The right to copy, back-up and move virtual goods from one platform to another is a philosophy that, well, confounds me, and I can’t help wondering whether the expression of virtual goods somehow has us believing that these really ARE a pair of jeans, or a house, or a car or whatever, that somehow we feel entitled because of the sense of reality we get from virtual goods, but then I remember that many people have a similar sense of entitlement to ANY content that can be digitized, it’s people who CREATE content who just don’t ‘get it’, their rights as individuals need to be subsumed to some kind of, well, collective.
Botgirl is the latest to articulate the “we have rights” school of thought as it applies to Second Life, and urges us all to back-up our inventory and ship it elsewhere, or to keep it, at the very least, on our hard drives, safe from the ravages of time or the impending collapse of Linden Lab. (Although if Linden Lab collapses, I’d propose we’ll have long moved on and will be swapping holographic mesh houses on Microsoft’s Windows 12.0 or wherever). Her argument echoes the argument of many who came before, and will come again:
- We have a rationale. The rationale is that we don’t want to lose stuff. You wouldn’t want us to lose stuff would you?
- The content creators won’t mind – they sold it to ME after all, and I can do what I want with it.
- And don’t give me any arguments about platforms and Linden Lab or whatever – that’s like defending the MUSIC industry for gawd’s sake! That’s like defending, I dunno, Communism or something! Didn’t you know how inherently EVIL it was for an industry to facilitate the commercialization of music for all those decades to the delighted enjoyment of millions???
- And don’t argue LAW with me. The law is vague or undecided. And besides, didn’t I tell you I bought it and so it’s MINE and I should have a right to protect what’s MINE?
OK, so sure, there are far more intelligent ways of articulating the above. But the basic argument is this: that we as consumers are ENTITLED. The consumer is the one with the rights. Not the platform owner. Or the content creator. Or even the courts, now that I think about it, because look at how DUMB they have been in trying to protect those monolithic record companies – someone elect Lawrence Lessig to the Supreme Court and FAST!
But I’m willing to listen to all kinds of arguments. I’m willing to think about fair use, and whether the legal regime for copyright makes sense. I’m even willing to consider whether copyright itself should be abolished. Thankfully, however, most of the “if it can be copied it SHOULD be” advocates don’t also argue for the abolishing of copyright, otherwise they’d simply truly BE communists, it’s all about a lack of private property and everything being in the service of the collective good if you take the argument to the logical extension. (Oh my, I’m probably sounding like Prok, but bear with me LOL)
But what I can’t help puzzling over are the larger contradictions in the argument. Or the larger silence around issues NOT related to virtual world goods. Or maybe I’m reading the wrong blogs.
Games and Worlds
So, let’s say I buy a suit of armor in Warcraft, or I get my wings in Aion, or a new car in Grand Theft Auto.
Now, the rules of the game will say that this property is now the property of my avatar. The rules of the game may also place restrictions around the monetization of game content, but the ‘idea’ of property is still inherent to the game. And most game objects DO have a dollar value – they’re traded mostly quite openly, either on exchanges endorsed by the platform owners or on exchanges that are ignored, which is nearly the same as approval.
Now, let’s say I’m worried that Blizzard is about to go out of business. Not this year, but in 5 years maybe.
Do I have a right to back up my Warcraft inventory in case Blizzard goes out of business? If so, then do I have the right to back-up, I don’t know, the Goldshire region? I PAID for Goldshire, after all, with my monthly subscription, and I’m only backing it up so that I can protect my right to enjoyment of this virtual ‘property’ I’ve invested in.
If you say yes to all of this, then see above, because what you’re advocating is to abolish the notion of intellectual property.
But if you say no, then what is it about Warcraft that causes you to say no? Is one type of content creator different than another? Just because it’s a large corporation, does that give them lesser rights to their intellectual property than the person making shoes in Second Life?
Maybe the lack of monetization somehow makes the exchange less of a purchase? But isn’t time exchanged for goods a transaction? The lawyers would say that it is – if I spend 20 hours painting your house and you give me a chicken, we’ve conducted a transaction which has fair value, just as grinding for 20 hours to get enough herbs to make a potion also gives fair value.
Or maybe you’ll say it’s the Terms of Service, which are clear about this issue about who owns what. But in Second Life the TOS is clear, but in SL’s case you are fine with ignoring it, and on Warcraft you’re not?
Or maybe it’s because with Warcraft you can’t actually USE that content somewhere else. In which case you’re not actually talking about intellectual property, you’re talking about your desire for interoperability. About which more later.
But first, tell me the difference, because I don’t get it: why is a game like Warcraft different from Second Life? If I’m allowed to back up my inventory in one world why shouldn’t I be allowed to do the same in another?
A Web of Content and Walled Gardens
Find me the back-up button on Facebook. Find me the way to not just copy and paste my endless wall posts and right click and save all the photos of me on Spring Break, but to copy the connections I have to other people, their profiles, their connections, their posts back to me.
Or find me the place on Google where I can click the button that says “download my saved search history and profile” – you know, that database that Google keeps on you of every link you can click and every e-mail you’ve sent.
Show me on youTube where I can back up the video that someone ELSE made. Oh – sure, I can get burners and rip the videos off, but do you approve? Should I be able to go and download a BotGirl video from youTube and embed it on my own private site for my own enjoyment? Will Botgirl be upset or will she say, yeah, that’s fair use? Or did she believe that in posting it on YouTube she had some control over how the video was displayed and be able to take advantage of the statistics attached to that platform or, maybe, even be able to monetize it one day with some AdWords or something.
The Web is filled with walled gardens. Places where we make stuff and share it but do so with at least a moderate understanding of how those particular walled gardens work. We don’t expect the owners of Facebook to copy our personal information over to MySpace. We don’t expect the ability to back-up our social networks and take them somewhere else. We understand that the platform itself functions because the platform owner has built tools to KEEP us there, to make it DIFFICULT for us to just migrate all of our content to the next hot widget that comes along, and we participate in those platforms willingly, for now anyways.
Now, we may wail in frustration when we realize that most of our photos are on Picassa and not our hard drive, or on Facebook instead of a DVD, but we don’t blame the platform owner, we blame ourselves for not backing up our own stuff. And for our own stuff – the stuff that we uploaded and shared and which was native to us in the first place this is fine. But we UNDERSTAND that we don’t have a right to a copy of our social network graph in Facebook – we can take our photos with us, but we can’t click “export” and carry our networks somewhere else.
Botgirl makes a common argument: “But restricting fair use through DRM and TOS policies is an institutional wrong that undermines the rights of every single Second Life resident. The legitimate way to deter content theft is to go after those who steal, not to treat every consumer like a latent thief.”
And yet the restriction of fair use over our OWN stuff is what the vast landscape of social media is greatly BASED ON. The natural extension of the Botgirl argument is that no site should be developed which doesn’t allow easy portability of all of “our” content, even if the connections and cross-tabulations of that content was facilitated by the platform owner – the platform owner has no right, in other words, to create a system which has a few hooks in it to keep you there, or to create one where the intellectual property developed within it is difficult (or illegal by the TOS) to transfer.
But here’s the thing: let’s say you disagree with the above. Let’s say you think that you SHOULD be able to take your social networks with you when you go. Well, you sign up for Ning not Facebook. You post Torrents instead of youTube videos. But you KNOW when you join – “this is a walled garden, and I gain something from it but there are rules in play here and I’ll make the sacrifice”. Just because you don’t like it later doesn’t somehow retroactively give you the right to change your mind or to impose your new desires on the platform owners or your fellow community members.
The rules were posted, the norms were fairly clear, (or you figured them out soon enough) and your not liking it doesn’t confer an entitlement to it being changed.
Is Virtual World Content DIFFERENT
Linden lab developed a proprietary format for virtual content. They made this format accessible through the open source viewer. But the portability of that format did not imply a RIGHT to portability. There’s nothing in the TOS or, even, the law which confers that right.
One of the other common arguments made is that although the law doesn’t explicitly allow copying of content, it SHOULD. As Botgirl says:
“It took the unrelenting efforts of renegade software developers, actively dissenting consumers and organizations like the Electronic Frontier Foundation (EFF) to release digital music from DRM. The fight to free video content is still underway. The battle to liberate virtual property has barely begun.”
Now, I don’t follow the music industry. But as far as I know, the release of music from DRM didn’t suddenly wipe out the rights of content creators (namely musicians). However, it’s an ineffective argument because WISHING that the laws were different doesn’t MAKE them different. As of today, there is no legal precedent by which a TOS has been over-ruled by a court. Wishing that the courts judged the concept of the TOS to be non-binding doesn’t mean that they have – and unless you’re willing to BE the precedent and fight this through the courts, you’re still doing something which right now is illegal.
Platform-specific virtual world content is therefore subject to the TOS. And I would argue that even if it was fought in court, it would STILL be subject to the TOS, because in spite Botgirl’s claim that Linden Lab IMPLIES in its advertising that virtual goods are GOODS, they do no such thing. They simply claim that virtual goods are goods IN SECOND LIFE.
Show me the ad by Linden Lab which says something like: “Make money selling virtual content in Second Life AND OpenSim.”
It doesn’t say that. In fact, the promise that the Lab makes is that they will provide a platform, an economy, and various (attempts at) protection which will allow you to create, share and sell goods in Second Life.
Not the metaverse. Or the Web. Or at the corner store. In Second Life.
If you want a ‘universal marketplace’ go and sell and buy stuff on TurboSquid. Quit complaining that Second Life content can’t be used across the metaverse. It wasn’t made that way, it wasn’t promised, and there will be lots of other platforms (and mesh imports) that will deal with your dream.
The Rights of Content Creators
But more than anything, what I find to be an affront is the idea that the content creator has no rights. That their understanding of how Second Life was set-up should be over-ridden by, well, by someone’s desire to bring copies of content to OpenSim or to back it up because the Lab might fail.
The mob has more rights than the craftsperson entertaining that mob. The collective over-rules the content creator. Your rights to consume, and to consume anywhere at any time and in whatever way you see fit is paramount. In fact, I can’t help wondering whether, in their passionate defense of consumers, these are the same people that decry global warming as a hoax, worried that their right to burn fossil fuel will be infringed upon by some boring old TOS about carbon emissions.
Having said that, content creators DO lack certain rights – to have other expressions of the licenses they grant to their content, for example. But the lack of those rights (or, actually, they HAVE those rights they just don’t have easy ways to confer them) doesn’t give a consumer the right to impose those rights FOR them, to decide that “Copy/Mod/Transfer” MEANT copy it to whatever Grid you please….and frankly, if you want to impose those rights on content creators, in my books that’s a far greater tyranny than the one imposed by those who would deem to protect you.
I’m for more ways people can save their own data. Copybot’s always a sore topic because of its rampant misuse. However, equating virtual world items with music is not solid reasoning. I *buy* music, it resides either on discs that I own, or digital copies that reside on my computer. There’s no reason I should be told I can’t do what I want with what I own, assuming it’s not negatively affecting others. (For example, case being made against XBox360 modders where it’s used to pirate and/or cheat at online games.)
Virtual world property, however, doesn’t ever reside anywhere but the virtual world host. I think the case becomes much more credible when we have an offline building tool and/or some level of data transportability. It’s an important distinction, because it’s like by accessing Second Life, you’re going over someone’s house and playing with their Legos. You don’t get to take the Legos home with you.
Unfortunately, I suspect that this may be part of a larger set of societally scoped questions and issues.
This larger picture is about whether we (individually and as a society) believe that the right to control the usage of digital content in order to be compensated for its creation is valid. It is about whether people have the right to circumvent the legal system “because they can.” It is about whether the value of sharing trumps the value of compensation for initial creation, such that there is a moral high ground for implementing sharing even when a creator does not agree with that decision.
A shift to these thoughts seems to have started with the music industry. It’s happened in the construct of virtual worlds. It’s happened in the social media sphere, where entire presentations and eBooks have been literally copied character for character and image for image and rebranded as someone else’s work.
Inevitably the defenses when people who choose this path are confronted seem to fall into a few camps:
* “I didn’t know – after all the system let me do it.”
* “The system let me do it, so it must be ok.”
* “He/She/They have no right to prevent me from using this any way I want.”
* “If it was wrong, it was up to the person who provided the information to prevent me from doing it.”
What happens if a majority of the people in a society choose to disregard any laws that they do not agree with, and to do so with moral certainty that this is not only a good choice but a justified one?
Are we in a society that uses “whatever the machine allows” as the final definition of ethics and morality? I hope not.
As a counterpoint, YouTube now has a new algorithm that checks uploaded content for copyright infringement. Publishers can choose whether the behavior on infringement is 1) to prevent distribution and viewing of the infringing material or 2) to require an advertising overlay to benefit the originator.
I wonder whether this is a valid solution model for the future of copyright management. Essentially it removes the problem of copy prevention, a problem that is not fully solvable in a digital world, and replaces it with an ensured compensation component.
This change would transform the whole issue from copyright enforcement, prevention of copying, to compensation assurance, ensuring that when a work is used, the appropriate parties are compensated for their contribution.
Content creators do have rights. They have copyright. You seem to be complaining that consumers also have rights under copyright law, such as fair use rights to back up their inventories. Copyright law is supposed to balance the rights of creators with the rights of the public.
You accuse Botgirl et al of acting as if they’re entitled to certain rights, but you are doing the same thing.
Agreed Hiro – that’s why I find the comparison between virtual world goods and music rights so baffling.
Joel – well said. Far better than I could say it. But yes, the entitlement culture, facilitated by ‘ease’ doesn’t mean that you abandon the premise that someone who makes something should have rights. Just because a law can be broken doesn’t mean the law should be scrapped.
This, by the way, is something I find infuriating about one of Lawrence Lessig’s arguments when he claims that copyright of music leads to the criminalization of children. (Bring the kids into it?) He basically says: “Kids are going to break the law anyways. Is it fair to make kids into criminals? Therefore isn’t it better to change the laws?”
That argument is fundamentally unethical in my books.
Now, having said all this, I think that digital technology, in its facilitation of copying, opens up entire industries to innovation – not because they should try to protect their standard practices and business models, but rather towards creating new business models and technologies which recognize the reality of digital content but which use creative means to provide services to people and yet protect the concept of copyright and IP. (iTunes anyone?)
Finally, Christine – your argument bears no weight. I am not arguing for the removal of any of the rights of consumers. They can buy, share, modify, transfer, shop, have access to open markets, display their purchases, and maybe even make stuff themselves. They can do so in a platform which affords them governance and policy, a fairly frictionless market, allows anonymity and self-expression, and is otherwise a fairly laissez-faire environment in which to enjoy themselves. If these rights are insufficient to consumerism, what other rights could you possibly need?
Oh, and secondly Christine….you’ve made the same mistake that everyone else makes about copyright in this instance.
There IS no transfer of copyright. The virtual goods being traded are not copyrighted goods, they’re licensed software products. To conflate the two is a mistake and is fairly common – just as your social network on Facebook isn’t a ‘copyrighted material’ but rather the product of software, so too the digital goods in Second Life were not created under a copyright regime but rather under a licensing agreement in which works (which are your copyright) are licensed for display in Second Life.
The copyright holders decision to do so is based on a terms of service and norms/policy and enforcement environment in which the holder is assured that the platform’s intent is to hold the product “within” the platform. If you knew that your work was intended to be backed up and sent to other grids, you might make a different decision on whether to do so, or charge a different price. The fact that a consumer “buys” the product does not confer universal ownership, because the buyer too is aware of the policy, norms and TOS of the platform and to act otherwise is both against the TOS and illegal.
Through all the “meta” wrappings…
this is all about the values “grandma” tried to teach you at age 5.
None of them have any value for the machine culture youre all evangelising.
and that simply is why, after 50 years of machine/tech culture media. Youve all become psychotic.;)
yeah, a few are “only” delusional.;)
But a “love machine” will take care of that soon enough.
c5
So long as you can’t copy/paste the love I’m gonna send you Cube I’m with you.
http://news.cnet.com/8301-13772_3-10415251-52.html?tag=newsEditorsPicksArea.0
wikis, vr worlds, tierdman, cnet, and government…
we are what we eat.
I “like” Obama’s words.., but he’s got the wrong “tech” advisors for a republic, but i guess the right ones if you just want to give up a 200 year old -ever adapting constitional 3 part government over to a single corporations TOS and BOD.
So far, for 20 years “every simulated-virtual- digital 3d world” has been the equivalent of a totalitarian regime.
so frankley any talk of viewser rights is just psychotic. Terra Nova, Kosters Bill of Rights, etc.. all just silly PR nonsence.
When a platform exists for a “free 3d vr republic” then all of this “meta” rights blogging will be mute. And reality will be addressed again…
hopefully.;)
If so much brain damage hasnt already been done.:)
Wait wait wait, folks. We DO have an offline building tool. You can install your very own OpenSim walled garden to build things in, on your very own PC. Virtual world property can, in fact, reside on your own computer, just like digital music, and it can, in fact, be moved from your own OpenSim to another OpenSim.
For that matter, you can actually save a copy of your own search history from Google, provided you have clicked the button that says Google will package it up for you. Mine goes back to October of 2005, because that’s when I clicked the button.
I also get copies of my Facebook messages, comments, and other interactions sent to my email—so they are backed up and my conversational history isn’t trapped on Facebook’s servers. Don’t you?
And I don’t even pay for those things. I don’t pay Google or Facebook any money at all, and I still value those things enough to back them up. So if I have paid for something, don’t you think I would want to take the precaution of backing it up, just in case something happens to the servers on which those things reside?
The question is about a sense of entitlement, but not in the way you are presenting it, Dusan. The question should not be, “Why do SL consumers think they have a right to back up the digital content they have purchased?” because they have a right in every other situation to do exactly that. The question should be, “Why do SL content creators think consumers should have fewer rights with regard to their digital property than they do with other kinds of digital property?”
well, all that love will only be a percentage of that which Phillips new TOS will allow;)
Commodified, “Love”.
Wasnt that a “Tribble” ?
Because the TOS says it’s so Doreen, it’s as simple as that.
You miss my point, which is that you accuse others of entitlement, yet yourself feel entitled.
You also don’t really answer Doreen’s question, of “Why do SL content creators think consumers should have fewer rights with regard to their digital property than they do with other kinds of digital property?”
“Because the TOS says so” answers why consumers DO have fewer rights, not why they SHOULD.
Ouch! I don’t think my position is very radical. In fact, it’s pretty moderate and tries to balance the interests of consumers, creators and platform providers. Although you wrote “you’re willing to listen to all kinds of arguments” it seems to me that outside a couple direct quotes, what you mostly did was create a straw dog and put a bunch of silly arguments its mouth. That’s a pretty effective approach for a rant, but not one that promotes constructive conversation.
So to clarify my actual thoughts on some of ideas you associated with my position:
I do not condone copying or distributing content that was not properly purchased.
I do understand that some content creators are opposed to the idea of free use.
I don’t think the music industry is evil (just dumb).
I don’t think that only consumers have rights.
I don’t think that if something can be copied it should be copied.
I do think people have a right to capture their social network data.
I do think it’s fine for you to download a video I posted publicly on YouTube for your own private use.
I don’t think platform owners are obligated to make it easy for content to be portable.
I don’t think wishing that laws were different makes them different.
I do think that although TOS are valid contracts as a class, that doesn’t mean that every clause in every TOS is enforceable.
Okay. I’ll stop itemizing now, but hopefully you get the drift.
I think the reason that (mostly) reasonable people disagree so much at the moment is that technology is not moving forward via some rational plan, but in disruptive leaps. So there are huge gaps in the governance, interoperability, infrastructure and law needed to balance the interests of all parties.
If I had a magic wand that would absolutely prevent the sharing and acquisition of content that people don’t have a right to, while at the same time giving consumers full control of their rightfully acquired digital goods, I’d cast the spell without a moment’s hesitation. But in our current environment, the decisions that empower one group tend to disempower another. Hopefully we can work towards a compromise without demonizing each other in the process.
Hmmm. I’m really not sure in what way I feel entitled or am saying I feel entitled.
In Second Life, about which I’m specifically speaking, the platform has been developed and has grown based on a specific set of policies around content protection as expressed in the TOS, governance and enforcement (sometimes well, and sometimes not so well). The understanding of this set of policies, or world-view might be a better understanding, is fairly clear: objects can be sold or shared within the framework of copy/mod/transfer but the exporting of content is not permitted unless you were the creator of the content.
I don’t feel entitled, as a content creator, to make any additional claims than that. So how am I claiming an entitlement? I’m not. I don’t feel entitled, I have simply agreed to the conditions of the world in which I’m participating.
I am asking for no entitlement. I am agreeing to the rules and framework provided and am asking only for stability and transparency in how that framework is executed and with the hope that it won’t change without good reason.
Consumers, however, are saying that they are ENTITLED to MORE than this framework provides. That because they purchase an item under a clear framework which precludes anything other than the c/m/t provisions and precludes copying items so that they can be put on your hard drive or taken to another grid. This is an entitlement, because it asks for something which is not provided.
This sense of entitlement is abetted because it is POSSIBLE. This does not, however, make it legal, and there is no precedent nor prevailing legal opinion that the rights of the platform owner to set the standards by which the world can be governed should be over-ruled just because someone doesn’t LIKE it.
The wonderful thing about OpenSim is that it allows anyone to set up their own grids and to set their own policies. It allows different worlds with different frameworks for content – sold or not, free or not, with C/M/T or not, with Creative Commons as the IP framework – all are possible, and they are at the discretion of the individual platform owners or world owners.
As a content creator or consumer I can therefore make choices about what kind of IP/content regime I prefer to operate under. Maybe it’s one in which it’s clear that content created and transferred can also be ported out to other grids or backed up on your hard drive. That’s great – you know the rules, you understand what you’re bound to, and you can make decisions and set prices (or give stuff away) accordingly.
If you don’t like the rules of the platform there are other choices. Nothing I’ve ever heard trumps the ability of the platform owner to set the terms and conditions by which the software expressions of content, protected by LICENSE (and not copyright) are governed.
But your second question is telling. Because it demonstrates either a confusion about the difference between copyright and licenses (and thus fair use) or, instead, means that you’d rather have a wider debate about intellectual property and copyright. Which is fine, and it’s an interesting debate to have.
But let’s not pretend here that Linden Lab is a tyranny and is suppressing some kind of universal right. They have a right to set a licensing scheme how they want, and consumers and content creators have the right to participate in that or NOT.
But what you’re asking is a broader question, which seems to confuse copyright materials with licensed content.
I support the concept of fair use. I think the legal definition of fair use needs an overhaul, but the general principle is, well, fair.
But I equally believe that there should be, and ARE walled gardens, wherein we can make decisions and work in environments where the technology is deployed in such a way that we can operate under different frameworks that govern our contributions to communities.
I believe in this because I believe in the doctrine of choice, believe that there is not ONE set of rules and protocols that will govern the various ways in which intellectual property is created or shared. There is no universal truth – neither “everything that is digital can be copied, therefore copying should be legal” nor “nothing should be copied”. In some cases, the former is true – content whose copyright has expired, for example. In some cases, the latter. And in some cases it will be a mix of the two, where ownership of scientific research, for example, needs to combine both ‘open’ AND ‘closed’ in order to facilitate innovation.
My point about Facebook isn’t that you can’t back-up your comments, as Doreen is suggesting. It’s that you don’t have the rights to “back up” the software nor the databases that run the platform. And just because you can do these things on OpenSim, Doreen, doesn’t mean that it makes it a necessary feature of the platform’s policy elsewhere, it just means you can do it, well, on OpenSim – but you make a choice by participating in the platform that way, just because you CAN back up the digital content, however, doesn’t confer legality on the act of doing so if that act is explicitly prohibited either by law or by a particular platform owner’s policy.
Now…Linden Lab made certain choices about how they constructed their platform. Do I think I’d do it differently? Yes, I do. I have problems with the rights system in SL, just as I have significant problems with the inventory system. But just because I have these issues doesn’t entitle me to use copybot, what it does is entitle me to advocate for changes and, if I don’t like it, to move on.
Botgirl – thanks for the response. And yeah, it was a rant…I was feeling ‘ranty’ HAHA.
But the thing I’m ranting against isn’t complicated. It’s your statement:
“I do not condone copying or distributing content that was not properly purchased.”
Where did your purchase of content confer on you the right to do anything with it other than wear it, use it, or keep it in inventory?
You may have problems with inventory or the ability to back it up, in which case you should be screaming loud about THAT and not about copybot. You have a compelling argument but you’ve arrived at the wrong conclusion.
I agree with the following:
“I think the reason that (mostly) reasonable people disagree so much at the moment is that technology is not moving forward via some rational plan, but in disruptive leaps. So there are huge gaps in the governance, interoperability, infrastructure and law needed to balance the interests of all parties.”
However, I also see this as a tremendous advantage to this and many industries, because it opens the door for someone to come along and innovate in a way that brings the governance in line with possibilities. If people don’t like the way the Lab does it, then someone will come along who does – for content creators it might be Blue Mars, and for consumers it might be openSim, although I suspect the winner might be the one who brings the two into synch.
By the way, I wasn’t trying to characterize you in particular with the majority of my post, merely the general attitude that has appeared in endless blogs and rants elsewhere
Because you rock in all ways, but in this particular instance I do feel that you’re advocating for the wrong solution to an acknowledged risk.
However it might appear, we’re creators and consumers, we’re *not* owners and purchasers.
I feel that purchasers should absolutely have the right to back up digital goods in the same way that they have the right to back up purchased non-digital intellectual property — contingent on no infringement occurring.
However, I know that while I paid for the use of SL content, that I didn’t *purchase* that content. There’s no gray areas that I can see in the law about this. The Lab’s ownership of that content is upheld, and I agreed to that, *as did we all*.
Tateru – I need to learn to be as succinct as you.
Oh – and I should give another example – the Kindle.
When you buy a Kindle, you’re also buying into a framework in which the books you buy will not be transferable to other devices. They will be BACKED up and you can have them on your hard drive but you know what the ‘regime’ is you’re buying into. It’s like SL but with better back-up procedures…but it’s still a walled garden with its own rules and you either buy into those rules or you don’t and download books from Google or wherever.
But the inability to make back-ups in SL doesn’t negate the framework or the laws, just as if the Kindle didn’t allow back-ups on your hard drive. You might make a difference choice about BUYING a Kindle, but the lack of back-up doesn’t permit you to break the law.
Wow, these last few posts.. I can hardly get any work done, I just keep checking these for new comments!
What is Linden Lab’s position regarding residents that publish articles promoting and inciting TOS violations?
@Doreen
It may be convenient for you to say “they have a right in every other situation to do exactly that. The question should be, “Why do SL content creators think consumers should have fewer rights with regard to their digital property than they do with other kinds of digital property?””
This assertion is simply not backed by facts.
Some examples:
* You can not back up all Facebook content, only the bits you get by email. You cannot back up your Friends list (other than with screen shots), your Friend Group definitions, the text that you have entered on Fan Pages or Groups Pages, nor the content you have submitted to games, surveys or other third party software that bolts in to the service (some may do this, but not all).
* You cannot back up your ratings that you have posted on YouTube about other peoples’ work, nor your comments submitted on their videos (at least as far as I have seen… if it’s possible I’ll be happy to find out how)
* I recently encountered a web-based and otherwise nicely designed small business accounting system that provides no ability to directly back up user data – the best you get is to run reports or do screen captures.
* You can not rip a commercial DVD whose license prohibits that type of copying (technically you can, but it is illegal)
* You can not copy software outside of the license terms. Not all software allows for any copy past one archival backup copy. This does not allow you to, for instance run it on any “other platform” that you choose.
* You can not use a restricted-usage digital photograph or video in any context outside of the original license terms, even though it is eminently possible to make exact copies.
Whether you are allowed to back up content or copy content for other platforms and uses, whether user generated or vendor generated, is a matter of the features provided by the service or application, and of the agreement that you enter by using the service – expressed in Terms of Service or other contract. Just about every one of these agreements states that you should not use the service if you do not agree with the terms.
While I agree with @Botgirl that technology and the conceptual framework of the legal system are not in sync, I have a somewhat different concern, and I hope that no part of what I am saying is taken as demonizing.
This larger concern is the common choice of people to make the leap to assert that the laws and contracts provided by providers are merely a “suggestion”, one that only needs to be followed only if the individual believes them to be reasonable.
People may disagree with the terms of service for a system such as Second Life, but that does not make them invalid. If they are not technically enforceable, that does not make it legal or right to claim that the terms can be ignored at the whim of the user with no consequences.
Claiming that a point of law is likely to be unenforceable, yet has not been struck down or proven unenforceable, and then using that position to decide that it is ok to ignore the law is dangerous for all of us – if taken as a common way to think about laws in general.
“Let’s say you think that you SHOULD be able to take your social networks with you when you go. Well, you sign up for Ning not Facebook. You post Torrents instead of YouTube videos. But you KNOW when you join – “this is a walled garden, and I gain something from it but there are rules in play here and I’ll make the sacrifice”. Just because you don’t like it later doesn’t somehow retroactively give you the right to change your mind or to impose your new desires on the platform owners or your fellow community members.”
And that, I think, is the rather succinct crux in my own reasons for opposing CopyBot and its ilk. It’s also partly why I left “Second Life” – my personal gripe with putting effort into work which fundamentally could do nought but sit on Linden lab’s servers. That’s not to say I oppose the practice, but when my personal motivations suggested I move things about in a portfolio, I really had to come back out and focus on 3D studio work. “Second Life”, being the isolated platform that it was, turned out not to be my ideal platform. That doesn’t mean I should have the right to change what it is though, and far less should it be a place where someone can pay me mere pounds to store and redistribute my designs as they wish. For that, I’d go to Cafépress.
[...] They simply claim that virtual goods are goods IN SECOND LIFE. Show me the ad by Linden Lab which sa… [...]
[...] They simply claim that virtual goods are goods IN SECOND LIFE. Show me the ad by Linden Lab which sa… [...]
Thanks for the nice reply. You really freaked me out there for a minute!
My initial blog post on the topic was pretty much of a rant as well. I’m certainly no intellectual property expert and my position was born out of my personal frustration with the currently stove-piped virtual world space, and the (possibly misguided) intention to increase grassroots pressure on stakeholders to go through the hell of coming up with better solutions. Even with the best of intentions, resolving interoperability between different organizations, or even between interest groups in a single organization is slow, hard going. And there’s not a lot of motivation to fix what’s broken until there’s either enough pain or anticipated of gain.
Anyway, these are certainly interesting times and I think we will all likely laugh at ourselves ten years from now when we look back on our archived punditry from 2009.
@Dusan: The hell you say? I thought I was too wordy!
@Ann: I believe their position is “None of our business”. That’s what they’ve said in the past leastways. You’d have to ask them about current policy.
I think that you started out the post with an important question. Do we (consumers) see digital objects as real “things” and therefore we feel we have purchased them regardless of the TofS or laws?
Just to confuse maters & extending the thread about license versus copyright & what is a purchase see the following.
http://www.pcworld.com/article/172973/in_autodesk_case_judge_rules_secondhand_sales_ok.html
&
http://www.eff.org/deeplinks/2009/10/it-s-still-duck-court-re-affirms-first-sale-doctri
I am not sure if Autodesk has appealed the ruling. In the long run, it will be market forces that decide these issues.
Dusan; Does this ruling have implications for extending the legal argument to digitally distributed copyrighted/licensed materials, not just those sold as hard goods?
[...] content and copying Interesting post over at Dusan Writer’s blog about content, licensing and [...]
[...] The Chimney HuntWhat are people saying? -Digital Entitlement: Our Right to Copy in Virtual Worlds. http://bit.ly/59JxRe #secondlifeHere’s a winter London pic from yesterday: [...]
[...] with another link to be added to the ones I posted yesterday, Dusan Writer’s reply to Botgirl, Entitlement, copybot and virtual worlds. Again, much good discussion in the comments [...]
jean-ricard – incredibly fascinating ruling, with far-reaching implications.
However, I’d propose that the difference is that there’s no “platform”. If Autodesk was a platform it would have direct bearing on virtual worlds.
Take, for example, the idea of selling or transferring avatar accounts. Many game platforms prohibit this, including Second Life. It’s not just the software that’s being sold “second hand” but its use within a specific domain.
I’d propose that in Second Life, the virtual goods may be represented by software which, on its own this ruling suggests a ‘buyer’ has a right to resell, regardless of the license provisions set out by the seller, but the difference is that the software is also sold within the context of its use within a specific environment, which would mitigate the impact of this ruling.
Having said that – I have no doubt that these issues WILL be challenged eventually in court. And maybe a similar ruling will come out for context/platform-specific cases, in which case all bets are off across dozens of industries.
There’s a web service called backupify.com that can backup all your Facebook, Twitter, Gmail, Google Docs, Flickr photos, and more.
Google also has something called the Google Data Liberation Front. It has the goal of letting you take all your data off of Google services easily. For example, you can click one button to get all your Google Docs in one big zip file (or get each one separately if you like).
Long story short: if you buy bits with constraints on them and then expect to unshackled yourself from the constraints then you are fighting an uphill battle.
If we found out LL was bankrupt tomorrow and nobody was willing to purchase them then they could and *would* pull the plug on the servers.
Your virtual toys are lost and currently the law gives no recourse to the consumer.
This isn’t to say that a better solution wouldn’t be a good idea and that people who *offer* such a better solution wouldn’t have advantages in the marketplace (all other things being equal). Still, it remains the responsibility of the providers to create the infrastructure, the content providers to utilize such infrastructure and the consumers to accept whatever costs such enhanced content comes with.
Doing otherwise (such as using copybot type tools) is nothing more or less than copyright infringement. Dress it up anyway you want, it doesn’t change the legal impact and possible consequences.
The main reason we don’t see more consequences in SL is that suing for US$10 of stuff is beyond pointless, especially considering the transnational nature of SL user base.
Just posted: “Entitlement and the Consumerization of Second Life” http://bit.ly/4xGJhS
I think that the important point is you can’t conceptualise a “right” as some sort of platonic ideal that exists outside of a social framework and the power differentials that exist within that framework. Linden Lab has the “right” to do what it does because it has the power to do what it does, partly for technical reasons but mostly because the system under which we live is structured in such a way as to facilitate the exercise of certain rights, principally property rights, at the expense of other rights, such as the right to a minimum standard of living, real or virtual.
Dusan is right when he says that if you complain about the Lindens’ policies you are essentially complaining about living in a capitalist society. The conclusion that I draw from that is that it’s time to start thinking about other forms of social organisation, both on and off the grid.
Dusan- great rant.
Right at the beginning Hiro said virtual property doesn’t reside on his computer,it resides on someone else’s platform. That’s not quite right – my sculpt maps, textures, etc reside on my computer. They are portable for me – I can make objects with them on a variety of platforms. That’s what I think is copyright – not the object I made. Even if I choose to make the object full perms on whatever grid I make it, I don’t, by inference, give the purchaser rights to the components I used to make it. Just because I uploaded my sculpt texture into SL and used it to make a full perm object doesn’t make my sculpt map full perm and fair game to be used by anyone.
What copybot progs (like Second Inventory) do is copy those files that came from, and are still on, my computer. Once copybot copies them they can be used to make that object or any other object. That’s where the problem lies,and why, as a creator, I don’t want even my full perm objects going outside the platform in which they were created.
As for the ‘right’ to copy things in case they are lost – Do we allow that in real life? When you buy a watch are you also entitled to another just in case you lose it or it’s stolen?
[...] the recent (and vibrant) discussions of intellectual property and license rights in Second Life, and this week’s announcements about Blue Mars, I thought [...]