Thursday, February 12, 2009

Content creators frustration with Linden permissions

There are many out there in Second Life who create for the creators - what do I mean?
You know that fantastic sofa with loads of animations you just bought? or that AO that has you posing while you stand and chat? what about the door script on your house?
These are the builders' suppliers, each is created by someone and because of the very nature of their sales they have to sell their creations full permissions - dont they?
After all if they didn't then a builder couldn't add an animation to a sofa or modify a door to fit or if they could they couldn't then resell their creation.
But this leads to an obvious risk - what is to stop anyone from then taking those creations and, instead of using then in a build, just reselling them as animations or doors or whatever?
The answer is nothing - Lindens answer - file a DMCA claim which can cost thousands after the original creator has already lost thousands.
We are not talking pennies here - people are losing money on a daily basis and a lot of the time it can be through pure ignorance on the builders part.

Yesterday I spoke to Sylva Petrov a noted animator in Secondlife:

Sylva Petrov: Due to ignorance or intent, every time I sell animations to builders, I risk them becoming tomorrow's freebies
Dana: How?
Sylva Petrov: If the builder doesn't change the perms he is giving them away essentially, and quite a few think that just setting the permissions on the containing object is enough. I even got yelled at yesterday for asking for samples of a builders work so i could show her!
Dana: no because you can copy from the contents if the perms are not set
Sylva Petrov: she SWORE up and down that the mlp2 scripts set the permissions when it was sold, people believe all sorts of urban legends
Dana: If someone sells something to me full perms then I would take for granted it was all of it - including the animation
Sylva Petrov: yes, but they're not, they're supposed to be selling them no copy or no transfer.
they set their own part, the bed for example, to it, but they don't realize the contents are wide open. Ignorance probably does more damage than intentional thieves.
Dana: Can anything be done?
Sylva Petrov: Social change is difficult, expensive, and not very effective - technical changes are cheap, easy, and almost always work.
Dana: Don't you point out and make an agreement with the builders about setting perms?
Sylva Petrov: We can roar ourselves hoarse to the builders about proper permissions setting, but what of the builder that starts tomorrow? A technical fix will eliminate the 'honest' mistakes.
dana Vanmoer: What you are asking for is that LL sets a secondary permissions system?
Sylva Petrov: yes, so we can say how the people that buy from content creators can set the perms afterwards
They can give us owner-after-next permissions
The ability to set a property on an item that will force the item to become either no copy or no transfer on the next owner to our buyers.
The way it would work is if i toggle that switch - lets call it the 'limited full perms' switch if they try to make it copyable, transferable will gray out if they make it transferable, copyable will gray out
Dana: So after you give a full perms object, it automatically becomes either no copy or no transfer if they give it to someone else - wouldn't that be difficult to do?
Sylva Petrov: Linden labs collects millions of dollars from us a month to do difficult things that's what they're paid to do. According to a programmer, it shouldn't be 'that' difficult

There is a JIRA on this very subject where many have voiced their opinions, it is as yet unassigned (surprise surprise)
Lets help those that make our lives better by supporting the content creators and helping them to protect their products from thieves and ignorance by voting on this HERE
And to Linden Lab?
Actually I can't say I am surprised this is ignored by Linden Lab, many will say its not a priority but I would argue that those same people would soon regret it if the content providers stopped selling full perms for the builders.
I love my AO and my amazing scripted furniture - don't you?

0 comments:

Post a Comment

Blog Archive