[opensource-dev] oh give me a break

Anders Arnholm Anders at Arnholm.se
Tue Mar 16 01:48:37 PDT 2010


Kevin Woolley wrote:
> I own three Sims in SL, that's ~$600 a month or so to the Lindens, and
> that's supported off DRM'ed content creation that I sell. If my income was
> to vanish because of widespread content theft then I'd be out of SL.  
>
> I find Hax's attitude extremely concerning.
>
> In fact I think we should now recognise that Open Sourcing the viewer has
> been a mistake, and the Lindens should close it off again, possibly
> replacing it with controlled licensed development. As a professional
> developer who regularly makes use of Open Source, and has contributed on
> occasion I am philosophically completely in favour of Open Source wherever
> appropriate. Indeed that's why I subscribed to this list in the first place.
>
>   
I find this idea of putting once head into the sand as worrying. The 
copybotting started long before the viewer got open sourced.  As long 
the content are being rendered on the client side there will be 
possibilities and these will be exploited. Several mistakes in the 
design of stuff making think easier that it need to be have been exposed 
and fixed in then open source viewers.

The only solutions are om the social level, to make copying content not 
worth the effort, this involve work on all side. Making it easy to know 
how made the items, making the originals "affordable". Yes to high 
prices does make people make copies. People also make copies becasue 
no-copy items, no-mod items. To lower the rate of copied content we have 
to work on why people copy. With out that it wil never have any success.

There been a nice illustration floating arounf the internet, showing the 
problems with DRM protections today, mostly on video media.

http://www.techxav.com/wp-content/uploads/2010/02/piratelegal.jpg



> choice needs to be made between protecting in-world content and the desire
> to open source the viewer then there really is no choice - Open Source must
> be sacrificed.
>
>   
The removing on the open source viewer will not do anything to help 
stoping the content copying. Sorry, to tell you this but it will not 
help. Look at all the other examples around, do they have comtent theft? 
Yes, Do they have open source viewers? No. Why do you think this would 
do anything on second life. As long anyone can sell content, it will 
gets copies in Second life. And if one can't sell it there it will be 
sold to other places. We have already seen that SL content have been 
ilicaly moved to different worlds Include the old google one, IMVU or 
whats it called. I'm sure that blue panet stuff have loots of copied sl 
content.

The fight is against peoples moral and will, this has to change, trying 
to kill once favorite viewer. Does make the customers your enemy, if the 
customer turns enemis they are more likely to copy your content.

> I see no reason why the Lindens could not adopt some for iPhone like model
> for development of the viewer. Certainly from what I read here the Lindens
> need to stop apologising and impose some sort of controlled gateway model
> urgently.
>   
The iPhone model is all about content creators, It would turn Second 
life into Entropia Universe. For me a step towards thats is a step in 
the wrong direction.


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