[sldev] Re: [ARCH] Permissions

[John Hurliman]

Argent Stonecutter wrote:
> From: John Hurliman <jhurliman at wsu.edu>
>> The comparison to iTunes is a red herring. Do you honestly think that
>> the iTunes store would be successful if there was an easy to use way of
>> downloading any song you wanted for free?
>
> There *is* an easy way of downloading any content _you can see_ in the 
> iTunes store. You can only "see" 30 second clips, true, but when you 
> go to a store in SL you can only see pictures of most of the 
> content... you have to buy it to download it. Or find someone who has 
> bought it, and download their copy... like people do with music.
>
> But what we're talking about in THIS context is even closer to the 
> iTunes model. You bought something in-world, or on the iTunes store, 
> and you want to take it to another grid, or play it on a Zune. To do 
> that you have to get SL's or Apple's permission, or bypass the DRM.

To get something close to that would require a change in how content is 
delivered to clients. Instead of sending "plaintext" ObjectUpdate 
packets that describe exactly how prims look and what textures they use 
and how everything is linked together, you would send encrypted content 
to the client, and through a closed-source module or some other 
protection means certain trusted clients (much like the iTunes official 
software) would be able to view assets but malicious clients that intend 
on moving assets from one domain to another would be unable to do this, 
or at least have a difficult time cracking the protection. I want to be 
clear that this is what you are suggesting as it is much different from 
other suggestions in this thread.

The discussion about trusted/untrusted domains really has nothing to do 
with this as the weak link in the chain is the clients that have to be 
able to see these things to have a useful experience. If you are talking 
about protection of simulator-side only assets such as protected scripts 
the domain trust problem becomes relevant, but not for basic assets that 
are being handed out to clients blindly.