It is clear that the problem of violations of intellectual property rights on open source grids – which I discussed in an earlier post – is not going away.
When I visited Open Life grid, I saw plants that I recognised as coming from the Heart Garden Centre. They were advertised as “Please help yourself” and the content creator name was not Lilith or Dolly Heart. I contacted the Hearts to see if these were indeed their plants, and Lilith confirmed it.
“It’s heartbreaking,” she said. “Dolly and I have visited OpenLife and our aware of what is going on in there. It really is quite disturbing. So many content creators’ work appearing there full perms – without the original creator’s permission.”
Lilith’s concern is that Open Source grids could become a haven for illegitimately obtained content.
“The content theft is quite alarming if you are a content developer,” she says. “It does make one wonder what will happen with all these other Open source grids. If these grids can’t attract ‘content developers’ people will just rip and copybot content to have whatever they want from SL.”
She and Dolly have spoken to Sakai, the founder of OpenLife, and are keeping him updated about the situation regarding Heart plants and trees. And those conversations – plus the concern expressed on this and other blogs, do seem to be having an effect – on OpenLife at least, as it moves towards a further degree of stability with its own currency (the Credit).
One of the areas of contention has been Second Inventory, a system that allows users to store objects that they hold in their inventory on their hard drives. The makers say this is a very useful tool to backup valuable inventory items in case of loss – and indeed it is, perhaps especially for content creators. It is also useful for others too, enabling a back up to be created – although it is worth noting that users need full permissions to save objects to their hard drive. This is a tool that is widely available – you can even buy it on XStreetSL, and it does have perfectly legitimate uses. As, of course, does the CopyBot.
However, some users have been utlising Second Inventory to move their owned objects from Second Life toother grids. Now, even if a content creator has given full permissions for usage on the Second Life grid, that does not mean that they are necessarily granting permission for their objects to be used on other grids too – that possibility may not even have existed when the object was created and sold.
What compounds the problem is that when an object is uploaded to an Open Source grid using Second Inventory, it gives the “creator’s name” as being the name of the uploader, and not of the true creator. Thus the creator no longer receives credit for his or her creation (let alone Credits!), and a vital element in the creative process (let alone the commercial process) is lost.
Now Sakai, the creator of OpenLife, has taken a great step forward by disabling the use of Second Inventory in the new version of the OpenLife browser, while he and the creators of Second Inventory work together on ways to overcome this problem:
On the OpenLife blog, Sakai writes: “
“Users of the Openlife and popular backup software for Avatar inventory called Second Inventory would be aware of the disabled access to the Openlife with second inventory software whilst improvements to security and stability are made.
We’re pleased to let you know, that second inventory developers are working together with the 3DX team to make improvements to the methods and capabilities of second inventory and it’s access to the Openlifegrid.
The improvements being developed will make will improve it’s security and safety to provide Openlife users a 3rd party backup method for your valuable inventory and a method for Secondlife Creators to safely import their content to the Openlife knowing the software cannot be used to steal the content or not respect the creators Avatar Name.
The second inventory team expects the first changes to be available in the coming soon version 1.2.0.9 version of second inventory.
Collaboration and design ideas have already started in co-operation to improving the security relationship between, content creator <-> user & the Openlifegrid. Improvements to script upload capabilities have also been shared between the second inventory & the Openlife Grid and can be expected in the next release.”
This is very welcome news, and Sakai is to be commended for making an effort to make OpenLife a safe place for content creators. The introduction of the Credit too will allow the development of legitimate commerce on the grid. And, on the whole, I think it is safe to say that people will usually prefer to be honest – especially when they know that they are dealing with small businesses whose livelihood depends on small scale sales (although Prad Prithivi has recently discussed the phenomenon of cultures where IP rights are routinely ignored in a rather alarming post on Metaversally Speaking).
But there is still the question of how content creators will be able to trade on Open Source grids. This is one of the questions that we will be addressing on Meta Makeover on Tuesday 10th March at 2pm SLT, when we’ll be presenting a special programme on this issue. If you would be interested in contributing to the programme, contact me, Saffia Widdershins at primperfect@gmail.com or else come along and join us in the Meta Makeover studios on Northpoint to see the show live.
Prim Perfect 