Dear Lindens, No, Don't Listen to the Communist Shill, Please

Bettina Tizzy is trying to get all her friends in the closed country-club Not Possible In Real Life as well as use high-visibility fora like Metanomics to flog an absolutely AWFUL idea: putting Creative Commons licenses in the Second Life viewer.

As I tried to post on her site: I totally oppose this idea as it encourages distribution of content for free, not payment of content creators and not protection of copyright laws in a context where copyright theft is rampant.

Creative Commons is a ruse -- a pretense of caring about copyright that actually merely weans creators from the idea that they should *charge for* their work. It makes the Internet an endless freebies barn, and only encourages the communist idea that everything should be for free, and people should work for free "for the good of the community".

You don't have to have a Creative Commons license to share something in Second Life; you just check off "copy" and "transfer" - a permissions system that was already ostensibly inspired by Lawrence Lessig -- although he is merely creating a vast subterfuge that is trying to undermine copyright and private property, in fact (and he's now left Creative Commons).

Proof of the lack of usefulness of the CC license for real people really trying to make a living (versus subsidized troupes of content makers subsidized by corporations) is that inworld, on Democracy Island, the CC license maker has virtually no users. It's just NOT needed.

If someone has a burning need to participate in this fraud, they can go on the Internet or have a web page or mark it on their product without having to hijack the entire Second Life economy into this communistic shill.

Leave the permissions system alone; get LL to close off exploits and devise the needed ways to obfuscate textures, and stop contributing to the thuggish opensource criminality with this sort of thing.

Again, try to understand what is inherently wrong with Creative Commons.

It doesn't start from the premise: "How can I protect intellectual property rights and make sure that people pay me for my content?"

There isn't a single license in that Creative Commons deck that says "Use after you pay me using PayPal at this account". If it did THAT, we could celebrate it.

But it's no accident, comrade, that it DOES NOT do that. Instead, it pretends that what people are dying to do is merely get credit for their work, but give it away. To inspire "mashups" and re-uses for non-profit purposes -- but not get paid.

People try to pretend that all the extra visibility they can from these supposed mash-ups and non-profit use add to their income. This vast subterfuge is trying to succeed everywhere this discussion is had, even on the New York Times Circuits page.

There isn't any peer-reviewed, independent assessed, double-binded scientific study proving this. No serious criticism of CC ever seems to get off the ground, as whenever somebody tries to criticize it, legions of copyleftists descend like bats out of hell trying to grind the person into the ground.

Lessig of course has walked away from all this, leaving it -- why are we not surprised?! -- to another Jedi Master of the Internet, Joi Ito. Sigh.

As I said, the purpose of their communistic shill is to wean people from ever wanting to be paid for content, and force them -- frog-march them, even -- to find "other business models".

Like, oh, stock options from old electronics companies they once sold, or their parents' money, or a government or foundation grant, or book royalties or whatever it is they can siphon off the wealth of the ages that does not involve themselves actually working, making a product, and selling it for a price.

It's fine if some people live that way; indeed, they must. But an entire world, online or offline, cannot be constructed with only the communist/oligarchic business model. The free enterprise model still works pretty well to feed a lot of people, and it's unlikely to be destroyed any time soon. That model rests on private property and intellectual property; in SL it does indeed rest on real estate and the IP of creators, as much as some people would like to deny one or both of those pillars.

The image I swiped from Lessig's site mislabels it as "Lessig as Stalin" in a tongue-in-cheek pretending that people who label him as leftist are all wrong because...uh..he once clerked for a right-wing judge and that sanitizes him for life of ever having his views called "socialist" ROFL.

But in fact it's Molotov in the picture. Molotov was a true Stalinist, who had a very, very long run, and was only partly "repressed" but later partly "rehabilitated". The desert and drought he said he'd conquer only got worse with Soviet misrule.

And drought is exactly what you will see if you allow the Internet, or Second Life, a small part of the Internet, to be run on Soviet principles of communism.

I see Nexeus is now getting into the Clever Zebra type trap now, too, and I can only say: don't quit that day job Nexeus, and stop destroying other people's businesses in SL just to purvey your ideological beliefs.

Test them on yourself first.

Quit your day jobs and consulting contracts and see how long you live in that desert, then blog about it.

Quit making content you get paid for in SL, quit hoping somebody respects your IP, and live off your freebies' tip jar.

I'm hoping to find more good criticism of Creative Commons, which is shilled by Hamlet Linden Au and other FIC types out the wazoo, with little depth of thought about what it means for people's livlihoods.

In fact, even the industry critics don't focus on what I can readily see about CC: that it is trying to wean people from a model where they DO insist on copyright and DO insist on getting paid by only encouraging those who DO NOT wish to get paid but who merely want credit for their work. That's a grave flaw -- but a deliberate one in a system that simply wants to move the entire online economy away from free enterprise and capitalism to communism that they control as oligarchs and advisers to oligarchs.

John Dvorak has a very good column from a view years ago -- I'm going to keep looking for more. There's just no way we can let this dreck into the SL viewer.

Comments

[Eric Rice/Spin Martin]

Second Life *is* a walled garden country club. It's so locked down, it's insane. That said...

The Copyright Office does not provide a service to connect you with a copyright owner so you can work out some arrangement about using creative work. Everything we create is copyright the second it's created, since about 1974.

Creative Commons is just a layer that *I*, the owner of a piece of IP, place WILLINGLY on my work, so no one has to figure out how to find me to ask. I can keep things All Rights Reserved and I can also change bits of that to allow attribution or derivatives and such. *I* make that call.

I post pictures on Flickr under a Creative Commons license, with a specific statement that you can re-use, must attribute, but not use for commercial use. I can challenge this in court.

I also sell work and am paid to create.

The all or nothing approach is getting dated. I'll shoot a bunch of photos and some I'll share and some I'll profit on.

The problem with the argument about the Copy/Mod/Trans options, is that those are Second Life only features, and Creative Commons licenses address something much bigger and broader than that.

If LL is looking to provide a standard way for us to import models from Google's Warehouse or other sources, that license information has to be carried over. A shared model that is deriv-ok must not be allowed to be checked 'no mod'. Perhaps that's why it's being introduced?

It changes little whether or not the viewer has CC licensing or not, because it's not like SL is in any sort of standard format that works with the rest of the world. It's closed, proprietary, and socially DRM'd all by its lonesome.

So yeah, while I fully support Creative Commons, and I fully believe that you can share and get paid, I don't think it will make any difference if its in there or not.

The grid has to *run* better for me to care. 3D Twitter it's not. Wait a sec, bad analogy.

FIC 3.14, over and out.

[Ordinal Malaprop]

"inworld, on Democracy Island, the CC license maker has virtually no users"

This might have more to do with the fact that nobody cares about Democracy Island any more.

Anyway, I like CC licences. They are widely used on "sample" work by all sorts of photographers and others, so that they can make it clear that they are happy to have samples distributed in all sorts of channels, as long as they are attributed/it is not a commercial use/etc. They also do all sorts of paid work which is not under those licences.

Anyone who thinks that everything should be under a CC licence is really not living in the real first or second life, but that isn't the point of them. They are explicit statements of permitted use for certain items of copyrighted material, and as that, useful as a shortcut.

I don't tend to use them for more than blog material, as I prefer the BSD licence (or none) for open scripts and grant an exclusive licence for clients, but their use do not involve abandoning the idea of copyright; they in fact reinforce it, by stating it with appropriate permissions instead of just saying "here, do what you like with this".

[Prokofy Neva]

Eric,

Read John Dvorak's excellent "humbug" piece on this. CC is just a layer over copyright you already have and does not serve you.

A "walled garden" is merely a geek-specific archaic concept that merely means that geeks can't easily steal all the code and content *shrugs*. They can't make all their widgets *shrugs*. So what? It's an open market where everybody ELSE can come in and not have to fight open source tyrants and obscurities and where they can at least in principle protect their IP. That's all a good thing.

If CC makes no difference, why are you being politically correct and being old-school kool-kid and shilling it, Spin? That is SO 1990s.

It's been pointed out in the threads on Bettina's blog that having only CC in the viewer doesn't capture GNU and all the other kinds of licenses. But they are all shills of the same variety. They don't get people paid.

I especially agree with Dvorak's point that CC telling you it gives you permission to put something in the public domain is insane, as public domain is a default in law higher than any socialist clan's effort to spread ideological devices like this on the Internet.

[Cait]

"You don't have to have a Creative Commons license to share something in Second Life; you just check off "copy" and "transfer"."

Exactly! Second Life has this built in already. The only way to improve it is to have a history of creators for multiple modded pieces.

I give almost all my stuff away for free, but I'm not in SL for the money. Creative Commons is great, but should never be mandatory.

Capitalism allows things to be given away. Free does not equal Communism.

[Ann Otoole]

LL isn't going to do anything so retarded as ask for a class action lawsuit like that. Why don't these people, that think they are entitled to everything for free, go to the bank and withdraw all the money in the vaults? At least then they would be sent to live with the rest of the idiot club.

[Melissa Yeuxdoux]

"There isn't any peer-reviewed, independent assessed, double-binded [sic] scientific study proving this."

I thought you didn't like BDSM....

As Mark Twain said to his wife, you know the words, but you don't know the tune.

[Gwyneth Llewelyn]

*pushes RIAA and Disney lawyers aside*

Well, Prok, your article is about 5 years late: http://lindenlab.com/pressroom/releases/03_11_14

To quote: "In addition, Second Life has committed to exploring technologies to make it easy for creators to license their content under Creative Commons licenses."

That's old news, very old news.

If you wish something more recent: http://blog.vivisectingmedia.com/2006/03/creative-commons-salon/

And I quote again: "The reason James was speaking at the Salon was that CC and Second Life are working together to provide the rights and licensing system for the creations by the users. Since the user retains the IP rights to their creations, CC helped design a simple in-game way of licensing the creation as CC, giving other gamers rights to the creation if so desired." ["James" is Hamlet Au]

So every other year or so Linden Lab announces their promise to integrate Creative Commons licensing in SL.

Now, why is this important or useful? Actually, these days, incorporating CC content in SL is very, very hard — legally speaking. Consider the typical example. You get a picture of a texture from a public domain source. That's the easiest case: you just upload it and you don't need to worry about the origin of the picture. You can create derivative works at will; or you can just use the texture in your buildings. No problem at all.

Then we have the other extreme, which is almost as easy: you wish to use a copyrighted image from, say, GettyImages. You pay them the required fee, download the image, get a receipt. Then you can immediately start to use it as a texture. If someone asks you about the source, you show them a receipt. Easy. Sure, it has a cost, but the point is that it's easy: both technically and, more important, legally.

Now let's say you've got a wonderful picture that you've found on Flickr which you'd lke to use. It's licensed under a Creative Commons Attribution license. You can use it, so long as you refer the author. But now you have a problem! How do you refer to the author inside SL? You stamp their name on the texture? Hardly!... Do you contact the author and ask them for permission to use the picture without making an attribution, since that doesn't work in SL anyway? Do you ignore the author and place an obscure notecard inside the object saying that the original texture came from work licensed under CC? Do you create a blog post saying so?

How, exactly, do you legally use a CC-licensed texture?

In my experience, you don't. You can't. There is no legal way to do so. CC was never meant to work that way. And it's not only textures. You can imagine the same thing happening with sounds, animations, or a nice CC-licensed design of a fashionable outfit you found somewhere. It simply doesn't work with SL.

Honest SL creators will thus avoid CC-licensed materials like the plague. They'll stick to copyrighted material (paying the fees) or to public domain material. They're the only ones that are legally safe to use.

What LL is promising to do — since 2003 at least! — is to create a built-in mechanism where you will be able to comply with a licensing scheme beyond the default public domain/fully copyrighted one. It has to be challenging, since we've been waiting for 5 years to see that.

Creative Commons licensing does not mean that everything suddenly becomes free. That's the usual rant of someone who never really read what CC is about. CC allows a more fine-grained licensing scheme in a standard way, that's all. You can use copyrighted material — if you have paid for it — under any terms and agreements that the author has provided you when signing a contract with you. CC basically oversimplifies this process by allowing you to select "pre-created" contract types. It doesn't supersede copyright; it complements and extends it, fitting possible applications in neatly packaged legalese.

I'm not "for" or "against" CC as a matter of principle; there is a space for it. For instance, about half of the content I create is released under an Attribution license. The other half is fully copyrighted. A very small number of content I create is in the public domain, but it's tiny compared to the rest. I haven't felt the urge to create complex notecard-based systems to allow people access to my content in SL under certain restrictions; instead, the usual copyright/public domain rules have served me well. Obviously having CC as an additional option would encourage me and many others to create a more fine-grained release of IP rights to the public, but I won't hold my breat waiting for something announced in early 2003 and still not implemented in SL...

[Prokofy Neva]

I know, they announce it -- and wiser heads prevail, apparently. Good!

Because it's stupid, unnecessary, and is even more misleading than the unsupported permissions system is now.

It is not the way to run a normal economy with a free market.

It's only a way for Marxist professors to pretend their utopian ideals have legs.

It's not "Disney" and "RIAA" merely to wish to engage in normal business practices where people are paid, and protect their IP. That's the normal thing -- the abnormal thing is to expect to give things away and placate people with merely "credit" and "being mashed up".

If I ever use anything from public domain, I write the original author's name on the object description on the object menu. Don't overcomplexify things, Gwyn.

We don't NEED a licensing scheme beyond the default public domain one and the real-life legal protection of copyright. What we need is the support of real-life law, not fake Marxist CC rules interspersed between your rights and the marketplace of people.

The Lindens should make it easier to mark your work, and make it easier to file DMCAs with inworld tutorials and a Linden dedicated to this task, who isn't one of these snotty legal interns they have barking at people now.

Cc is unnecessary, misleading, and destructive. It prevents people from doing what they need to do, which is to get paid for their work with a permissions system.

When you're ready to live by the sword and die by the sword and exist exclusively through CC, give me a shout, Gwyn, until then, it is arm-chair socialism sending other people to work for free while you collect consulting fees telling everyone how wonderful it is.

The biggest ruse coming out of CC is the belief that it "creates a way to share" or "creates more fine-tuned permission". Baloney. If the default is that it is in the public domain unless marked; if "fair use" is the norm, and if you can easily mark on your objects in SL what your intent is and more or less have it stick, CC is a distraction, an interruption, a disruption -- and that's just it, disruption for the sake of disruption isn't new bleeding edge technology, it's crime.

[Eric Rice/Spin Martin]

How is it socialism when I add an extra layer to MY STUFF saying what YOU can do with it?

I appreciate how cute all the communism and socialism talk is, but come on. We're not talking governments, we're talking people having things available to do what they want with their OWN shit for the betterment/good of others.

It's not OUR fault the copyright laws and copyright office is getting old and dusty.

I want to make a nice picture of a cloud and give it away. And from that, it's a Marxist thing.

No. Seriously.

If anything, it's marketing. More people have my stuff for free (if I allow), there's no gov't or corporation TELLING ME or FORCING ME to do it.

The option is there. Use it or not. Big whoop.

[Cocoanut Koala]

That would be all very well and good, Eric, for those who desire their content to be carried over and who don't particularly expect reimbursement.

This looks to me for all the world like what we are supposed to accept as sufficient when (a) we can't check off copy/mod on our objects and (and because) (b) we don't get a choice about what other grids it goes to, or whether they retain those permissions.

"Oh, hey, you can't choose what other grids your stuff goes to, but you get this nifty little thing to say what you HOPE people will do. So see, it's all okay!"

No thanks. If that comes to pass, I doubt I will continue to make content at all.

coco

[Prokofy Neva]

Eric,

Because it's a shill -- and you don't earn a living that way, and unless you are independently wealthy living off stock options, you can't really afford to give away your stuff completely. If you do *some* it's because it's been drilled into you by politically correct memes everywhere that you *should*. And given how you are often an iconoclast and an early one on this stuff, I'm surprised you keep buying this line. It's fake. It is not working. It will die.

If people want to do some thing with their own shit, they do it -- they don't need CC. They write "copy me" or they just put the stuff out and it copies. They can say "use my stuff and credit me" without entering this fake institution that merely shills people and tries to wean them from the idea of SELLING the stuff.

You don't need CC to give the cloud away. The cloud being given away is the default. YOu need some other institution that REALLY cares about getting people paid, and work with that. Somebody should make Common Creatives that enables pepole to be paid and to claim IP and help them do that, and blow this other commie stuff out of the water.

Bill Gates was right to call it "kind of communist" in 2005, and they all howled and whined that they couldn't be compared to tanks in Hungary. Uh, yeah, we get all that. But...you get tanks in Hungary unless you stand up to it when it takes this seemingly benign politically correct form and then spreads into a 3-D world, where it has no business being.

Spin, people have your stuff because they come to your website or podcast or vlogging. That's what's important. Your creation of the content. They don't have it because they can right click and swipe it. Making the content is the value. Community around the content is the value. Copying and distributing is NOT the value. And that's where they go horribly wrong. THey are fetishizing the copying and distributing as if that does doesn't happen NATURALLY and organically when you have people who make content and other people who show up to view it or interact with it.

What's evil about CC is that they ARE WORSE than any government or private corporation as they insert themselvse between you and your product and your audience as if they can give permission for you to copy and distribute your content to your audience. They can't. They should not exist. They are a Marxist superstructure in search of a base.

You know in your heart Creative Commons is a hollow vessel, and yet you cling to it for fear of seeming uncool and not with the program.

[Prokofy Neva]

BTW, Spin, I'd love to get some links to some real examples of real things you made that some one really made derivatives or mashups or whatever other cutesie name someone dreams up for them.

Because that's the other piece of it. The Creative Commons shill says, "Oh, it's ok to copy! We love your! You make mash-ups!" and therefore try to backdate the hacker criminal mind and make it seem like it's fine to hack and copy, as long as the tribal insignia "CC" is hashed on to the process. It really is lame.

Instead of instilling in people that they shouldn't be plagiarizing and copying and making "derivatives" like this, and should create their own work, they instill in people that all their copying can be sanctified by having a CC "license" -- and if someone didn't put that on their work, why, they're to blame, not the hacker. It's sick.

[Eric Rice/Spin Martin]

Coco, then you don't have to check the boxes that allow that, now would you?

[Eric Rice/Spin Martin]

Okay, perhaps the idea of 'opt-in' isn't clear here. You don't have to use it if you want your stuff to be All Rights Reserved. Period.

Heck, if you want to shoot someone, shoot the hippies that want to freely share/give away stuff, instead of just the CC system.

That's like hating Adobe for Flash video, instead of the people they use it.

If wanting to take a bunch of sunset photos and freely put those on the web with stipulations attached, I can do that. And I'll use CC. For other stuff, I'll charge or sell.

Long-ass bread lines and old bearded guys have nothing to do with this.

You sure you ain't Republican? ;) In the wide swath of people who are either freetards or moneytards, it sometimes seems like it always falls along THAT CERTAIN LINE.

Just sayin', Go Obama and all.

[Prokofy Neva]

Instead of wildly flaying and trying to apply labels like "Republican," could you supply me with an example of some actual "mash-up" or thingie using your content that you uh celebrated with CC wonderfulness? Thanks.

[Eric Rice/Spin Martin]

Over a cigarette, I just had a thought. We generally teach our children to share. Why? Probably because it's just a nice thing to do. Maybe because people like you, maybe because it's just a nice human thing to do. And maybe people might mean 'lots' of people.

That's the one thing that has stuck in my mind and, on another note, is the opposite feeling I get when I keep reading about the 'shareholders' of Yahoo re: the Microsoft/Yahoo thing. Yeah great sure it's all money money money, you greedy-ass pigs, but perhaps, it's not the *right* thing to do.

Sharing is a nice thing to do. Making money is nice, too.

Maybe that's the problem, we're just the filthy, whorish Americans all concerned about ourselves (well, have of us anyway), instead of a greater good.

If wanting to share, because it's nice, is somehow bad, well, hell, sign me up. And if a software company decides to work in various check boxes to help facilitate that, hey, cool.

If you hate it so much, then you don't check them. The sky isn't falling.

And of course, Gwen nailed it anyway. Like we're ever gonna SEE it in the SL client anyway.

[Eric Rice/Spin Martin]

Sure, I share photos on Flickr, marked with a license (except a few), and others I sell (not on Flickr). I'll be setting up an istockphoto shop soon.

A couple of long time friends are pro photog, they sell work, are hired to shoot (expensive!) and certain selections are shared as CC on Flickr.

Simple example. (Also, I've used CC photos as textures in SL and I've purchased photos (images) as well, and obey the licensing as stated in either the CC/C scenarios.

[Laetizia Coronet]

Instead of wildly flaying and trying to apply labels like "Republican,"...

Instead of wildly flaying and trying to apply labels like "Communism", could you, Prok, explain how it "it encourages distribution of content for free"?

It does not. It gives the creator a copyright tool (going whichever way you want it) which is valid outside Second Life, unlike the copy/mod/trans system.
It hasn't thing one to do with communism, which would be forcing the whole world to produce freebies.

[l]

Prokofy Neva, you are simply a troll, arguing over nothing for the sake of arguing. You'll most likely find a way to call me a communist because of this post. It probably won't even occur to you how crazy a statement that would be, and how insignificant this whole argument is.

[Dusan Writer]

I find the language a bit distracting - communism and so on, however I've been thinking about this topic for a while now and your post spurred me to finally get a long ramble down to try to articulate this uneasy feeling I've had, namely that there may be merit to thinking through the fact that open source and creative commons are an attempt to craft an uneasy truce with power, and that in this truce there are dangers of their own.

http://dusanwriter.com/?p=686

Lessig set up Creative Commons in response to the monolithic copyright laws which governments kept shoring up in favor of corporations over individual creators. While corporations were able to protect their brands, this created challenges in digital domains, in particular collaborative communities. Taylor pointed out in Play Between Worlds that "if companies want to retain all the privileges of being primary owners of these worlds and insist on retaining narrow formulations on how game space is constituted, do they then have corresponding sets of responsibilities to their user base?"

Because game space is a product, the monolithic copyright protections won by corporations left less room for the development of the cultures arising from game platforms, in other words "player" rights to their contributions to what many started seeing not as game platforms or products but rather community or cultural spaces.

Second Life became the exception to this, giving users broad rights to their creations. But both the Linden response through Mod/Copy/Transfer and later, in the wider world, the application of creative commons in which users were able to author their representations and environments were nonetheless a compromise with the "fact" of existing copyright favoring the platform owner. As Tushnet pointed out:

"When most creative output is controlled by large corporations, freedom to modify and elaborate on existing characters is necessary to preserve a participatory element in popular culture. Copyright's purpose, after all, is to encourage creativity for the public interest, not only to ensure monopoly profits."

And yet copyright law had swung in the direction of monopoly profits. Based on that law, sampling 4 or 5 notes of a song could land you in court - the ability of creators to mash up and modify existing content towards participating in a, well, a creative commons was hindered when the laws defaulted to being either monopolistic or public domain.

CC was created to try to cobble a compromise on a copyright system that was a burden to individual creators and an asset to corporations and those with the assets to enforce intellectual property rights.

So is this bad? I'm not sure. But it's easy to get lost in the details, I think, while losing sense of the larger picture, which is that CC is in fact an attempt to grab back power that was lost, and cobbling together compromises and creating what I call an uneasy truce with the powers that be should probably be done first by recognizing that this is a position of weakness rather than strength.

In Second Life, the powers that be had the foresight to grant rights to content creators. But those rights were GRANTED rather than being rights that were de facto given. The patron platform is still the Lab and we're beholden to it. If the broader legal system recognized the implicit right to mash-up and modify content in order to contribute to a creative commons, and to make choices over how, when and whether we profit from those contributions, then the Lab's granting of IP rights would have been technical rather than legal.

As it stands, we're asking again for the Lab to grant a refinement to what they've granted and the mechanisms for tracking that refinement because as content creators we're still holding the short end of the copyright stick.

Broader powers are tilted towards the protection of copyright for its monetary implications, and the power to enforce that protection is vested in the Lab. In both cases, some content creators feel that this negates their desires to both protect IP and to allow mashing up content towards making contributions to the culture.

Lessig pointed out that "we stand on the edge of an era that demands we make fundamental choices about what life in this space, and therefore life in real space, will be like. These choices will be made; there is no nature here to discover. And when they are made, the values we hold sacred will either influence our choices or be ignored." (1999)

Copyright is not something that's a "truth". It is the embodiment of our values and what we believe the world should look like. The Creative Commons was crafted as a response to what many saw as vesting too much power in the protection of content for its profit motive. This isn't a bad thing, but it doesn't mean that the Creative Commons became the new embodiment of our values.

It's easy, it's there, other people are using it. But it was created in an uneasy truce with monolithic copyright law.

Second Life provides a means to explore other modalities of copyright protection. This should be done in full consideration of where the powers lie, who has the power to enforce, and what values we'd like to see represented in our world. Adopting the Creative Commons is simply a way to come to a truce with the powers that be - a way to try to engage them in protecting our values and to protect our content. That doesn't mean that it's the only way to do this.

I'd like to think that Second Life is a pathfinder. It was the first platform to adopt such a vigorous approach to allowing users control over their creations. Diluting a visionary platform with the Creative Commons simply because its an accommodation that worked within other power structures doesn't mean that we need to adapt it as our own.

Rather, being part of a visionary world, we can instead craft our own code, our own model, and perhaps in the process provide new examples and methodologies that respect the contributions of content creators to the culture.

It would rest on our shoulders, however, to ask the whats and hows: what protections do we want, what values should those protections help to articulate, what balance are we seeking between the protection of the profit motive and the common good, how can this be embedded in the code, what reliance are we willing to place on the enforcement of our rights, how should this reliance combine code and policy, how is this reliance executed by the "powers that be" and what do we do when they fail us?

Rather than simply adopting a system that was an uneasy truce to begin with, we have the opportunity to revisit first principles rather than simply saying "well, this worked somewhere else, it's a cobbled together approach in response to wider powers, but it's the best we've got". It's our world, or so we sometimes believe, and we can be the source of innovation rather than merely the adopters of the innovations of others.

[Prokofy Neva]

"it encourages distribution of content for free"?

Uh, that should be obvious. Because it does. It has no feature in it to encourage content *for pay*. None. None whatsoever. It creates peer pressure and takes away choice like that. Instead, it implies, deceptively, "Everyone will be taking your stuff for free anyway, and who are you to stop them? So let them, but just make sure they credit your name."

It's a terribly insidious proposition and it needs to keep being exposed.

Any system that tells you that distribution "for nonprofit" is the only thing that the system allows is a system that deliberately, consciously, and emphatically encourages distribution of free content, for free. It punishes distribution NOT for free. It DISCOURAGES distribution for PAY.

Dusan, exposure of these ideas as communistic makes people uncomfortable because they'd like to think that their touchy-feely liberal ideas have nothing to do with the GULAG, but in fact, they inexorably lead to the same conclusions and are criminal at root. People need to be paid for their work. Encouraging distribution for free *is* communism. It says that property should be expropriated and collectivized.

It's ESPECIALLY insidious in a virtual world where coders essentially control the levers of power and property.

That's why all your hand-wringing and thumb-sucking about "power" is completely bankrupt because you neglect to look at the real holders and wielders of power in our context.

And even in the record industry, I have to say that this story isn't as cut and dry as you would think reading the Rolling Stones about the Eagles. The star-making machine does make the stars, and that costs money.

Lessig did nothing of the kind. That's the spin and the cover story, but Lessig is someone who repeatedly, again and again, inserts a hidden agenda into every equation and this one is very clear: wean people from property; get people to accept that property rights don't matter; enlist them in the freetard commune.

Ultimately, what CC does is destroy the individual creator's incentive to charge for his work and destroys the efforts of people to create digital content for pay, and doesn't destroy the old dead white guys' copyright. If anything, it destroys the new live black guys' copyright more swiftly and with more deadly political correctness.

The compromise the Lindens made ostensibly under Lessig's tutelage in fact undermines Lessig, and them, and that's a good thing. Because it's a permissions system in which you don't distribute "for free" and "to make non-profit mashups" in a hippie commune, as Lessig would have the entire Internet be; it creates an economy in which anybody can create and themselves get paid by putting a price tag on an object that combines with "resell/transfer" to PAY HIM.

Lessig was only willing to be part of this to undermine big game corporations and create alternatives to them when LL was creating such an alternative because of his own deep loathing for capitalism and corporations. So it was a Marxist expedient, a NEP. He pictures poor people or starting California start-up geeks worthy of getting paid sticking it to the Man.

What he didn't wish to support -- and the Lindens never wished to support -- were dress designers or jeweler-makers or animation-makers who earned $50,000 or $100,000 US a year -- this development of an entertainment industry and socializing industry didn't fit with the world view of either Lindens or Lessig. Lessig is long gone from SL and never looked back and never commented -- although I have confronted him on his blog or commented on his ambiguous role on my own blogs and others on this topic.

In other words, the Lindens and Lessig didn't mind having intellectual property as a temporary expedient to stick it to the game industry, but they never wanted it to become a power in its own right, demanding copyright protection and technical work against exploitation. So it didn't. And that's why people are screaming now. And that's why the Lindens don't care -- like Lessig, they think everything should just be distributed for free, as long as their VC friends pay them or as long as they get a profit from selling server space, or, in the future domain names or hook-ups to asset servers. They profoundly don't care about users' copyrights.

There is absolutely nothing wrong -- nothing wrong whatsoever -- in the intimate and organic linkage between copyright and profit-making. Indeed, many people who push the CC line, including Lessig himself who sells books, benefit from this intimate linkage. Trying to decouple this intimate linkage was not about redistributing power or some such hippie bullshit thing. It was about destroying the power of capital and the corporation which these folks loathe like the plague for heavy ideological reasons.

If their work was about enabling more small businesses and creator entrepreneurs to get paid, they would have had a "pay me for this" option in their insidious "licensing" system. But they didn't. Instead, they had an ideological shill that said, "Don't care about getting paid; join the big hippie hootenanny and give away everything to the poor and be free."

It's an outrageous hoax.

We should not be crafting any such bullshit whatsoever. Copyright law persists, despite the depradations of Lessig and Stallman and worse. The black and white picture of this that the Lindens and the socialist bloggers portray is totally skewed.

All that you're proposing here, Dusan, is to undo in fact the good for the creator that was put in the system in the first place by creating RIGHT CLICK AND PAY THIS OBJECT AND THIS AVATAR as the heart of the system -- as it should be!

"Perfecting" CC

Proof of the failure of CC, if in nothing else, resides in Lessig leaving it to go pursue "anti-corruption in politics". And now he's had his first big reality check with Obama, whom he "advises" not taking his "advice" and coming up with 3-4 unexpectedly mainstream, rather than hard-left positions.

It was never about empowering the individual with Lessig. It's about destroying bases of power so that he and his leftist/socialist/anarchists/"commonalists" can obtain power themselves. There is nothing that seeks power more than a zealous idealogue, and that's what he is.

[Cocoanut Koala]

One would hope, Eric. But that's not the plan a contingent people are pushing for.

These people say, "It is impossible to have these checkboxes for other grids." And it is too "walled-garden" and such.

Or, as Lindens might say, "too much work."

But mainly, "That is not the right philosophy."

Their plan is to have stuff just go off elsewhere - even to places we can't enter - and for us to be able to do nothing to stop it, largely because they think our stuff should be free anyhow.

And this creative commons plan here, this strikes me as just the excuse to allow that. "Well, see, you can state your INTENTIONS that way, and that will make it just fine."

Mind you, these are the SAME people claiming endlessly that the checkboxes don't work in the first place. That because some people manage to copy your stuff anyhow, they are useless.

(That would be the old 0-1 thinking; if a thing isn't foolproof - if there is so much as one exception out of thousands - then we should give up, default to 0, and let crime prosper.)

They claim checkboxes are pointless despite the fact that they have worked well enough for commerce to prosper on SL for years now. Despite the fact that without them, no one would would make things to sell, because selling, as a concept, wouldn't be possible.

So this little Creative Commons agreement, foisted on us, smells to me EXACTLY like the little thing that is supposed to make us not mind having our stuff ported everywhere with no permissions at all.

Well, no. I'm going to have permissions checkboxes - ones that remain intact in other worlds - or be able to prevent my things from going to other worlds, or I won't be making things.

coco

[katykiwi moonflower]

What the license and the DMCA claim fanatics miss is that SL is full of exploits and bugs, and even a right click pie menu option to declare a usage license can and would be exploited.

What is needed is greater security and bug repair of issues, such as the permissions change bug/exploit that was reported on JIRA one year ago but has been ignored by a Linden team more intent upon creating dazzling, nauseating graphics and trying to enhance the "new user experience."

Without the necessary bug/exploit fixes, a usage license scheme is a waste of time. The exploiters can change the designated use on a pie menu as easily as they can now change permissions to full perm.

[Cocoanut Koala]

And a word about this sharing thing, Eric, since I see you have brought it up.

But actually, it was a point I was
thinking about making yesterday.

Everyone likes to share. Everyone loves the good feeling you get! (Or nearly everyone, anyway.)

The problem is not the sharing. The problem is not who wants to share and who doesn't. The problem is not that some people are selfish and won't share.

The problem is when someone ELSE wants to decide for you what you should share.

I would like to decide, for myself, what things I am doing for "the greater good," and what things I am doing to make money (to allow me to even hang around to do anything for the greater good).

I can't tell you how sick I am of other people deciding that our stuff should be free.

Or deciding that since some people will take it anyway, any protection against that should be taken from away from us.

If I want to give away one of my cottages for a charity auction, I get to do that. I don't want anyone taking it from me to give away, however, just because they have decided I should.

If I want to have my Lil Cottage Freebie of the Month, I get to do that. I don't want someone ELSE taking my Lil Cottages, though, and whatever else, and deciding they will go to another grid, and I have no choice about it.

(Which LL has already done to us, with the IBM grid, and we can't even go there to see what has happened to our stuff.)

It's not that some of us are evil and selfish and don't want to share.

It's that we want to decide what we are going to share, and when, and with whom.

I don't think that's so terribly selfish and not-nice, do you?

coco

[Cocoanut Koala]

"It does not. It gives the creator a copyright tool (going whichever way you want it) which is valid outside Second Life, unlike the copy/mod/trans system."

And the above ^ is exactly what I'm talking about.

Who decided that, Laetizia? You?

You have determined there can be no checkboxes and no permissions system in other grids LL decides to license?

Deciding that it is impossible to have any sort of set up with any sort of other grids approved by LL in which the checkboxes exist is exactly what I'm talking about.

And this is how the CC thing will be waved around. It is to get us to let GO of our checkboxes.

coco