece, it represents my views alone and may not represent that of any colleagues. It’s fairly long and rambling too.

No, I’m not going to be discussing DRM / Copy protection’s feasibility again - I’ve done that enough lately, and really there’s not a whole lot new to say on the matter - if you can put it in a contract, you can then enforce it. I’ve spelled that one out before.

This post is to explore some options for some permissions that can realistically survive other people hosting regions for themselves, and stand a reasonable chance of being respected. The inspiration to this post being a musing on the validity of ‘no-mod’ and ‘no-copy’, in both cases these permissions tend to stick in the way of what a consumer wants to do with a piece of content, and in both cases the permissions are fairly arbitrary.

I’m looking a lot at the past for ideas here - the web itself actually has some very strong analogues to where virtual worlds are heading, and surprisingly enough these kinds of permission games have been played out before there.

As with everything there is a bit of a balance here - evading the permissions model is always going to be fairly trivial for someone with a few skills, video game piracy still occurs - even when the copy protection schemes get so onerous that there have been claims it’s physically damaged hardware. If one makes the permissions too tight, it’s going to dissuade legitimate consumers, and inspire others to break it.

Thou shalt not modify.

Let’s start with no-mod, and first examine why creators use this permission. There are two big reasons that seem to spring up when discussing this permission with content creators. First - any object with mod permissions can be cloned via scripts (or manual copy-by-numbers), and Second - the creators have a desire to develop a brand image around their products being recognizable, or have a secondary market for product modifications.

The first reason is more of a problem for “no-copy” - I’m going to leave that for when I touch on no-copy, since it’s fundamentally that trait they want, not denying consumer customization rights. The second is potentially more understandable - consider the example of a major motion picture company offering free content - for their intents they want it to stay the same, keep logos and trademarks, etc.

So what can you replace this with? Well first the potential exists for marking whether something is original or not - that much can be done with a form of ‘object hashing’ (or fingerprinting), determining whether something is identical to as it was shipped is actually a lot easier than determining if something is a derivative of it.

This means that potentially if you ‘travel’ with the modified component, recipient servers can say “Hey, this looks unauthorized. I’m not letting you bring that in here”. These checks being easy and hopefully efficient enough to do.

When on a users own server in their own environment however this one is effectively unenforceable - trying to prevent users modifying content on their own servers is akin to trying to prevent someone from modifying an image that’s stored on your local machine.

Sure modifying it might be more difficult than the original creation (without layered source files, etc), but all the pieces are there and certainly a degree of blunt force can be applied.

On the inverse however - I’d like to suggest that perhaps this isn’t something you actually want to do 90% of the time. Returning to my analogues - let’s assume you are producing landscaping objects, something to decorate a scene with. The closest equivalent is that of the website template or stock imagery. While the composition is an important factor in the development of the scene, most people are going to want to customize it slightly - the best users are going to be the ones who do major customizations and bring their own flair into the design. It’s possible to then point to these customized versions in your own marketing (Hey you can do this!).

So expressing this in permissions, we have a few new options potentially for legitimizing user behavior while at the same time marking what the creator will/will not allow.

Please note - by suggesting these I am not saying anything different to what I have before. Permissions are at their heart completely unenforceable without legally binding contracts dictating their use, in which case those contracts are enforceable, not the permissions.

• Plain No Modifications Allowed - This one is pretty broad, but it’s still somewhat valid in it’s construction. Enforcement requires some legal magic - but technical enforcement alone is a toothless tiger.
• No Transmit Modify - Consider this the situation above where you can customize it on your own space legitimately. The permission is you cant transmit it to other servers or users in a modified state.
• Attribution Required - Modified objects must contain an original creator tag that can be examined by visitors and observers. Any attribution built into the objects themselves should not be removed.
• Modification Limited To - A list of attributes on the object which can be modified (such as say color, size/dimensions, etc) but leaves the rest of it marked as no-mod.

Thou shalt not copy.

This one is a little tougher to enforce, and I’ve gone into great detail about copy protection before. The heart of this permission is to make sure that content is licensed for a single usage at a time - traditionally there is two types of enforcement on this in Second Life: “no-copy+trans”, being there is a singular copy of this item which can be transfered to another user and “copy+no-trans” the inverse, you are allowed unlimited copies, but not allowed to transmit them to other users - in both cases the goal being that only one user can use the content at a time, and if more want it they need to pay for it.

It’s possible here to think of some new permissions which actually fit these roles better - consider the idea of a license. You have a license to use piece of content X. This license can be transfered to another user, however you then lose the ability to use “X” until you acquire another license.

No-copy doesn’t have many analogues with the web itself, the major reason being that on digital computers it’s actually impossible to “move” something. “Moving” is actually “make a copy, then delete one”, enforcing singular copies of a license is very difficult.

The closest we can find is content protection used on Video, Audio and similar - be it through iTunes or somewhere else. In this case, the analogue isn’t very good since in those cases you are explicitly denied from transferring the content to another user. Full stop, end of discussion.

Perhaps a better analogue comes from cryptographic keys - companies such as VeriSign maintain something called a “Key Revocation List” which is the list of keys that they have removed from active service - while those keys still work, if someone does a look on the KRL for it they will say “Hey wait a moment, that’s not valid.”

Licenses then become something that is authorized through a monolithic provider (either run or contracted by the original copyright holder to handle the licenses). If you wish to transfer a piece of content, you let the provider know you are transferring it to X. The provider revokes your license and grants a new one to the new holder - licenses can be checked before content is transmitted to a new server, and the server can decide whether to accept it or not based on the results of the license server’s check. (Of course the server might just ignore those results too.)

It is also possible to consider some alternate “no copy” bits here too - such as allowing the content to be licensed on a “per-server” rather than “per-user” basis. Certainly commercial content is likely to be licensed in such a manner since it handles ‘group usage’ better.

Potential permissions?

• Singular Usage Only - Only a single copy of the item may exist. To enforce this serial numbers will be required on the item (This is #17). This is equivalent to the “no-copy+trans” permission in SL today, of course there is the concern about content being deleted accidentally, etc, so mechanisms need to exist to replace lost content.
• Singular User Only - This content is licensed to a single specific named user. No other users may use this license, however this use may make copies for their personal use.
• Singular Server Only - This content is licensed to server the server located at W.X.Y.Z, or addresses in the range W.X.Y.Z/24. In English - a single server or group of servers only. Transferring out of this range is explicitly not allowed. Within this range unlimited copies may be allowed.

Thou shalt not transfer.

The last permission is the concept of transferring your license to other users. Secondary resale markets, etc. Certainly a number of creators embrace the resale model and provide bulk packs of content for resellers.

This is pretty simple and I’ve described it above. The permission is pretty simple too - and potentially you could enforce more complex licenses (such as say a viral license) through this mechanism.

The permissions here?

• Transfer not allowed - License transfer is expressly forbidden.
• Unmodified Transfer Allowed - License transfer forbidden if content is modified
• Modified Transfer Allowed - License transfer only allowed if the content is sufficiently modified (the “stock photos” license)
• Transfer allowed only under these terms - You cannot modify the permissions if you wish to transfer his item.

On the inability to express every scenario with permissions

One of the problems with the above is that you simply cannot express every possible legal license with a few check boxes. While it does make it easy to generate a license from these (in the way that Creative Commons does with 3 check boxes), in these cases it would be nice to be able to provide a custom string that can let you define custom permissions and actions and have it interpreted on the server.

At risk of seeing everything a nail (if all one has is a hammer) - a highly limited interpreted programming language may actually be a more flexible solution here. Especially if the language is close enough to English that it’s understandable to the casual observer.

Consider something akin to the following paragraph

COPY:
   IF USER HAS LICENSE AND
      COUNT OF OBJECT IN REGION IS LESS THAN TEN AND
      TODAY IS MONDAY
   THEN
      ALLOW
   ELSE
      DENY

MODIFY:
   DENY

TRANSFER:
   IF OBJECT IS MODIFIED
   THEN
      DENY
   ELSE
      ALLOW

While slightly less than perfect English - it’s relatively understandable. Copying of the object is allowed on Monday and only if you have less than ten copies of the object in this region. Modification of the object is always denied, and transfer is limited only to the original unmodified object.

In this manner, a complex license such as the GPL could have a programatically interpreted helper to assist in license enforcement (although the legal bindings behind the GPL are the real teeth). Such a license would look very simple: “COPY: ALLOW, MODIFY: ALLOW, TRANSFER: ONLY UNDER THESE TERMS: ALLOW.”

Server side Enforcement

Servers ultimately have the final abitration on whether to enforce these or not. If Joes server decides not to use these permissions, well there’s not much you can do if you dont have a contract with Joe forcing him to. (Of course if he gets your content unlicensed - then that’s copyright infringement.)

It should be noted that it should be possible to design a server that will also expressely refuse content marked under certain permissions. (That is it will not rez), for instance if the server is unable to prevent someone from modifying something, then the server may say “Well, I’m not going to touch anything that could get me in legal trouble - public domain content is the only type accepted here.”

There’s actually a number of reasons why people would want to be able to mark those kinds of permissions - the legal angle is definitely one, ideological is another - a group may want to only allow Public Domain or F/OSS content. Another group might want to avoid the problems with viral licenses and simply deny access to virally licensed content, ultimately the flexibility to decide should be in place.

At the heart with this issue - flexibility is king. Permissions managers, etc should be designed under the implication that they need to support a wide variety of models - and ultimately it will be the market and users that decide which models succeed and which do not, there is probably going to be a lot of ideas surfacing over the next 12 months on how to handle this. This is merely one of them.

So, in my previous few posts on this topic - I have somewhat neglected covering the practical alternatives. Things that can be made to work, and can be difficult if not impossible to break. I’ve made some mentions before on things that can be done, but I’m going to elaborate on them here.

The Good, the Bad, and the Ugly.

To begin with, we’re going to need to make a divide between ‘good’ and ‘bad’ consumers - good consumers are going to be defined as your standard consumers - the people who like to purchase legitimate content from the legitimate sellers - and like to know that they have bought legitimate content.

The second group are the group who dont really mind if they purchase pirated content (or get it for free), this group is somewhat of a lost cause. They dont tend to buy content today, and they probably wont change that habit in the future.

What you want to target is not minimising the size of the second group (all that will do is waste time and is unlikely to get you any kind of extra revenue), but preventing as many of the first group from slipping into the second group (intentionally or unintentionally)

Signing content

Just like a signed copy of a book is worth more than the plain hardcover, it’s possible to sign a purchase with a “To <buyer>, I <content creator here> can affirm this is a legitimate copy that was sold to you.”, there’s a few ways of doing this, number one:

Verifying purchases via a server

Have a registration server - anyone can see the signature of your item and confirm it against the server to see if the person who has it legitimately bought it. This does have the downside that you need to maintain your server ad-infinium if you want people to be able to verify your content.

Verifying purchases via cryptography

This is a niftier solution, and should work for all time as long as people have a copy of something called your “public key”. This means that when you sell the item to someone, you add a digital signature to the purchase with “XYZ bought this from me.” and then sign that message with something called your “private key”. As long as your public key is public - anyone can use it to verify it was you who really signed it.

Pros of Signing Content

• People can verify that a purchase they made came from the original creator legitimately.
• Other people can verify it too - lowering the social value of possessing fakes.
• Helps build up a brand

Cons of Signing Content

• Relies on people recognising content to be able to say it was a fake of designer X.
• You need to probably rely on a mix of both cryptographic signatures and verification services which will likely involve a cost - for a identity-verified cryptographic keypair (such as the ones Verisign provide), and the cost of hosting the service.

Fingerprinting (”Watermarking”)

It’s possible to take a digital asset, and produce a fingerprint of it - fingerprints, like their physical counterpart are very good signatures of someone, but they arent someone themselves. In digital terms this means producing a smaller version of the asset that is unique to it, and registering it so that if any “clone” shows up, it can be said to be derived from the original asset.

Services exist already for print media which register these fingerprints so that if they are ever used elsewhere, someone can verify who originally made the asset.

Pros of fingerprints

• You can verify a fingerprint with a third party to see the original creator of the item.
• Help when filing copyright infringement notices because you have the registration to act as a “I did this first”.

Cons of fingerprints

• Fingerprints cannot tell if something is or is not legitimate alone.
• Fingerprints can be “smudged” by tampering with the asset, the more “smudge-resistant” you make it, the higher chance false positives can occur.

Make it as easy to buy legitimate content, reward those who do.

This one is more of a business opportunity for some individual or group - but make it possible to buy your content on an amazon/iTunes equivilent which is quick and easy to purchase from, and guaruntees legitimate content.

If your content is a pain to purchase, the chances of someone getting frustrated and either nor purchasing, or getting via less-than-legitimate means increases. Reward the consumers who do purchase legitimate content with updates and other services that people getting the false one wont - as a side bonus this will instill some brand loyalty and likely get them buying more content from you in future.

None of these ideas are mutually exclusive - they work best together.

Fingerprinting is complemented nicely when you have signatures attached - in doing so, you can combine them to say “This is not a legitimate item, the original was created by XYZ who’s signature is missing”. By doing so, you can place social pressure on people to purchase the real thing.

While there will always be a group (mentioned above) who dont care - the majority (the good consumer group) will, and will likely try purchase legitimate whenever possible. If merchants present their digital signatures and a third-party verification as part of the purchase process, then it becomes signficiantly more difficult to buy a fake unintentionally.

One last thing

This list is not a total list - it’s what I thought of in five minutes. There’s plenty of other ideas which can be made to work, a lot of it requires third party verification from reputable services, but thankfully neither of these is a new thing. Digimarc provide watermark/fingerprinting services with registration already today for print/web media, and Verisign provide the cryptographic keys nessecary for signing content. (The algorithms for which are very well documented already having been invented at least thirty years ago)

I had a very interesting discussion with David Levine (SL: Zha Ewry) last night at the Metaverse Meetup, several luminaries were present, including Prokofy Neva, Tish Shute, and others. We had a varied discussion ranging from the possible future of Virtual Worlds to an informative discussion on the feasibility of copy protection in open standards and worlds.

Reuters has some interesting coverage over here, however I do feel the need to make some corrections on a few points made. While Eric has got lot of interesting points covered, some of them are a bit more nuanced than first appear and I’d like to cover a few of them.

In OpenSim, by default, no copy protection will exist at all. “You cannot know what a foreign piece of software will do with a piece of digital content once it receives it,” Levine said. To insert a digital rights management tool into OpenSim is to invite criminal hackers to find ways to circumvent it and undermine the credibility of the software, he argued.

This isn’t quite true - at least some of it anyway. While he’s spot on with David’s comment that you cant tell what a foreign system will do with a piece of data. OpenSim does support permissions by default - the nuance here is that permissions do not equal copy protection. Copy protection (also known as DRM) I’ve covered in more detail previously.

By default OpenSim - right now, supports your standard SL-flavoured permissions as the default permission module, it’s there today - yes you can swap one permission module with one that doesnt respect those, and yes you could remove it entirely.

Unfortunately as I’ve stated before, there’s no rule of computer science that stops someone from modifying something. Good or bad it is always possible, even if you need to go down to the level where you have a soldering iron installing a “mod chip”. With open source software this is admittedly easier - but any professionally schooled programmer will have all the grounding needed to defeat a copy protection system.

This is why both myself and David Levine believe that the solution is to engineer something that involves assisting and speeding up legal systems. Modern societies decide to respect copyright laws, and therefor they built institutions such as courts to handle disputes, however Prokofy does raise the point that lawyers tend to be expensive, and if the only way to sell content is to have a professional lawyer, then we’re back to old media conglomerates.

As I have stated before, I’m not entirely sure this will be the case, there’s a number of reasons for that, first - something being broken is somewhat black and white - if there is any way to get content under terms not licensed to you, then you can do it. It doesnt really matter that suddenly there is an additional method for doing so, because it was already possible.

The presence of the Open Grid Protocols allows one more potential avenue of attack, but to a malicious individual, this is more difficult than just grabbing the asset from the local cache, or using a tool such as GL Intercept, because it requires connecting in additional servers and dealing with a lot more than you absolutely have to.

Returning to my point - I think we will find that actually people want to be legitimate, purchase content from legitimate providers - and hosting companies (who are actually powering the systems running the World) will have big financial incentives to obey the law and not have copyright infringing content on their systems (since it makes them liable, and corporate lawyers really don’t like that.)

The solutions I’ve mentioned before still hold, first - you can keep on keeping on, in all probability sales will increase rather than decrease because you will be dealing with a much much wider audience. Second - hosting providers will want to be allowed to receive content from top creators, and that means signing contracts which indicate they will enforce permission models wanted by creators (and moderated by consumer demands).

I think for us, the developers the key is to make it possible for people to say “Well, I want my content handled in these five ways.” and be able to host a world that interoperates obeying those laws. Likewise we need to make the inverse easy too so that people who want to share content themselves can, and do so easily. This part comes down to tools - which is in the domain of the technical, however if someone violates that contract, then that’s the moment that social systems need to be employed.

Social solutions do not necessarily mean legal systems - it’s possible that it’s as simple as “Well, you violated our contract, therefor we’re never sharing any more content with you”. Legal contracts will likely be the mainstay at the higher levels (as they always are), but there is nothing stopping the establishment of guilds or other groups which represent groups of content creators to enforce en-masse.

Certainly commercial pressures will cause people doing hosting services to enforce these, because if they do not, their customers will be denied access to new content which will hurt business.

It’s also possible for people to consider alternative models of distribution, including the possibility of say subscriptions to content providers, for instance paying a regular fee to be allowed access to the content creators library of content (done either per user, or per region, I can see plenty of use for this).

For those of you interested in hearing more, and exactly what myself and David discussed, a video of the presentation has gone online - you can hear our exact words and all the nuances therein (and unfortunately with a topic this complex, there’s a lot.).