[sldev] realXtend Global inventory tests successful

[Sean Linden]

On Fri, Aug 22, 2008 at 8:48 AM, Robin Cornelius
<robin.cornelius at gmail.com>wrote:

>
> Well currently anything at all you have not created has no license
> attached so it cannot be assumed to be anything other than no
> distribution rights. I would say that goes for linden default textures
> too as although the artwork with the viewer source is licensed nothing
> that is downloaded when connected has any kind of license so one
> cannot be assumed.
>
> Now what would be good if you could start to attach licenses to asset
> ID's. Now i know that everyone has there own favorite licenses but
> there must be a sane finite number you could get to ranging from no
> permissions to fully permissive, incorporating various Artistic type
> licenses and options for scripts, various no commercial /allow
> everything options, to cover a wide range. Then if the license ID is
> sent with the asset info, its easy to know if you may use that asset
> (with an appropriate viewer to look at asset id).
>
> Yes some one could hack a viewer to ignore this but thats no different
> to now, what would be different is that content would have a very
> clear licence and it will be 100% clear if you may reuse this within
> SL or take it outside, or just do nothing with it etc. Lets not turn
> this into a security by obscurity discussion this is about licenses.
>
> At texture/sound etc upload appropriate license could be selected by
> content creator.
>
> This should even be able to be added to the existing system without
> breaking anything, just assume ALL existing assets have no license
> specified and treat this as a special case. May be allow content
> creators to set the license on existing assets they have rather than
> re-upload.
>

This sounds really interesting to me, Robin. Right now changing any metadata
associated with an asset requires creating a new asset, so it would be
impossible to change the license on something you've already distributed
after the fact, but this is not necessarily a bad thing for stuff you've
already applied a license to. It may, however, be useful to be able to apply
a license to something that has no license. This would be kind of difficult
to implement, however, because the current system assumes assets are
immutable.

People have talked about different ways to handle asset metadata but the
most "obvious" way to do that is with a separate metadata file since it
would require a different format for each asset type to embed the metadata
(and I'm not even sure you could for, say, sounds), but the asset system
doesn't like lots of little files (it has a large block size) and we have ~2
billion assets. Not that they'd all get metadata applied. Then, if you make
that file mutable, you're either dealing with locks or just doing
best-effort attempts to make sure updates don't clobber one another.
Actually, come to think of it, the asset servers probably support a way to
say "update this file but only if its old content is still x".
-------------- next part --------------
An HTML attachment was scrubbed...
URL: http://lists.secondlife.com/pipermail/sldev/attachments/20080822/f5a36a8f/attachment.htm