[sldev] Re: property rights in distributed systems

[John Hurliman]

Dale Glass wrote:
> On Saturday 08 September 2007 17:54:45 Ben Byer wrote:
>   
>> Nope.
>>
>> All three examples you just named are cases where the operating
>> system is enforcing some rules for the benefit of the user (owner) of
>> the system.  Accordingly, all can by bypassed in some way by a local
>> user.
>>     
>
> Never used a multi-user Linux system?
>
> Shared hosting, parents managing a system for their children, etc work 
> exactly this way: You're subject to somebody else's will. If the admin 
> doesn't want you to read /etc/fstab then you can't and there's no way you 
> can bypass it (excluding explots, but that's a different topic).
>
>   
>> The "DRM" or property rights issue is the complete opposite -- it's
>> my computer trying to prevent me from doing something I might want to
>> do (copy objects I didn't create).
>>     
>
> But it's not "your computer". In SL it's LL's asset server, on a shared 
> hosting system is the provider's server, in a family it'd be the parents' 
> computer.
>
> This isn't DRM. DRM stops the rightful owner from doing what they want with 
> their own content. But that's got nothing to do with a situation where 
> you're using something that actually isn't your in the first place.
>   

It definitely is DRM. If people really wanted to protect their assets 
they would never create or distribute them outside of a private island, 
never let anyone see them. But the problem is copyright holders want to 
distribute their content to a certain degree (allowing people to see 
their work, allowing people to have no modify no copy versions, etc) but 
keep it protected at the same time. An example would be a website that 
lets you stream videos you can watch, but measures are taken to prevent 
you from saving the stream to your hard drive. Same problem in Second 
Life, where you are trying to achieve a level of DRM that is impossible 
(see the Copybot discussions).

There are two slightly related but different things going on here. On 
one hand you have assets that really should never go in to the hands of 
other people (private scripts) and the asset server will never send 
those files to unauthorized clients. That becomes slightly more 
difficult with distributed assets but it is not an unsolvable problem 
with notions of trust levels of simulators and public key crypto (only 
trusted sims are given decryption keys to run your private scripts). On 
the other hand you have to send content to people such as sounds, 
textures, animations, and primitives but you don't want them to be able 
to store the data they are receiving to the hard drive. There's no point 
in even spending energy trying to figure out how to protect this side of 
things since the current system is just a set of bitmasks asking nicely 
not to do certain things. Just like rogue browsers can disable 
javascript protection of right-clicking and saving images, a modified SL 
client can bypass any of those friendly requests.

John Hurliman