[sldev] Re: "It's Just Not Possible"

[JB Kraft]

Thank you for responding. As I mentioned, this particular issue is a
personal one for me as, as a musician, I am directly affected financially by
the problem. My other hat, as a programmer, does leave me with somewhat of a
paradox in this regard however, as I can see behind the curtain. To the
resolution of that, I very much appreciate other views and would like to
state, for the record, that my scruples are most certainly intact. I very
much endeavour to protect the artist in every way as I feel the dimishing of
the value of art directly, as we all do.

My stance to date indeed is an ideological one, but I think that is where
the solutions lie frankly. Perhaps I am not eloquent enough to put that
properly forth.

As a programmer, I do see the moving of bits around as essential and
essentially the same thing, be that 20,000 machines and a 3D world or a
Commodore-64 pulling data off a tape drive and poking it into ram. The
difference is simply scale. I see the browser, and SL for that matter,
simply as a fancy dumb terminal, a VT-100, that some server sends data to to
render, whether that data lands on the screen as green globby text or
windlight is semantic to me. The difficulty is to see that data as something
that belongs to someone, though indeed it does, and how to protect that.
Frankly I am not sure you can given the way computers work without making
them not work or not work well. To use your example, the data is simply not
the same thing as the spoon in a drawer and therefore needs to be dealt with
differently from an ideological perspective and not only from a programmers
perspective. The forging of a silver spoon takes a great deal of human
effort, the copying of an image or song takes none. Should the protection of
theft of those things not be approached differently? I don't know, but at
this point, I think they should.

Perhaps I don't spend enough time in the company of lawyers to speak to what
discussions land on their lists but from where I do sit, I hear very little
coming from them on ways to approach the problem differently. The lawyers I
do hear from, from my record company for instance, are all trying to talk
about ways to apply the conventional model of the spoon to the very
different problem of the mp3 and I suppose I am just trying to put forth
that we may find even better ways to address the problem if we try to come
at it from that ideological direction as well. Making the programmer the
locksmith fits the spoon metaphor, but I propose that we at least entertain
the notion that a digital asset may not actually be the metaphorical spoon.
Mp3's may be something that the makers of laws and copyrights did not even
conceive of or account for when they built the model and it is the model
too, that needs adjusting.

I apologize to the list if this particular discussion is somewhat too
philosophical and out of bounds to its purpose but I feel strongly about it
as both a programmer and a musician and think it bears the consideration of
other approaches from both the the litigators asking the programmer to be
locksmiths and the programmers somewhat naively seeing information as
something that "wants to be free". Knowledge may want to be free but I'd
rather you gave me a few cents for my information/music somehow. :)

best regards
JB

On Tue, Jun 10, 2008 at 1:58 PM, Random Unsung <ravenglassrentals at yahoo.com>
wrote:

> JB, I'm glad you concede that SL is not a mere web browser, but your other
> statement about IP and lawyers is merely one ideological take, one common to
> programmers, and not even one all programmers, especially moderates, agree
> on.
>
> Number one, just because you can break into a house or steal the silver
> from the knife drawer technically doesn't mean this is morally and legally
> allowed. It isn't. And it's this decoupling of coders from the moral and
> legal suasion of real life that makes them continually morally and legally
> suspect. Locksmiths, architects, and doormen don't constantly inform their
> customers that their work is all hackable and pointless; they work to close
> the gaps. Software programmers should restore their accountability in the
> spirit of those real life professions.
>
> I don't think you can call yourself scientific, as in the science of
> computing, by claiming something "can never be done". By that logic, you
> would never stream a virtual world in 3-D across 20,000 servers because "it
> can't be done".
>
> Most people do not say their theft of a silver spoon in someone else's
> drawer is legitimate merely because it is always a drawer-pull away,
> because, well it is. Civilization is based on such scruples. I would urge
> you to restore them to your own field.
>
> The RIAA is not futile. It's not perfect; perhaps it is not the final say.
> But it works to secure many people's IP, despite the constant claims that it
> is futile by such as yourself.
>
> The existing legal and moral structures of thousands of years are perfectly
> adequate in their bare essentials to address the issue of creativity and
> theft and property. It is only in modern times that the progress was made in
> fact to establish property rights in the face of the tribe, the leader, the
> king. No need to go backwards to pre-Enlightenment eras just because we're
> on the Internet.
>
> No one who has a stake in SL can be directed to "quit talking about
> programming metaphors". The making of metaphors, and indeed the entire
> debate about programming the world of Second Life, is not the solve provence
> of coders.
>
>
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