Hubris, was Re: [sldev] Cache politics: performance vs obfuscation

[Lawson English]

Gordon Wendt wrote:
> With all due respect if you have linden after your name (Q Linden in 
> this case) then you are going to be assumed to be speaking for LL 
> every time you post anywhere, is it fair? no but that's life on a 
> mailing list that the company you works for runs.
>
> On the topic of obscurity through obscurity it doesn't work, period.  
> People can easily figure out that glintercept is at 
> glintercept.nutty.org <http://glintercept.nutty.org>, anytime I post 
> on the forums people see that since I link to it from my signature.  
> To discourge piracy either go full out or leave it out in the open and 
> make the platform allow people to implement their own solutions to this.
>

Eh, the middle way is best, I think.

Don't support things against the TOS via the SL viewer GUI, at the very 
least. Beyond that, minor obfuscation that requires a potential thief to 
have more technical understanding of what is going on than merely 
accessing things via the standard MacOS/WIndows file GUI should be 
sufficient to offer legal protection to content creators. Any protection 
BEOND that, will require more work on the content creator. A 3rd party 
solution to grab textures as they are uploaded and run them through 
signature/watermarking before forwarding them to LL, might be an option. 
No doubt there are others, but for content creators, even slight 
obfuscation should offer legal protection. No obfuscation whatsoever, 
might not.

In my non-legal view, of course.


Lawson