A good overview from a neutral outside observer on the copybot issue in Second Life provides perspective on the issue over at Plagiarism Today.
Among their conclusions about actions that Linden can take:
* Fix the Permissions: Linden Lab has said that it is impossible to stop the use of something like CopyBot. But while DRM fails in the real world due to the realities it faces, if the RIAA and MPAA could control the laws of physics, they could probably concoct and effective DRM. However, even if it only stopped the current bots, it would be seen as an improvement. Complete prevention is not the measure of success in these situations.
* Streamline Abuse Reporting: The DMCA process at Linden Lab works, but it is a headache. Much like Google, they require a mailed or faxed notice, which adds both extra hassle and extra time to the process. They could streamline the process overnight by accepting emailed notices and electronic signatures, as per the ESIGN Act, and in the long run could offer even more streamlining by providing an in-game method for reporting infringement.
* Better Detection and Banning: Users of the software need to be certain that they are going to be banned. Even if they can not close the loopholes, they can likely detect the misuse and notify the copyright holders. This would reduce the need for community enforcement of copyright matters and, when combined with more prompt banning, would discourage the misuse.
They also make the following conclusion:
If you’re a designer in Second Life, it may be time to start thinking about diversifying or even leaving the service. Though all such worlds will have an issue with content theft once they reach a certain size, there are steps that companies can take to mitigate against and reduce the impact that copies have on the virtual economy.
These are steps that Linden ha failed to take or even seriously consider and that practically guarantees, regardless of community efforts, that the issues with copying will only grow.
If there is any broader lesson that can be learned from this situation, it is that cooperation between hosts, service providers and copyright holders is critical in bringing about change.
It’s still unclear to me whether there’s any cooperation currently between content creators and Linden. If not, I’m starting to wonder whether this isn’t the same conclusion that the wider community is starting to come to on their own. However, I’ve hesitated weighing in myself on the issue – wiser minds around than mine, although I’m still sitting on one of my pages long posts and trying to decide how to wrap it up! A complex issue, but in the short term, still leaves that gnawing feeling that in spite the great leaps forward in technology that Linden is making, they’re far more preoccupied with Windlight and stability at the expense of the in-world creative community.
First off, thank you for the link and the mention, I’m glad you enjoyed the article!
In all of the entries that I read on the topic, I saw no evidence of cooperation between Linden and creators. In fact, I saw additional roadblocks in the form of a mailed-in DMCA and stonewalling.
While I grant that, as a company, they have many other issues to contend with, there are simple steps that they could take to make the process less painful without raising cost or providing much additional distraction.
I wouldn’t say it shows outright disdain for the creators in second life, but it certainly shows a lack of willingness to take any action, no matter how small and no matter how much it might help…
I think i’ve boiled it down to 3 main options, now trying to decide which is (most) true…
A/ Linden don’t know what to do and have no real vision for Second Life’s future. This one seems more plausible when you learn they originally planned to make (or commission) all the content themselves. Instead they switched to user-generated content – it was a good call, it took off, it wasn’t what they’d planned, now they’re lost.
B/ Linden don’t want to do anything. Also very convincing, seems to be the company’s culture: ignore it and it’ll go away. They’re right, if they ignore the issue of content protection it WILL all go away – all the builders, designers, graphic artists, musicians, DJ’s etc. We’ll all just go away.
C/ Linden only do anything in order to protect their profitability. Very convincing! Especially when you realise how important Premium members are to growing the SL economy and then notice that their numbers are falling. Suddenly ad-farms have to go and we’re getting mainland beautification via the Public Works projects. Not a coincidence. This is probably the leverage residents need to exploit. Make Linden see what harm stolen content (or the lack of new content) does to the economy and their profitability and suddenly we might see some action…
After reading Wagner Au’s book (intriguing until he became a “virtual world consultant” and then I thought he got a little thin), I was left with a sort of impression that SL and the residents are pretty much a whacked out, nutty group of people with a few empowering stories and odd gender-bending relationships. Not to say it’s not a great read, but it has me wondering whether it isn’t in some ways representative of Linden’s attitude towards its residents. Yeah, they loved having Anshe on the cover of Business Week, but even now they’re disavowing any of the work of real world companies who tried to take a crack at Second Life over the past year only to decamp in frustration. Basically, their line has been “SL isn’t ready for that kinda prime time”.
So let’s extend this – if Rosedale really is represented accurately by Wagner, then he’s an idealist, still dreaming about SL as a sort of “Be Bop” Burning Man (I posted on this today). The common refrain is “we’ll make a great platform and gee, won’t it be awesome to see what our nutty community comes up with once we do.”
I’m all for Be Bop. I’m all for Mirrored Flourishing (they tend to love stories of welfare moms who make good or someone who make better cars than Chrysler in their basement). But Linden’s attitude seems to be “look, this is a parade, a giddy carnival of fun and passion, and we’re not going to intrude with any sort of big business, old school, capitalist mentality, although sure, we wanna stay in business, but our ethos rules man, peace out.”
So, where they stand: let’s make sure everyone can fully express themselves, and one way to do that is to open up the grid. We need to anyways because although all these other platforms don’t have our hip, cool, surfer, laid-back ethos (combined with our deep love of code, cuz God’s in there man) they’re starting to circle around our little world, and wouldn’t it be awesome if people could hold their own little Burning Man’s by having their own servers.
But if that happens, they risk all these little private islands disconnecting from the Main Grid, so they start cleaning up the mainland. The future is in letting everyone host a parade, not in shopkeeping anyways, because after all, with 10,000 jeans already on the market, the bottom will fall out anyways, which isn’t such a bad thing because it will let everyone get back to their be-boppy roots.
What’s more important is not to upset the core ethic, which is to make sure our giddy users have access to the deepest tools possible for creating fun “stuff” (P.S. the in world economy was an add-on anyways, done in dire times as a way of saving Linden Labs, so it’s not like they ever really had their heart in it). And in doing so, we’ll make sure that we keep the space open for all the educators and collaborators who are our real future anyways – schools learning new ways to spread new models of education (we can teach the world!), and businesses who upend their business models once they see the magic of be bop reality.
I’ve argued before, however, that Linden needs a good dose of re-visioning. And in so doing create a more compelling strategy than “Our job is to create technology, it’s up to the users to decide what to do with it.” They seem to think that they’re creating a platform for liberation and social change, but don’t seem to realize that they’re acting more and more like an Internet Service Provider and in the commodification of their platform are thus attracting people who care about performance, intellectual property protection, tracking, privacy, and security.
Linden’s singular focus on providing tools to users towards enabling a shared creative “Burning Life” has blinded them to the fact that they’ve actually positioned themselves as nothing more than a server farm, with a bottom-line focus on island sales (thus the new “low prim sims”), with the dreamy hope that they’re the frontier of the age of virtual worlds (I’ve read that they play parlor games at LL trying to guess whether they’re the Compuserve, Mosaic, or Netscape of their time) and that their vision is so powerful that all those old nagging worries about content theft will go away once we all wake up and see that there’s a glorious new world that awaits.
There is. And it’s called the Internet. And the competition for the attention and talent of DJs, texture artists, modelers and others has an increasing number of options.
Linden needs to re-evaluate what the future looks like because the future includes people who can work anywhere, from anywhere, in any virtual world. And yes, there will always be room for the libertarian carnival, but like Burning Man it might only come once a year because who can take a lifetime of that, and it will get torn down once its done.
Hmm, and having said all that, replacing Rosedale as CEO might go a long way towards accomplishing what we’re talking about.
http://secondlife.reuters.com/stories/2008/03/14/exclusive-rosedale-to-step-down-as-linden-lab-ceo/
I can agree with the basic principle that Linden needs to do some serious re-envisioning of their product. One of the impressions that I’ve gotten as I’ve read Linden’s own sites and replies is that they don’t seem to understand what they want to be as a company or what they want SL to be as a product.
They’ve got some neat technology, many users who enjoy it and they need to find a way to make it cohesive and profitable. Not easy.
I think part of the reason people like me don’t “get” SL isn’t because we dislike virtual worlds, but because we don’t understand what the purpose of it is. One can hardly blame us when you look at the mixed messages Linden sends.
This seems to translate directly into how Linden handles these content issues. They say they take content theft issues seriously but don’t offer any meaningful solutions or even attempts at solutions. Part of it likely is the profitability issue and the fact there is no money to be made by removing infringing works. Some of it though is that they don’t know if or how this issue fits in with their future plans.
If they knew, for certain, they were going to be a company that was going to profit almost solely off of the exchange of virtual goods, they would likely do something to lock it down better. But they don’t want to invest in locks if, in a few months, the business model changes to something where content theft doesn’t matter.
You can’t invest in a future that you don’t know anything about.
I guess that’s the bottom line…
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The timing of this whole discussion has certainly taken on new meaning with the announcement of Philip taking on the role fo Chair of LL in order to find a replacement as CEO.
I particularly liked Samurai Pickle’s take on it.
http://samuraipickle.wordpress.com/2008/03/14/philip-rosedale-stepping-down-as-ll-ceo/
The post picks up a comment by that smiley virtual world watcher Robert Bloomfield:
“Linden Lab’s unique business vision allows them to break plenty of rules, but they can’t ignore the basic economic forces governing corporate growth and ultimately access to capital markets. The search for a successor is going to lead to some real soul-searching about two key trade-offs in Linden Lab’s strategy. First is the tradeoff between stability of the software platform and feature-heavy construction that allows creators with tremendous freedom. Second is the tradeoff between catering to individual residents who want a new world full of fantastic possibilities for their personal lives, and enterprises who see virtual worlds (but perhaps not Second Life) as the future of electronic commerce and the virtual office. Without a tremendous influx of capital that would allow them to become all things to all people, Linden Lab’s new management will need to make some big decisions on which way to turn.”
It is amazing how well-timed all of this is. Hopefully some of it will be taken to heart as they conduct their search…