Exporting stuff, permissions, and licenses (was Re: [sldev] realXtend Global inventory tests successful)

[Gareth Nelson]

Here's the thing: A human-readable URL is precisely that - human
readable. But a flag is machine-readable, and thus gives a means to
automate checking in tools for cross-grid transfer. I know that this
would be incredibly useful for my own efforts at least, as my current
approach is basically "IM creator with bot, ask consent with a yes/no,
upon yes complete export" and this does not scale very well.

On Sun, Aug 24, 2008 at 6:53 PM, Sean Linden <sean at lindenlab.com> wrote:
> On Sat, Aug 23, 2008 at 8:23 PM, Lawson English <lenglish5 at cox.net> wrote:
>>
>> Gareth Nelson wrote:
>>>
>>> Surely the permissions flags constitute a form of license?
>>>
>>> Aside from this, what's wrong with a new "transfer to other grids" flag?
>>>
>>>
>>
>> Many of us want to see that. Problem is that neither Zero or any other
>> technical Linden can speak for LInden Lab about what they're going to do
>> until the lawyers are consulted, etc.
>>
>> BUT, before LL comes to a decision about how LL will handle its own
>> database of user-created assets, we can still experiment with a dedicated
>> server or two, to see what makes sense, both tethnically and from a user's
>> point off view.
>
> Personally, I think any flag that's not attached to some technological
> protection mechanism will only result in confusion. For this particular
> case, the flag could be "exportable" and it could be used to allow the owner
> to get a cap to be able to download the asset itself directly, perhaps
> translated to some XML export format by a web service. This is just
> speculation of course; I'm not working on anything in this particular area
> (I'm currently testing the new garbage collector -- don't worry we won't
> delete anything until we KNOW it's not referenced).
>
> For everything not directly attached to some technological protection
> mechanism, it seems like just a URL specifying the license, along with
> concerted efforts to minimize the number of licenses people use, would a
> flexible and universal mechanism to tell people what they're allowed to do
> with stuff. Perhaps there could be a blanket "minimum" license to allow
> distributing stuff in each grid, though I don't know whether such a thing is
> necessary. "Minimum" would mean that if something has the copy flag it
> doesn't matter if the license says they can't have more than one copy; the
> copy flag trumps.
>
>
>
>