Pavig Lok

Content ownership is the most difficult question I've had to deal with working as a professional designer in SL (and opensim). The fuzzy logic of LL's concept of ownership, and the tools they make available (let alone the tools they tacitly endorse) create an ethical and legal minefield.

Arguably LL never needs to deal with the complexities they have created as they blur the boundaries between licensing and ownership of IP. For content creators however this has always been a vexed problem. The confusion between implicit rights built into the permissions system and explicit rights one may write into informal licenses is confusing and messy.

For a long time I worked as the "authorised agent" of Arcadia Asylum, a popular freebie maker in SL. (I even have the notecards to prove it :) Mis Arcadia's licensing requirements were very simple: basically her stuff was full perms for free and could be used for anything (including creating new products which could be sold).... she just said it couldn't be sold as is. It should always be available in it's original form for free.

Here's where natural justice and moral rights come in. Many folk would argue: "I have a right to sell this freebie because i put it into a box, which makes it a new product." Now technically - perhaps legally - that may be true, but morally we feel that doesn't constitute "creating something new". Our sense of natural justice views such an act as: "putting an object in a box" and the nature and ownership of the object - thus any rights over the objects use - are undiminished.

There are of course legal precedents which effect these rights. The right of first sale for instance - that means if you get something you can sell it or give it away. The right to copy however is a different thing. First sale doesn't allow you to, for instance, produce unlimited copies of the item you bought and sell them protected by the first sale doctrine.

Due to the messy situation in regards to legal rights over content that LL has allowed to continue, even LL is unsure of the rights of an object. When I have asked LL for their position on an object (such as Arcadias) which is full permissions, but includes a notecard saying: "You may not sell this unmodified, and you may not remove this notecard that says what you just read here" their response has been non-commital.

Usually LL will refer to the perms as a statement of intent - which really doesn't wash legally. I work for a company which commissions lots of work "full perms" (or sourcecode delivered) yet sets terms on redistribution - we pay a premium for anything we might "own" and be allowed to redistribute. That's part of the contract.

Within the SL system however we are still in a situation where that granular control of rights is neither implicit nor explicit. It's not even catered for.

Arcadia's content is a case in point. In the real world removal of the license (which says "don't remove me") would be considered circumvention and a criminal act. In SL removal of that license is trivial and implicitly condoned by interpretation of intent by the floppy definitions implied by the permissions sytem (ie full perms means do what thou will.) LL predictably won't touch such things with a ten foot pole.

Unfortunately this lack of clarity makes a mess from all directions. Both Arcadia - a stoutly opensource "socialist", and Stroker Serpentine - perhaps a textbook SL capitalist.... in fact all those who have some investment in their intellectual property and how it is used... no matter which side they're on, they're all disadvantaged by LL's sloppy definitions of IP.

Understandably LL doesn't want to be sued. Even so I think they could do more to facilitate allowing better definition of who owns what. If anything it would indemnify them - as subsequent IP squabbles would be between the interested parties rather than between each party and LL.

But what would I know.... Just my two cents... Pav.

I think it would help if the Lindens kept us updated with a solid roadmap document (that they also followed themselves.) As Tateru has noted previously, we hate surprises. A solid roadmap helps us prepare for the future.

We're also worried about stagnation - good html on a prim for example we've been waiting on for two and a half years since the first tech demos and now we have an alpha of webkit on a prim via the alpha plugin architecture, still a long way from complete. If they have a roadmap they need to stick to it... tighter than they have previously.

The SL community certainly needs to back off and let the lindens extend the platform and service, but they certainly need to support us in feeling confident in their plan. Just my two cents as always.

I think there's plenty of things wrong with the walled garden approach, though it suits some. Those it doesn't suit leave and set up their gardens elsewhere, as you notice Rezzable has done. Many bigger companies however: Intel, Microsoft, IBM are running opensim so that they can extend the platform. I mention these three as they all started in SL and are now running projects producing collaboration tools and scientific visualization systems using the opensim platform.

Having a plugin architecture allows SL to encompass a far wider group of use cases. We may see these alternative uses of virtual worlds bringing more of these folk into SL now that they know they can extend it. ScienceSim for example, a developing set of tools for "collaborative visualization, education, training and scientific discovery" shows great potential for integrating research and education into SL like environments. At the moment it lives outside of SL as the system is too closed to allow such collaboration. Plugins may change that.

I understand the dangers of messing with the status quo on the grid, but having a system too closed stifles innovation. In SL at the moment land ownership and throwing parties works great - education, science, research and real world commerce not so much. Croquet, OpenSim, project Wonderland etc are stealing folk away cause they can go to those other platforms and pull up a whiteboard to discuss stuff (like you'd do in the real world). Such plugins could reduce this exodus.

On the other side, running plugins is optional. If people start extending your SL experience with plugins you don't like just don't install them. We always have the option to ignore things we don't like :)

This is fantastic news. Let's hope the api allows enough hooks to allow greater frameworks to be built around it. There's also a danger in such things which we'll see down the track - slot machine plugin anyone? - but a fine start. Like anything the Lindens might imagine allowing on the grid, giving it enough power to enable great use cases gives it the power to enable ill. I'm excited by this and also very interested to see how it plays out.

If folk you meet online can evoke such animus and enmity, then why not love? :P

I don't think the article actually connects this educator with the symposium in anything apart from a poetic sense. Nor does it comment on the symposium itself... It's a think piece.

I must say though that emphaticaly yes, you can blame that teacher for the poor learning outcomes in that situation. The politics of any hardcore zealouts in so can not be blamed for bad practice. These people are expected to know what they're doing - that's their job after all. They are expected to perform in real world institutions where the politics make even SL politics look meek.

I'd go as far as to say that teachers probably don't need to be cleverer than their best students, but that as learning facilitators they need to follow due process. You are always one step ahead of your students because you have researched the material the week before... not minites

Reports I've heard are that it does the job it is intended to do. (...which means if you buy it you probably won't be surprised by it not doing the job. A problem several iphone IM apps suffer from.)

One thing to keep in mind is that the current iPhone / iPod Touch OS doesn't allow applications to run in the background, which limits the behaviors available to many of the communications apps on the device, making it clunky to switch in and out of them to do anything apart from pause, play and skip music tracks. This makes IM style programs more clunky than they need to be (as they're the kind of thing one switches in and out of often.)

Extended services (push) in iphone OS 3.0 due later this year should generate an increased number of services of this type, but anything as slick as what's on your pc may take a while longer.

Well when you can claim to have invented the idea of a "marketing company" http://www.patentlyo.com/patent/2007/11/ferguson-challe.html or even patent patent trolling http://www.patentlyo.com/patent/2008/11/junk-patents.html there's something seriously wrong. Unfortunately these things don't get laughed out of court.

It is unsurprising that their other new hire is ex McKinsey and Co. as all their announcements lately have very much followed the McKinsey public communications strategy, that the key message is more important than the confusing tin tacks detail. Oh well. At least they're practicing some sort of corporate communications management - hopefully it'll evolve.

When we looked at a bunch of companies that offered five nines service what it really meant was: "we have failover and we warn you before we drop service." So what it really meant was 99.999% of the time we'll tell you before we fail or recover from failure, or your money back. In terms of real drop proof fail proof service the best any could do was about 95% uptime - but they always tried to sneak their maintenance downtime into sunday witching hour blocks.

The truth is business doesn't usually understand precisely what they need. If they did, we'd be using more of these "also-ran" technologies because they're fit for purpose, rather than basing technology decisions on incomplete information which has been shaped by marketers.