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.).