If You Can See It, You Can Steal It

The other night I went to the Metaverse Meetup, a group of people interested in Second Life and other Virtual World technology to hear Zha Ewry (David Levine of IBM) and Adam Frisby (Adam Zaius of Azure Islands and OpenSim). Of course they were there to talk about interoperability and the wonders of open source and of course I was there to ask questions from the audience. And yes, approximately once every 47 seconds, we were told earnestly, flatly, aggressively, confidently, and exclusively that if you can see it, you can steal it, so don't bother trying to lock the barn door.

But first, a mis-en-scene. We're in one of those old Manhattan low-rises in the E. 20s converted into an office building, the air conditioning is waning, there's nothing to drink except the D'Agostino's overpriced Odwalla you thought to bring yourself (and most didn't), and here's 4 geeks, completely immersed in their laptops doing something for about 40 minutes while the rest of us sit there, uncomfortably unsticking one buttock and then the other from the plastic office chairs, and staring at our seat mates -- who don't look like any avatars we know. The ever-ebullient Eric Reuters is there up in front, and the nauseating Joshua Meadows (yes, I washed my hands after).

The lovely Zha Ewry made a fabulous entrance with a laptop, with a dress so diaphanous you could barely see it, legs up to here, and heels dyed to match equally invisible (the rumply jeans and polo projected were just something malfunctioning with my wearable). Adam was looking his usual cross between Dennis the Menace and Wally Cleaver, if you know what I mean. We were here to witness the dawn of the Metaverse -- or something. Of course Annie Ok was there, looking even more slender and vivacious than the last time she expertly conjured us together out of the ether, if that was somehow possible. Jerry Paffendorf was conspicuous by his absence, out in San Fran working on The Secret Project. So there, it's out. The Secret Project has to be metaversal, if Jerry is in SF. I asked if it was "like Loopt" and drew a curious stare from Otaku/Otape/Offtopic (please, don't make me go in the game and look up the spelling of his name). I get OT doesn't ever take a New York taxi cab or he'd have been bombarded with Loopt by now. I asked if it the Secret Project was bigger than a breadbox. As OT couldn't tell as OT was NDA, we fell to talking about, uh, Nova Scotia, and therefore we very rapidly ran out of things to say, or rather, I didn't say the things I did have to say about NS because now Zha was booming over the transom, and continued to do a marathon talk for about the next two solid hours, causing several would-be metaversals to sneak out in boredom.

OK, then. I'm going to let Tish Armstrong/Ugotrade explain all the technical stuff because no doubt she will have taped the talk or had copious notes, and I'm going to focus on what concerned me, because what the hell else do you expect me to focus on.

OpenSim isn't a world -- roughly every 52 seconds, after the 47-second cycle we had telling us ifyoucanseeityoucansteal it, we were told OpenSim is not a world. It's a not-a-world, not a not-not-a-world. It's a platform. It's software. It's just a bunch of people working on stuff they call "towers" (not to be confused with evil silos in evil walled gardens, but just, well, towers). I observed that this Platformed Thinge had three features which I believe are required to pronounce something a virtual world (Caleb Booker will disagree):

o a community, a group of people around some shared purpose
o a place, a sense of place, a common space to put stuff together
o drama (Tish says the blogosphere has disagreed about OpenSim, therefore drama)

Now I ask you, are there REALLY any other things that make up a virtual world?! Of course there aren't. I noticed a big sort of cherry tree with pink blossoms in Wright Plaza which is named not for Will but some other unknown dude who is the actual founder of OpenSim even though it's Adam's World. I wondered, now, hmm, is that Barnesworth Anubis' tree? Looks awfully familiar. Straylight's tree? Seems very similar. Adam says it was some other guy whose name I forgot. Point is, they had a world, they did stuff together. Zha began to wax enthusiastical reach mystical escape velocity about how when you are putting a prim out and somebody is building with you, you lay something out and there your friend in SL is sliding a prim toward you simultaneously, you know how you just get together like that, and I said, bingo, that's a world, and I don't know WHY you insist on calling this socialware a platform, so very geek.

Adam, who like I said is a cross between Donny Osmond and Kurt Cobain, said oh, no, it's a platform, but you can build worlds on it. It's like those tedious geekoid explanations about how ohno, SL isn't a game but you can build a game on it. Blah, blah blah. Yeah.

Ok then. So, tell us about how you can steal our stuff. I'd like to think if I weren't in the room, these happy geeks might have talked about all kinds of their fun little nerdy stuff instead of those awful thorny social and political problems that they claim a curious right to identify and control and yet not remain accountable for. But, nobody in the room was talking much, and, guess what, when people asked questions, like William Leandros, they in fact asked about these very issues of asset and data transfer. William asked why you couldn't have digital signatures. He had a longer explanation about this later that seemed to me to be saying "These guys in fact don't understand the technology fully" not "it's futile to encrypt". I thought the problem with the key idea is that you always have to send the key over the wires at some point and then it gets taken under that seeit/steal it concept that is so well exemplified by the Lindens' eye see/hand steal logo.

But Zha assured him oh no, that won't work because of 120397812349087a;sldkfj;alsdf101987;lang.

I do want to hear more about that some time from both parties.

Alrighty. So moving right along, here's where I asked about five questions, none of which got answered satisfactorily.

1. Call your lawyer. This is of course the recipe of these young studs, who want to dispense with all those boring things like copyright protection through technical means, and just make people do DMCA notices and trials. I raised my hand and said, let me explain how open source is just the opposite of what you claim:

a. SL had a beautiful concept -- permissions with mechanical implementation so that you didn't have to register a business, ensure copyright by hiring lawyers, filing suits, etc. -- you just click off boxes. Zha loves to talk about this as "marking intention". I love to talk about it as deterring bad behaviour. Different. Even Eric Reuters was saying, you know, just by putting the price tag on stuff you do get people to pay even for copyable downloads, etc. This brilliant concept of LL's, endorsed by Lawrence Lessig (but not really to its real logical consequence), enabled anyone to enter the economy and make and sell stuff. A woman in Brazil can log on, make a dress, sell it, and get at least 80 percent protection mechanically from theft; and even though some of her compatriots might be busy stealing her dress or somebody else's dress, that person, if they are a wealthy first-worlder can hire a lawyer, but hey, they only in the end settle out of court and get some measly sum. So...lawyers are not the answer, and this is an elitist and non-accessible solution and also even for those who access it not so viable.

b. Zha responds by saying the companyies will have some sort of EULA or TOS to ensure these things and then you ask them to do takedowns -- it was rather vague to me what she said precisely because it seemed to leave it all up to the company and not the individual or the object -- and that lead to my next point:

2. By refusing to engineer the implementation of permissions (they're all on strike from this "futile" job), this gang is, in my view, driving other companies to other solutions, instinctively. The harsh reality of non-IP protection and porous permissions; the stark absence of any economy interface and all sorts of concocted finance problems then leads other people to make more walled gardens -- big ones, small ones, downloadable ones, flash ones. Like the Sheep's new Webflock, which is like those generic white plastic plates you buy in bulk at your kids' school and then they all paint them and then bake them by some process, each to have some unique work of art to have in your home. They call it "white label". So it remains deep and proprietary and expensive ($100,000). Or you get something a million miles wide and two centimeters deep (Google's Lively) for free.

a. Here's where I have to LOL at Tish and the gang, as they are all curling their lips at flash worlds that don't come to Jesus and get saved with open source, but as soon as these other folks do the "run free at last thing" and run off and make all kinds of separate worlds that aren't open standards and linked up, they cry foul. But, sorry, you don't get to insist on "open" and include within that also "closed" as the free, open option. And my very point about this soi-disant "open" is that it leads to elitism and lawyers as solutions rather than check-off boxes for the masses, and it also leads to companies running off to secure their problems with "adjacency" (flying phalluses) and IP protection (their own, for starters) by simply bundling up and shrink-wrapping their own world you have to buy and have the key for.

b. And here's the other undesirable problem flowing out of the opensourcedness: creators can't get IP protection so they go to stables maintained by oligarchs or big investors like Rezzable which creates a Disney effect. Then VWs become about "experience" and are event-driven, not content/object-driven, and the creators don't have to worry about their corporate-driven concoctions, as they can wither up and die or be stolen and virally spread to give brand recognition -- it doesn't matter. They will have been paid. Handomely, hopefully.

Zha does make explicit in this meeting that "shallow DRM" is merely "marking intent" and c/m/t is merely a mark of intent since anybody can hack it. Sigh.

3. Zha then, as usual, talked confidently of Real Life Analogies That Apply. "You can't apply technical solutions to social problems," this Big Blue worker tells us, although of course IBM is among the many giant corporations that does that all the time to prevent theft. Zha tells the dressmaker in Brazil essentially to get stuffed if she doesn't have a lawyer, but the big corporation can demand and get its own firewall arrangement with the Lab. Firewall is the new DRM.

Of course, in real, there are all kinds of technical solutions to the social problem of theft like "jail" and even in the Rite-Aid, all the stuff is tagged and if you try to talk out the door with it, the buzzer goes off on the metal detector by the door and you are asked to kindly return with your purchase to the register. So, naturally it doesn't seem like that big a deal to tag stuff in a digital world and put in a metal detector but no, let's just find backwards arguments for legitimizing theft instead.

There was another moment when I was reminded of how funny the opensource extremism is, when Zha talked about the dreaded "forking". See, forking is what gives the lie to openness of opensource. Because if you disagree, you fork. That's to be discouraged. Therefore open source isn't open. It's full of internal contradictions like that.

Zha spoke of that mystical brotherhood, where people come to the OS group and are "judged by their work" and if its good they get to stay, etc. -- that awful horrid tribal stuff that is so unscientific around coding projects, which is a kind of glorified penis measurement contest because nobody makes a universal set of criteria that can stand above the group as a rule of law, instead it is merely heavy subjective and visceral "get it or don't" "patch or GTFO" sort of bullying.

Several people commented later that while it had 4,000 sign-ups, most people were just prototyping on their own computer offline, realizing that geeky dream of being able to work offline with more prims. But then their sims didn't connect up to anything and they got bored. That may mean it never comes to anything. Some had connected up their sims, but there's still a lot you can't do. Of course, Adam and Zha kept holding out the prospect that all these other people were going to come along and make other modules that would make all the other worlds.

I can't help thinking there is something backward about this approach. People making platform technology that they envision lots of worlds being built on top of are making a bid to be the platform of choice and the connector and the owner of a business model that makes everybody pay for names or domains or connections like the troll at the bridge. Instead of making separate worlds, that then join if they have a reason to, working out standards that people gradually and organically make work, this bunch of Bolsheviks is trying to preset the standards and pre-dictate what "open standards" should mean for everybody. I find that high-handed.

Oh, of course Zha will loudly declare that they have no idea how it will turn out and don't dictate it, but frankly, they do. There was the predictable moment in this long lecture where she said something about Prodigy in order to evoke the usual malicious glee in the room about how backward and stupid they were not getting the first Internet revolution.

So I pointed out that no committee of geeks like them sitting around now and claiming that this or that model is "dead" like Second Life or walled gardens in general, had any validity. They were projecting based on the last iteration's perceived obstacles, which in fact weren't the obstacles they imagine. Walled gardens went on being built, with proprietary software sitting on OS software precisely because you cannot make a world exclusively with something "open" that doesn't protect the space to *keep* it open by enabling monetarization.

In discussing DRM, naturally Adam airily dismissed any notion that there is any company that uses this anymore and implied with exaggerated certainty that all companies are moving away from this and why even the iPhone is hacked (people in these discussions often point out the iPhone as something that is proprietary and not OS).

I guess they never read articles like this or this. The fact is, people don't need 1,000 different kind of players, they tend to have one. So if their only issue is being able to play a tune *cough* then what is their beef? That vast fiction is of course what the anti-DRM lobby is based on, although of course what they really feel entitled to is a Napster.

Zha indicated that her dream was to be able to fight a monster in World of Warcraft, cut off its head, and then go into the social space of Second Life, say, with that head, with the artists of WoW comfortable with that porting, and lay the head triumphantly on a bar and dance around it with friends. Sigh. Why? Because WoW is a bad social space, and is only good for war, and SL is a bad war space, and is only good for socializing.

Of course, it doesn't seem to occur to her that both SL and WoW will advance within their walled gardens and add things that people want that will make it unnecessary to go outside the walls. And the demand for going outside them isn't great enough to spawn a market needing to be served.

Just as its very hard to find criticism of Linux on the Internet (Wikipedia is totally rolled, and even the "Criticism of Linux" page has been eviscerated). An article like this lets you know how extreme the lunatics are (called at home -- sound familiar?)

In the same way, it's impossible to mount a critical attack on the OS religion in SL without suffering heckling in meetings and even really nasty griefing as a byproduct and of course undying withering hate. However, I'm confident that just as the real world and the market and free economies and societies have consistently been able to rebuff the extremism and lunacy of Linux, and used whatever was useful from it in a practical way, the same will occur with virtual world extremism -- which begins with the social nihilism of saying that people in a community in a place with drama aren't a world.

Comments

[Dale Innis]

Darn, you go to all the good events. :) And I have to settle for three-minute web videos and Zha telling me what happened. I need to get out more.

I think to a large extent you and the people that you see as lying are just talking at cross purposes.

If you look at Adam's recent weblog entries and the OpenSim changelog, you'll see that in fact a permission system (with a very SL-like c/m/t as the default implementation) is in fact being actively worked on in the OpenSim code. (Something that I didn't realize last time we discussed this, or I would have pointed you at it.) Looks like it's been in the code to some extent since at least last April or so.

So your desire to see the OpenSim folks engineering c/m/t-style IP protection, even if it can never be 100% effective, is being fulfilled.

But techies frown at things that aren't 100%. :) The thing that the perms *can* do 100% correctly is indicate which permissions the creator would like the object to have, given the available settings (what settings we want to make available is a whole 'nother set of discussions, but c/m/t seems like a good starting point to most people apparently).

So your typical techie (by which I suppose I mean me) will be most comfortable saying that permission bits are *really* a way of indicating intent (since that's the thing that they do indubitably); we can and will engineer systems that make it hard, or inconvenient, or annoying, or guilt-producing, to violate that intent, but since we can't do it 100% I'd rather not say that that's what the permission bits are actually *for*.

(On the issue of whether OpenSim is a world because of the tree in Wright Plaza: Wright Plaza is definitely part of a virtual world, and that virtual world is called "osgrid". osgrid, the virtual world, is composed a a bunch of things, including: OpenSim, the software that runs on the servers to make it work, the SL viewer or whatever else people are using on the client side, a bunch of users who've registed on the web page, a bunch of places that people have defined on those servers, and a bunch of content (like that tree) that people have put into the world. So (just as Adam and Zha are always saying) OpenSim isn't a virtual world; it's a thing that you use to make virtual worlds, like osgrid, and a whole bunch of other different ones that use OpenSim as the server software.

Hope that's also helpful...)

[Dale Innis]

Just realized that I never answered some of the questions about IBM's use of OpenSim from the comment thread in the "rebutting Dale" post. In case no one's reading that older post anymore I'll do some answers here, since it's relevant to the current post as well.

IBM's a very spread-out company. OpenSim is distributed under a nice undemanding license, and bringing a copy of it into IBM doesn't require much more than local approval as far as I know. So if someone in Duluth gets their manager's permission to bring in a copy, and someone in Paraguay gets theirs, there's no one person in the company who knows about both of these events, and keeps count.

Similarly as far as I know no central place in IBM keeps count of how many islands IBM has bought in Second Life.

So any guesses as to which number is bigger than which would have to be somewhat speculative, although given that buying a Second Life region does involve a purchase order at the very least, whereas bringing up 100 OpenSim regions just involves having a dozen machines to do it on, I would not be at all surprised if IBM had more OpenSim-based regions in operation at some point during a typical week than they have going in Second Life.

You know by now that there is no "Adam's Grid" connecting all or most of the OpenSim-based regions into one big virtual world, but I'll take your:

"The point is, they aren't merely running these behind their firewall, but are connected to the rest of Adam's grid, are they not?"

as asking if the OpenSim-based regions running inside the IBM firewall are connected to at least some other grid running outside the firewall.

As far as I know, the answer is a very solid "No", with one exception. It took quite a bit of work with the firewall folks and the legal folks and the security folks to get one of the small experimental internal grids set up so that folks outside the firewall could even log into it, and more fiddling to permit the initial AV-only login and teleport interop tests. And that was connecting out to an SL beta grid, not to an OpenSim-based grid.

Setting things up so that two different regions could link up fully to become part of the same grid (which includes sharing asset-server access) through the firewall would have been a big enough deal that I would expect that I would have heard about it. Now that's not necessarily true; it could be that there's an internal OpenSim grid somewhere within the IBM firewall that is in fact linked up to some external OpenSim-based Grid, having gone through all the hassles of getting that approved and working. But I can tell you it's definitely not the norm.

"If they are completely hidden and protected behind a firewall, shoot me,"

Nah, I don't believe in capital punishment for mere mistakes. :)

"but the fact remains that a) they experiment with connecting, obviously, when they do interop tasks"

Definitely! Although not, as far as I know, with connecting to external public "Adam's grid" sort of things. More likely with connections between two internal grids. And of course there's lots of stuff to experiment with besides interop; by no means are all those internal OpenSim servers being used for interop work.

"and b) they have more servers running with this OpenSim software than they have SL islands."

Not unlikely. 'cause of they're free an' all. :)

"I find it incredulous that IBM wouldn't connect to anything else, if for no other reason than to experiment."

(I think you mean "incredible".) As far as I know, with the exceptions mentioned above, all the connections have been one IBM internal OpenSim region connecting to another IBM internal OpenSim region. We take our firewalls pretty seriously. :)

"Even if all IBM did was take a copy of Adam's free garage home brew and continue on their own to modify it and play on their own servers and never look back, they still bear a relationship to OpenSim and are surely not indifferent or uninformed about the developments there, chief of which is the absence of IP protection permissions implemented."

Sure! (Well, except that you keep calling OpenSim "Adam's", which is unfair to the rest of the past and current devs.) And I'd point out that you also bear a relationship to OpenSim and are surely not indifferent or uninformed about the developments there. Or at least not too uninformed. :)

"Do people just prototype their own thing on their own server offline all day? Do they only invite one or two people online? Do they every all gather for a barbecue in each other's backyards or collectively do show and tell in sandboxes in a hooked up grid? Surely they must do at least THAT much!"

The various OpenSim-based virtual worlds are used for all sorts of things. The ones inside corporate firewalls are, presumably, being used both for techie sorts of experiments, and for things that you wouldn't want to do in a public VW, most notably confidential meetings, conferences, and events. The grids that are used for this today are "hooked up", but only within the firewall, not to the outside.

Barbeques, probably not so much, unless there's a confidential meeting associated with it. :) IBMers who want to go dancing can do it in SL; so far I haven't seen a convincing business case for a dance club inside the IBM firewall (although now that I mention it... :) ).

[Clubside Granville]

Hey Prok, you asked me before about obfuscation, and that topic should be at the forefront of extending Second Life and its clones. But before that...

I like Adam. I enjoy our chats and his enthusiasm. But as I've told him and anyone else not fleeing my appearance, Second Life's code/design should be no one's inspiration. It's hopes, it's principles, it's marketing lies are all good sources, but it's technology is wretched and was behind the times when it was launched. Good netcode, server-side object rendering, SpeedTree, extendible profiles, the list goes on, and while some may argue these can be glued onto Second Life, adding a spoiler to a Neon doesn't make a sports car, it gets you laughed at.

Back to obfuscation, the next step beyond copy/mod/transfer. It can be a partial solution but it requires possibly three new layers to Second Life's concept to objects. The first step would be object compilation. After this happened, people who bought the oibject could no longer deconstruct it. The could move it, rotate it, but that's all. No un-linking and writing down all the coordinates to make a copy.

Now here's where Open Source gets in the way. Second Life's viewer does much of the work, meaning even if the traditional viewer handled the compiled object differently, the Open Source viewer could still spit out the underlying prim information needed to render the object and thus reveal what is accessible today. A second layer, far more complicated, could converted the compiled object into a mesh or other 3D technology that was no longer prim-based. This would require new storage and rendering technologies and while safer, may be too labor intensive. It would defaet local decompilation for the most part.

The last new option would be to shift more of the rendering to the server-side, passing the least amount of client-side data as possible, freeing Open Source clients to be open because now there is nothing to steal.

The first and third bits of tech still suffer from the Open Source server, gien the chance to transfer prim-based objects between compatible technologies, the ardent thief would just render the object on their offline copy of the server, exposing the elements. It sure makes life tougher, but not like the second technology would.

So yes, tech can help protect IP in Open Source by adding steps to the copyright offender's game plan,, but only well thought out tech can truly protect people and thyat requires effort that you rarely find. Besides, they will say, someone will just hack your account and get the source object from you, so why bother? Joy!

[Prokofy Neva]

No, Dale, stop misrepresenting the story, because we can all go to Adam's blog and read what he wrote, duh.

Read what he writes:
http://gwala.net/blog/2008/07/copy-protection-nuances/

I don't see any permission system "being worked on". He writes about how you *could* put one in *if you felt like it* but he and Zha agree fully (so much for Zha's original fake claim at VW07 that he moderates the extremist Adam) that no engineering to protect copyright permissions should be attempted because it's futile and only invites hacking. It's the extremist view.

Joshua Nightshade, the little scumbag, also totally muddies the water deliberately by claiming that everything he makes on OpenSim can't be edited because he says so and the code as it is doesn't allow it. Oh? But...it isn't a c/m/t system that is tied to a buy/sell interface and backed by an OS. Perhaps it's merely a vestage of SL code, I don't know the mechanics.

It's not there because he put it in after deciding "we need to engineer permissions" -- it's merely there as a default, or as a possibility to code by adding another module or whatever. It's not backed up by by/sell.

I will have a fuller rebuttal of all this later, the Sluniverse discussion about Eric Reuters is also disgraceful. I'm definitely taking Eric's side on this and hope he isn't browbeaten into recantation by these assholes. Some self-serving fast-talking Microserf starts double-thinking his way out of looking bad and begins to scream about "journalistic integrity."

[Melissa Yeuxdoux]

"The fact is, people don't need 1,000 different kind of players, they tend to have one."

Aside from the issue of one's car (where wearing headphones tends to be frowned on and not everybody has audio hardware that lets one connect their player) or one's home (where not everyone has home audio that lets one connect their player, or a convenient way to keep theiri player charging while connected to their home audio system), the correct statement is they tend to have one player at a time, and are less than happy at the thought that they must rebuy their music collection because they've switched players.

[Cocoanut Koala]

As I understand the IMB sims, it works this way:

They can take our stuff to their sims. But we can't go there.

They can leave their sims. But they can't take their own stuff out of the sims.

And all this is fine by LL. There was never any checking with us as to whether we wanted our things dragged over to the IMB closed sims, where we can't even see what happens with them.

They can go there - and we have zero idea what happens to them from that point on.

coco

[Rhiannon Chatnoir]

Annie Ok is still editing the better resolution video of the presentation. But if you want a glimpse of things as I caught them recording on my cell phone, you can watch it here: http://qik.com/video/138463

[Cocoanut Koala]

P.S. I hope these open-source sim guys aren't too surprised when nobody much wants to come play with them on their free-for-all grids.

[Dale Innis]

Prok: "I don't see any permission system "being worked on".

Hm. In the very post that you linked to, Adam says: "By default OpenSim - right now, supports your standard SL-flavoured permissions as the default permission module, it’s there today".

And there's lots of stuff in justincc's changelogs (see http://justincc.wordpress.com/) about enhancements and bugfixes related to permissions, like "Melanie Milland contributed a patch to fix llRezObject() to better respect permissions (r5281)".

So I don't *think* I'm misrepresenting the story. :)

Coco: "They can take our stuff to their sims. But we can't go there." They can only take stuff that they own, in the SL sense. So it's not really any different than when you sell someone something in SL, and they teleport to a private island that you can't get to 'cause you're not on the access list.

It's very true that you can't tell what they're going to do with it when they get there, but you trust the people who own the infrastructure to obey the desires that you've expressed via the c/m/t permissions.

[Dale Innis]

Oh, and on my reply to coco: at the moment no one can take any assets anywhere out of SL to some other grid, because there's no asset support in the interop protocols. So all this talk should be in the future tense... :)

[Cocoanut Koala]

I read that things could be taken to the IBM sims, but things cannot be taken out of them, and we can't go there.

coco

[Cocoanut Koala]

I don't trust them to honor the permissions when there are no permissions.

In addition, where there are permissions, I would still like to decide whether my items will be taken there or not.

There really is no reason whatsoever to run over those desires.

coco

[Gareth Nelson]

"Oh, and on my reply to coco: at the moment no one can take any assets anywhere out of SL to some other grid, because there's no asset support in the interop protocols. So all this talk should be in the future tense... :)"

Not true, people can't take assets out using the OGP protocols, but of course they can using a normal client or libsl bot.

[Dale Innis]

Quite true, Gareth; people can take stuff from SL to other grids indirectly, via Save Texture As or whatever. I was thinking of direct grid-to-grid transfer, which SL doesn't support for assets.

[Dale Innis]

coco: yeah, we're starting to mix up the interop-between-grids question, where no assets can move so far, and the SL-regions-behind-a-firewall question, where (once it's actually set up) those regions will be on the main SL grid, just access restricted. Sorry if I added to the confusion there.

For regions that are on the main SL grid, it's already the case that people can take stuff that you sold to them (for instance) and go to regions that you can't go to because they're closed to (say) only the owner. There's no way to mark something "nomod nocopy notran, no going to any regions that I can't get into". :)

There's all sortsa nuanced stuff that we can't currently specify with SL permissions...

[Dale Innis]

(Actually I should have said "on *an* SL grid"; I don't actually know if the current plans are for behind-firewall regions to be on the main SL grid, or a beta grid, or what. But anyway it'll be part of SL, pretty much like any other SL island that's restricted to certain people is still part of SL.)

[Prokofy Neva]

Dale,

Once again, you *are misrepresenting the story*. It's insane how persistent you are.

Read what Adam wrote: "By default OpenSim - right now, supports your standard SL-flavoured permissions as the default permission module, it’s there today".

That is, not by design, not by intention, but by "default". And...what are "SL flavoured permissions"? The exact same ones? it's merely a "default permission module". It isn't *intended to work*.

Because...how can it be INTENDED TO WORK?! By having a buy and sell interface, duh. The point of protecting your copyright isn't merely to protect it to keep it to yourself, or to offer it as a freebie for people to take for personal, non-commercial use, but not have transfer rights to resell (essentially the CC concept), the purpose of copyright is to sell stuff. Duh. It's not socialism; it's capitalism. And that's more than fine; indeed that's a *business requirement*.

Your sophistry here covering up the phony bullshit is visible at 10 paces.

I'm happy to go review this bug report from "Melanie" but..."Melanie" is likely only at the level of Creative Commons, as there is no monetary system in place, or contemplated *as part of the world-generating software like SL* to make it so that people can SELL content and keep its copyright mechanically.

It's astounding to me why this should require endless wrangling to prove. It's so obvious; and Adam said it from the outset: he is not interested in trying to protect permissions, he believes it impossible; he's not interested in having an economy; he believes it's too hard. Others can do it if they want, blah blah.

So now, suddenly, even though Adam's intent is explicit, and Zha has merely chimed in with him saying, no, it's an engineering impossibility, and hasn't really talked about a monetary system, either (we're likely to be treated to lectures about *that* impossibility, too), suddenly, if there is some vestige of permissions left from the reverse-engineerd software (yes, indeed, reverse-engineered) and if there is some bug report of somebody fooling around with it, suddenly, what is in fact explicitly Adam's and other's intent is "compensated for" in order to answer my critique. And that's utter bullshit.

Out of the gadzillion bug-fixings and feature-adding out there on "Justin Case's" blog, Melanie's concern about "rezobject" permissions seems to be the single instance of anything at all remotely like permissions, and I can't help thinking it could just as well refer to "share with group" to enable group builds or some other kind of issue. We'd have to hear more from her; she mainly seems to be working on estate settings and settings that prevent the default hippie commune from then hobbling the individual user, as follows:]

"Melanie Milland contributed a patch so that locked prims no longer allow any avatar to deposit scripts in them (r5401)."

"Melanie changed estate settings so that individual estates can have different settings that are stored in the database, rather than forcing every estate to use the settings in bin/estate_settings.xml, as was previously the case. There may be some small issues remaining - please report these bug if you come across them (r5555)."

and so forth

Oh, and please tell me that an IBM geek who calls his avatar "Lulworth" is someone I'm to take seriously?

"Not true, people can't take assets out using the OGP protocols, but of course they can using a normal client or libsl bot."

See, doesn't that say it all ROFL?

Dale also engages in sophistry with Cocoanut too, because there isn't a demand that any one can see in reality for a permission set from a creator that says "no mod/no transfer/no going to other islands I can't go to myself or that are closed to the general public". There'd be a very limited, or non-existent use case for that.

I love how geeks always shy away from edge cases, but then make up edge cases all the time to support their extremist theories.

There aren't all these fake "nuances". What there isn't is a buy/sell interface that respects "no transfer" or "transfer but no copy/mod" *with a monetary system*. The two are really inseparable if you want a real economy, and not just a CC hippie paradise.

The fact is, yes, IBM gets to have a firewall where, yes, no one can go except them and I suppose their special friends, and yes, they can make stuff on that grid that apparently can't be taken out? That was their whole point. Notice how people who are willing to liberate all your content and do nothing to preserve the average person's content rights are only to happy to establish their own bastion of privileges to secure their own interests.

This is why everything that Zha and Dale and others say is so hollow, and so "New Class".

[Dale Innis]

Prokofy: "That is, not by design, not by intention, but by "default"."

The word "default" in this case means "what you as the user of the software get if you don't do anything special to change it".

That is, Adam is saying that c/m/t permissions are in there, and they are what the OpenSim user gets if they don't explicitly remove them and put in something else instead.

So yes, by design, and by intention. I'm not sure what you thought "by default" meant: that the features were in there sort of oops by accident? :)

OpenSim does have a buy and sell interface. It's not connected to anything real (Paypal, the Lindex, whatever), because it can't be. OpenSim is designed to let *anyone* set up their own virtual world, but most people don't have a connection to Paypal or the Lindex lying around. Those people who do, or who have some other connection to a real-money exchange, can plug it into the provided API.

The rest of your comment is sort of hard to parse :) so I'll leave it at that. OpenSim *does* have a c/m/t permission system that's designed and is being coded, and it does have a buy and sell interface. Those are just true things. I would think they would gratify you! Why is it so important to you that OpenSim be a bad thing?

[Gigs Taggart]

"I thought the problem with the key idea is that you always have to send the key over the wires at some point and then it gets taken under that seeit/steal it concept"

This is correct. However, if your friend there was talking about signing rather than encrypting, it could work.

I can sign a document/object/whatever with my private key. You can then verify my signature using my public key. The trick is making sure that the public key you use is one that I really issued and not one a fraudster issued, but that's not too difficult a problem to solve.

What this gives you is an airtight way to prove that I created a particular asset and not someone else.

This doesn't actually form any sort of copy protection, but it does give consumers a way to be sure that they are getting a genuine product, and not a ripoff.

[Prokofy Neva]

Um, I get what "default" is and let me repeat it for the hard of hearing: It's what Adam has because he doesn't do anything to change it because he doesn't WISH to add it and is adamantly AGAINST developing it. Duh.

The problem isn't that "it's important to me that OpenSim be bad," it's that I take seriously what it says, and I realize the implications, whereas you, as IBM, are trying to spin it into something good to justify your emotional and mental investment.

No, Dale, you're not reading what Adams says or speaks in public presentations. *It is not his intent to have a permissions system or economy*.

Of course it's not "hooked up to anything" because they don't want it to be.

>Those people who do, or who have some other connection to a real-money exchange, can plug it into the provided API.

And they are...where? Trust me, if this was important, and if the people in this project weren't ideologically copyleftists, this would long be done by now.

It is not being coded; there is no evidence of this that you can provide. Instead, we have the statements -- very explicit -- from Adam and Zha -- that they WILL NOT engineer for permissions and expect people to call their lawyers.

That you persist in trying to spin this continues to expose your bad character, so that's a public service, but it doesn't make it any more true.

What illustrates, again, the Big Lie here, is that months ago, when I first raised these problems of lack of permissions and economy, if it were REALLY case and REALLY present, anyone could have said, oh, but in fact we DO have permissions and a monetary system and are WORKING ON IT.

BUT THEY DID NOT. Instead, they said, no, we don't want an economy and we don't believe in permissions and think they are futile.

Now, MONTHS LATER, you seize on some woman's bug report or some default aspect of something nobody bothered to change but didn't bother to develop, as proof that it is present and "should gratify me" (as if this is "about me," isntead of being a basic, fundamental issue of whether you have a socialist or capitalist platform).

That's completely intellectually dishonest, but I'm glad we can expose that here, again, a service to the public.

[Prokofy Neva]

1. That's not what he was talking about only -- it was also the problem of preventing copying. I'm sure he could run circles around you. One of the problems I've observed with people who work as programmers in the real world is when they see extremist copyleftists like this, they don't wish to debate them. They are silent. I'm not sure what the dynamic is. Perhaps they know they are dealing with religious zealots who can't accept reason.

2. People in virtual worlds don't care about authenticity as much. They don't pay the equivalent of a month's RL rent for a Gucci bag, they pay a token amount, and whether that bag is the real thing or not is less important because it can be made to look more real in a digital world, that's the problem.

[Dale Innis]

No, Prokofy, "default" doesn't mean that the c/m/t support was somehow magically in the code by default, left there by Santa or someone, when the OpenSim developers got to it. It means that the devs *wrote* the code, and that unless the *user* does something to change it, the c/m/t support is what they get.

I didn't mean to get into another brawl about OpenSim anyway; I was just correcting my earlier statements. I said that OpenSim didn't (yet) have c/m/t support; it turns out that it does (albeit not done yet). So I corrected myself.

The important thing, though, is the larger one: that LL have clearly stated that they will not allow the IP rights of SL residents to be violated in interop. You can refuse to hear it if you like, but Zha and Adam and me and many other terrible awful people are saying that while 100% IP protection is impossible, less-than-100% protection can and will be implemented.

If anyone -besides- Prokofy still thinks I'm lying about this, let me know and I'd be glad to discuss it. *8)

[Prokofy Neva]

I'm not surprised that when SL is reverse-engineered -- as it was indeed reverse-engineered by libsecondlife, which is then used by OpenSim (that should put paid to their claim that they "aren't reverse engineering), the vestiges of what they copied are in the software.

Did these coders start from scratch and make a robust permissions system *connected to an economy and buy/sell interface*? No, they did not. They appear to have made something merely like the CC concept -- if if fact anything at all. The links given are completely unconvincing.

They didn't set out to do this, Dale, and you know it. Adam and Zha have been very clear on this, even if you aren't -- I don't know whose ass you think you are protecting here.

Once again, read what Adam and Zha *say repeatedly*. They say they *refuse to engineer protection of copyright through implemented permissions*. They say they cannot have a monetary economy because of its difficulties.

So end of story -- Adam accidently talking about people "selling their wares" as he did at one point truly was a slip made by someone so used to SL and living in its clone that they forgot that in fact there's nothing to support the "buying of wares" and no visible group of people really working on this seriously.

This c/m/t can easily be gotten around by libsecondlife.

Not done yet means...not done yet. And they don't broadly intend it. If this or that individual using it ends up making it, what good is it if it is merely a CC notecard in essence, adding to the freetard culture, and not an economy where creators get paid?

Once again, as I've amply explained, LL's hortatory and declarative claims that they "won't let people violate copyright" are completely null. They are null because they are not an engineering plan, but a vague philosophy. They are null because they are said in a context where they had *originally* implemented permissions physically through making engineering obstacles to copying if the box wasn't checked, so in fact, it's nothing more than the "call your lawyer" solution.

They are not protecting copyright by mechanical means but subscribing to the copyleftist "futility" argument.

You aren't working on less-than-100 percent; nobody is. You can't point to a single thing about this, as your pointer to Melanie's bug thing may have to do with other kinds of permissions than the one really at issue here: the right to uncheck the box sell/transfer and uncheck the box copy IN ORDER TO SELL IT -- combined with a buy/sell user interface.

These are all pretty obvious and demonstrable things, and your continued effort to misrepresent this lets us know that you are prepared to go on lying in order to protect some interest.

[Gareth Nelson]

By the way prok, about copyright's purpose:
"To promote the Progress of Science and useful Arts, by securing for limited Times to Authors and Inventors the exclusive Right to their respective Writings and Discoveries."

Does that say "to make money for a select few while heavily restricting everyone else"?

"The fact is, yes, IBM gets to have a firewall where, yes, no one can go except them and I suppose their special friends, and yes, they can make stuff on that grid that apparently can't be taken out? That was their whole point. Notice how people who are willing to liberate all your content and do nothing to preserve the average person's content rights are only to happy to establish their own bastion of privileges to secure their own interests."

1 - Prove IBM want to "liberate your content".
2 - The purpose of the firewall is privacy and corporate security as Zha and other IBMers have said, i'd doubt it's "we're going to make cool content and rip off those fools on SL but we'll keep it to ourselves". A lot of companies have private IRC servers and intranets behind a corporate firewall for similar reasons.

"No, Dale, you're not reading what Adams says or speaks in public presentations. *It is not his intent to have a permissions system or economy*.

Of course it's not "hooked up to anything" because they don't want it to be."

1 - What the code actually does overrules what one of the developers says he intends (and yes, despite your alternative history where adam wrote opensim largely himself, he's but one dev)
2 - I'd have thought you'd be one of the last people to condone that any joe bloggs be able to install opensim and connect to the lindex. This isn't about "they don't want to", it's about "it's not feasible".

[Prokofy Neva]

I'm aware of that assanine communist literalist take on the "purpose of copyright" but there's obviously one reason why an artist or author would need to "secure his right": to sell his book or work of art or design. Otherwise, it can't be sold. Some things are so obvious, they don't need stating, except for the insufficiently educated.

IBM's firewall isn't about liberating content. THey don't care about some girl's dress. The point there is that they can flee to their own safety of a corporate-maintained firewall, while leaving everybody else who can't do that to fend for themselves.

The obvious easy way to protect IP of the corporate type, and innovation and inventions, is to put them all behind a firewall and run an access list. Firewalls are the new copyright.

The Lindens can issue risk APIs for those wishing to sell currency. If the right trusted arrangement were established, I see no reason why an open sim couldn't hook up to the LindEx. Indeed, Joe Millar talked about making the Linden the gold standard of the Metaverse.