Why should LL place flags regarding actions taken on another grid where LL has exactly zero jurisdiction? Given that LL would have exactly zero jurisdiction, how would violations of these flags be enforced? Hell, how would these flags even be implemented? The whole point of OpenSim is that it's going to be running on separate grids not controlled by Linden Labs. This is one of the (very many) problems that this will entail.

That being said, my concern is not with content leaving SL for other grids, but content being brought from other grids into SL...or perhaps content leaving SL, being illegally modified on other grids, and then being returned to SL. Who knows whether someone will be able to take non-full-perms content over to another grid, and what if that other grid allows users to see the uncompiled script code? That would pretty much destroy SL scripting, and quite possibly cripple the economy.

But with this particular issue, I think that it goes without saying that all content created on the AGNI grid is meant for use on the AGNI/ADITI grids. Instead of adding new flags, LL needs to look at how to prevent its content from being uploaded to another grid. In those stories, by the way, you'll notice that none of their assets went with them, they wound up ruthed. I do agree that we have to address these issues, but I think that first we LL to come up with a policy regarding intergrid asset transfers before we start discussing permissions flags that they probably can't enforce.

However on a wider basis, I think the need to talk about licensing is now. Not only for content in SL, but also content made in the Opengrids. This issue works both ways > content license on copyrighted items is important, as well as licensing terms for items that are to be handled as open source. (of which there are many licenses out there, all different)

"Saijanai, I fail to see the unseemly haste in hammering out these permissions in this way. If the default is "trust no one except the original Linden grid" then leave it at that until there is time to educate people on the issues.

Otherwise, it turns into an All-Union subbotnik where many people are brow-beaten into opening up their content "for the good of the Metaverse" and if they don't, seen as stingy, backward, FUDded, etc.

Furthermore, I'm sure I'm not the only one, as a mere lay person looking at this, that wonders what "a grid" is. The Lindens constantly talk about "the Grid" with a holy gleam in their eye as if it were "everywhere our software plays...and everwhere something connects to our software". By that definition, the entire real world is "America" — but of course, other countries see it quite differently!

You also have no definition for what "trusted" means. Trusted...by whom? Who decides? To do what?" etc.

I'm utterly AGHAST that there is even a "Linden plan" to "allow copy of full perms items into the wild," and that one would have to find this out by dredging through a JIRA.

The idea that "most" content creators "wouldn't think anything of it" is a grave misreading. People who give out freebies as loss leaders to their stores in Second Life aren't also making them available to the back of the beyond where no one will ever come to their store. People who wished to help an identifiable community that they could see and follow and help gave freebies specifically for that setting, not for the Metaverse at large to suck into its maw and resell elsewhere. There is a huge amount of outrage by especially oldbies when their freebies are resold because they have "transfer" on their permissions. (I've always advocated that they should shut up, and allow newbies to resell content placed on transfer to help them start in the economy – if they really cared about newbies, that's what they would do, instead of browbeating and trying to get social opprobrium to work instead of simply checking off "no transfer". They have that option; they should do it. But what if they haven't grasped the full ramifications of all this, that checking off "transfer" means "go anywhere"?

As Ann Otoole has pointed out on my blog discussion, no the TOS most certainly does not allow for anywhere and anynow with IP. It specifically states that the context is Second Life and Linden Lab's servers. Indeed, they should – and may legally be enforced to – not share content outside their grid without an express durable protected regime of permissions.

I don't see IBM as part of Second Life. Is the snake that swallows the frog part of the frog? No, the frog is part of the snake now.

People begin spouting Creative Commons rhetoric in discussions like this, and invoke its complexities (that have sent Wikipedia editors screaming, even). But as I've constantly pointed out, mod/copy/transfer – or NOT! – is dead simple, and you don't need to get fancy.

People invoke the CC license to use content as long as it is referenced as if this is some big progress in the realm of intellectual property. It isn't. It leads to some compliance; it's also a signal to some to ignore compliance as there are unlikely to be consequences. I've never seen any credible study that shows how CC is really used, once you scrape away all the ideological rhetoric surrounding it. By and large, CC is a scheme cooked up by copyleftists to make it look like they "care" about licensing, making sort of bogus licenses that do not put any actual money in any creator's pockets like "copy free but credit me".

I'd hate for that same bogus spirit to permeate the SL permissions issue going forward. After all, you cannot see who made a skin inside your inventory such as to be able to "credit" that person in some way even if they did give it away with the understanding they'd be referenced or credited. SL isn't a web page; it's a world.

Scripters always wake up and realize the danger to the economy when it's their own skin, and seem to perceive the threat to the economy only in the threat to the integrity of scripts. But we all know – or should care – that the danger is inherent in content-creation as well, such as skins, textures, builds – and frankly in land, too.

Re: "I think that first we LL to come up with a policy regarding intergrid asset transfers before we start discussing permissions flags that they probably can't enforce.

Yes, absolutely, this is what is needed, and that's what's missing, and that's why some of us are so exasperated with the Lab on this issue – they keep failing to make a policy, and to create a clear, comprehensible roadmap to their bright future that explains their plan for what they'll do with our stuff.

I'm sorry, but Zero Linden saying in an office hour attended only by insider baseball tekkies saying, when pressed, that he is interested in keeping SL permissions, just doesn't cut it.

Why? Because when I go here: http://wiki.secondlife.com/wiki/SLGOGP_Draft_1
and as a non-technical person, slog through it, I don't see that permissions are being maintained. This could well be ignorance on my part, but, hey, this is the sort of thing you need to spell out in big letters in words of one syllable unless you want to address an angry mob, of which I am only the first harbinger.

Instead, what I see are things that sound like the agents' inventory is simply accessed – and that's all there is to it. Accessed and – copied? Kept on other servers elsewhere? Any permissions on that stuff? And this "signing the TOS" indicated – does that include "don't steal our stuff"? None of this is fleshed out. And please don't tell me "oh, but it's a draft, it's a wiki, anybody can edit it." Because you can see the mind of the framers here, and the mind of the framers is not set to a robust default called "save our stuff".

The bottom line remains, if you give someone a copy of some data, there is no way to control what they do with it with technical means. Any attempt to do so is just window dressing. That goes for cross-grid scripts as much as it goes for textures today.

Transfer of inventory between grids should allways be explicitely allowed and explicitely requested and never automatic. One way to do that could be to add a perms flag that defaults to "no inter-grid transfer" and has to be explicitely set by the creator - and on grid change, those elements will not be tranferred to the new grid.

Additionally - but I guess this is so obvious that it will be a default in the implementation - grid changes should be explicitely stated to the client and only be done when the client gets the explicit acknowledgement of the user ("you want to go to grid XXXX run by YYYY? [yes] [no]")

Actually limiting what is transferred to the new grid is a good idea anyway, because if people dump their 30K inventory on the new grid on arrival, that arrival might take a few hours to complete ... (and even on recurring visits there would have to be some sync to be done that adds new or updated stuff and removes deleted stuff).

Barney, I hadn't thought of the issue you just mentioned – your own built objects or things you made just for your own use, not thinking of their permissions as they only come out of your inventory.

Basically, with Zero Linden's design document described here http://wiki.secondlife.com/wiki/SLGOGP_Draft_1
it looks to me that the default thinking is "let's always access all the folders in inventory because we can, and that's a great goal for growing the Metaverse" rather than "let's figure out how to protect permissions because that has been at the heart of our economic success." If I'm wrong, and in fact buried within that technical document there is some kind of robust respect for permissions, please point me to it.

And the thinking you hear in these discussions is always like Tegg's, even if Zha Ewry is around to nod sagely and say "we want to respect creators' intent". They hack away at the concept of permissions by making up absurdities, like "OMG your will be naked or bald" – appealing deeply to male or female vanity about being bald and blaming hair creators for shaming people and making them bald and not being "good sports" instead of thinking for a normal way to honour their hard work and desire to sell their creations.

Obviously all those silly avatars in the library made by Lindens and Nylon and such will port fine, so just put one of them on if you are hysterical about being bald.

Who says we want a seamless 3D world of private grids? We don't, especially if it can't ensure the integrity of the economy and monetary system and IP and everything else. This is a stated goal of extremists in the AWG, not the general public, and not specifically the creator class of SL. AWG has always been an accident going somewhere to happen claiming that it is an accident that occurred and that we "must" react to.

As far as I understand, it's NOT a trivial thing (and probably not possible) for the OpenSim folks to simply reach over into SL and grab assets to use them in an OpenSim. Maybe they can convince SL to let them grab a few textures, but not things like arbitrary shapes, scripts, gestures, etc... right? As Strife points out, this would be a violation of the ToS on LL's part. Aren't you all jumping the gun here in a rather extreme manner?

Yes, those who are creators and have full perms on their own items, this is also an issue for. I don't want every doggone thing I created to transfer to another grid with me. I'll end up having to use an alt account to visit other grids if that ended up being the case, just to keep my work where it belongs.

For many its a very sensitive economic issue.

We have to make sure that their rush to protect their business model doesn't step on ours, which hinged on their business model. And sorry, when I pay something like $2500 US tier a month, I don't get to be told witheringly, "Oh, get another business model".

The Lindens can get another partner, another TOS, another customer base, too, if that's how they're going to roll.

In short, the principles for guiding this discussion simply MUST be:

1. Respect for content creators and their permission sets, and not harassment of them to go full-perm for the greater glory of the Metaverse, and not withering dismissal of their concerns because "if you can see it you can copy it" technical issues.

2. Incorporation of their concerns, and wide and open debate, without threats and intimidations of bans, and threats and intimidations of personal insult by Lindens and their allies, about how these permissions should be set for the wider grid concept.

3. No undue haste shown in creating this permission set on a panicked/hack basis just to suit some models that in fact aren't based in permissions and property rights, but based in merely forcing content creators to agree to cumbersome checkoffs or type-ins of grids they are willing to ship to.

What is this stuff about a partnership with IBM, and compromising passwords and inventory?

Where are people getting this concept of LL assuming that they can send full-perms assets to another grid?

Keep it short, give me URLs with hard data and reliable cites as to what exactly is going on. Until then, all we've got here is people shouting in fear based on very little in the way of hard facts, and that's what I call jumping the gun.

My explanation for the IBM subgrid is that LL has defined it as part of the Service. After all LL is just offering IBM a new and different facet of the Service.

Again I'm asking... is this technically even possible? What, exactly, can OpenSim get access to in a form that can be used effectively in their own sims?

At the moment it is not possible, to answer your question, Lex. Everyone was ruthed when going from Aditi to an OpenSim in Zha's blog. IBM does have a private subgrid, but in Zha's post, you could see that no assets transferred.

So at the moment, not possible. However, that could change, and the TOS can always be changed by LL at a moment's notice as well.

And I have to ask exactly who at LL thinks they need to be working on this when there are more serious permissions issues to deal with? (And they are screwing up the permissions system already judging from the new defects I am beginning to observe)

This open sim thing is optional and there is plenty of work to be done on higher priority permissions system feature requests and defects. If LL works on this ahead of the long promised improved DRM/IP protection then they are demonstrating gross incompetence IMHO.

My recommendation is for LL's lawyer(s) to start sitting in on these AWG meetings because the small number of people there in no way represent the whole of the residents of Secondlife.
I have seen nothing from LL calling for content creators opinions on this topic. This entire thing is being done in a closed manner with the appearance of openness yet LL is making no effort to educate the content creators of Secondlife as to what is really going on.

And yes we all know the technocriminals can already steal everything. This is an intellectual property rights and the associated legalities issue. Please don't start with the publishing of yellow cover how to books on stealing in Secondlife in response to this comment.

I wonder what Stroker and his law firm will have to say the first time one of his products is ripped to an open sim and all the script source becomes available to the open sim operator?
This entire thing is a noble idea but is simply untenable in the real world of laws and intellectual property rights.

This isn't going to work out the way the tech types that are not business people want it too.
They simply failed to think this through before burning all that time and effort on it.
This is why tech people do not run global enterprises.
Bill Gates had to use real business people to run Microsoft. Theres a clue.

The simple fact of the matter is that LL cannot allow content to transfer until such time as all the legalities are worked out. Then this feature can be considered. Until then any content carried out of Secondlife that was not authorized in advance is simple and clear cut theft with LL as an accomplice to the theft by creating a system that enabled said theft.

Careful with that... that's not possible and it's not going to be possible unless LL specifically sends that script source code and/or bytecode to an outside party, and I still see no reason to believe they're doing that or plan to do that.

And they do have tentative plans to open source simulators and allow private running of your own sim on your own computer - that could well be defined as "within the Service". It may be possible to take content into those spaces. Say buhbye to script permissions if that happens. They will be hacked in short order.

I haven't quite made up my mind about this issue, which is why I follow it pretty closely.

@Ann: You misrepresent what LL promised, they didn't promise IP protection or DRM, they promised to overhaul the permissions system, specifically finer grained permissions dictating usage and transference.

There are at least two different aspects of creator intent that will need to be expressed: to which other grids a given object should be allowed to travel, and when an object does travel to those other grids what the permissions should be there.

One simplifying assumption would be that if an object is allowed to travel to another grid at all, the perms there would be the same as the perms in SL (in the original grid where it was created); that is, if I check whatever box is necessary to say that it's okay if this mod/copy/notran object goes with someone who TPs to FinnogaGrid, when someone does that and arrives in FinnogaGrid, the object is mod/copy/notran there also. I don't know if that's too restrictive, though. Comments?

And then if we go with the "trusted grids" idea in the original JIRA writeup, there's the whole issue of just what "trusted" means. As I wrote elsewhere, one solution that was briefly tossed around at Zero's last Office Hours is to allow each content creator to explicitly specify a list of grids to which a given object would be allowed to travel; that way the content creator wouldn't have to trust anyone else's trust decisions.

On the other hand it would be simpler in concept, coding, and server space if each grid had some set of "trusted" other grids globally specified. It might be reasonable to start with the simple thing, as long as the architecture and protocols allows moving to richer models as we figure out what they are.

(I can imagine, for instance, having grid-lists as things with their own UUIDs, and then an object could specify the UUID of the grid-list that its creator trusts for that object; most people could use their own grid's default one, other people could make their own. Just one possibility.)

We also need to be sure that we let creators/owners express their intent in various ways so that most people will not have to do something special every time a new grid is added to the connected set. That's a topic we didn't get to at yesterday's Zero hours (hehe), but we'll need to address it.

We can let creators say things like "let my content flow to whatever grids are connected at all", "don't let my content flow to any other grids at all", "let my content flow to all and only those grids that get added to the Official List of Linden-Trusted Grids", "let my content flow to all and only those grids that get added to Yumyum Bunnyhug's List of Grids that are Nice", "let my content flow to any connected grid except X and Y", "let my content flow to only grids A, B, and C", and so on. In all these cases, it will be important to have safe defaults, and not let content flow to a grid unless the creator / owner explicitly said something to authorize it.

The richer we make this language, the more flexibility we give the content creators and the more accurately they'll be able to express their intent; on the other hand the language also gets harder to understand and correctly implement, and it gets to be more work to specify exactly what you want. We can try to make simple things simple and complex things possible; I hope we manage to do a good job!

if you can teleport to another grid outside of Second Life, that has reversed-engineered SL in whole or in part, even if you are ruthed today, your assets are vulnerable in principle and the issue is legitimate. And to claim that you have to be "careful" in making demands about this to LL is absurd – content is already hacked and ripped as a matter of course within the given "walled garden" grid with already known exploits, so the issues are obviously broader, and LL doesn't have to "stream out" something to another grid to have it be hacked up, script or content.

The beginnings of interop ARE a threat to content creators (and land owners) because the framers of the Architectural Working Group, in making the design documents, have not articulated any technical or social solutions, or even framed the issues as far as I can see. Go to the wiki, and see for yourself.

In every SL Dev or inworld meeting or transcript I've ever seen, the permissions issues are always either hotly undermined by extremists, to silence by Lindens and others in the room, or, there's a symbolic nod to the issue, but everyone shrugs and says "oh, those are hard complex impossible things to do so yes we need to think about it" – but it's not their center of gravity.

It must become their center of gravity. The jumpy ruth to other worlds is not objectively something anybody but a handful of Lindens, IBMs, and AWG Groupies need or want. To constate that is not to engage in FUD or to be backward and reactionary; indeed, those that would like to return us to the unenviable state of the hippie or communist commune or tribal survival of the "fittest" are the non-progressive ones.

Dale, you say that creators "shouldn't have to do something special" every time a new grid springs up like mushrooms after the rain, which they will, and yet you in fact outline just such a proposal with this "let my content flow".

That's backwards. The framing of the issue shouldn't be "let my content flow unless". But it should be "don't let this avatar leave this grid for this other grid with this inventory unless...". That's the point you're failing to see. In your to make the default be hook-up and access, you're not taking care of the inventory. Avatars have to accept that if they are going to tool around the Metaverse, they don't get to be shuttle-traders with everybody else's stuff, they have to go naked as Ruth, unless their destination has c/m/t perms respected.

Of course, that begs the question I've always asked about interop and so have actual MMORPG designers themselves who are outside the Linden magic circle. Why not just make a new avatar with his inventory box for that new world? Why try to force avatars and their luggage all around the Metaverse. Or why not have a universal avatar with luggage that can upload only full perm items such as to travel to other worlds? I mean, I can't help thinking that if you approach this with a very, very simple and practical metaphor of a real-life person going on a real-life journey to another country, where he needs a passport, visa, currency for that country, phrase book, etc. you will be better served instead of saying "let's make all the protocols standard to default to openness and access everywhere and then worry about how to graft on impediments to the flow later".

Getting off topic:
We will see Grid Wars: Content creators from one grid launch an assault on the caretakers of another grid for not doing enough to protect their IP. People already complain to LL about people stealing content, but with new grids people will start blaming those grid's care takes for 1) not doing enough and/or 2) participating in the theft. It's not going to be pretty.

In the end the grids will be like nations, with treaties and organizations (The United Grids?). The treaties will standardize abuse management, user & data travel, and data and communication formats.

And no, I don't see why creators should have to allow their stuff to be taken to other grids against their wishes. Forcing copyrighted content to open source is totally against the spirit of the charter. Want to cart it around easily - go make yer own stuff

What I would like to see is an avatar format that is easily "carted around" if need be. I don't need all my inventory to cart around with me, but I would like to see work on the avatar done in this fashion.

Most of the avatar is on your private harddrive, anyway. Just an FYI. So no need to give its content to a foreign grid, for the most part.

https://lists.secondlife.com/pipermail/sldev/2008-June/010575.html

One point that I realized just now: the middle ground permission concerning "trusted grid" will need to be grayed out for now because it has no definition, so there are really only two settings that can be supported:

"Creation Grid Only [Second Life Grid]"

which keeps the existing flags the same and just makes clear the current legal situation and is the default

OR

"any grid [full permissions]"

which sets full permissions and gives explicit permission for people to copy the assets with this setting to any grid using any means necessary, which has to be set by the creator.

Note that the "any grid [full permissions]" setting does NOT give automatic permission to copy nested assets.

This is especially the case for things like avatar skins, etc. The current flow is inventory > client > bake > upload to sim > sim handles display to other avatars and sims - as far as I know (yes I know this is simplistic, but is my understanding of the flow)

This is something that could quite easily be handled by the client itself. Say inventory > client > bake > client sends textures to other avatars which request to view you. Cutting out the step of the sim inbetween. Or say your home sim - wherever it is, could be the one handling your hosting of your baking needs while you are away from your primary grid - and sending to other avatar viewers the baked texture to view. In no cases will a foreign grid or sim get your inventory, it can be handled straight from your home sim to clients requesting the baked texture. I'm quite certain that attachments could possibly be handled in much the same fashion.

That's no good, because we've already established that just because all three categories are open doesn't mean the creator wants their items distributed to other grids. They didn't get polled on this; they had no opportunity to consent. Furthermore, there are obvious cases where people would want perms opened in SL, but nowhere else, starting first and foremost with one's own inventory, where one doesn't check off perms in builds done for one's own use. Other cases might include communities where people wished to make their items available for free as loss leaders to have people come to their stores or events, not to provide for the Metaverse at large to resell. There's already a lot of agitation from people who hate having their freebies resold. I think they should just check off "no transfer" and be done with it, but I can certainly understand their concern, especially in this unexpected wider context where the whole Metaverse gets their stuff. Somebody on XYZ1029789 grid in South Korea isn't going to go fetching back to their store on a server in Second Life in Texas because they got the freebie. Teleports already work very crappily across the mere 20,000 or so simulators of SL spread over 3 states, we can't expect they'll work well across grids.

Some things to consider:

a) The 'agent domain' encompasses your SL inventory. But your SL inventory as represented by an agent domain contains no content - in the sense that the SL inventory is just a big list of nested folders with item names that reference actual assets. The assets themselves are stored in the asset system, not in inventory. Getting them out involves the permission system.
The demonstration of SL avatars logging into an opensim-based grid recently didn't include asset sharing. Even if/when a login to an opensim-based region domain does share inventory from the login avatar's SL agent domain, that will not automatically compromise any assets - since assets aren't transferred to a grid/sim just because they're listed in inventory. In the case of an object, only rezzing it will require the asset content data about how it is composed of prims/textures etc to be transferred to the sim. That is where a permissions system will come into play.

b) The SLGOGP doesn't include the sharing of assets within its scope. That simply means that nothing has been proposed yet, not that permissions will be ignored or that someone has decided that all 'full perm' assets will be allowed to be transferred to other grids.

I personally would like to see the permissions of inter-grid transfer of assets, especially bytecode, explicitly addressed by LL - not necessarily as suggested by this issue, but still by some modification to the existing permissions system.

While that is true, I don't personally think that allowing full-perm assets to 'escape into the wild' of other grids would have such a big impact. The main reason being because all of those assets can already be copied using freely available tools. Hence, they can already be moved into other grids automatically with or without LL or the creator's consent (and I don't think that it would even violate copyright to do so). It is now true that the tools are only accessible to 'software' types that can figure out how to download/build/use them - but it is only a matter of time before 'point & click' tools exist accessible to everyone.
(just as originally copying a DVD required significant software proficiency, but it can now be done by anyone who can install a user-friendly application locatable with google).

Any company with enough resources could technologically completely duplicate the entire SL grid content today (sans non-rezzed content - inventories, script bytecode, login/personal info etc). It might even be completely legal to do so.

The exception to all this is, of course, script source and bytecode - which are never downloaded to the SL client (without permission). Hence, it can't be captured without the creator's involvement and is secure within the confines of LL's system (sans bug exploits). Keeping the current grid model, unless no scripted attachments will work inter-grid nor any scripted object's scripts run when rezzed in non-SL grids, that bytecode will need to be transferred out of SL and into the other grid(s). The alternative is a fairly radical change to the current architecture where script bytecode can continue to run in the confines of the grid where was created (or a trusted one) but have it's effects (on the sim world and avatars) felt on the other grid via a streaming connection not unlike the connection between the grid and the client now.

I agree that now is the time to push LL to start discussing/thinking about it. I don't necessarily agree that a hasty solution should be thrown into place as though there is an emergency. I don't think that the limited scope of the SLGOGP or the unofficial comments or ruminations of individual LL developers should be taken to mean that any decisions on inter-grid asset transfer has been made.

One solution is to just not connect to such grids at all; if everything in a particular grid is automatically m/c/t, then it's just not possible to TP there with any objects (including shapes, skins...) at all. A less restrictive approach would be to allow connection to such grids, but allow the flow of only those objects that are marked as being allowed to flow there, and that when they flow there would turn up as m/c/t if the target grid were a normal permission-supporting grid. So if I make an m/c/t object in SL, and mark it "allow to flow to any and all grids", then it would be allowed to flow to Joe's Full-Perm Commune which is running code that doesn't enforce perms at all. On the other hand if I have a m/c/no-t object, then I can't take it to Joe's Full-Perm Commune even if it's marked "allow to flow to any and all grids", because it can't flow there with the right permissions.

Plausible?

Now most of these bits are about the owner's intent rather than the creator's, so maybe we don't need to worry about them so much in thinking about inter-grid transfer? If the owner of an object doesn't want it to be "allow anyone to copy" in a foreign grid that he TPs to, he can just not throw that switch when he rezzes it (and of course if the object is nocopy to him in that foreign grid, he won't be able to throw the switch even if he wants to). So maybe not a problem?

Are there other attributes of an object (its sale price? it's creator ID?) that we need to think more about in inter-grid transfer? Probably worth some thought also (although perhaps not as urgent as the ones we're currently chewing on).

Yes, I believe it could be possible to be "viewing" a foreign Opensim, while still logged to the LL grid. Which means you likely could be able to see your inventory on the other grid, say during the handoff you are still communicating to the last LL sim you were in. I doubt highly you will have to transfer all your inventory to another grid simply by entering a new one. You could quite possibly still be seeing your normal inventory , provided you are simultaneously connected to a LL sim.

all your inventory is - are references to assets, not actual objects - similar to links- and likely something you can see as long as you are logged in.

So yes, you need a checkmark "Creation grid only" and have it checked by default. This should prevent dropping the asset in another sim, which is the act of transferring it to another grid's inventory system.

However, what I want to put to bed is this crazy concept you need to transfer all your inventory to another grid in order to wear your favourite hair. I highly doubt that needs to be the case. The sim you are in has no reason to even be aware of the large majority of your attachments, provided they are not scripted. Other viewers within sight of your av need to be aware, but not the foreign sim or another grid's inventory system - no.

someone with more knowledge of how scripts run server side can jump in here - I have my doubts that even scripts need to run on a foreign sim either, long term. They just have to be run by some sim, but unsure if it needs to be run by the sim you are in.

no it's not, not according to US law, anyway. Able to copy != right to copy. Hence the term "copyright". And surely not in countries governed by the Berne Convention.

When you rezz a thing, the region that you're in asks the asset server for it (or a copy of it, or etc), and if the asset server complies it instantiates it, starts executing the scripts in it as required, etc. So it's only the rezzed things that the region (potentially on a 'foreign' grid) has to know about. My first thought would be that scripts in the rezzed things would have to execute on (be executed by) the region that the objects are rezzed in. But it's possible that some clever proxying or something could avoid that; also worth thinking about. (Gee, I hope someone's writing this all down. )

Couldn't resist... )

The point of having a permissions bit for content is to allow the creator to express their intent,and the scope of the license they are selling, and an expectation that LL will not take actions to violate that license. So for example, if a creator says that a skin is for use in Second Life Grid only, then they can expect that LL will not allow that asset to be transfered from LL to another grid.

But the reverse is also the case. If a content creator wants to, for example, move content from here to a sever on the OpenGrid, and the technoogy exists to do so, then that asset should be transferable. The ability to log in is almost the ability to teleport. The ability to seemlessly teleport between girds oeprated by different companies is an essential step in creating a unified multiverse. Consumers, who have bought and paid for licenses, should not be restricted in moving content from one grid to another, if that is in the terms of the license they have purchased. There is no one size fits all here.

Some creators will want their content to be inside of Second Life World only, others will want their content to move more widely. The original object should have enough permissions so that a content creator can express what right they are selling. Since the ability to move between grids did not exist when the content was created, that right remains with the content creator unless it was otherwise sold or transfered.

The best way to handle the trust issue is to have each object have a pointer to a resource, a URI, that lists what grids are inits trusted list, if it has trusted permissions. By default that list would be the list of grids that the native grid trusts, but it would not have to be.

Le me take an example. Let us say that a University creates a teaching HUD. They want it to be distributable inside of Second Life, and in the grid they run on their campus. They would give permissions for Second Life World, permisssions for a trusted grid, and a pointer to their trust list. The HUD would then be usable in Second Life, and in their own gird. Already IBM has opensims behind their firewall and is experiemnting with moving content between opensims and LL grid.

The ability to move between grids implies the ability to move content, and therefore content creators, and content consumers, need to be able to set, and know, what rights are being exchanged. Grid operators need to have enough infomration so that they can honor the licenses that they have agreed to honor by hosting the conent, just as your ISP doesn't give other people access to your email, but sends it to other people who you designate.

Um, "share with group" is vital to group rentals. I realize that's not on your radar at all, but but I think it's safe to say that most concurrent log-ons and hundreds of thousands of residents get this, because it's what they have to do to get a TV deeded to a group rental. It's also what you can use if you are in an idealistic hippie commune and don't mind trying to share all your stuff to enable others to try to move it or build it or add to it, but in reality, we all know THAT use of it a) is abused by griefers who drop malicious scripts into the object then to annoy you, or giant-size ordinary objects to haras and block you (this is done all the time with all the library items which default to this old hippie regime despite constant calls to undo that) – it's why Linden party hats are often griefing objects and b) share with group doesn't carry well and all kinds of problems develop in group builds precisely because these permissions get messed up, are buggy, etc.

Since they are messy and buggy even on this grid, I wouldn't overly-worry about them on other grids. The main purpose of this exercise is not to fantasize about group builds on Azure that are then ported to Adam's OpenSim (although I realize, that of course that's possible one of the main "use cases" here, trying to port Adam's rental expire of hundreds of sims with all their builds over to OpenSims).

Rather, the main purpose is to make is less possible for people to steal and use and resell creations from SL. So stick with that first.

What I've said before was that a) the default should be never teleport to other grids unless they recognize permissions and b) when teleporting, respect the checkoffs of this grid. I don't see it as objects flowing, I see it as a plug/socket as a I said – each object has above it a meta tag of stuff that fits with the other grid or doesn't.

A lot depends on how what Cenji is explaining plays out with these folders. If the automatic default is to access and reference all folders of an avatar, then anyone on those foreign grids can grab your inventory. We are already seeing demonstrations of copybot libsl avatars that copy your outfits and your profile and groups.

Since these other worlds don't have buying and selling, don't have money, and they don't WANT to have money, except as an add-on/hack-in of some sort of module, then perhaps all objects for sale simply shouldn't port, period. I really do wonder how these worlds will last or grow without monetary systems and trading interfaces, and this idea that there will be a zillion little versions of this really seems insane, and not progress, but regress back to the era of fiefdoms and principalities with their different coins.

Cenji, my question about your explanation – I realize that objects aren't "in my folders of my inventory" but are only UUIDs or referents harking back to an asset server that serves them up (or doesn't quite a bit of the time). But...those refererants are the things that are hackable, and if they contain things like prim facets or pixels or or whatever bits of stuff make up things, then it seems like they are reproducable without that asset server serving them up, precisely becuase of this "if you can see it you can copy it" problem we're constantly being banged on the head over by anti-IP protection types.

In other words, does the act of fetching itself trigger a stream of data that itself is the thing used to hack into that object and obtain its characteristics or are there are shields in the way of that.

On a grid where there are no permissions, the permissions will "read" as merely a nothing – not a greyed out box that prevents rezzing, but as "full perms". That's why we're having this discussion in the first place, no?

Hypatia, if the asset server serves up those assets like your hair, and you TP to another grid that does not have that same asset server, I don't see how the referents that fetch the assets can "work" or "hook-up". Unless of course there is a big fat pipe already to this asset server from opensim already, just...because.

On the topic, and I'll try to bring people's attention back to the primary driver here--that you don't "own" things you "buy" in SL. The content creator grants you a license to display it within Secondlife's "Service".

Adding more bits to a record is not going to change the legal aspects here and we all already know that the permission system will instantly be coded around (hacked) to steal content just as soon as LL opens the gate. This is rather obvious given the outspoken opinions (favoring criminal activities, defending criminals) of the very people pushing this interop open sim idea.

The temporary solution is real simple. No data transfer out of or in to Secondlife for the time being. All the sim/grid operators can agree to make a free set of avatars to pick from and thats who you are when you land in their sim. While you are there you can make or buy (assuming that option ever happens) something to use in that service. When you leave that service your assets remain there where they are licensed.
If 2 grids have no IP problems (millions of IP owners do not own content on their grid(s) and they decide to transmit between them then fine. But LL has terabytes of IP and no license to distribute that IP outside of the Secondlife Service.

You do not have the right to decide how the IP of creators is handled. Only the LAW will do that.
Maybe the open sim folks should try explaining this to our beloved US congress who is just now realizing what hackers are since all their laptops are being hacked and hacked (presumably by whichever country they happen to not like at the time) Somehow I suspect you will have difficulty explaining what IP is to them given their handling of the Orphaned Works Act that clearly indicates they are rather clueless on the topic.

This cart is way way way out in front of the legal horse and you can't change law with code no matter how much you chant "The code is the Law The code is God".

Interoperability will not include intellectual property that exists prior to interoperability unless each individual IP owner writes a new license/TOU.

I am not the equivalent of a Luddite on this. I see the future. But the legal issues must be worked out first. I do not care to see all our dreams get erased because a bunch of well intending techs on a noble quest exposed our dream to massive legal and financial liabilities.

LL has a general counsel (top lawyer). Let's hear from him before too much effort goes into this.

http://wiki.secondlife.com/wiki/Texture_Pipeline_Improvements

It reminds me highly of the heyday of such viewers as Blaxxun's Cybertown - where avatar assets were also transferred by http, although in a completely unsecure way. Avatars never existed on the world platform - they were hosted on totally normal webservers, in your private webspace. Linden's method is vastly superior.

What I am saying is to forget about the Opensim The communication I am proposing is from LL grid to your viewer, your viewer to LL sim, LL sim to other viewers. Where you happen to be is immaterial. Your connection is still to LL, you are still within the service, and communication to draw the majority of personal avatar assets only has to talk to other viewers, which could also be logged into multiple grids. Nothing has to be transferred from anyone's inventory to view your avatar, nothing to another grid or sim. All that is flowing is information for the viewers, that is - how your graphics card should draw your avatar. Just like in any sim you can go to right now.

As far as being able to steal it if someone sees it, well, that can happen anyway, even in an LL sim. The risks are the same, there. Until we get DRM on graphics cards in regards to things like textures (which is of course quite possible in the future), that will always be a risk. It's a risk even now, with people uploading ripped content from SL into Opensims. That's no reason to nerf those who aren't stealing anything, just moving around place to place.

If you are saying that some completely different regime should be developed outside the asset server model, where everything is in the viewer and on your hard drive, then that's different, I suppose, but I don't see how that works, it's not a 3-d streamed world then but a flash world.

The only way around this will be to require that content rezzed in another grid's sim actually only be a reference back to the original grid, which would be responsible for streaming the content directly to the viewer and streaming any effects the object has on the environment to the other grid (effects of scripted actions, information the sim needs for collision and physics computations, for example).

"if the asset server serves up those assets like your hair, and you TP to another grid that does not have that same asset server, I don't see how the referents that fetch the assets can 'work' or 'hook-up'." - you're correct, they won't work. However, the whole point of developing the open grid technology in the first place is to make avatars portable between grids (that don't have the same asset systems). So, an open grid protocol that leaves every foreign avatar in a grid 'ruthed' and without their stuff is impotent. That's why we need some kind of creator permissions - since neither allowing all full-perm content to transfer by default nor allowing none to transfer is a good solution.

I think the ideal solution is to have assets streamed to clients from the asset system in which they're stored, regardless of which agent domain the avatar looking belongs too or which region domain the sim they're in belongs to. In order for the sim they're in to function, it too would also have to have some streamed data to it from the originating grid - but not the complete asset. This makes sims more P2P among themselves. For example, to simulate an object perhaps a sim doesn't need the prim data or object contents. It may only need an approximate collision hull, mass and other variables appropriate for the physics engine, streamed events when the object's scripts interact with the avatars and other objects in the sim etc.
This may well be very similar to the technology that ends up being developed for handling the special case of attachments - so why not use it in general for handling the presence of foreign objects in sims (for which the creator hasn't given inter-grid asset transfer permissions - since transfer wholesale would be more efficient). Effectively your SL client might then be connected to components of many grids when you're in any given sim, since you might have in view objects originating from many grids for which the creators never gave inter-grid transfer permissions.
The down-side of something like this is that it could happen that a particular sim containing mostly foreign objects has little to simulate, while the originating grids do all the work. Pie in the sky: how about a standard 'sim transfer' protocol where sim execution is automatically and transparently migrated to be closest to where the majority of the assets it has rezzed (and in the process the once-foreign objects delonging to the destination grid become native and the native ones become foreign).

I can tell I'm tired when my verbosity level exceeds Prokofy's

In the long run, centralisation has been the Achilles heel of all of SL, and it's only been able to scale by progressively decentralising the system.

I am proposing something new but not entirely new. The LL system already pretty much works this way I propose, just I am proposing a decentralised method to "carting your avatar with you" without violating creator permissions.

Currently, the sims handle all the baked textures, not the asset server. This has been the case for quite some time now! Let me repeat - currently the stream is request for texture > your viewer bakes it with all your clothing textures > reupload to LL sim as a baked texture > that sim then sends out your baked texture (skin + clothes) to other viewers which make a request to view your textures when they see your av.

Your avatar is mostly on your harddrive, yes. The mesh and all the Linden default avatar textures reside in your SL directory on your drive, that is very true. There is no downloading involved except for textures to apply to your avatar and data to tell the viewer how to deform your shape, plus data to draw your attachments (more textures from asset server and data to deform prims). This stuff has no need to be transferred to another sim or grid in order to be seen. It can work by requesting it from the LL sim that baked your textures/LL asset system itself. Vice versa for someone arriving on an OpenSim account in a Linden sim. No reason to transfer the inventory at all!

I'm trying to explain that its a bogus argument that Opensims need to have your entire inventory in order to draw your av. The reason it doesn't work right now is because you don't have a simultaneous connection to an LL sim to tell the viewers what to draw > the experiment of Zha's severed the connection to the Aditi grid/sim.

There is such a thing as a "child agent" for a sim > you can be in communication with an LL sim and not actually be in it, even now. That is how you are able to see other LL sims and all the content across sim lines. Your viewer regularly requests sims far out of your field of view for baked avatar textures of other avs you see, even now. Keep that in mind.

Depends on the definition of "copy" if it comes under copyright law or not I would think. Every time someone see a creation of yours that is rezzed in SL, a description of the prims and textures that make it up and how they're organized (which is basically all there is), is 'copied' hundreds or thousands of times, mostly by people and organizations you don't know. The data has to be copied by every networking router box over the Internet between LL and your PC. Most of the network links use a broadcast technology that anyone can 'listen in' too. I don't think every network operator can be sued for copyright violation.

My understanding of copyright law is that your rights hinge on if it defines you as a redistributor or not. If a visitor to my home hears one of my CDs playing, that isn't considered redistribution. if I play it to an audience of thousands, it is (even if they all have a legitimate copy of the CD at home themselves!).

There are too many grey areas for me to be convinced it violates copyright law even in the US.

Modern web browsers cache megabytes of copyrighted images on the harddrive. If I setup a web-browsing kiosk PC in my cafe and install Firefox on it - am I in violation of copyright? (since the hardware I own has copied thousands of copyrighted images and is serving them up to the public that use my kiosk)

What about all those ISPs that run caching web-proxies - surely they're redistributing copyrighted content! No?

How is that different from me "caching" all the content in SL and serving it up from my own servers?

IANAL, so I really don't have the answers.

Further, you do not have a license to redistribute (outside fair use) the 2D content at all unless you get permission.

All of the material and licenses and DMCAs and lawsuits related to content theft at Renderosity can serve as your precedents for "render 3D display" licenses.

And this is the problem. Too many people have been soaked and brainwashed with intentionally wrong information by a select few pushing this concept to get it in place before the legal ground work and framework is complete.

Slow down. If this interoperability effort gets pushed too far too soon it will get shut down the hard way anyway. No need to hurry and screw it up for everyone.

I also clarified an idea about the "Trusted Grid" which actually COULD apply in a short while, but doesn't currently and won't until things are closer to working: "trusted grid" refers to a list of trusted grids or a list of lists (or both). So you could refer to Linden Lab's list of "trusted grids" and acknowledge that you DO trust it with the content you've created, or, just name a grid that you yourself trust because you own it, or whatever.

Regardless, this trusted list doesn't exist yet. There's not even a way of naming a grid that everyone agrees on yet, so it can't exist, even if the grids existed, which they don't.

Now, Prokofy and many others here aren't quite sure what is going on with the IBM login demo. That's because it is not anywhere near finished yet and because Linden Lab is slowly redesigning things to work in a multi-grid system, so even the first changes on the path to full grid-interoperability aren't quite working the way people are used to.

The first change has to do with login. RIght now, you log into the target simulator and from that simulator you get all the info you need to connect to the Second Life grid. This makes the sims overwork and won't make sense anyway when there is more than one grid of sims that you might log into.

So, what Zha did was implement the NEW login design that Linden Lab has come up with. Each avatar is associated with an "Agent Domain" server, which takes over a lot of the chores that the sim normally does, like login, asset handling, etc. So, as a test of this new concept, Zha rewrote OpenSim software slightly to accept login messages from Linden Lab's test Agent Domain server and then did the login demo she has a picture of on her blog.

The reason why her avatar was ruthed is that so far, they haven't finished designing all the steps required to get the asset server from either grid to talk to the client software when using the new login so there was no inventory available.

Ruth, incidentally, is just a drawing that the client does when it can't find any valid data concerning an avatar its been told to draw. The older clients draw "Ruth" while the new ones draw a cloud with a name tag. The "Ruth" avatar and all other base avatars are built into the client and the new client is told to draw a cloud instead of the Ruth female base avatar.

Getting back to assets, in the old way of doing things, the client talks to the asset server through the sim it is sitting on, so the sim has to be part of the grid or you have a security violation because the sim could "fake" requests for the inventory of anything it wanted. The new way is that the Agent Domain talks to the asset server, and the sim doesn't get access until after the Agent Domain has performed the introductions so the sim can't ask for anything except what the avatar already has in its inventory, because the asset server knows which avatar is associated with which sim, because the Agent Domain performed the intro amd tje asset server won't
give out assets not associated with that avatar (I think this is how it works, corrections welcome).

The other peice of the puzzle is that if the server does not "trust" the new sim/grid it won't give out the data either. So the avatar has to have the right to rez the asset according to the asset server AND the sim has to have the right to do this as well. If those two conditions aren't meant, the asset won't rez.

One aspect of "trust" is that there is some agreement between grid operators that the new grid will treat assets the way the old grid does, and honor the permission system from the old grid. Trust also means that grid operators agree that they won't copy out the asset data their grid been given and sell it to the highest bidder or whatever.

The highest trust possible outside the normal LInden Lab servers is the agreement between IBM and LL because the only thing that is going on there is that IBM is running its own secure servers behind a firewall, so that they can have corporate meetings in Second Life without fear that someone will eves drop from Linden Lab or TP out with a notecard created while inside the IBM sim. Assets go in, but they can't get out.

IBM's security is designed to prevent people from stealing chat log transcripts of internal meetings, putting them on disk and selling them to corporate spies. I think that if IBM's security is good enough to protect data worth millions of US dollars, its probably good enough to protect second life assets worth, at most, a few thousand dollars. It's the grids in the upcoming open system that you have to be concerned with and LL's design should make things at least somewhat secure.

I've probably gotten a lot of details wrong, and even if I haven't, I wouldn't be surprised if this stuff isn't clear to people reading it for the first time. I've been talking with the LIndens and Zha and libsecondlife people and OpenSim people about these things for many months, and have written some of the documentation on the wiki, and I still don't get everything at even the most basic level. One thing I hope to do is create some flash movies that animate the way the current system's data exchange as well as the upcoming system. That way, it will be easier for people to see what is going on and what WILL go on and the Lindens and Zha and so on can correct my misunderstandings as I animate them.

And speaking of the walled-garden issue – which you are – there is nothing that says walled gardens are evil and to be avoided. Second Life obtained its success hitherto by being a walled garden. Please, spare us harkings back to AOL and Compuserve lectures, because there really is something very different about 2-way or multiway communications and the 2-D web, and the round 3-D world with interaction and collaboration and creation, my God, you couldn't create something on AOL and ship it somewhere, so let's be practical here.
The Internet as we know it today owes as much of its success to centralized corporations with proprietary code running sites like amazon.com, making things like Kindle, and sites like ebay.com as it does to all this open source stuff that people on the JIRA are always fanning and thinking is the greatest thing since cream cheese.

I'm well aware of the child agents issue. I don't know if child agents can run as far away as another grid to do their look-see, however. I'm simply not finding it persuasive that it is a "bogus" argument that OpenSim needs to grab referents or assents when...the OP here rushed this proposal to press over precisely this concern, and he's one of the geeks in the AWG, not some panicked dressmaker.

People in SL have to obey US laws all the time – such as the ban on Internet gambling. So that's the case already, and only when the Lindens realize their dream of cloning SL all over the planet so the Chinese or Russian government can use SL to ensure repression of dissidents by having localizers partner companies do all the enforcement will you see this cease, and possibly work the other way when somebody makes Cayman Life for gamblers.

Cenji, this idea that the technical issue of "copying" that has to happen for you to see it is something that enables you to be free of all discussion of copyright is for the birds. If you're going to go down that road, you can sue my retina for copying Gucci bags on Fifth Avenue. The point is then do you SELL THEM or distribute them NOT for personal use off your retina.

There's nothing grey here unless you wish to be non-compliant and hide behind putative greyness.

I really loathe all this sort of high-tekkie thumb-sucking of the sort, "Gosh, if I load up my Firefox that needs to grab an image to see it, and I violating some skanky imperialist US copyright law that is outdated old white guys harming creativity?" Well, again, duh, no. Are you going to SELL that image you grabbed on your Firefox or DISTRIBUTE IT or NOT? It's about "fair use". Technical rendering to even see a thing is a kind of extension of "fair use" doctrine.

This idea that all the browsers are copyright infringers strikes me as a distractive literalism that gives every thief a pass. Browsers don't commit copyright theft. People do. By distributing or reselling.

Cenji, I think this is something that will end up being mostly the case for Linden Lab approved subgrids and privately hosted sims (say, offline use on your personal hardware) that may be hooked up to LL's network - but I can't see LL going for serving up bandwidth for Opensim content. For LL avatar accounts, I can see them allowing it for avatars, but that's a far more trivial thing and likely something they could even charge for (want your av to be seen everywhere - buy a Premium acct. etc)

"What about all those ISPs that run caching web-proxies - surely they're redistributing copyrighted content! No? "

Google gets takedowns all the time they even list the number of hits that couldn't be displayed on the search engine and explain the takedown in brief form under "chilling effects"

Yes.

LL makes you agree to allowing them a non-exclusive license to distribute your stuff within the service > it does not say that it can leave it. And that is what happens when you rez an object in an opensim. It leaves that grid and enters another. Avatars are different because the data can be routed to never be handled by the foreign sim or asset servers, attachments arent even seen by the physics engine. (though that could change with raycasting - but I'm quite certain thats a loong time off, and even so not that big a deal)

I certainly hope for LL's sake that they have not been transmitting content to IBM without a license.

So ya, to the left I'm a Nazi, to the right I'm a Commie. Whatever floats yer boat

What you fail to see is that you are all overtaken by events even before you post things like this. Even as Zha and the Lindens were TPing over to Adam's, other people in libsl, or people who have grabbed libsl because it is out there, were doing the Next Big Thing which was to copy avatars completely, not just their look or stuff, but their groups and profile descriptions and names, making mini-mes right next to the original avatar (this was blogged about). So that means that this idea that fake requests won't be honoured and everything's ok is OBE'd now, because hackers can make fake avatar clones to issue the real-looking requests now. That may well have been their purpose, in fact, if everything depends on the Lindens servers responding only to avatar requests it believes are authenticated because they logged on with the right passwords etc. what does it mean if avatars are now fully copyable on to other avatars so that fake requests can be issued?

Regardless, no-one but you is supposed to know your password and the avatar database certainly doesn't' have that info in any directly useable form.

Getting back to what the OpenSIm people were showing off, that was done using non-standard hacks because there is no standardized way of doing it yet. They just grabbed teh data out of the cache. What Zha and LL are trying to do is create a standardized way to do it that preserves the permission system. If an OpenSIm grid/sim isn't part of the recognized list, it won't get all the assets from the LL asset server. That the OpenSIm people obtained all their assets already was simply a TEST of the capabilities of their asset servers. If an OpenSim operator wants to remain "Trusted" they won't do that kind of thing once the system goes operational, at least on a public grid and what they do in private for testing purposes is probably covered by "fair use" for educational purposes... And even if not, if no-one ever finds out, including you, its really not worrying about anyway, now is it? YOu can't stop them or prove they've done anything wrong.

As far as Zha's purpose goes, I think you've misinterpreted. Until they get login working right, they can't test other features. Once they get various features working and tested, they'll implement even more features. Eventually, all the required features will be implemented, INCLUDING the permissions system and THEN they will start beta-testing. After it is thoroughly tested in beta, they'll put it on the main grid. Until then, the proper thing to be talking about is the design: trying to make sure the design they are working on fits your needs. Telling them not to do it at all is a waste of breath, IMHO.

"We need decentralization because only thus can we insure that the knowledge of the particular circumstances of time and place will be promptly used."

• Friedrich A. Hayek, from the "The Use of Knowledge in Society"

http://www.econlib.org/Library/Essays/hykKnw1.html

When someone has teased out what I mean by these quotes here, then they will understand my point of view

"Crank that last bolt a bit tighter Simon"- Charles Atbridge

Look if you can find them but you don't need to understand a bunch of quotes and enter a 4 paragaph discuss history discussion I hope to understand my point of view

Let me put it succinctly.

It's a balance between your rights and the rights of those who made the items in your inventory, plus the rights of LL to not shoulder the full cost of your bandwidth bills. Cry whine wail all you want to about it, its not going to change anything. There are a variety of reasons you're very likely not going to get full inventory transfer to just any personal opensim grid right upon popping your avatar in. (in fact you're quite likely to get no inventory transfer at all - its all going to stay on LL's grid and you'll most likely have some limited abilities to show up wearing your av items - and possibly rez content that's been allowed to be rezzed in the sim you happen to be in)

That is not saying there will be no interop at all, but it's sure not going to be unlimited. There will very likely be a distinction between trusted grids and untrusted grids. There will not be full transfer of items from LL asset servers to personal sims so you can reverse engineer them to your hearts content. Much of the work is being pushed out into the agent domain from the sims, which is going to enforce permissions. I hadn't realised at first till Sai said - that it was so close at hand, the new architecture, but apparantly its getting a lot closer.

http://wiki.secondlife.com/wiki/Structural_Design_Overview
http://wiki.secondlife.com/wiki/Agent_Domain
http://wiki.secondlife.com/wiki/Region_Domain
http://wiki.secondlife.com/wiki/Multiple_Domains
http://wiki.secondlife.com/wiki/Central_Services
http://wiki.secondlife.com/wiki/Running_at_Home_and_Offline

Ofcourse the moment you suggest this people like Prokofy incorrectly and bullyingly assert falsities (despite being corrected on this unendingly, she still comes back to repeat the lie) about how you hate content creators.

The rest of the internet has faced the same problems that content creators in SL will now have to deal with. As has been stated before, if you're going to be able to see something on your computer, there's going to be an interception point that someone can utilize to steal it. Acceptance of this fact is not a suggestion that nobody should bother nor is it a statement that any concerns are ridiculous. But the moment you stop thinking that you CAN secure permissions and start working on ways to protect your IP without the use of checkboxes that have been broken countless times already is the sooner you stop stressing yourself out about it if it happens.

As a content creator, do I want my stuff to be given out freely all over the place? Obviously not. But that doesn't mean I don't understand the reality of it, and don't look at it as anything but simply a matter of time.

As far as DRM goes-- it's really impossible. Someone will always crack it. There are countless examples of this from software to product activations to CDs to DVDs to hardware. There is always a way. If we expect LL to step up and escalate the permissions system beyond what it is now then we're expecting them to never fix anything else because their resources will be consumed in a never ending arms race against people breaking their DRM the moment it's released. And DRM only penalizes legitimate buyers. I don't look forward to needing to provide several forms of encrypted codes every time I want to wear a pair of shoes. Do you?

Enough with the hyperbole already. Prokofy, you don't even make anything in the first place, you are so ill equipped to understand the situation from the perspective of someone who does.

I'm not a content creator, but I can obviously grasp the importance of securing the right to private property and protection of intellectual property rights as the foundation of any free economy and free and civil society.

The idea that people are "ignorant" or "don't get the issues" because they disagree with the copyleft movement is one of its sillier and most easily debunked religious doctrines. And pointing that out isn't bullying; it's not caving to the bullies that constantly try to end every discussion about copyright protection and preservation of value in the economy with a club over the head about technicalities in the viewer. Sorry, but you can't use force on this, it's not persuasive – technology is a gun, coding is a weapon. If people are not to become its slaves, they can certainly struggle to devise other technology and policies to cope with the exigencies of technology without rolling over like Gorean subs.

Many Internet users grasp that if they right-click on an image, they can copy it, or they can use Printscreen. But they also grasp that they can't redistribute or sell such images if they are copyright-protected without consequences, and the consequences are real, and the reason there is no more free Napster, and paid Napster or paid iTunes are those consequences that people constantly making the argument about the crackability of DRM fail to admit.

Many people in SL realize that because it is a 3-D streaming world that has to be seen on your viewer, it can be grabbed. We got all that years ago when the first nerdy little tekkies hectored us to death with these "insights". That doesn't mean they also expect that wanton thievery and exploitation of those captured images is permissible – they don't.

So it's not about endlessly recapitualizing the technically obvious, visible from the moon, and expecting to prevail by arrogantly repeating what everybody got ages ago, in the expectation that mere repetition of technical constraints are a helpful and persuasive argument – it isn't.

It's about finding ways to mitigate theft and misuse of images and preserving value. And that's what is being done, finding ways to create technical and social solutions on top of the technically obvious and intractable problem of capacity for copying.

You cannot legally – in real life – expect to secure permissions unless you have a device or means, technical or political, for announcing this and attempting to enforce it, even if compliance isn't 100 percent. And that's what it's all about. This isn't about being "hysterical" or "FUDded" or "stressed out". It's about normal economic behaviour to protect the rights of private property, which, contrary to the socialist and utopian views of many coders and war avatar and gun makers, are in fact the bedrock of a free society.

It's a far more sophisticated discussion that you're capable of taking part in Joshua, so you may wish to bow out early.

You can add all the big composite adjectives you want to your wall of text rants but it doesn't change the overarching point that,

1) You don't get it.

2) You aren't even affected by this discussion as someone who contributes no content to SL.

3) Soviet Russia has nothing to do with Second Life, no matter how many times you want to pat yourself on the back for translating a book.

Other thoughts:

• presumably allowed asset copies would be non-transitive (A->B and B->C doesn't enable A->C).
• I don't think full-perm should imply inter-grid transfers, IMHO transfer should be separate and should default to "home only" for existing content always.

Actually, I think you can do it with one permission bit and persistent origin grid... A request to transfer asset X (that was created on grid A) from grid B to grid C will be allowed IFF:
1. grid B institutionally trusts grid C AND
2. grid transfer allowed bit is set AND
3. creator of X has established (at origin grid A) that she trusts grid C AND
4. grid C implementation of asset X is compatible with that of origin grid A.

You'd also need caching policy, revocation policy, etc. You probably want to allow for migrating an asset's point of origin from grid to grid in some way, maybe by establishing creator equivalents between grids, and allowing a creator-copied assets to persist at the target grid.

If someone steals your intellectual property, sue them using the mechanisms allowed according to the copyright laws applicable to the country you or they reside in.

This discussion should be about asking LL to reply to DMCA notices reasonably and in an acceptable and timely fashion instead of more hysteria over hypotheticals regarding potential theft around a policy decision by LL that's still at least a year away from being made.

1. I get it perfectly, and have continued to get it, and it's not necessary to keep reiterating that one has grasped a tiny technical point which amounts to "hey, kids, you can right click and copy any image!". Duh.

2. Not contributing content is irrelevant. I commission and sell content; i have tenants with content. Content is king in SL. I don't identify with all the ideologies and aspirations of the content class, but I can certainly defend the principle of private property and protection of intellectual property rights, which are fundamental to any free economy.

3. I've translated dozens of books. And Second Live reiterates Soviet Russia because it is based on communistic and Bolshevik principles, too.

4. You can't ask a proprietor of a site to take down infringing content when there is no regime to publicize permissions intent, and attempt to control exploitation – which is what the permissions give us. Having the Lindens response faster isn't the only solution, it cannot scale, and it is not sufficient.

On Thu, Jun 12, 2008 at 12:04 AM, Prokofy Neva (JIRA) wrote:
> Cenji, this idea that the technical issue of "copying" that has to happen for you to see it is something that enables you to be free of all discussion of copyright is for the birds.

How on earth did get that interpretation out of what I actually wrote?

> If you're going to go down that road, you can sue my retina for copying Gucci bags on Fifth Avenue. The point is then do you SELL THEM or distribute them NOT for personal use off your retina.

Right. That's why I mentioned "redistribution" in my post. In the 'cafe with an internet kiosk' example above, suppose I charge 10c/min for use of the kiosk. Then, yes I would be redistributing copyrighted works that I've copied from the web and stored indefinitely, and yes, I am selling them for profit. Telling the judge "it wasn't me, Firefox did it!" would hardly be a defense. I don't see copyright holders issuing DCMA take-downs to every Hilton International for having a pay-for-use web kiosk in their checkin lounge.
So, yes, I do believe that what counts as infringement isn't black&white and that the law has some catching up to do.

> There's nothing grey here unless you wish to be non-compliant and hide behind putative greyness.

Actually, there is. The entire legal system is built on the erroneous assumption that a description of human behaviours is amenable do being written (i.e. written language to describe which behaviours are acceptable and which aren't). Well, surprise, the evolution of language in living organisms wasn't so accommodating. Words may be black&white insofar as something is either labeled with some word or not, but the interpretation of words is highly context sensitive across a range of time scales (ranging over second-to-second changes in your sensory environment to the long historical context in which you've been embedded). It is simply a logical impossibility for two living (or artificial) systems to interpret signs in exactly the same way (or even for one to do it repeatedly). Thankfully, statistically, it can be arranged to be sufficiently close for some particular purpose - which is what allows language to work at all. Unfortunately, language evolved to be spoken and hence is highly redundant and omits what is available in the sensory context of being spoken. When it is read the context of the reader has usually changed more significantly from that of the writer than when someone just speaks to you. The upshot of that is that written natural language is a poor choice for conveying meaning. The legal system, being one based on written natural language, is a testament to just how powerful the statistical correlations can be made with much effort, but it is still far from some perfect edifice by which every question can be answered in black&white (something which, of course, is impossible - but my point is that we can do much better).
The case where the writers and the readers are separated by decades and moderate changes in the context of application of the laws makes the situation even worse. It all comes down to what probabilistic deviations of interpretation you're willing to accept as "close enough".

> This idea that all the browsers are copyright infringers [...]

If you thought I suggested that at all, you're reading much more than what I've written (making my above case for me in the process )

I think we've gotten a little far afield here.
All interesting discussion, but I think I've probably over-stepped the reasonable use of JIRA already

-Cenji.

DRM equals companies like Sony putting software on your computer that loads when you reboot it and slows down your system because it's monitoring every program you open to make sure you aren't able to copy a new Ashlee Simpson cd.

It equals software that hackers have utilized to break in and compromise systems exactly because it works in the background.

It equals resource escalation and time and ultimately makes it worse and worse for legitimate people who AREN'T stealing content because the ones who are can always get around it.

As far as LL is concerned it will be lost focus and lost developer time because they are chasing after hackers who are always one step ahead. New things will not be fixed. Stability will cease to be.

I don't really want to have to deal with that because I bought an avatar in SL.

• transfer of assets to another grid.

• transfer of assets to clients that are viewing another grid.

Rezzing objects (including attachments) involves transferring assets to another grid.

Displaying textures (including clothes and skins), animations, shapes, and sounds involves transferring assets to a client application.

The client application does not transfer these assets to the other grid. The only transfer to the other grid that may occur is a baked texture for the avatar, and the implementation of that could potentially be changed to keep even the baked texture on the original grid.

So a human avatar with Linden hair and no attachments COULD be used on another grid without violating the TOS, because the assets would still be accessed through the original service.

Firstly the issue that it isn't particularly clear in SL whether you are buying the ownership of a digital object or a license to use a software component- whilst a license makes much more sense, much of the SL material talks of buying objects (and the UI refers to owners etc.) - so an argument that you believed you were buying the object outright, and therefore expected the rights of ownership (which would include transfer between platforms) would be a coherent case if taken to court. This is essentially a similar argument to the one Bragg used against LL over ownership of virtual property. However, since that case was settled out of court means that there is no legal precedence either for or against this argument.

However, let us assume that it was accepted that you only buy a license to use a software component. How enforceable usage restrictions in EULAs are, is still a mute and contentious issue (http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/EULA#Enforceability). Remember that as well as protecting content creators, copyright law also gives content uses certain rights - in the EU there is the concept of fair use; in the UK, copyright law permits making a copy for backup purposes. An EULA which retricts using the content to particular platform arguable violates fair use. An analogous case might be that of Apple's EULA for OS X which prohibits installation on non-Apple hardware, which is being challenged by Psystar.

What is interesting in the Apple v Psystar case, is that Apple is not taking Psystar to court for violating the EULA, but is taking Psystar to court for bypassing the software which prevents OS X running on non-Apple hardware. The is part of the problem with DRM and the anti-copy protection parts of DCMA - it allows someone to enforce restrictions by technology which they have no legal right to enforce, and can even prevent via technology a content owner doing things they are permitted to do (or even have a right to do) under law.

To be honest the legal enforceability of the current permissions can be challenged - being able to transfer an object from an old account to a new account (provided it is deleted from the old account) could easily be argued to be fair use, even if the object concerned was no transfer. In the UK, as mentioned, making a backup copy is a legally enshrined right, so using a copybot to make a (single) copy of a no-copy object for backup purposes only is not only legal but depriving someone from being able to make such a backup copy is illegal! (and remember that if such a copy was stored on the local computer, this action would be taking place within UK jurisdiction).

Joshua is making the tired argument that every faction in SL makes about every other faction it doesn't like: oh, that can't be done, because it would use up the Lindens' time and resources they need for something else. Yet the Lindens have shown themselves to be like the Cat in the Hat, balancing many plates and cups and spoons simultaneously.

War factions are always using the argument that the Lindens "can't engage in an arms race" with griefers, either, and yet...they do. They do keep one step ahead because they aren't here to prove maximalist and extremist points and cases serving abstractions, they are, despite their failings, here to serve customers in a broader concept merely than having software coding concepts proved technically true. It's a balance.

Interesting that you throw up words like "war" and "factions" in your description of people who disagree with you. Shows how you approach a discussion.

1) alternate grids won't have any popularity because people do want their "stuff" to be available and all this nonsense about alternate grids will have been nothing but a waste of time and effort
2) tools to export/import content across grid will be commonplace and you'll have missed the boat on controlling anything at all

I don't own the music when I buy a CD, I pay for a license to it, but that still doesn't keep me from converting it to an MP3 to use on my puter or any other portable music device. This includes CDs that were released long before MP3 even existed.

I may not own the skin I bought, I'm perfectly fine with that, but I did buy a license to use it on my avie and I don't see why ripping it in SL and reuploading it to another grid with no intention on redistribution or resale is any violation of fair use of what I paid to use.

Try to balance things as carefully as you can now to strike a balance between creators and consumers (making things available to trusted grids only seems like a perfectly acceptable solution to me) and as long as it's usable, most people will simply live by it.

If you don't, the risk is that people will do what you're trying to prevent en masse anyway and any copying tool will result in full permission items which will result in far more widespread infringment than what you tried to prevent from happening in the first place.

Once again, you are making the erroneous analogies to CDs and other paid-for electronic software or music for personal use, or "fair use" and not getting the point here, like others before you: it's about redistributing and reselling. And it's perfectly normal and done everywhere on the Internet for companies to curb copying for that purpose, to punish it, to litigate against it. And that's fine.

There's no inherent right to rip a skin contained in your purchase of that skin. You are able to wear it within the viewer of SL because it was made for that world – it was not made to be ported to other worlds. I find it an utterly fake claim that personal use also has to entail compromising intellectual property. It doesn't. Regimes can be made; permissions can be set.

As for the idea that if you don't let everything be openly copied for this fake "personal use" which you imagine will be obeyed, there will be "copying tools" – that's silly. Just because there is a threat of infringement doesn't mean you roll over and do nothing about it.

Thus why the issue of trust cannot lay with LL alone. There must be oversight and governance.

So at minimum I think anyone operating an open grid that will connect to SL at all must be trusted and must at minimum be bonded for $1,000,000 (minimum) and must fully incorporated, etc etc. There must be accountability. The bond ensures judgments will be paid in the event of lawsuits, etc.

We need lawyers on this. This effort has exceeded the bounds of technologist's qualifications to proceed.

That is what creators are concerned about. I don't know anyone making content that wants some unaccountable alias somewhere on the planet opening up a vacuum cleaner on SL and then popping back into SL on 5,000 alts selling scripted objects that were stolen. (And yes scripts need to work across grids if this is to be a success) So this all needs to be worked out from a legal and liability standpoint. first. And forward thinking creators know what the exponential increase in possible customers means so we are not all going to take a Luddite position. We just want this done right from the start.

Kitty.. You purchased a license to render the skin in Secondlife only. Sorry thats how the situation is at the moment. The bytes are licensed for display inside the Secondlife Service. Violate this and you revoke your right to have an account in Secondlife. And the skin creator has the right to sue you for whatever such a lawsuit would result in.

Yet another misnomer.

https://wiki.secondlife.com/wiki/PJIRA#Caveats

"The Second Life Community Standards apply to all areas of Second Life, including the Second Life Public Issue Tracker. Any Resident who disregards these guidelines may be banned from future use of the issue tracker.

Examples of specific behavior or actions which may result in removal from the Issue Tracker:

• Using the Issue Tracker to promote your business, cause, blog, website or anything not directly related to the issue at hand.

• Flaming - The act of posting a message that is intended to incite anger or directly attack a person or persons is called "Flaming" and it not appropriate for the Issue Tracker. Please keep to the facts of the issue at hand. Posts that disregard this may be deleted.

• Private Discussions - Blogging your personal opinions or off-topic rants. Pjira is about finding solutions to issues. We love productive feedback. Please stick to the technical details of the matter at hand.

• Editing Wars - Repeated changes to a resolution, priority or classification of an issue within Pjira.

You are each responsible for you own posts - regardless of how or what someone else posts. Keep all posts to the issue at hand. Personal attacks or inappropriate posting with result in banning.

We let clients log into an opensim region, using the proposed OGP agent domain based login protocol. In particular, the current aditi (beta grid) implementation of the agent domain, and a specific, modified opensim. Aditi called the opensim region with the name, uuid, and desired location for the avatar. No password was passed. (the opensim is trusting that Aditi has validated the user) The avatars, showed up as Ruth, as no shape, textures or assets moved. It doesn't count as a teleport, or anything like deep connection between the grids. In short, no assets or avatars were harmed in the execution of this code.

Let me then add some comments, about the rest of the topic:

As several people have pointed out, there are a bunch of parts associated with moving stuff around. The point at which the asset issues begin to emerge would be when you actually started to move assets. What would that mean? Well, roughly, the opensim would have to make a call to some service run by Linden Lab which would actually serve up the bits which represent the asset. This service doesn't exist today. All of the assets in Second Life live on servers inside the linden firewall, which are reachable only by Linden's servers. Content gets sent to clients via region servers, in the form of the stream of data which feeds the client. Adding a service which offered up access to this content is clearly within the scope of the interop work being discussed.

What this thread, is, quite reasonably asking, is what sort of permissions ought to apply to such a service, and somewhat implicitly, how should access to such a service should be managed. In short, if we are going to allow regions to fetch assets from other regions, and offer them for display to client connected to those regions, what would be the proper technical way to mark and the rights of the asset creators and owners, and what would be good technical ways of expressing these rights and managing them. Tied in with this, would be what would be good legal models for dealing with possible violations of those rights.

I don't work for Linden, so clearly I can't speak for them. But, I can observe that, just as there is a Terms of Service which governs accessing the servers with a client, most likely, one would want a Terms of Service which would be required before accessing assets. Such Terms of Service, as Ann Otoole points out, are legal documents, and one suspects lawyers will be involved in the crafting of any such documents. Just as an account could be revoked for a violation of the TOS, so could a grid connection.

Finally, personally (and I am not a lawyer I chose to study recursion, not tort in university) I think that Joshua, Ann, and Prok, have it about right. Most of the current content creators have offered their content for use within the Second Life service. Nobody has an inherent claim on that content in any other context. As Ann also points out, many content creators, are interested having the option to offer their content more broadly because they see bigger markets, more customers, and potentially more gain from this. I think this is exactly right. Providing ways for content to be marked for use in broader contexts, making sure those marking are tied to technical and legal mechanisms which allow for reasonable chances of managing copyright violations, is exactly what is needed.

~ Zha Ewry

[x] Creation Grid [Second Life Grid] only

and blog about this issue and develop some new policies as fast as possible. My suggestion is that LL indicate that they will turn a blind eye to peole who have explicitly received permission (should be a no modify notecard) from the original content creators to move any given specific asset off of SL, but commit to honoring the current TOS otherwise. And that also to explicitly spell out the details of what they plan on doing with assets via automatic permissions control as the grid interop becomes reality.

I'll post a link to the new jira when I get it up.

"Decentralization is not an absolute; one of the ways freedoms are ensured is by centralized federalism"

is fighting words to state rights advocates, yeah. US fought a civil war over it, and the rifts aren't healed. I personally believe in a balance. Just enough centralisation, and no more. Highly centralised states fail. The Soviet Union crashed and burned. I know people personally who survived the Nazis and later the Communists in Europe - no need to try to explain it to me.

The Fatal Conceit: The Errors of Socialism - read the book Hayek won a Nobel Prize for his work. Liberal thinkers have done more than ANYbody to fight the fundamental problems within socialist thought. Liberalism is the basic fabric from which economic thought in the USA is woven. The USA has separation of powers > theory of yet again another Liberal thinker, Charles Secondat de Montesquieu. It is not a centralised structure, it is a DEcentralised federal structure.

Don't spout off thinly veiled socialist crap at me then claim those speaking in Liberal terms are a commie/nazi/whathaveyou. I'd appreciate it

The role of the state is fundamental to stop the undue use of force in democratic societies. To put it simply "your rights end where someone else's rights begin". That's the primary function of the state to preserve freedom - the freedom of individual action. The federal system in the US is not a terribly centralised structure, it is a balance between the central government and the rights of the states, a very uneasy balance at times. The checks and balances are there to protect us from abuse of state power. Read Montesquieu, because its his theory on which the USA system is based.

A highly centralised SL has already failed too. Memories are short apparantly to all the grid outages of 2006, when we had a much more centralised grid. As the grid has been decentralised, it has allowed for more people to be concurrently logged in with far more stability now. As it continues to be decentralised, it will lead to a more robust SL, both technically and economically - large numbers of people concurrently online is good for the economy.

We ignore the work of Kurt Goedel at our peril. No one person can have perfect knowledge about a complex system such as Second Life, actions in complex systems have unexpected consequences. All too often, engineers and social planners believe they have perfect knowledge and can plan economies perfectly from a centralisation perspective. It results in food shortages like in Venezuela right now, where they are swimming in oil money and yet few ways to put food on the store shelves.

How does this relate to SL and this JIRA? Very simple - by removing the freedom of action for people to make choices over their private property, we are taking away their freedom of action, and meddling with the right of the individuals to decide the free flow of goods between grids. We have to find a balance between the rights of the consumer and the rights of the creators. Partially that will be a social solution, and partially a technical solution. So yes, I support this Jira. Yes I support preserving the intent of creators through the permissions system. Yes I support additional licenses for creators to choose from and the ability to restrict or enable various content for different grids, depending on their personal knowledge of what works best for the situation at hand - something none of us should assume the right to do for them, as that is abridging their freedom of action.

We're not that far apart really, but it would help to end it with the silly leftist remarks, because I am not a leftist and never have been. I am a liberal in the true sense of the word - my economic idols are liberal thinkers, through and through. Hayek, Bastiat, Smith, Jefferson, Madison, Montesquieu, Gassendi etc. Seen as dangerously to the left of the ultraconservatives, and dangerously to the right of the libertarian left Classical liberals exist though, and we're not going away We are the stuff of which the USA was founded upon - its liberal fundamental principles which keep the USA free and are the basis of Constitutional thought, don't ever forget it.

We're talking past each other, Prokofy. American history is as much my love as Soviet history appears to be yours. Maybe we're in two different worlds.

If I understand the documents of the AWG right, one of the aims is to formalise the conditions under which assets can leave a grid and to provide a flexible framework that allows a content creator to specify his/her wishes more exact than currently is the case. Not having this flag takes away that possibility and forces the people interested in inter-grid operability to work under more difficult legal conditions.

Nowhere on this page I have seen a coherent alternative suggestions. "Don't do this, its dangerous for our economy " is not good enough. In cases were the dangers were made explicit, wrong assumptions were made about the conditions under which assets would be transferred and/or the objections were geared towards steps that are still in the future and not a direct consequence of this proposal.
Nowhere it was made clear how we would be worse off having this flag compared to not having it.

In summary the proposal gets my vote, because it clarifies the current situation and allows me to specify my wishes. Those who believe all this is premature and far to dangerous to be touched, can simply leave the flag alone and work on generating a meaningful discussion about what route we should take instead.

What's truly awful about what you're saying is falsely picking up the theme that content creators "will be interested in other markets" when in fact they have not indicated that. It might be a reasonable assumption, but if they knew the risks, if they knew the issues, they might much rather prefer to tie their permissions to one platform provider rather than risk cross-platform "market access". It's a fake carrot being handed out to somehow disguise the stick of theft lurking everywhere, to make it seem like the right-thinking savvy cyber-kool kids will "get it" that they should scramble to markets all over the Metaverse and "have a different business model" and just basically look at all units of all creations as "loss leaders" and "freebies" that they will then "customize" or "provide services for" etc. along the lines of the copyleftist generative nonsense.

So it's merely rewarmed Lessigism and Creative Commons dreck to be suggesting this, when you have not nailed down the permissions – it's luring people into dropping their really legitimate concerns about the loss of their IP, by holding out the chimera of mass markets. One of the things that coders don't get about the way the markets work in SL is that they are social markets. People buy dresses because they know the dress-maker, or they associate the product with an event or a person or a place.

And BTW, if you put me in a sentence with Joshua Nightshade and claim "we are all right," you may be playing
"conciliatory" politics, but it's false, as there is nothing I agree with Nightshade about, and that's clear from this thread.

It's fake to say there is a growing interoperable Metaverse, too. There isn't. Uh, where is it? The overwhelming majority of worlds with the overwhelming majority of populations are walled gardens with proprietary codes. There is no objective public demand or majority game/world/platform developer demand for "interop" – it's a concoction of LL and IBM and their hangers-on.

No wrong assumptions have been made whatsoever. Because no explicit recognition of the need to preserve permissions and figure out how to port permissions have shown up in the design documents. It's like the initial Linden/AWG take on currency, which is "guess we won't have that in other worlds, too hard" – now Zero is doubling back and saying, oh, they might have it if they can get other people to accept its use.

>We ignore the work of Kurt Goedel at our peril.

I guess I'll continue to live dangerously, then.

<don't ever forget it.

or else!

LOL

Let me take this opportunity to express my deep regret that Zha's big leap didn't do anything to stop global warming or help starving refugees in Darfur, either. I'm disappointed.

Here's Gabriel Graves on the forums:

http://forums.secondlife.com/showpost.php?p=2027459&postcount=24

"Just so that it is clear in everyone's minds, NO LL written source code was incorporated in to the OpenSIM programs. The only source code published by LL was the viewer code. You cannot create an OpenSIM just by taking source code from the viewer.

What the OpenSIM people did was reverse engineer (examine) the messages that the sim and viewer talk using, look at the viewer source code to help them understand how SL works internally, use published (by LL) technical specifications (blueprints) and use their own knowledge of how SL works from a user perspective to create the OpenSIM code.

The SIM source code in OpenSIM is not even written in the same computer language as LL SIM code and LL never published their SIM code.

There has been a lot of misinformation written about OpenSims and so I felt I should clarify a little."

Saijanai, the proposer for this JIRA, had this to say in Zero's office hour (transcript here:
http://secondthoughts.typepad.com/second_thoughts/2008/06/touching-assets.html)

Lazarus Longstaff: OpenSim is not a reverse-engineering of SL. That is FUD.
...
Johan Laurasia: open sim hasnt reverse engineered SL
...
Dyne Talamasca: Not that reverse engineering is really a dirty word.
...
Saijanai Kuhn: OPenSim is based on libsl, which IS reverse engineered.

Uh, while "reverse engineering" may not be a "dirty word," it is a violation of the current TOS 4.2

"You may not charge any third party for using the Linden Software to access and/or use the Service, and you may not modify, adapt, reverse engineer (except as otherwise permitted by applicable law), decompile or attempt to discover the source code of the Linden Software, or create any derivative works of the Linden Software or the Service, or otherwise use the Linden Software except as expressly provided in this Agreement. You may not copy or distribute any of the written materials associated with the Service. Notwithstanding the foregoing, you may copy the Viewer that Linden Lab provides to you, for backup purposes and may give copies of the Viewer to others free of charge. Further, you may use and modify the source code for the Viewer as permitted by any open source license agreement under which Linden Lab distributes such Viewer source code."

Of course, there is a history in SL of the undermining of this concept:
http://www.secondlifeherald.com/slh/2006/12/no_criticism_pl.html

>What's truly awful about what you're saying is falsely picking up the theme that content creators "will be interested in other markets" when in fact they have not indicated that. It might be a reasonable assumption, but if they knew the risks, if they knew the issues, they might much rather prefer to tie their permissions to one platform provider rather than risk cross-platform "market access". It's a fake carrot being handed out to somehow disguise the stick of theft lurking everywhere
Why shouldn't they have the chance to decide for themselves? There is no fake carrot, theft exists now and will continue to exist whether or not grid interop and asset transfer happens or not.

>It's fake to say there is a growing interoperable Metaverse, too. There isn't. Uh, where is it? The overwhelming majority of worlds with the overwhelming majority of populations are walled gardens with proprietary codes. There is no objective public demand or majority game/world/platform developer demand for "interop" – it's a concoction of LL and IBM and their hangers-on.
And you know this how? http://opensimulator.org/wiki/Grid_List and http://www.yosims.com/ list quite a lot of grids

>No wrong assumptions have been made whatsoever. Because no explicit recognition of the need to preserve permissions and figure out how to port permissions have shown up in the design documents.
They weren't meant to, that what this JIRA is for

The question for me is whether that part of the TOS is legally enforceable or is a contract of adhesion, which would be thrown out if ever challenged in a court (and we've already seen in Bragg v LL that a court can overrule parts of a TOS).

The legally enshried right in the UK to make a backup copy is an example where that clause can be challenged - if LL tried to enforce that claus against anyone in the UK exporting content from SL for the purposes of making a backup, LL would be breaking UK law (which if challenged in court could lead to LL either having to change its TOS, offer the service within the UK on a different TOS to elsewhere or withdraw from offering the service within the UK).

Whether someone has a legal right under fair use to use an asset bought in the LL grid in an alternative grid, is ultimately something which has to be decided in court. If that right exists then no amount of TOS or EULA terms will overrule that right.

This of course, does not give anyone the right to sell pirated copies on any grid!

An analogy can be drawn with the Apple iTunes service - there you have the ability to buy third party content from an Apple platform. Apple strove to restrict the use of that content to the Apple platform only - prohibiting exporting that content to other platforms (again similar arguments can be made that a non-Apple device might including the ability to pirate content - hence the need to keep iTunes a closed platform).

However, within the EU, the legality not only of that closed platform but also of the use of DRM to enforce that closed platform was challenged - http://www.ft.com/cms/s/2/1fc40360-abe9-11db-a0ed-0000779e2340.html

For me the issue is less about preventing assets from being moved from the LL grid to thirdparty grids, but providing some level of protection once they get there!

Reverse engineering for the purposes of interoperability is permitted under many jurisdictions.

Moreover - given that the open source license for the viewer is quite liberal, the clause - "Further, you may use and modify the source code for the Viewer as permitted by any open source license agreement under which Linden Lab distributes such Viewer source code" effectively undermines the "you may not modify, adapt,reverse engineer, etc." clause.

Interoperability isn't an excuse; interoperability wasn't even a goal or a possibility in past years and is only just now becoming an issue.

OpenSim did not begin its reverse-engineering for "interoperability's sake" but for operability's sake – let's be clear on that.

The current TOS makes very explicit and clear that the restriction on reverse-engineering isn't related to the viewer; the exceptions for the viewer are not to be understood as applicable to anything but the viewer.

My point about the social market is not that the market is exclusively social, but that it is a major factor, especially for start-ups, and transplantation of these products isn't a sure thing. A small subset of coders shop like most people shop, and you know who you are. One reason weapons and gadget makers put so much stake on word-of-mouth is that they believe "viral" advertising through people networking and making connections is the most valid form of sale. But they are a small subset of merchants, too. Most people shop first through search/places and search/all and then through picks and word of mouth spread their find further.

>Why shouldn't they have the chance to decide for themselves? There is no fake carrot, theft exists now and will continue to exist whether or not grid interop and asset transfer happens or not.

They didn't get that chance, as nothing has appeared on the official blog, nothing is even in the forums, and the design document and wiki and office meetings did not deal with this until frankly some of us pushed it hard.

>And you know this how? http://opensimulator.org/wiki/Grid_List and http://www.yosims.com/ list quite a lot of grids

And I know this because...I can read news in the industry? Citing opensimulator and its offspring is hardly an argumentation for saying there is now some sort of huge demand for interop throughout the Metaverse. It's a range from A to B, of a small circle, a few thousand users perhaps? And not all of them are explicitly calling for interop, though no doubt some simply want to port all their SL stuff over to opensim.

>They weren't meant to, that what this JIRA is for

Oh, that's ridiculous. Every single other facet of life after open source is discussed --currency? space sims? etc. etc. This is conspicuous by its absence. You don't just graft on an entire integral facet of an economy as an add on in a bug or feature request on the JIRA!

But thanks for confirming what I suspected – that there is nothing in the design documents about preserving the engine of the economy, the essence of Second Life, the permissions system, respecting intellectual property, which makes SL different than any platform.

Thanks for agreeing that it was left out – which is a stark and telling thing all itself.

It has been regarded as ethical to reverse engineer for "the purpose of learning the underlying technology" - and (at least until the DMCA muddied the waters), the courts tended to take this line too. There's a good overview at http://www.webmilhouse.com/files/reverse_eng_paper_final.pdf. The bottom line tends to be intent - if the people reverse-engineering Second Life were not doing so at that time with the intent to launch a direct competitor to SL then they were likely to be "as permitted within applicable law".

"In Bragg v. Linden, a court did no such thing, AFAIK. ... The matter of the unconscionability didn't apply to all aspects of the TOS, either, as far as I recall."

I didn't say it did apply to all aspects of the TOS - I said that a court can overrule parts of the TOS. In the case of Bragg v Linden, the judge overruled section 7.2 of the TOS ("You and Linden Lab agree to submit to the exclusive jurisdiction and venue of the courts located in the City and County of San Francisco, California, except as provided in Subsection 7.3 below regarding optional arbitration"), by insisting that the case was heard in the Pennsylvania courts where Bragg filed the original complaint (and rejecting the request from LL for the case to be heard in California).

The ruling on the unconscionability of the arbitration clauses in the TOS can be found at http://taterunino.net/robreno-may-30.pdf in Section III. It is a lengthy document - the key sentence is near the bottom of page 42 ("Finding that the arbitration clause is procedurally and substantively unconscionable, the Court will refuse to enforce
it")

OpenSim isn't "based" on libSL, it incorporates it, much as it incorporates server packet information from the realXtend server among others to be compatible.

Neither Saijanai nor Gabriel Graves are listed as OpenSim developers/contributors, which you can read here and took me all of three seconds to google

http://opensimulator.org/wiki/Development_Team

so I don't see what Saijanai saying about it matters. However, Lazarus Longstaff, who IS listed as a developer/contributor, does say (you quote) "Lazarus Longstaff: OpenSim is not a reverse-engineering of SL. That is FUD."

This insistence on pushing the wrong information over and over, coupled with your insinuations of illegal activity now, is so juvenile. OpenSim is not a reverse-engineering of SL. End of discussion.

I would say you should spend a bit more time doing research before you posted something but I know if you did that you'd never be able to compile these epic diatribes.

This has been talked about at office meetings I have attended since interop was first mentioned. I am assuming they will get their chance, IMO it is too earlier for blog announcements.

>Basically, with Zero Linden's design document described here http://wiki.secondlife.com/wiki/SLGOGP_Draft_1
>Every single other facet of life after open source is discussed --currency? space sims? etc. etc. This is conspicuous by its absence.
So when you say design document I assume you are referring to this document, but you must be talking about others since this document does not have things like currency within it's scope.
>But thanks for confirming what I suspected – that there is nothing in the design documents about preserving the engine of the economy, the essence of Second Life, the permissions system, respecting intellectual property, which makes SL different than any platform.
I never said or implied any of that, but as has been pointed out by Cenji:
"b) The SLGOGP doesn't include the sharing of assets within its scope. That simply means that nothing has been proposed yet, not that permissions will be ignored or that someone has decided that all 'full perm' assets will be allowed to be transferred to other grids."

Currency issues are in the same wiki; the entire wiki is not one that is concerned about permissions, or the value of the economy; quite the opposite.

If previous office hours talked about permissions, it was in the pro forma, glancing way that it has at times on SL DEV, merely to say "oh, that's hard" or "oh, that's sensitive and ordinary people have to be brought along about that due to FUD" etc. etc. It has never had serious treatment.

The SLGOGP does not include sharing of assets and permissions – full stop. Until there is more concern about this, given the track record of this group and particularly some of its members who have celebrated copyleftism and Copybotism, including the original maker and seller of Copybot who was invited to the Lab for the first group meetings, we have to assume that "full perm assets" is the default and the goal until very explicit announcements are made.

I'd tend to believe what Saijanai, a very active member of AWG, and Gabriel Graves, who I don't know, are saying about this, particularly because they are not specifically core developers of OpenSim, precisely because they are less likely to be biased, and I'd hardly believe Joshua Nightshade. Second Life is all about reputation – even without any technical reputation system. Your trail of behaviour, forums postings, comments inworld actions over the years form your reputation. I don't agree with much of what Saijanai says, but over time, seeing him at meetings, I don't see that he would make a deliberate falsehood about something this basic. Everybody knows you can sniff packets on this game, and they are sniffed.

I've actually spent a lot of time reading OpenSim stuff on its own website and around the Internet and I can see two points over and over again: a) its developers being thin-skinned about allegations of reverse-engineering; b) its developers not caring about the implications of reverse-engineering or saying that reverse-engineering isn't even an offense (we can see that again here in this thread) c) others less emotional about it saying matter-of-factly that of course it's reverse-engineering. Seems to me that this is a very controversial issue that probably developers disagree about, and quoting knowledgeable people on it is hardly "spreading disinformation".

Gosh, I love the idea that you can get off the hook for the offense of reverse-engineering by raising the flag of "learning" (I''ve heard that one before, certain designers say that when they rip skins, too) and also claiming that "at the time' you didn't intend to profit – so it's ok then later to take the reverse-engineered code and then profit?!

>>>
Perhaps the easiest way to solve that issue would be to simply disallow connection to the asset cluster(s) unless the permissions system on the requesting sim were of the same or compatible type with an acceptable hash?

Or, perhaps since the grid is apparently opening (heh... there are a couple of people lurking here I mentioned this to months ago... vindication in the face of disbelief ROX!!), there could be a way to implement a shared, distributed asset system with its own enforced checks and balances? Yeah, I know this would require the database rewrite from hell, and fast as all get-out, but I would ask "is it not worth it?" In this way, if the target grid shares the asset system at all, it shares the same one, in multiple, redundant copies, distributed so that there never again be a single point of failure? A P2P database that forces the server to respond with a correct hash of the server binary with the requested UUID? I'm thinking out loud at this point.. P2P database design is not in my sphere of expertise, but it seems to me that a single asset system that forces honesty on its own would be the major way to go to enforce compatibility between databases. There is only one database, and others aren't permitted to connect...
>>>

And.. who's this "we" certain people are referring to? I installed a stand-alone OpenSim server on my laptop and connected to it. One of the first things I noticed was the fact that none of my assets, created by me or not, were available. It was as if I'd lost my identity. I didn't like it.

Face it, it's going global. Other grids will interop with the LL main grids. It's going to happen. Now, we can either whine and complain like babies "oh, my content! my IP!!!" _or we can nip this in the bud now, allow people to be themselves, and implement something that will allow inter-grid motion of assets with the proper IP rights continuing to apply.

I'm not a complainer, I'm a fixer. I've made content, too. I script. I do not want everyone in the world seeing the high-dollar scripts I've made unless they've paid me in full for my trust. The scripts are cheap; it's the trust that costs. Now, we can either do something similar to the above or find another solution, but essentially, the more you try to control something the less control you'll have over it. OpenSim is here to stay. LL has been planning to open the server code for nigh on 2 years now, and we were all warned.

I am suggesting the P2P distributed system above. If anyone else has a different idea, I'm all ears, but the political/legal rambling and rhetoric gets NOTHING DONE. I want to hear technical solutions.

Edit: >>>
I am also now wondering what went on behind closed doors when Cory Linden left.

0 - the default: don't send this object (or texture, script, shape, etc) to any other grid.
1- not the default, set only if the creator sets it that way: allow this object to be sent to any SL-connected grid that supports the perms set on the object.

This lets people who trust LL's judgement on which grids to connect to to delegate the issue to them, and requires the minimum amount of supporting infrastructure. And by including "that supports the perms set on the object", we can accommodate connecting to grids that have incompatible permission systems (like for instance none at all); even if SL were to connect to such a grid, no object would be sent there unless the creator explicitly authorized off-grid sending by checking the box, AND the object had permissions compatible with the destination grid (so for instance for a grid with no DRM at all only full-perm off-grid-enabled objects would be able to go there, since everything on that grid is effectively full-perm). And if there were some other different VW that supported the idea of no-copy but not no-transfer (sorry, "soulbound" hee hee), then no-copy objects with the off-grid-allowed bit set could go there, but no-transfer ones couldn't.

Plausible?

You're right, it has absolutely no bearing on this discussion, as well as being false, it's just another one of her petty attack vectors she utilizes when she can't discuss a subject or issue and must reduce things to juvenile components to disregard.

Linden Lab has not been explicit on the policies it arrived at, private or public, regarding reverse-engineering. Some people go to the cornfield; some don't. The pattern isn't an obvious one. The public has a right to know about this. It's very, very material to this topic because it shows how both LL and its partners and future grid connectors will behave to the considerable volume of intellectual property on its servers. To pretend it's a legal issue that can't be discussed technically, or a technical issue that can't be discussed legally (the usual circular logic in these discussions) avoids the problem of intent and reputation. If the very first grid that Zha Ewry of IBM jumps to is one that has reverse engineered, in whole or in part, the server code of the grid from which she jumped, then we have to ask: how about our permissions, especially when neither grid has explicitly contained anything in code or in policy to address these matters.

GC Continental, in grasping the nettles here, lets us know what is involved: a) stopping all further transfers, ior at least not blessing them as this first jump by Zha was blessed b) rewriting code in a hurry, and bunches of it. And I don't doubt that the devs and the groupies will say, "Oh but that would be to go against Progress, Science, and the American Way and Stop Learning, Creativity, and Innovation and Contribute to Global Warming". So anyone who then says, hey, what about our permissions, why are you defaulting to full-perming them will be shushed in the name of Progress, told they are FUDed, told they are impeding the opening of new markets, told they have "got it all wrong," and if they keep persisting in caring about intellectual property, booted and banned.

I wonder if we can trust LL's judgement about what grids to connect to, given everything we know about the track record up until now.

And really if you don't think LL is capable or trustworthy enough to make that call why are you even in SL?

>The SLGOGP does not include sharing of assets and permissions – full stop.
The Agent Domain/Region Domain structure was proposed as a way to reduce load on the simulators long before interop and AWG, it happens to fit well with interop so was the easy choice to pursue. So far the SLGOPG only deals with logging into an agent and region domain. It may later include sharing of assets and permissions, currency, communications, etc. or maybe additional documents will be drafted for those protocols.

>Until there is more concern about this, given the track record of this group and particularly some of its members who have celebrated copyleftism and Copybotism, including the original maker and seller of Copybot who was invited to the Lab for the first group meetings, we have to assume that "full perm assets" is the default and the goal until very explicit announcements are made.
Why do we have to assume this? I myself assume the opposite, that LL would want to protect the content creators rights in SL and therefore the default would be no assets leave the grid until the legal ramifications are addressed and the permissions system being debated here is ironed out.

If you check the reference I gave, you will find case law when that was a succesful defence.

"or saying that reverse-engineering isn't even an offense"

It isn't. I'm in the UK, and hence under the various international copyright treaties my use of the software is governed by UK Copyright law - so I'll discuss whether reverse-engineering is an offense within that context (i.e. whether I could have legally worked on the libsl project)

(1) It is not an infringement of copyright for a lawful user of a copy of a computer program expressed in a low level language—
(a) to convert it into a version expressed in a higher level language, or
(b) incidentally in the course of so converting the program, to copy it,
(that is, to "decompile" it), provided that the conditions in subsection (2) are met.

(2) The conditions are that—
(a) it is necessary to decompile the program to obtain the information necessary to create an independent program which can be operated with the program decompiled or with another program ("the permitted objective"); and
(b) the information so obtained is not used for any purpose other than the permitted objective.

If we consider libsl - clearly the "permitted objective" was to decompile the SL Viewer to create an independent program (in this case an opensource library) to be operated with another program (in this case the SL Servers)

The clause in the SL TOS about reverse engineering (as well as any clause in any EULA) is, I'm afraid, irrelevant in the UK since the UK law states:

(4) Where an act is permitted under this section, it is irrelevant whether or not there exists any term or condition in an agreement which purports to prohibit or restrict the act (such terms being, by virtue of section 296A, void

However, there are some exemptions to the above, namely

(3) In particular, the conditions in subsection (2) are not met if the lawful user—
(a) has readily available to him the information necessary to achieve the permitted objective;
(b) does not confine the decompiling to such acts as are necessary to achieve the permitted objective;
(c) supplies the information obtained by the decompiling to any person to whom it is not necessary to supply it in order to achieve the permitted objective; or
(d) uses the information to create a program which is substantially similar in its expression to the program decompiled or to do any act restricted by copyright.

So (a) would apply if LL fully documented their protocols.
(b) would prevent the libsl team from reverse engineering say the GUI components of SL - which I don't think they did
(c) is borderline, since being opensource, libsl would be providing information to anyone interested - on the other hand that would also be the permitted objective. Provided that the libsl code/documentation did not contain any direct quotes of decompiled code, libsl would probably be ok here.

(d) is the most interesting one, and basically provides a level of ip protection. In particular if we take the example of "I've heard that one before, certain designers say that [i.e. raise the flag of learning] when they rip skins, too", the act of ripping a skin may not in itself be an offence, unless they then subsequently use the information so gained to develop a substantially similar skin.

"also claiming that "at the time' you didn't intend to profit – so it's ok then later to take the reverse-engineered code and then profit?!"

I didn't say anything about "profit" - I said "intent to launch a direct competitor to SL". Basically, in the terms of the UK law, provided that libsl did not intend to create something "substantially similar in its expression to the program decompiled" i.e. the SL Viewer, it would be perfectly legal. As the intent of libsl was not to create something a substantially similar viewer but to allow the creation of other software to interact with the SL servers.

Had LL not opensourced the viewer code, any use of libsl to create a viewer substantially similar to the LL viewer would have violated (d) and hence been illegal - it is likely that the same would have applied to OpenSim. The legality of alternative viewers and OpenSim derives from the opensourcing the client code. My understanding is that work on OpenSim only started after the open sourcing of the client code due to the (continued) delay between LL announcing that they would also open source the server, and actually doing so.

1. I see no Lindens coming forward and saying anything here or in SL DEV or on their blog in the past, or now, affirming the spin you seem to take on their intent: "It may later include sharing of assets and permissions, currency, communications, etc. or maybe additional documents will be drafted for those protocols."

"May"? Why leave that for later? Why didn't they start with it?

2. Mathew, I see you are very adapt at Internet lawyering to try to cover yourself from charges of reverse engineering, which you don't think is wrong anyway – but I'd really like to hear an interpretation of UK law not from someone justifying reverse engineering in the abstract, but from someone prosecuting it in real life. I really, really find it specious and unpersuasive that libsl gets to tinker with the code on a reverse-engineering basis as a sandbox exercise, then throw up a sandbox defense later, when they are all on OpenSim and positioning themselves to in fact become a real competitor to Linden Lab. I see a lot of thinking in this "legal analysis" that amounts to sophistry, literalism, hair-splitting of the type we saw around Bragg v. Linden.

3. One of the sacred doctrines of open source is that when you make something in it, you open source that. Naturally, this depends on the kind of license, but there's sort of a coders' ethics. And yet in the SL context, this has been hugely violated, to the outcry of coders themselves. Example: the viewer code is open-sourced, but when people who work assiduously making patches for it by the sweat of their brow, they live only to see that their volunteer work is snarfed up by two proprietary companies (LL and ESC) and resold as licenses, or as consulting to outside firms. Lindens have answered this with fine-print in the licensing and basically said, "too bad for you". Eddie Stryker has also followed the same ethos, offering for-sale versions of search, for example, or land bots, out of code that was given freely by volunteers supposedly with the understanding that they would have access. It's one of those really dubious things about the whole open source shtick, that they think nothing of first calling on everybody to be open and open their code and enable everybody to "learn" and "use it for personal use and compiling and interoperability," then they do a 180 degree switcheroo and obfuscate it and make it proprietary code that they sell. There's something hugely disturbing about that, ethically, whatever its proponents say about "that's the way it is done".

4. Your understanding that Lindens first made the viewer source code open, and first announced their intent to open-source the server code ventually, THEN the libsl and OpenSim people began work is erroneous.

Libsl began reverse-engineering long, long before LL either made the viewer source code or announced its intention to open source. In fact, they pushed LL towards those events. Long ago, in 2006, on my blog in fact, Eddie Stryker bragged about libsl's work, and gave a link to a website with an insecure certificate.

Don't forget that Adam Zaius was a long-time member of libsl, but left after it was repeatedly pointed out to him that there were severe ethical issues involved in libsl.

Libsl came on the scene in 2006 and among the first things that happened is that loads of W-hats, 4-channers, and b-tards joined the group, which was open to join, and actively participated in code hacking. Among the very first things they achieved were: a) god-mode stalking, which mean they could stalk any avatar regardless of whether that avatar had checked himself off as visible or not or was friended, so it was often used for griefing; b) megaprims, which were often used to completely engulf mainland sims and grief; and c) Copybot, which was notoriously made and sold to entirely disrupt the economy and spread fear and panic.

The extraordinary memory hole in SL where people forget all this, or never heard about it, never ceases to amaze me, but understanding this history is absolutely essential to studying the level of ethics and intent in the open-source movement in SL. One of the things that the late Jesse Malthus was unable to accomplish, when he grasped its importance, was to persuade Eddie Stryker and Baba Yamamoto to remove the griefers from their group. Eventually, these griefers were banned because enormous amounts of documentation of their griefing with reverse-engineering and sim-crashing and obscenity and the like was presented and checked by LL.

1. I do not think anyone from LL's legal department will ever see this discussion so discussing the legal context here is almost pointless as LL has isolated legal discussion to contacting the legal people as per the instructions in the TOS.

2. The polite reminder that SL's TOS/CS apply here seem to have been missed by some folks.

3. Gigs Taggert made a change to the issue title in a manner I think may be covered in point 2 above, The person that created this feature request may wish to address this update action accordingly.

4. Microsoft is coming to the effort.

>"May"? Why leave that for later? Why didn't they start with it?
If you cannot login into the agent and region domains, everything else is moot, so obviously this has to be the first step.

Yes, Microsoft is all over this now, chatting with Adam Zaius on Facebook, and getting ready to "swarm" its people in.

So the intents and thoughts and plans of the little people now are pretty irrelevant, but it was good that Saijanai tried, and good if he keeps on trying even in the face of a windstorm of open sourcing and hacking, which, once again, we see is a kind of ruse, whereby giant corporations convince little companies and their enthusiastic volunteers to make their code available to them.

Why can't content permissions be part of the regime for the log-on?

2) I don't think that reverse engineering is wrong since the UK Copright Act clearly gives me the right to do so under certain conditions regardless of any contrary conditions in any TOS. I've already given you the decompilation section which you can confirm for yourself (section 50B from http://www.ipo.gov.uk/cdpact1988.pdf). There is also Section 50BA which would cover observing, studying and testing the the network protocol used by SL - the following is a direct quote:

50BA Observing, studying and testing of computer programs

(1) It is not an infringement of copyright for a lawful user of a copy of a
computer program to observe, study or test the functioning of the program
in order to determine the ideas and principles which underlie any element
of the program if he does so while performing any of the acts of loading,
displaying, running, transmitting or storing the program which he is entitled
to do.

(2) Where an act is permitted under this section, it is irrelevant whether or not
there exists any term or condition in an agreement which purports to
prohibit or restrict the act (such terms being, by virtue of section 296A,
void).

Again you can download the act itself from http://www.ipo.gov.uk/cdpact1988.pdf and read this in black and white. Paragraph 2 clearly states that the TOS clause preventing reverse engineering is void in this context. You may also consult various textbooks on the subject which will confirm the above - http://www.amazon.co.uk/Introduction-Information-Technology-David-Bainbridge/dp/1405846666/ is an excellent resource.

3) The dual licensing model that LL uses is very common amongst commercial companies which adopt GPL as a license. I have contributions in the SL Viewer, and before LL would incorporate my patches, I had to physically sign and fax to LL a 2 page dual ownership agreement to those patches. The agreement can be found at http://secondlifegrid.net.s3.amazonaws.com/docs/SLVcontribution_agmt.pdf . I refer you to paragraph 3 in that document which states:

"You hereby grant to Linden Lab, and to any party who receives Your Contribution, a perpetual, irrevocable, non-exclusive, worldwide, no-charge, royalty-free, license under any patents owned by or licensable byYou at any time without payment to third parties, to make, have made, use, sell, offer to sell, import and otherwisetransfer Your Contribution in whole or in part, alone or in combination with or included in any product, work ormaterials arising out of the SL Viewer Project, and to sublicense the foregoing rights to third parties throughmultiple tiers of sublicensees or other licensing mechanisms at Linden Lab's option."

This is hardly fine print in the contribution agreement - there are only 6 paragraphs, and it seems quite clear that by signing this document I was allowing LL to resale my contributions. I did take advice before signing the contirbution agreement, and had I not been happy with this situation, I could simply have not signed, and LL would not have included my patches. No third party patch will have been included in the SL code without this contribution agreement being signed. If you are prepared to sign and fax a 2 page legal document of this nature without either reading it or seeking independent advice, you must expect nasty surprises!

4) Please read what I write before making statements of this kind - I did not say that libsl and OpenSim work began after LL opensourced the client - I said that work on OpenSim began after they opensourced the client - i.e. the timeline was libsl development began; LL opensourced the client; OpenSim development began.

You could, but it is not needed to just logon, and if things go wrong when testing logon then you have to consider if content permissions is a factor.

"2. The polite reminder that SL's TOS/CS apply here seem to have been missed by some folks."

No, I've not missed it, I've questioned whether it is legally enforceable.

The issue turns on the question:

If I purchase an asset, or a license to use an asset, on the SL platform, does Copyright Fair Use give me the consumer rights to transfer that asset to a different platform?

If the answer is no - then we are in the situation that this proposal assumes, namely that transfering an asset to a different grid requires explicit permission of the creator.

If the answer, however, is yes - then those rights overrule anything that is said in the TOS, anything that is said in the CS, anything that is said in any creater EULA, any features that LL may implement in the SL code, anything that is said in jira or on a blog etc.

So this whole discussion, what actions LL may or not take in linking other grids etc. all hinge on the answer to this question.

Now, I suspect most people know what they would like the answer to be; many will be able to speculate what the answer could be; some will be able to give persuasive or emotive arguments as to what the answer should be; a few will be able to cite similar case law suggesting what the answer would be - a lawyer on the other hand would not actually answer the question but advise how to limit liability irrespective of the answer.

However, until there is an explicit judgement made on such a case in court, there is no definitive answer to this question!

Again, no user-created content was transferred in this first demonstration. It was just demonstrating the bare bones of the login protocol, which does not yet contain any provision for transferring user-generated content of any kind. The discussion that we're having right now is about how best to make sure that if and when that feature is eventually added it's done in such a way that the transfer properly respects the intent of the content creators and owners.

The proposed change (the most minimalist one I clarified above) merely makes this issue clear. As I've noted, the flag doesn't say ANYTHING about private negotiations with content creators, it only makes clear what is implicit in the current SL TOS because said TOS never mentions other grids in the first place and therefore you can assume nothing about the creator's intent concerning other grids.

For all we know, he/she wants it for sale on the Second LIfe Grid and wants it given away for free on OpenSim, but you can't be sure so therefore, you can't assume anything at all. The proposed UI change is a way of clarifying the already existing situation: permissions settings apply to "Creation Grid Only [Second Life Grid]" until the content creator can be consulted for a permissions change. There is currently no way for the content creator to make such a change via the Second LIfe system, so anyone who wants to copy assets to another grid needs to talk directly to the relevant content creator and get their permission that way.

I'll be raising the issue with the GTeam at tomorrow's meeting, if anyone is interested.

Mathew, you fail to see that libsecondlife and OpenSim overlap with the exact same people.

Some of these folks 'observed tested and studied' with an aim to grief and cause havoc, and then later some of them set up a competitor.

I know all about the dual licensing arrangement because I just referenced it in my comment, duh, merely not using that term. And that's what I find troublesome, ethically, as do others, including coders, and that's why I added, "and yet some will counter "that's the way it's done".

I read what you wrote, duh, and I corrected it, because evidently, you didn't read what I wrote or know the history:

Re; "work on OpenSim began after they opensourced the client - i.e. the timeline was libsl development began; LL opensourced the client; OpenSim development began."

Number one, some devs had access by NDA to the viewer long before it was open-sourced. They overlapped with libsl.

Number two, you can Google to find that Central Grid began claims of its simulation of SL before LL made its announcement.

Remember, This is a US company and British or Iranian law is irrelevant in general. An example you may understand is there will be no gambling online in the USA. Sorry it is that simple. The US laws apply here and any discussion about some other country's laws is totally irrelevant.

Although I would certainly love to see this topic under debate in the United Nations General Assembly I am certain they have bigger fish to fry.

And as I said earlier, this discussion about legalities here is pretty moot. If you have a legal concern your avenue for resolution is spelled out in the TOS along with the LL Legal Department contact methods. LL's technical people are highly unlikely to be getting involved in a legal debate.

Here's the blog from Phoenix Linden that announced the opening of the client code, "Embracing the Inevitable". Some resident devs already had it by then.
http://blog.secondlife.com/2007/01/08/embracing-the-inevitable/

Here's press coverage of LL's announcement of their intent to open the server code, too, in April 2007.
http://www.informationweek.com/blog/main/archives/2007/04/linden_lab_to_o.html
I think my remarks in April 2007 were more than relevant!
http://www.3pointd.com/20070328/platforms-and-technologies-panel-at-vw07/#comment-150940

For all your talk about "trusted grids," here's what Joe Miller, Linden Lab's VP for platform technology, said at the time:

" "We'll be open-sourcing the back end so sims can run anywhere on any machine whether trusted by us or not. We'll be using open protocols. SL cannot truly succeed as long as one company controls the Grid.""

So the plan for protecting IP is...where again?

• For all your talk about "trusted grids," here's what Joe Miller, Linden Lab's VP for platform technology, said at the time:

• " "We'll be open-sourcing the back end so sims can run anywhere on any machine whether trusted by us or not. We'll be using open protocols. SL cannot truly succeed as long as one company controls the Grid.""

There's a difference between allowing the software to be used by any and everyone and allowing content explicitly created in SL to be given out to any and everyone.

OpenSim provides software for free on their site. If someone took that software and used it to start up a child porn grid, is that OpenSim's fault or responsibility? No.

Similarly LL saying they will provide the server platform to anyone is different entirely from saying that content in SL will be freely available at LL's discretion to any other grid.

However if they open source the server the same way that they've open sourced the viewer I think most people won't really bother with it or the licensing demands they attach to it.

Copyright law can trump the TOS - under UK Law for example (section 50) I have the right to create a backup copy of software, the right to decompile software (given various conditions are met), and the right to observe, study and test any aspect of the operation of software. Each of those rights include the following clause:

"Where an act is permitted under this section, it is irrelevant whether or not there exists any term or condition in an agreement which purports to prohibit or restrict the act (such terms being, by virtue of section 296A,
void)."

e.g. if I bought some shrink wrapped software which included in its TOS or EULA that I was not permitted to make a copy even for backup purposes - UK law would declare that part of the TOS null and void.

On the other hand, UK Copyright does give me the right to copy and adapt software but only if it "is not prohibited under any term or condition of an agreement regulating the circumstances in which his use is lawful" (section 50C) - i.e. this right can be trumped by the TOS.

OK, so I should have qualified this in my comment - i.e. whether copyrigh and fair use gives me a statutory right under fair use to transfer assets which trumps the TOS.

Did I get anything wrong there? I realize there may be some really important, uh, bugs squashed that have to do with really burning issues like, oh, where my avatar's foot shadows fall at 3 pm under Windlight customized to Coastal. But...other than that, what's the net benefit?

The Nicholaz situation alone would have brought about big improvements if they had done more than stick an adjective on a zip file of the viewer source code.

Hopefully if they open source the server they'll have learned from that mistake.

When people's content is made with this software, then open-sourcing that software, especially if it shows up sans permissions when deployed elsewhere, really becomes a major issue.

"But you are incorrect if you feel a license to use a service does not apply.
LL does not even need a reason to deny your access to their service and that is entirely legal in the USA."

The TOS is not incontestable - Bragg v Linden demonstrates that - although Braggs main complaint was settled out of court, LL tried to insist that the case was arbitrated in California as agreed in the TOS. "Finding that the arbitration clause [of the TOS] is procedurally and substantively unconscionable, the Court will refuse to enforce it" (http://taterunino.net/robreno-may-30.pdf in Section III)

As such, if a US Court ruled that a consumer had a non-overridable right to transfer an item purchased on one platform to another platform, it could declare any clauses in the TOS to the contrary null and void.

"This is a US company and British or Iranian law is irrelevant in general" - this is where it gets complicated. Given that the servers are in the US, by gambling in SL, it can be argued that I am committing an offense in the US hence the gambling ban; it is certainly the case that by gambling in SL, I am causing LL to commit an offense in the US! However, by offering a service to people resident in UK, the contract between myself and LL to use that service is undertaken under UK consumer law (which has the disadvantage that LL have to charge us VAT at UK rates) - even if the actual use of the service is governed by US law - and clauses in the TOS which are null and void in UK law cannot be applied. This is why if you look at the TOS on sites such as Apple iTunes, they actually have different TOS for all countries to which they offer their service!

That isn't to say that LL can't terminate my account for violating such clauses - but if they did, I could take then to court in the UK under UK consumer/contract laws. LL would undoubtedly insist the case was heard in a Californian court, but it is likely that request would be denied by the UK court on a similar basis to the denial in the Bragg v Linden case.

This is all hypothetical due to horrendous costs of mounting such a case against LL.

Anyway, the point I wanted to make is that the question of whether you have a legal right to transfer purchases between platforms which trumps the TOS is one which can be debated, but not definitively answered until a court judgement on the matter is explcitly made.

But I think you're jumping the gun and attributing malice when there hasn't been really any statements from LL to that effect.

I think their willingness to set up interop protocols and have the AWG meetings shows an attempt to address the legitimate concerns of content creators in SL, a group which I belong to as well.

It just isn't going to happen and there are a number of people here attempting to argue law that are so far out of their league it isn't even amusing.

You are not going to transmit content without a license unless you want to suffer the legal costs to defend and lose. I cannot say it anymore bluntly than that. And LL is not that dumb.

I could, however, if I felt like it, recreate that character visually in OpenSim or SL with varying levels of difficulty tied more to my skill at content creation than anything else. But again it would be simply for visuals since you can't really cast level 8 Curse of Agony in OpenSim or SL.

I think more the analogy you're reaching for is using the same login portal for both WoW and EQII and OpenSim and SL, and yes, that is something that WoW is very much interested in heading already.

There is also already talks about being able to port currency from WoW to Tabula Rasa or Guild Wars, as well as items, etc etc etc, so this isn't a foreign concept even if it's rudimentary and theoretical.

I'm not talking about cases where you do not have a license. I'm talking about cases where you have a license to use the content, but the license attempts to restrict what platforms you can use that content on.

You will find a number of cases where platform restrictions in a license to use content (e.g. software, music etc.) have been challenged in court - sometimes successfully, sometimes unsuccessfully.

I've no idea which way a decision might go in the case of virtual world content - as such as a content consumer, it would be unwise of me to assume that it is safe to export content between grid without an explicit agreement to do so; however as a content creator, it would be foolish of me to assume that the TOS or EULA would give me any legal recompense against anyone who transfered content they had purchased from me between grids without my permission.

There are many ways to get to a ubiquitous grid and preserve IP rights and critical branding.

Matthew, re: "The ruling on the unconscionability of the arbitration clauses in the TOS can be found at http://taterunino.net/robreno-may-30.pdf in Section III. It is a lengthy document - the key sentence is near the bottom of page 42 ("Finding that the arbitration clause is procedurally and substantively unconscionable, the Court will refuse to enforce
it")"

If coding proceeded with logic like this reading of law, it would be a mess. This statement refers only to the narrow issue of where/how you arbitrate". What is unconscionable is not the entire TOS or any specific element of it, like its prescriptions against reverse engineering, as you seem to imagine. What is merely unconscionable is this matter of *arbitration only. And no accident that the minute Bragg was settled, Linden re-did the arbitration clauses of their TOS, go and look and what they are now – they'd likely preserve themselves from a claim of "unconscionable" regarding that narrow matter. That judge, again is not making a 'ruling" as there is no decision in this case – Tateru Nino isn't a U.S. lawyer, isn't any kind of lawyer, and isn't someone to be reading as an authority on this case. If there was a finding, it would have dealt narrowly with the question of how to abitrate, not on the content of the rest of the TOS. Of course, once a TOS is challenged, perhaps that opens the door to further undermining of its various strictures, but, that's not the final say on the matter.

Here's the message from the lawyers at this year's VW08 workshops, however, for all you legal beagles playing "IANAL" Internet lawyers: when TOS or EULA are declared unconscionable, they never prevail on appeal. They don't win on appeal when challenged! So you really have to look at precedent and actual cases to understand how applicable this law, and this "finding" in a kind of rhetorical precedent really means (it's not a legal precedent as there is no judicial ruling – the parties settled).

gives Joshua a cookie for fighting the good fight

Indeed, I was the one who inserted SECOND LIFE AS WE KNOW IT into the "use cases" because simple things like "let's have a geographically contiguous world, shall we?" were being forsaken for having window-like portals everywhere like Croquet.

As has been stated over and over again, a separate group needs to be formed, in which the interests of the economy outside the narrow base of coders can be reflected and debated, without the constant harrying and bullying of coders telling creators and land developers that they have to give up permissions, go to open source, open markets, and make new business models, blah blah blah. It's not about somehow being ignorant, or FUD'd and not accepting "technical realities." it's about power and representation and being denied a voice. I'm tired of sitting in meetings where teenage script kiddies devise ways to practice social Darwinism and scorched-earth anarcho-capitalism not on themselves, but on me, a 52-year-old adult who pays more tier in a month than these kids frankly ever see in their allowance in a year. And I'm a small business, and not making a RL living, and don't represent creators – this is just to give you a taste of the incredible short shrift that this entire exercise has given to everybody else in SL not in the magic circle with the coders.

I'm tired of these people talking about "thecommunity" – by which they mean the 200 people who decide everything about Second Life, and yet don't pay most of the tier of Second Life. It's really that simple.

I'll start as a feature proposal the idea of forming another group when I can think of a good name for it. THIS AWG CANNOT be entrusted with these matters, due to its technical agenda preoccupied with other concerns, due to the reputations of some involved, and so on.

hands Strife a packet of saccharine, a stick of butter, and a bottle of oil to replenish his supply

And once again, the point of it is to address legitimate concerns raised by content creators. "Full stop" as you're fond of saying.

If you feel that the scope of the project is losing focus, perhaps you should attend some of the meetings and raise your concerns patiently instead of all caps and with myriad conjoined two-cent phrases du jour.

This needs to be there in your face when you buy, Just as no mod/no copy etc is, then buyer can choose NOT to buy content that does not suit their intended use.

All for this if implemented in a transparent way.

• I feel this is very important. Also just as important is for buyers to be able to see where they can take something they buy in SL. They might buy intending to take it to 'XYZgrid' and find they can't.

• This needs to be there in your face when you buy, Just as no mod/no copy etc is, then buyer can choose NOT to buy content that does not suit their intended use.

I totally agree. I expect as this goes on you'll see shops advertising themselves as "This content available on all trusted grids" or "Take stuff you buy here out of SL!" etc etc.

I would put my content for sale and advertise as "Take stuff you buy here out of SL!". Willing to put 'my money where my mouth is'.