I think I pretty much nail Meadh on this reply to her lame reply to my original slam on Interop, which I post here because it won't fit on her blog without repeat posts:
Oh dear God, Meadhbh Hamrick you're simply disgraceful. People who play psychiatrist on the Internet and tell others to "get help" or "get anger management lessons" or tell them to "take their meds" are guilty of malpractice, as real physicians never diagnose or prescribe in this fashion online. Shame on you. And "vitriol" is what you technocommunists describe *anything* that challenges your worldview and attacks your sand castle of invalid arguments for how virtual worlds should be organized. "Vitriol" becomes *any criticism whatsoever* even if no obscenities are used; even if no incitement of hate is unleashed; even if no names are called. Just to call you what you are: the communists, really, of our time, makes you foam and froth and sling accusations of "vitriol"; except you are completely laughable, because you go to the lengths of telling me you're "socialist, not communist" yourself. Now seriously, Meadhbh Hamrick; do you REALLY expect me to believe that?
Your twin admissions in your astounding reply: 1) that you *are* socialists and 2) that we *did* have to expect more theft from VWRAP are the most astounding admissions of this entire bad-faith exercise!
Migraine Dinova's refusal to take accountability for her ferocious online sectarianism has gone well past the sell-by date. I don't care if people are online anonymously doing their thing; I sure as hell do care if they undermine my property and privacy in a mammoth assault project like this.
Which brings me to your silly screams of "libel" and "looniness" and all the rest.
You are so very dense, Meadhbh Hamrick. So very, very obtuse and literalist, you tekkie "geniuses". You "brilliant coders".
When you set about *making copyright an add-on" or "making it a regime or a plan secondary to inherency" YOU ARE INDEED UNDERMINING IF NOT DESTROYING COPYRIGHT. DUH! DUH MUCH! That's *exactly* what you are doing, and you know it, I know it, and loons like Migraine know it (and here I *will* start calling names to burn in the point: you opensource freaks undermine copyright deliberately and consciously at every turn; you browbeat and incite force-sharing and conceive of copyright merely as a lawyer's exercise; you deprive software and communities of users of software of embedded copyright as inherency -- and then you whine and cry when you are accused of being copyleftists.
One has only to read the JIRA for which I was expelled, with the "kind ministrations" of Soft Linden, to realize how diabolical you Lindens and post-Lindens are; how sinister and cunning you are about trying to remove inherency of copyright. An Electric Frontier Foundation operative slams *having any copyright inherent in the tools at all*; a user comes along with the obvious copyleftist OS agenda and calls for a new sort of default that the user can invoke forever and always as non-inherency; and you can't see this as undermining, and you blush and stammer and say this is a builder's boon. Shame on all of you. And then you ban me for pointing out that this is an obvious stealth copyleftism; that even if the default rez from the server is still permissions as an inherency, that an ideological sandbox collectivist who demands that he can flip a switch and make a new kind of *server side* (*server side dammit!*) inherency is in fact up to no good! He is gaslighting. He is moving the goalposts. He is encroaching on inherency.
Why do I mention inherency? Because the Berne Convention validated copyright as an inherency. You don't need a license for it; it is a not a status to be granted by a state authority. It is inherent in the work. It is also inherently coupled with commerce without extra powers or licenses.
*Second Life delivered the Berne inherency metaphor*. That's all. And it did it despite you hippie slackers. The prim rezzes with all the perms on, and you have to undo them if you want to go commie and liberate your prims. Good! Because in life, perms rez that way too. It's a trivial matter to undo them; if you need a bulk permissions, you can do that in inventory. The JIRA jihadists who insisted on ramming copyright inherency with a cunning trick requiring *server-side code changes* would have had it go further than that, making one flip by the author of the switch to ever more inworld change to a Lessig is Moore.
Sorry, but I saw what you did there.
Your clamour that I can't call what you're doing "communist" because "we included in the designs protections for IPR and a security model that would allow service deployers to choose whom they interoperate with" -- all BOGUS. Add-ons, not inherency. A TOS or a treaty betwee grids but *not inherency in the prim*. Not a status conferred by the servers, kept on the prim.
You wouldn't do this, because you said "it's technically impossible". You always do. That it persists inworld despite copybotting as a social injunction taking a perfectly viable and useable technological exigency form appears to be beyond your ken.
Your fluffery and distractions about I'm supposedly "going against my own values" by calling you communist "because you give choices" with whom one hooks up can't disguise the fact that giving choices AFTER you have withdrawn inherency; giving choices AFTER the horse has bolted, is not choice. Choice is undoing an inherency that remains as a default, not making inherent choicelessness and then trying to tack it back on with a sticky.
Open source goons are always telling us that they're really for capitalism. They're just going to strip it out now, but they promise it will go back in later as a "choice". ROFL.
You commies get *so caught up in your lies* and so contorted in your duplicitious postures that you really have lost touch with the reality of virtuality. We saw what you did there. You took out perms. You (Andrew Linden, others) were perpared to knock out inherency and change the server side authentic metaphor of inherency with a new regime enabling it to be casually, ideologically undone by sandboxers -- and thereby undermining it for us all.
Everybody knows what happens when everybody makes freebies; it undermines the economy for us all.
Ever notice that there's no Creative Commons in Second Life? Nobody wants or needs it. Share Licenses are not that, no way. In SL, again, it's inherent. It's built into the product. Nobody has to view a license or check a license. The product has checkboxes the creator sets, and that remains inherent permanently. There isn't anything else like that on the Internet, Meadhbh Hamrick, and you know full well that's the case. It's the magic of Second Life that makes Mitch Kapor and you other technocommunists burn with rage because it undoes your beliefs about paid content. It undoes your beliefs about DRM. It makes you lose your religion.
To which I can only say, good! Better you lose your religion, than we lose our IP! And yes, it's DRM. Your sophistry and tekkie distractions are ridiculous here. DRM is a system of rights management that is on the product, like a CD you can't copy unless, of course, you "crack" it. That's all. It's not about "a regime outside the manufacturing environment" like "out in the wild" with a CD. Remember, in games and worlds, "the client is in the hands of the enemy". So the DRM is in the wild anyway, even if on the grid rezzed from the company's asset server. Thank God for that asset server! It knows what to do with collectivized deeded prims not on transfer when returned to its loving embrace: it kills them. It deletes them permanently. The asset server is the best communist of them all.
But for the non-copybotter, that is, MOST PEOPLE, in SL, the DRM holds. Amazingly it holds. I buy a creation and the creator doesn't put it on copy or mod, and guess what, I can't mod or copy it and I live with that. And so do hundreds of thousands of other people. And that's great, that's grand, *and you can't stand it, as it goes against your religion about the Internet*. To which I can only say: take your religion to your own cathedral, leave other people's sacred places alone.
As for Linden's business interest in interop -- maybe they are now roadkill on the Metaversal highway as Web GL and Silverlight and Unity 3D come in. But maybe not. Because none of those things have solved what *we* need: IP, DRM, commingling of creativity, content and commerce (cube 3'd three Cs!) all consciously wedded together in tech to make tech serve people and their livlihoods, and not your damn stupid religion that destroys value.
As for "we weren't trying to force anyway" -- baloney. You tried to internationalize the problem of being unable to get the mass population of SL to give up its rights to you in some orgy of CC sharing by taking it to the IETF. There it would be a fait accompli. Don't think I haven't seen how hypergrid works, dear. You don't fly around from grid to grid with an object you got in the first sim and get a question when you rez: "Rez with initial grid permissions?" You don't get a notice, "Now entering perm-free copying zone". You don't get a notice, "Your price-setting DRM perms on your prims set back at your home grid no longer hold". You get nothing. And when you rez the object, anyone can copy it. And that's deliberate, that's ideological and that's why no one is interested in it, truly, and why the competitors to SL springing up outside the Leninist Open Sim regime like Inworldz are putting a tremendous premium on copyright, DRM and paid content as a technological bundle.
A bundle you and Zha and the others are always decoupling and always patting us on the head about and saying you will put it back in...later...as a license...as a scheme...as a regime. Anything but a technological injunction in the code, eh? Commerce is something you fear *that badly*. You and Tim Berners Lee. As I tweeted the old geezer, time for us to declare independence from these original founders of our Internet.
No choice on those Leninist hypergrids stripping value as you fly along -- and P.S. no privacy either. Private property and copyright inherency are part and parcel of personal privacy -- that's something you commies simply don't get.
And really, it's almost a waste of time to try to persuade you about these obvious values and inherent qualities because most people get it. Most ordinary people, and even most geeks get it. It's really a relatively small sect that has so screwed around with these notions that you cannot sense and feel them anymore.
So yes, *criminality*. Criminal in undermining copyright by yanking it from its DRM and inherency context and flushing it to other worlds that have no DRM or pricing or economy or anything. Putting it off to grid managers to make a contract, rather than leaving it inside the prims and the software. Nothing stopped you from making the same set of technological injunctions or levers or hammers that obtain in the simple Second Life prim from being portable, and being portable only to worlds that inherently, as technology, as a feature of their inherent "physicality" had DRM, permissions, and linkage of content, creator name and commerce. Nothing at all. But you couldn't accept this, grasp this, or simply *do* this. You had to invoke fake "choice" -- choice that isn't choice in a stark landscape where the choices are all taken out and only put back in as an afterthought.
Yes, IP theft; yes gouging of privacy, yes criminality. Just like the rest of your pack who first destroyed the music business; then the newspaper and book business; then finally government itself with WikiLeaks, all through the raging fire open source software's technocommunist rapaciousness. Everybody gets it. A writer on humanitarian affairs in the New Republic named David Rieff writing about these issues gets it in a heart beat. He won't use the words I use of "technocommunism" or "rapaciousness" but he explains the process: out of your California business model of copying and undermining copyright came ultimlately destruction even of the secret cables of diplomacy -- and of course, a ruination of the music, book and news business before that with the same unwillingness to put in the technological regime required *even if not 100 percent effective and even if not foolproof against hacking and copying* *as a signal of inherency* the breach of which creates an electronic trail for prosecution. That's all. Like Second Life? Like Second Life!
Second Life which so threatens you!
Sorry, but I won't be labelling my accusations of your undermining of the inherency of people's intellectual property in a virtual world, through your wilful destruction of that inherency and those technological levers to enforce it in DRM as *anything* but a crime. Not as ANYTHING but a CRIME Meadhbh Hamrick!
As for your claim that CC licenses "provide for commercial activity" you couldn't be more obtuse. The ability to use commercially *what somebody else has to yield up for free and cede all their rights to for commercial gain* isn't what we mean by keeping the link between commerce and comment, Meadh. Honestly, it's simply APPALLING what contortions you people go to with your communist lies (and I can't call them anything but "communist lies: when they get this bad).
Go read the CC licenses as I have read them many times. Any commercial use is for the person who copied. It's NOT for the person licensing. NOT NOT NOT. There is no license that says "take a copy, but pay me money automatically through an interface" LIKE SECOND LIFE. LIKE SECOND LIFE!!!!
That's why all of you hate it so much; Second Life stands as a profound indictment of all your religious doctrines; profound. Lessig refused to put in a license that linked content and copyright inherently in an item because CC was never *about* copyright, but about *undermining* copyright.
Most people who want to sell things online ignore CC. CC is useless for them. Most people aren't those few cases cited by the gurus like Doctorow who imagine that everybody is going to give away thousands of CDS, and everybody is going to get that one rich movie production company to buy a jingle. It's disgusting, how all of you rely on the persistence of companies still willing to couple commerce and content in licenses as a means of subsidizing your collective farm. Truly disgusting.
And no good saying "well, if that's what you want, write your own, or go somewhere else". People do. That's not the point. The point is that Lessig's content liberation conspiracy was designed to liberate people from wishing to possess their copies and only release them for money. It was *meant* to hammer a wedge between content and commerce and it indeed succeeded.
And that's why we have no music, newspaper, book, movie etc. business, and why we have a shaken government. Let's hope it doesn't spread further. Likely it will before we are through. There is an antidote. It is the walled garden. It is the defeating of the interops plot and a construction of system of bridged walled gardens respecting inherency of copyright.
A loon to judge CC because they DELIBERATELY left out and "forgot" a license that says "pay me money then take a copy?" Not on your life. This was deliberate; the cunning little nerd Cory Doctorow and Comrade Lessig know this better than you. Ask them. Ask Mitch. Mitch's writings in 2005 confirmed his beliefs. Hell, ask Gramps, your old aging hippie John Perry Barlow. At least he's honest. At least he doesn't lie. At least he doesn't hide behind "socialist" or "licenses". He says we don't need intellectual property at all. There, your cat's out of the bag. Watch his youtube. He says that content is like a doctor's prescription. Doctor's don't copyright prescriptions. They get paid for services. So they should just give the paper up.
What a schmuck. Coders get paid for services and he thinks we can all live in the world like coders and doctors with scripts and scrip. Wrong. We need a livlihood too. That means DRM and it means copyright inherency and it means a resounding NO to collectivism.
Your fake aquiesence to my point about walled gardens is hardly convincing. You don't believe in them. You think they're pretty and then knock out their walls. And here comes the showstopper! Call the JIRA! You admit that I could have sustained dmage from theft enabled by VWRAP. Extraordinary. Just....extraordinary.
You didn't maintain any protections because you wouldn't leave c/m/t and demand that only other countries/grids with c/m/t got to interop. It was so simple; yet you couldn't do it for ideological, not technological reasons.
Your fake invocation of those "Facebook people" that were going to come flocking into SL due to your VWRAP -- how many times will my eyes roll in their sockets! The FB group has 100,000 people. The same people in SL. Not new ones. Case closed.
I can't dignify your lame answer on IBM with a reply.
I'll repeat what I said before about all of you: you hate each other even more than you hate us, and that's why you're not to be trusted.
I don't care if you go on falsely misrepresenting my penetrating and apt critique of your collectivism as "vitriol" or "looniness" or try to groom me online by trying to flatter me about when you think I ask "helpful" questions like at SLCC and when I "surround my writings with crap".
History has left you behind on the dust heap on interoperability -- for now. Good!
I have been following this article since yesterday. I find hard time visiting sites that could give me this information. Glad that I found it here. Thanks for posting the reply of Berne Inherency and The Interop Flop.
Posted by: Name Change Deed | February 22, 2011 at 05:43 AM
Prok, you've monumentally missed the point.
Interop is already largely *here* via piracy and so forth, in its most blatant unrestricted form.
It was even somewhat here before Second Life ever existed, especially in light of the gigantic ripped texture sets from other game worlds and so forth.
What isn't here, are the fundamental, effective mechanisms *by which you preserve your rights* in such an environment. THAT is the critical point of intelligent interoperability.
What are you going to do, DMCA every random opensim server in every foreign country? Presuming they even cared? What we have now is total anarchy. Yay?
* * * * *
I've not been too keen on early adoption of 3D standards yet, because I think we are about where email was in the 1970's. The tech needs to mature, but mature it will.
Here are some givens for you:
1) Most virtual land will be hosted for free, or nearly free, soon enough. Regardless if we like it or not. It's just too cheap to produce. I say that as a land baron who still makes some money on land. Asset serving, access and rights management will be the focus.
2) Sufficient~quality, public domain freebies will flood all grids soon enough. The internet is drowning in this stuff, and gobs more are produced every day. Content creation is going to be commoditised. By the artists themselves, via competition. Already, a top artist can be outcompeted by a crummy artist who has great marketing skills. Distribution and access is more critical than the content itself. See Apple's 30% cut in their app store, autocratic approval strategy and 99 dollars a year to be a developer. Want *that*? If not, put the walled~gardens~only idea out of your head.
3) If we don't build *some* kind of interop standard, which would also allow for some basic, if crude governance ~ we've basically got a free~for~all where pretty much anyone can steal content with impunity. I've always agreed with you that online governance is important. But here, you disagree with yourself. Interop is the way forward ~ it's the opposite of total anarchy.
4) I'm no commie, or socialist, or anarchist. I'm as close to an unfettered capitalist as you'll find these days, and you've long clashed with that. VW interop is *my* best way to reach out and slap someone who is abusing my inherent copyrights, or abusing those of the merchants who do business with me (for the benefit of us all). When governments and treaties fail, we could at least cut the cheating bastards off from the rest of the civilised grid.
But you've 'voted' for anarchy, Prok, and are delighting in the death of responsible online governance. Well, guess what, you got it. It may be another 10 years before we have anything better.
Just as the modern court system began under oppressive monarchies, a fair and just standard can grow up from Linden Research, exceed and even outlast it. We've pretty much lost that chance, now.
Posted by: Desmond Shang | February 22, 2011 at 06:12 AM
Desmond, I know you mean well... but Prok has it bang on for the "interop" crowd in SL.
I agree with you though, I just disagree that was their intentions, to bring a capitalist market. Rather, it was funnel our content for free into Opensim via code (it already happens, but this would have automated it to a degree beyond we have it now). I have long clashed with the extreme "interops" in AW Groupies, and there's a reason why LL ditched them all. A really good reason.
Posted by: Hypatia Callisto | February 22, 2011 at 07:44 AM
And yes, I do kinda "want" that, Des... the Apple store is the first really viable marketplace for developers, and it runs the pants off all the rest.
Amazon threatens to bring a better one to the table, so I am in wait and see mode. What I do know, is that Google's lame attempt at a marketplace where there is no approvals and ratings system to protect the *buyer* is a road to ruin. How do I know? SL is my guide! Only people who do well are people who operate on very slim margins who trot out a ton of stuff as fast as possible, with little quality control and even less customer service. The mediocre blatantly copied crap and people who can't really make a living wage from it, as you observe. Only the aggregator can really profit, and even they are not able to do that well because by not having any editorial control (as a real shopkeeper would - no retail buyer would let anyone stock their shelves, I do have retail management experience before I came to the digital world), they are unable to create a marketplace that has appeal to both buyer and seller.
Apple's system isnt too unlike the idea I brought to the JIRA for an interop that could actually work, one you voted for, btw. :)
But I have faith, that none of it will actually happen - it will continue to be same old, same old (which I guess could be worse, but it could be better, too) it's interesting to see how I was violently opposed on the JIRA though - a great example of the sectarianism that exists in SL.
Posted by: Hypatia Callisto | February 22, 2011 at 08:10 AM
Prok, seriously. Get some help. Yes, maybe consider anger management, and if you've already got meds but don't trust them please find a doctor who will respect your input and try something different. Look at how much time and energy you spend building fires of rage in which to consume yourself. It is a terrible and bewildering tragedy and a squandering of your mental powers. How about some compassion for yourself as well as other people -- in any worlds? Please, get some help.
And don't bother to rant a reply at me because I won't be reading it. I just stumbled upon this post of yours because it was linked to something else I was reading. I stopped reading you quite some time ago because after a certain point your comments ceased to be amusingly off the wall and became just painfully sad to witness. I say this in all earnestness and with no malice. Please, get help.
Posted by: Bau Ur | February 22, 2011 at 10:41 AM
Someone at SLU invited me to come see their sim in OSGrid recently. I hadn't been to an Opensim grid in years, so I figured why not.
The first thing I noted was that performance has improved a lot in the years since I last went. It was on-par with SL (which isn't saying much right now, SL has back-slid a lot).
The next thing I noticed was it's still nearly empty.
The 3rd thing I noticed was everything was free, everywhere, because they still don't have any currency.
And the last thing I noticed was everything there for free was stolen or 'appropriated' from SL. I even found my former products there, which amused me to no end.
My point? These Opensims are a free utopia of free land, free stuff, and still nobody goes there. Because as i've always said, people don't value what they are given freely. They value what they earn and or pay for.
Creators have no motivation to make new creations in a world that offers them absolutely no recompense or protections. So everything is just sad rips of other's work.
Until these opensims get on the $L bandwagon, they will go nowhere.
Posted by: Darien Caldwell | February 22, 2011 at 11:42 AM
This is what I find interesting about the opensim Avination. They have a Freebie Policy:
http://www.avination.com/freebie-policy.html
"At Avination, we work hard on creating an atmosphere that makes everyone feel welcome and appreciated. An important part of this are promotional gifts, also known as Freebies.
In other worlds, Freebies have taken over and have begun to hurt the economic success and the quality of goods overall.
Therefore, we have formulated this policy to ensure that everyone has a chance to show customers their appreciation with free gifts, yet Avination is not flooded with Freebies to the detriment of business."
but like I've mentioned before, it's a world of merchants and casino owners, and when I went there and hopped around their grid, the only people I saw the entire time were the two who invited me to see their Casino.
Posted by: Cinder Roxley | February 22, 2011 at 12:08 PM
"1) Most virtual land will be hosted for free, or nearly free, soon enough. Regardless if we like it or not. It's just too cheap to produce."
I completely disagree. Running a 3d simulator is not a task for commodity hardware at this time if you want to support any kind of concurrency. The vast majority of internet sites still have their websites hosted with server farms serving up their webpages, and they pay money for this service. Serving up webpages is a much less computationally expensive task than serving up 3d content. Someone has to pay for the servers, power, network connectivity, etc. It is most certainly not free.
You may see people offering their services for free at a time when no one is interested, but as soon as the service starts getting used beyond the point where their connection and hardware can support it they'll have to either shut down or move the service to a facility more equipped to handle the load. When they need better uptime an reliability than a cheap solution can provide someone will have to actually pay for a server and will in turn have to somehow get money from the people utilizing the service to keep it running.
People use hosted services because the host is dedicated to availability, reliability, and performance. When you put your hard work into the hands of someone offering a service for free there is no guarantee the service will be available from one day to the next. They owe you nothing. Look at how much people panic when their corporate or personal websites go down. Now imagine how much more disruption we'd see if everyone hosted their sites at home with bandwidth caps and a general lack of reliability.
Right now there is a proliferation of "free" internet services. Usually sponsored by very large corporations that are using your personal information to provide advertisers with information on how best to put ads in front of your face. Whether or not this model will work into the future is an unknown as more and more people become desensitized to these types of advertisements. There is no such thing as a free lunch. You either pay for the service you're using directly, or indirectly.
Posted by: Tranquillity | February 22, 2011 at 01:15 PM
My apologies to the tl;dr crowd...
"many of us work for technology companies. our work allows us to change people's lives for the better by proper application of technology. the world being an imperfect place, we sometimes have to resort to crass commercialism to feed ourselves. for the most part, we get to make cool products for discerning consumers and the money just happens" - Meadhbh
What PLANET is this lunatic from? Is she a trust fund baby, a spoiled exec that doesn't have to work, a business owner that never has to worry for a thing? Newsflash, Meadhbh, YOU are living in a fantasy land....for the OTHER 99.99999% of humanity, what you call 'crass commercialism' is known by another word...SURVIVAL.
Now I more clearly understand your viewpoint...you got yours (money, overpaid job, etc) and do not need to worry about survival...so what if interop puts small businesses under due to content theft...hey, all they lost is a bit of 'crass commercialism'. After all, 'money just happens', why are these little people opposed to your noble endeavours? - Meadhbh
You sir or madam, literally make me sick.
"and she's probably partially right. there are plenty of free culture advocates that would prefer to see the concept of intellectual property consigned to the ash-heap of history." - Meadhbh
I would say Prok is a lot more than partially right, I would say in this case dead on right. Yeah, why worry about intellectual property? iN YOUR WORLD, you make out living in hardware (since you so cheerfully namedrop folks at Intel and IBM)...no skin off your noses if you ruin the businesses of THOUSANDS of people. Your overpaid techies and corporate execs still pull a paycheck by selling the hardware to both the responsible (DRM enabled) grids the pirate (Open Source, no DRM) grids. Its a win-win, from a viewpoint with zero integrity.
Your utter lack of compassion, consideration or introspection amazes and depresses me, meadhbh. You and the free culture brigade must be utterly soulless. replacing compassion with selfishness masquerading as concern for freedom. Technology uber alles!
"we wanted to support different IPR regimes ranging from rabid free-cultureists to DRM fans. we felt it wasn't our place as protocol designers to decide what license people used. we just wanted to deliver the bits and allow the endpoints to decide whether they trusted the person on the other side of a connection request." - Meadhbh
An therein is your failure. No RESPONSIBLE person is going to support a protocol that tries to be everything to everyone. And you are being disingenuous at best. This is a binary question...will there be BASIC content control / DRM to protect IP owners or will there be NO pretense of DRM to aid pirates in the protocol? You tried to choose neutrality where no neutrality is possible. In effect, you chose sides and tried to create a protocol for pirates. Oh, you tell yourselves you are neutral, that grid owners can set their own rules...but in the end, you sided with the free / OS folks due to your personal politics.
Hopefully, no one will EVER resurrect your VWRAP project, Meadhbh, but if they do, I pray they are RESPONSIBLE and ADULT individuals...not man-children pushing an agenda as your group was...and that they will place the needs of the USERS above their personal politics and the desirs of the radical free culture folks such as yourself. Unfortunately, since they will most likely be more of the SAME silicon valley techies with insular values, I expect a repeat of the current VWRAP.
"Prok, you've monumentally missed the point.
Interop is already largely *here* via piracy and so forth, in its most blatant unrestricted form.
It was even somewhat here before Second Life ever existed, especially in light of the gigantic ripped texture sets from other game worlds and so forth.
What isn't here, are the fundamental, effective mechanisms *by which you preserve your rights* in such an environment. THAT is the critical point of intelligent interoperability. " - Desmond
Des, Don't take this as a slam, but rather as legitimate confusion. Did you read the article that Meadhbh wrote? Her entire solution is to let others copy and if caught, some nebulous third party commercial IP management company will block them from content. ("the trust model allowed individual service owners to decide whom they trusted and for what kinds of activities. for instance, if you ran a commercial asset service and you were worried that assets hosted by your service were in grave danger if they were ever instantiated in simulators run by the pirate party in sweden, then the trust model gave VWRAP implementations the tools to deny access to the pirate bay's servers.")
Allow me to pose a few givens:
1) These pirate grids are ALREADY off the main grid
2) Even without interop, they are already ripping off content from the main grid.
3) This requires tools that can cause you to lose all access to the civilized grid if caught.
4) These tools are NOT commonplace items, limited more to the script kiddie set and a few creators of the tools.
Now for the questions:
1) So once interop happens, who are these nebulous content managers that will block content from pirate grids?
2) How long will our content be open before such authority constitutes itself?
3) How do we know we can trust some nebulous 3rd party who makes its money god knows how to manage our content?
4) If these content management services are COMMERCIAL as she indicates, how do we, the small businesses get protection? Great for big name fashionistas, sucks for small merchants.
5) How will these IP managers know a grid is pirate until WAY after the fact
6) How does making it EASIER for them to copy via a hypergrid model rather than via illegal tools and manual port, then slapping their hands after the fact make it better?
7) How in god's name does this promote internet governance?
You say Prok supports anarchy by opponsing interop, but it sounds more like you are promoting an institutionalized anarchy....a form of grid governance that exists more for looks than actual functionality. Personally, I'd rather see a few items manually pirated as opposed to an automatic piracy protocol like VWRAP where the copying happens instantly and all we can do is go 'naughty naughty, no more content for you' after the fact.
Can you please explain in greater detail what you mean here? I just do not see your point in this nor how as a small content provider it will help me in the least...though I see a lot of ways meadhbh and her pals will hurt me if they get their way.
Doesn't she sound just a WEE bit elitist and out of touch to you? She sure as hades does to me.
Posted by: Maklin Deckard | February 22, 2011 at 02:50 PM
Since I don't pretend to understand most of the technical details I would defer to those of you that do... and as in most things, there likely is no absolute truth.
Perhaps for me, the point I really got of all of the above comments came from @Darien Caldwell:
"My point? These Opensims are a free utopia of free land, free stuff, and still nobody goes there. Because as I've always said, people don't value what they are given freely. They value what they earn and or pay for."
I could only think of something Prok said a long time ago... actually two things.
First, charge people something, even if it's just 1L$ for anything.
Second, Those in the cheap seats will be the first to scream the loudest.
Posted by: brinda allen | February 22, 2011 at 03:49 PM
Oh for the time to post a proper response. But I'll give a quick response a shot.
To Tranquility: you've stated my point. There's far more to offering services, than just land. Many worlds and grids already offer land for free, or nearly free. Asset serving's the thing.
Questions:
1) So once interop happens, who are these nebulous content managers that will block content from pirate grids?
Even now, most serious operators of hypergrid connected regions will ban a copybotter and all their content on sight. Because it's bad for business and reputation. I have an opensim grid myself (nonpublic as of now). The last thing legitimate operators want is *any* association with criminals. Also a takedown notice to our ISP's could shut down our entire grid.
2) How long will our content be open before such authority constitutes itself?
On most private grids, unless the grid operator is dead asleep at the wheel or an outright crook himself, I'll bet you get a faster response than on the main grid. Most opensim operators don't have as much pull with their ISP as Linden Research surely does, and they do generally fear DMCA triggered shutdowns. Even more, they (we, I should say) fear the problem of identifying ripped content in the first place. This is the #1 reason my grid is not public, for instance. I'm the only one who has ever rezzed anything there, and by service terms, I can't even copy *my own stuff* from the main grid to it. I've assiduously stuck to Linden Research service terms; I have far too much to lose, to blow it over a house or two I cobbled together on the main grid in 2005.
3) How do we know we can trust some nebulous 3rd party who makes its money god knows how to manage our content?
You can't. In fact, how can you trust Linden Research to take care of your content, with regard to takedown of all illicit copies, search and so forth? Ask Stroker Serpentine about that. There is no perfect solution save for 'trusted computing' and I'll be damned if I have encrypted chips on my home machine, either. Even remote rendering places trust in the remote renderer. The real answer is governance. There have to be consequences for piracy on a more granular level than "sue/don't sue" the guy.
4) If these content management services are COMMERCIAL as she indicates, how do we, the small businesses get protection? Great for big name fashionistas, sucks for small merchants.
This is exactly the sort of question that virtual interoperation standards try to address. Yes, I was discussing this with Meadhbh in person, face to face, with lots of Lindens also. They aren't stupid; they well understand that there are use cases other than 'free free free' and to get someone like me onboard, I'd have to see *precisely* what you are also looking for. Hence my involvement in the discussion.
5) How will these IP managers know a grid is pirate until WAY after the fact
Grids aren't pirate per se. A copybotter can go to *any* grid, even the main grid right now, and rip huge amounts of content. One way: the grid simply don't serve assets itself at all, but only accepts asset serving from registered merchants or authorised distributors.
There are a number of ways to skin that cat. None are perfect. The key, however, is governance. Right now, anyone can hit another person over the head with a baseball bat. We don't all have nannies and helmets on, at home. The trick is that with governance, the perpetrators can be largely, if imperfectly deterred. Online, this can be done via identity ~ if you know I am *the* Desmond Shang, and can check that against a verifiable source (Paypal, for instance, uses bank accounts and their RL signatures to verify that an email is 'you') ~ it's possible to hold someone *very* accountable for their actions. Or deny them services if they won't tie themselves to a certifiable form of identity. It doesn't have to be a real name.
6) How does making it EASIER for them to copy via a hypergrid model rather than via illegal tools and manual port, then slapping their hands after the fact make it better?
Just copying anything and everything willy~nilly would bring the whole house of cards down; that is *not* the standard. If that's all there were to the standards, then the standards would be written in 2 seconds: "kill all permissions and let anyone rip what they want" ~ but that's NOT the way forward. This is why people like me were asked for their opinions on the matter. This is why formulating real, workable standards for commerce and so forth to function are so hard.
7) How in god's name does this promote internet governance?
Ripping anything you want to, doesn't promote anything. It's a tragic mistake and not how it's supposed to work, save for perhaps in the minds of the wildest fringe element. However, holding people accountable, does. Imagine a standard whereby a clear criminal can get thrown off of hypergrid, with all their regions. Imagine a standard where some grids are very particular about where and how they get their assets.
Right now, the more interoperability you get, the stronger *accountability* you get. Say, for instance, you could be Maklin Deckard across all grids. Your reputation would precede you. Any grid you founded and linked to your reputation thereby, would also be considered in that light. Right now, all grids are anarchic islands of their own governance, and what pitiful governance it can be.
* * * * *
It's a tough problem, but the key truly is intelligent interop and governance. Otherwise there are literally tens of thousands of private regions out there, and we'll *all* have to watch each one. Also, all grid operators will have to resolve intractable questions regarding criminal behaviour, such as: who created texture X first? This, obviously, won't ever work very well.
Say, for instance, I have my own grid that I wish to bring public within a year, where land is free. Well, perhaps with the caveat that you get land and can rez stuff there only if you hold land on the main grid Caledon estate.
How do I ensure that merchants providing assets to that grid are protected? How do I ensure that I am not harbouring content ripped from someone else? How can I hold criminal perpetrators accountable?
These are the questions that need answering. Flushing the questions down the toilet only preserves the status quo, which is: pirates rule the day.
* * * * *
Hypatia, if there were an "Apple" style marketplace, strictly speaking, it would be no skin off my nose. But I just don't see it lasting. The worst outcome would be to see it scooped by a 'Google' style anything~goes marketplace much like the google 3D warehouse, where there is *no way* to charge for *any* goods, anything uploaded to it is licenced as public domain forever after, and the only winner is Google. That's been the market response to the Apple approach, and quite frankly... I see it eventually winning, unless Apple gets reasonable quick. Look at Android platform adoption rates.
Not all of the interop crowd is a utopian or a commie. Maybe some vocal ones are fringe, but I see this just as personalities getting in the way of what could be a really effective thing. I don't think we want *either* the autocracy of Apple, or the kleptocracy of Google. That's what we all get, if we don't try.
Posted by: Desmond Shang | February 22, 2011 at 08:25 PM
I'm glad you're all talking among yourselves as I have work to do. I can almost die happy and go to Second Life avatar heaven as you now are able to make the necessary arguments without me -- some of you always could, and now others that don't even agree with me make them, too.
It's helpful to see the idiots outed in a thread like this and it's good to know that it's not me who is in a mental hospital because I need "help," but the Interop project that flopped and Meadh fired from the Lab along with the other hippies.
Yes, Meadh is truly revolting with that fuck-you hedonism that the Silicon Valley job cushion gives people like this, eh? Truly awful.
The canceling of the project speaks for itself -- even Mitch Kapor isn't that much of a hippie that he'd allow all the customers' content to be flushed out to a bunch of Marxist professors living on sims IBM is paying for or whatever. He's not that stupid.
More later.
Posted by: Prokofy Neva | February 22, 2011 at 09:59 PM
"It's a tough problem, but the key truly is intelligent interop and governance. Otherwise there are literally tens of thousands of private regions out there, and we'll *all* have to watch each one. Also, all grid operators will have to resolve intractable questions regarding criminal behaviour, such as: who created texture X first? This, obviously, won't ever work very well. " - Desmond
Desmond, this is all well and good. I THINK I understand where you are coming from (if you ever find more time, IM me inworld). BUT this does not explain the seemingly visceral revulsion the interop folks have for DRM. They want us to trust, they want to pass the buck 100% to the grid admins. WHY would it kill them to support C/M/T and an added 4th flag GT (grid transfer)?
If I make something on SL, whether to give to someone or to sell, and I do not want it to be transferred on SL, I uncheck Transfer and it doesn't tranfer (unless they hack the permissions or the lindens introduce a bug). WHY, other than intellectual alignment with the freetardians, can't Meadhbh and her friends grant me the same right in interop? If I mark something no transfer, why should there even BE a chance of it being easily moved off the grid? WHY do they wish to take my IP rights and convert them to mere trust relationships with some third party grid admin? Give me the OPTION of perms IN THE PROTOCOL or I am 100% against interop. Period.
Quite frankly, I do NOT trust the open source movement. You say...
"However, holding people accountable, does. Imagine a standard whereby a clear criminal can get thrown off of hypergrid, with all their regions. Imagine a standard where some grids are very particular about where and how they get their assets." - Desmond
BUT this being OpenSource, closed mind, software there is NOTHING to stop these grids from forking and starting their OWN hypergrids in another country...a grid can be pirate, if its admins are. Then make an alt ID, hook up a blank sim to hypergrid and rip what you want before getting caught and removed, hook back to the forked grid and distribute...dump alt, new alt, new sim to hypergrid, repeat. Protocols with NO built in content control / DRM are useless against this. Give US, the creator, the right to say 'I don't give a f*ck how reliable your grid is, I do not want my stuff there' rather than utterly open protocols that facilitate IP theft.
"These are the questions that need answering. Flushing the questions down the toilet only preserves the status quo, which is: pirates rule the day." - Desmond
Yes, they do need answering. BUT, and here is the big caveat, there needs to be more input from everyone affected. Sure, LL asked YOU because you are a big player in SL (again, do not take that as begrudging you success, far from it, wish I had been half as creative as you were), and LL brings in the techies (their tribal brothers, to paraphrase Prok)...but where are people like Hypatia creating higher-end content, myself running a barely break even enterprise, Prok with newbie and mainland rentals, or just the average socializer able to give input? WHY are these questions always answered ONLY by a cabal of large economic interests and soulless open source coders? I for one am tired of being handed everything by dictat from these individuals and told to like it or leave.
Its time for the techie / businesses that revolve around techies monoculture that thinks it has a divine right to create 'standards' to be opened up to include more diverse viewpoints than it seems Meadhbh is capable of acknowledging. As a technically literate (network admin with an engineering degree) non-coder and someone that doesn't genuflect at the altar of Open Source, I found the post she made that Prok linked to to be not only elitist, patronizing, but horribly fanatically biased towards the open source / everything must be free viewpoint while disingenously trying to proclaim herself neutral. Using terms like 'crass commercialism' and 'making things for discerning customers' doesn't endear her to the average person.
"Not all of the interop crowd is a utopian or a commie. Maybe some vocal ones are fringe, but I see this just as personalities getting in the way of what could be a really effective thing" - Desmond
Let me ask you. If getting answers and creating governance is important, and I can see (somewhat) where you are coming from, WHY cannot the movers and shakers purge this extremist fringe element...openly tell them they are impeding progress and move on past their ideas? Instead, they elevate people such as Meadhbh with her elitism and sense of self-importance to leadership roles...then wonder why the folks they ignore won't jump on the bandwagon.
Its not just personalities, Desmond, it is the outright near-theological fanaticism on the part of the anti-IP OS evangelists that infiltrate every project and attempt to co-opt the standards. For my own part, I'd rather see the whole damn thing go down in flames than let it be co-opted by these open source fanatics.
Dump the fanatics, broaden the group providing input to include those affected by the changes, and then perhaps we will get the answers we seek. Keep limiting it to ONLY techies/businesses/OS wankers...you won't get answers that are acceptable to the masses they are to be applied to....and the next interop attempt will die the same way as this one did.
Posted by: Maklin Deckard | February 22, 2011 at 11:08 PM
"Yes, Meadh is truly revolting with that fuck-you hedonism that the Silicon Valley job cushion gives people like this, eh? Truly awful." - Prokofy
Yes, her sparkling personality makes her the PERFECT person to represent interop....if you want it to fail in a flaming ball of self-importance, elitism and irrelevance. I have never met her, never corresponded with her, but after reading that condescending and arrogant blog post to which you linked, I hope anything she lays her hands on crashes and burns, for the good of humanity.
I loved these little gems of hers...
---
"but after 3 1/2 months she's produced 681 words (the original VWRAP draft was around 9776 words.) at this rate, based solely on word count, we'll have to wait another 50 months. but i'm not hopeful the powers that be at the IETF will leave the working group open for another 4 years waiting on a single draft."
Petty and vindictive -- Awww, she got her little feelings hurt that someone else is trying to do what she FAILED at and has to take a dig at them.
---
"many of us work for technology companies. our work allows us to change people's lives for the better by proper application of technology"
Messiah complex much? You may change people's lives, but it is massively arrogant of you to assume its for the better...how do you know it is for the better? Did you ask the people you affect or just make the assumption that since you got what you wanted it was beneficial change? I am betting, based on the techie coder mindset, the latter.
---
"the world being an imperfect place, we sometimes have to resort to crass commercialism to feed ourselves."
Translation to english: My god, I have to sully my hands for filthy lucre. How pedestrian....
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"we get to make cool products for discerning consumers and the money just happens"
Apparently folks that do not agree their products are cool, or do not want their life changed are not 'discerning'. And the money just happens? Must be nice up there on your lordly perch looking down on the lower-classes of non-techies for whom money happens because of hard work.
---
"i have long been smoking from Eric von Hippel's pipe and believe that in the long run, "open" systems will always find ways to survive in business environments where walled gardens fail."
Smoking from some kinda pipe, agreed. Once the 'california haze' disperses, perhaps she should consider that most businesses are and always have been CLOSED in how they operate. This whole lunatic 'open this, open that' movement is a fairly recent occurance in the history of business. What she believes amid the smoke is irrelevant...there is no track record to back her, or von Hippie with his cushy tenure at MIT which is unaffected by the success or failure of his OS fanaticism.
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"i am still a strong believer in the "make the pie higher" model where linden sacrifices a bit of virtual land revenue in exchange for the right to sell to other people's avatars."
Mighty generous of you....Noble sacrifice...WITH OTHER PEOPLE'S MONEY. Oh wait, money just happens for you, so it must just happen for everyone else. Riiiight.
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"linden is burdened somewhat by technologies, processes and a social contract that predates this virtual glastnost, but the problems are not insurmountable."
And a social contract that predates this virual glastnost? Apparently we poor deluded fools that do NOT want our IP to be free on the hypergrid are problems to be surmounted. Thank you and VWRAP for saving us from ourselves. /sarcasm off
---
"david levine and i"
"jon watte (then of forterra) and heiner wolf (of webkins)"
"lisa dusseault proposed"
"barry leiba, jon peterson and i"
"talking with David Levine and Suzy Deffeyes at IBM and Mic Bowman at Intel"
"smoking from Eric von Hippel's pipe"
Meadhbh sure does like to drop names and quote 'important' people in nearly every paragraph. I guess it is supposed to somehow bolster her position. I just find it annoyingly narcissistic in the 'Listen to me, I know someone at IBM and Intel, so I must be right' manner.
---
Yeah, you pegged her first try, Prokofy. A real piece of work. BTW which canned Linden was she? All I can say is that LL needs to do another sweep and get rid of the rest of the fanatics (you named another one, Soft Linden).
Posted by: Maklin Deckard | February 22, 2011 at 11:54 PM
Meadhbh (formerly Infinity Linden, not a secret) was the one who asked me for my input. She was trying to create consensus, or at least, multiple options. She should have dropped even more names; she barely mentioned who was involved, and I'll bet most of you never realised who was. There are a lot of quiet, thoughtful people out there, who simply didn't raise their voices loudly about all this.
There is such an option possible as an 'other grids' flag, but the problem is not that ~ the problem is ensuring that such a flag is *respected*. And that means: governance.
One thing about Meadhbh. She's something that so many people aren't: earnestly honest with regard to her virtual worlds agenda. Yes, she tells you where she's coming from. No nonsense. I don't fully agree with her take on things. But, I don't expect to. What matters are trustable standards *between people who disagree*.
Posted by: Desmond Shang | February 23, 2011 at 12:25 AM
"There is such an option possible as an 'other grids' flag, but the problem is not that ~ the problem is ensuring that such a flag is *respected*. And that means: governance" - Desmond
That is why the flag needs to be in the protocol rather than the protocol being 100% trust-based. Say grid A decides to ask SL grid for a player's inventory. Player has no grid transfer flagged items. The protocol itself SL-side should refuse to transfer these items, rather than relying purely on trusting grid A to respect it and refuse to add them to the players inventory. Literally build the BASIC content control right into the protocol itself, as long as SL itself runs that protocol and honors the no-hypergrid-export flag, that would handle most of the concerns about IP theft from within SL. SL is the motherlode of content after all. The rest can be worked on over time, via trust relationships.
My apologies if I offended you by speaking bluntly about a friend / collegue / ex-linden or whatever the status may be. I call them as I see them and I am not, nor have I ever been, a fan of attitudes such as hers. Its hard enough to get people to cooperate when you are blunt (as I have discovered) but you factor in the elite tone and you can pretty much kiss off cooperation with a lot of people. Accomplishment-wise, you are FAR above most people inworld and out, yet you are not condescending to the rest of us -- and hence folks for the most part cooperate with you with minimal pushback or try to see your POV. This is one of the reasons the disparate views in Caledon work.
She triggered a very visceral reaction with me when I read the article, just by her method of presentation...and notice your comment DIDN'T provoke that reaction? I didn't understand, I asked quetions, you replied in a civilized manner. You could have and always can be as blunt as you want with me...tell me my ideas are wrong or bad, and I may be blunt in return, but that's it.
But folks who pretend to know what is best for me while looking down your nose at me like I am some barely literate troglodyte because I do not follow their personal orthodoxy...as she did anyone not in lockstep with her positions, that triggers a reaction.
I'd still like to someday know more about how you see things, Desmond. If you ever get time ingame (tonight was my first night on SL in a couple weeks due to health), I look forward to further enlightenment!
Posted by: Maklin Deckard | February 23, 2011 at 01:59 AM