The idea of the “nudge” is what it’s all about. And I would submit that the “nudge” that comes in the default isn’t as much of a shove as the 8049 concept is.

The nudge that the default gives us in fact defaults to what most people want: not to have their stuff copyable, unless they decide, on that particular creation, that yes, it can be copyable.

It defaults to the inherent property of everything as already copyrighted and protected — it’s a metaphor that plays out from RL to SL.

It treats each creation as unique, uncopyable — until you decide to make it so.

Meanwhile, the CC and opensource nudge of liberation of perms is a shove, not a nudge. Oh, sure, you can make the *first* choice to change to a new, customized default. But then ever after, your each unique creation defaults as copyable. You can’t really then go back on it due to peer pressure, especially in a group — and then you’d have to change a custom default, not just toggle one box.

It’s a very effective psychological brainwashing, because it holds out to everyone the prospect that if they do NOT vote for this “choice” they are “hampering builders,” even though most builders haven’t asked for it or even want it, but the reality is that what these opensourceniks want to use it for is to liberate perms and force people to go to a liberated perm regime permanently. That is stated clearly in the first sentence of the proposed feature. That’s why Lindens banning me for repeatedly pointing up the political agenda of the opensource activists here is ridiculous, because they themselves front their political goals in your face. When catherine Pfeffer describes the servers of SL as “egotistical” because they default as your own prims, without copy (i.e. the “egotistical server” makes YOU egotistical by default), she means not to nudge, but to agitate you into admitting that you are selfish unless you liberate your creations “for the community”.

This is Bolshevik collectivization, and we need to push back hard against it. It’s no less destructive just because it’s digital and online; everything is online and will become more online, and it will have a devastating impact.

C/M/T is the heart of SL, and frankly, the Lindens put it in almost inspite of themselves, and very much against the will of some copyleftist Lindens.

It’s very much under assault now, not only with VWR 8059 but with the assault by Soft Linden as well on the “share bug” which he insists is “expected behaviour” — it’s a casual and even hostile attitude to the problem of the unwanted return and destruction of private property in SL, and that’s worrisome (he’s willing to suddenly declare return of *group owned* property by the same bug as a bug — indication of how suspect his entire claim is).

There is a concerted effort to decouple the binding of copyright to SL creations under the false flag of “builder’s convenience”.

The same gang trying to ram through Creative Commons crap and “liberate” everything under the fake premise that this “helps you get custom sales” are trying to drive out c/m/t and its adherence to objects in SL. It’s got to be called out for what it is.

Jacek Antonelli on his blog makes it seem like these are all exaggerated and FUD-ridden notions, that Dusan is picking up my critique of CC and becoming FUD’d himself, etc. etc. But I think any intelligent person who examines the CC shill closely can come away realizing: this system browbeats me into sharing everything “for the sake of the community” but doesn’t have a viable way for me to protect my copyright REALLY by having a way to get paid for my objects reliably.

SL, unlike the wider Internet at large, does that! And God bless it.

What I bet the Lindens are cooking up now is merely some “call your lawyer” or “file a DMCA” streamlined process, perhaps even automating it in the tools. They may make the automation of CC licensing or DCMA notification even in lieu of c/m/t. They imagine they would be doing people some sort of favour with this, but it’s utterly fake — the real way to protect copyright is not to tamper with c/m/t, not to browbeat people with CC, and not throw up your hands at the fact that integrity of c/m/t isn’t 100 percent. It’s their all-or-nothing argument that is used to undo even such protection that does in fact adhere, and that’s wrong.

Affluent middle-aged white men in Silicon Valley, larded up with gadgets and widgets and digital equipment out the wazoo, with A-list blogs or access to A-list blogs, were the first to start this meme that you “have” to have copyable songs and other digital content because otherwise you can’t copy it on to your many other electronic toys, and therefore DRM was “broken” or “wrong” or “can’t work”. They had more of an influence on manufacturers even than kids downloading on the Internet because they basically had the power of the purse to threaten the consumer electronics field significantly.

We don’t have to be bound by their indulgent whining, however, which was key to destroying the music industry. Not in SL, where you get something that is copyable to any other purpose you need with nothing that needs to be “jailbroken”, but you still can’t *transfer* it — if transfer is turned off — unless, of course, you go through some elaborate deliberate hack. but you aren’t motivated to hack, given that you can copy endlessly; you just can’t resell it. Brilliant.

I’ve counted Dusan Writer as a friend (or at least a friendly acquaintance) ever since I met him in the course of his UI design contest a year ago. He’s an interesting personality, and generally an intelligent fellow and a thoughtful writer…

I don’t disagree. My dream, and this came through in the UI contest I sponsored some time ago, was a far better system for making permissions and inventory tags “visible”.

Inventory is a mess – not only should it be more intuitive, but things like sorting on a perm basis, creator basis, etc. would all go a long way to improving the ability to package and sell content.

As someone who has struggled with the same issues, I relate: trying to package up a house, with all of the nested door scripts, textures, prims, notecards and whatever else has been one of those nightmares that had me screaming in frustration.

But I’d prefer that these things were dealt with on the visibility side rather than the creation side. Allowing people to flip their default perms removes a choice architecture which I think WORKS. Yes, it’s a nudge in the direction of friction, but that friction is what makes SL what it is: a conscious choice to switch from one model of content ownership to another, and to not then end up with an “out of sight out of mind” scenario where we’re not forced to remember that we made that choice.

Jacek had an interesting idea, however, which was session-specific perms. I suppose I’d go with that…at least I’d know that at log-in I’d be back to sharing the same content philosophy as everyone else on the Grid, as frustrating as that could be at times.

Thank god they’re finally implementing bulk permissions changing at least. Packaging items for sale in SL is extremely cumbersome. For me, content creation is about 25% creative work, and 75% repetitive drudgework. Anything that can streamline that process and cut down on errors is very welcome to me.

Setting your own default perm’s for SL objects you create would be useful but I’d still prefer to see a set of perm’s introduced for the ‘user-after-next’ which I believe would trigger a second wave of creativity in SL. Admittedly, it adds yet another layer of complexity to SL but it could be worth it. There is a proposal languishing in the jira : http://jira.secondlife.com/browse/SVC-2622

Otherwise, I couldn’t agree with you more, M/C/T made SL creative and compelling and LL tamper with (or ignore) that at their peril.