Following the recent (and vibrant) discussions of intellectual property and license rights in Second Life, and this week’s announcements about Blue Mars, I thought I’d take a look at the Blue Mars terms of service.
First, I should not that I don’t personally believe that Blue Mars is a competitor to Second Life. It’s better thought of as an MMO development platform and is more comparable to Sony’s Home than SL or OpenSim. Its architecture depends on heavy and time-consuming downloads in order to provide a more controlled experience for users which provides a visually compelling experience, allows a large number of avatars to be in the space at one time (there is little ‘real time rendering’, so more of the pipe can be reserved for avatars), but is also a barrier to entry which will be intriguing to track.
This isn’t to say Blue Mars doesn’t compete for user’s time and attention. More to the point, it competes for content creators, and with design tools that are still clunky at best, you need to have some patience if your expectation is to rez a house in Blue Mars (not to mention needing to first be an approved developer).
I applaud Blue Mars: it’s bringing to the Web the kinds of experiences you can usually only get from the big game companies who pour millions into MMOs or console games. For simulations and rich educational experiences and for casual entertainment it has deep potential. I first saw Blue Mars at the Virtual Worlds Expo in 2007, and while it has had a hard time delivering on the deadlines it publicly promised, that’s not unexpected, and it’s showing signs of gaining interest and platform stability. I personally think they need to hire a decent user experience engineer, but I’ll leave that for another post.
So with Blue Mars offering more controlled experiences than more open virtual world platforms, its challenge is to overcome ‘download fear’ – to promise compelling experiences at the other end of the 45 minute ‘world download’. To do so, it needs content creators – and not just casual ones, but companies willing to pour fairly significant resources into “mini-worlds”. And this is where I liken it more to a console than a virtual world: like X-Box or Playstation, the technology is important, but the relationships with developers more so.
For the “professional class” content developers in Second Life, this has been an appeal of Blue Mars, because it offers everyone the chance to build and manage their own individual worlds under the broader banner of Blue Mars. You can worry about the environment and its interactions, and let Avatar Reality manage the hosting and technology. And to make this happen, Blue Mars set up a terms of service which is heavy on IP protection while users are there primarily to, well, behave and enjoy themselves, at least insofar as they defined their legal framework.
Rights to Content
When you build something for Blue Mars you MOSTLY build it external to the platform using standard industry design tools like 3DS, Maya, Blender or even Google’s Sketch-Up. Thus, the content you bring in is your own, and the Blue Mars Terms of Service (TOS) acknowledges this:
Avatar Reality acknowledges and agrees that to the extent you have such rights under applicable law, and subject to the terms and conditions of this Agreement, you retain any and all applicable (a) copyright rights, including, without limitation, copyright rights in Content you create in and/or upload to Blue Mars, (b) trademark rights, including, without limitation, rights in trademarks, service marks, and other identifiers you create in and/or use in Blue Mars, (c) patent rights resulting from inventions you create in and/or use in Blue Mars, and (d) any and all other intellectual property rights with respect to Content you create in and/or upload to Blue Mars.
With rights in hand, the responsibility for ensuring those rights rests with the content owner. Your obligations for the protection of that content are, well, your own. The TOS reminds you that you’re responsible for enforcing your rights, understanding your rights, and holding Avatar Reality harmless from their enforcement.
The TOS asks you to acknowledge that people WILL try to rip your stuff and you acknowledge that Avatar Reality can’t do anything about it, although they may implement procedures to try:
5.3.4 third parties may attempt to circumvent any procedures and/or features designed to inhibit misuse of your Content and/or infringement of your intellectual property rights, and that Avatar Reality is not responsible for such misuse of your Content or infringement of your intellectual property rights, whether or not Avatar Reality creates procedures and/or features to inhibit such misuse and/or infringement;
5.3.5 that Avatar Reality may implement procedures and/or features designed to inhibit misuse of your Content without incurring any future obligation to create or maintain, or past or future liability for any failure to create or maintain, any such procedures and/or features.
Now, you don’t own the underlying code of Blue Mars, of course, this just covers the stuff you make, and there’s lots of other coverage for their service, disallowing de-compiling of source code, or using alternate viewers, that kind of thing. But at the end of the day, if you’re a content creator the TOS says that the ’stuff’ you make is your own, you’re letting them display it, and you’re responsible for your own enforcement.
Enforcement
The TOS covers both copyright and trademark infringement procedures. One of the things I find incredibly reassuring about their notification procedures is that YES, you do get to know who filed a claim against you. In Second Life, if someone files a take down notice against you, you do NOT get to know who filed the claim. This has always struck me as an absurd system: someone can file a false claim and you don’t even know who did it. It’s like standing trial and not knowing whose store it was you supposedly robbed.
While Second Life was built on the concept of anonymity and may be the main argument against revealing the claimant, this creates a very low barrier to filing, one that’s open to misuse. I’ve long believed that we can hold identity in proxy, however, and at the very least you should know the avatar name of the person making the claim.
Blue Mars allows you to file copyright and trademark infringement notices but it allows the person being filed against to both know who filed the claim and to file a counterclaim. The procedures are currently handled via e-mail and are outlined in a separate claims procedure document. These procedures require that you use your real life name, address and signature.
User Rights and Privacy
Users of Blue Mars enjoy, well, limited rights. There’s no avatar Bill of Rights like Metaplace. And there are no ‘Community Standards’ like in Second Life. Instead, users are faced with a list of prohibitions. 20 of them. The following, however, is the main definition of the behavior that’s expected of users (emphasis added) which asks that you not:
10.3 Publish, post, upload, transmit, distribute, disseminate or otherwise make available any material that is harmful, abusive, defamatory, libelous, obscene, infringing, embarrassing, unwanted, invasive of another’s right of privacy or publicity, hateful or racially, ethnically or otherwise offensive or objectionable.
The TOS is silent on the issue of how abuse reports are handled, your recourse, or whether there are variants in how enforcement is handled (temporary suspension, warnings, or banning) other than the block cap proviso:
YOU UNDERSTAND AND AGREE THAT Avatar Reality MAY, AT ITS SOLE DISCRETION AND AT ANY TIME, TERMINATE AND/OR SUSPEND YOUR BLUE MARS ACCOUNT FOR ANY REASON OR NO REASON, INCLUDING BUT NOT LIMITED TO FOR VIOLATION OF THESE TERMS OF SERVICE OR VIOLATION OF ANY OTHER PUBLISHED POLICY RELATED TO THE BLUE MARS SERVICES, WITH OR WITHOUT NOTICE TO YOU. YOU AGREE THAT AVATAR REALITY SHALL NOT BE LIABLE FOR ANY LOSS OR DAMAGE CAUSED, DIRECTLY OR INDIRECTLY, BY ANY SUCH TERMINATION AND/OR SUSPENSION. IN THE EVENT THAT YOUR ACCOUNT IS TERMINATED, YOU WILL HAVE NO FURTHER ACCESS TO THE BLUE MARS SERVICES AND YOU WILL NOT RECEIVE ANY REFUND OR REIMBURSEMENT FOR ANY CONTENT (AS DEFINED BELOW) AND/OR BLUE MARS DOLLARS CURRENCY BALANCE ASSOCIATED WITH YOUR ACCOUNT, EXCEPT AS EXPRESSLY SET FORTH BY AVATAR REALITY IN WRITING.
This term would seem to cover both the ‘casual user’ and the content creator.
Intriguingly, the list of prohibitions is also silent on issues that have been either contentious or otherwise covered by other virtual world platforms. It makes no mention of alts or adult-oriented content, although previously Avatar Reality had said that adult content was not going to be permitted, at least during the original phases of development.
But I find it more intriguing to consider Raph Koster’s Declaration of the Rights of Avatars and to interpret the TOS against that or, at the very least, to consider whether Raph’s notion that platform owners THEMSELVES should have limitations to their rights is in effect on Blue Mars.
Where the TOS is silent on this issue is the difference between the platform and the individual worlds. What might be permissible on Blue Mars Caledon might not be on Blue Mars Loco Pocos. How individual worlds will manage their communities against the TOS is not outlined in the TOS.
Blue Mars Branding
Finally, taking another lesson from Second Life, which tightened up the use of the SL brand by issuing often contentious take-down notices to people who were using the name in blogs or other materials, Blue Mars precludes the use of the brand in domain names (BlueMarsDanceClub.com is not allowed, for example, although DanceClub.com/onBlueMars is).
“Its architecture depends on heavy and time-consuming downloads in order to provide a more controlled experience for users which provides a visually compelling experience, allows a large number of avatars to be in the space at one time (there is little ‘real time rendering’, so more of the pipe can be reserved for avatars), but is also a barrier to entry which will be intriguing to track.”
Hello there Dusan, I am pointing out this section of your blog post as the only real issue that I see within it. ‘Time Consuming Downloads’ are actually not so Time Consuming. At first, during the beginning of the beta test, Blue Mars was 1.3 gigs because with it you were downloading the content of the currently available cities. That process is no more. Right now, the Blue Mars client is about 330+ Megs and is a very quick download (i dont have a speedy connection, im on a normal plan from comcast, i get about 500kbps – 1mbps from downloads) Once you have downloaded and installed the client and proceed to log in you are presented with a Places Browser, that from there allows you to download only the cities that you are interested in entertaining on your hard drive. This intuitive interface actually dramatically lowers the potential space that your Blue Mars experience requires on your hard drive. I was able to download about 5 cities in under your 45 minute time duration you explained here in this post. The client itself took maybe 15 minutes to download. So all in all, to get into blue mars, and get into the cities, it was around your 45 minute download to get the entire experience started, or just a little under. Perhaps 30-35 minutes. And thats just on my connection, those with faster connections will be able to get in much faster than that even.
Another good feature that is being developed at the moment is a ‘patching’ type system for cities. Once you download the city, you never have to download it again unless you remove it for whatever reason you may have. Soon, city updates will be automatic and each time you go into the city you will only be downloading the newest content, which unless the city is making a huge update, should take dramatically less time than downloading the city the first time did.
As for being ‘heavy’ most hard drives these days are in the hundreds of gigs, and many even having terabyte or multiple terabyte hard drives. City sizes being anywhere from 20mb to up to a few hundred MB. Extremely large cities might tip the scale closer to a gig, But on average we can expect about 200-500mb per city. Which honestly, is much less than going out and buying a game, that is potentially many gigs more. And with the potential that is given in the cities (and the current pricing will allow just about anyone to be able to purchase a city) I’d say that it’s a pretty nice set up.
Now although the experienced may be more ‘controlled’ on the player front as compared to Second Life. On the developer front the flexibility is absolutely amazing, and this will alow many developers to create their visions just exactly how they want to with the CryEngine’s power behind it. So users will be able to find something that suits just them, that inevitably will run much better and be much smoother than anything in Second Life can ever hope to provide with their current technology.
well the 300mb installer failed to uninstall the 1.5 gig beta, thus i had to do it myself, but now the new installer cant work, refuses since it cant find old betas .msi …. so for now.. blue mars for my part will remain unihabited…
offer a reg cleaner…eh?
but good to see a TOS thats says itsa business, not some sort of meta fantasy for viewsers and 3rd parties…
cube3
Wonderful clarifications Zet and thanks for that. I have to say, though, I’m on a very very fast connection but it still took 12 minutes to download one of the cities. Maybe my bandwidth is being throttled, who knows.
I didn’t mean to make it sound ominous, however. I just meant that there’s an ‘entry cost’ to the system, which is that in order to have the level of content in Blue Mars the content is downloaded rather than streamed. This is very common among MMOs and games so I don’t see it as a deal breaker, just a barrier. I do like the patch idea – another example of how this is really a lot more like an MMO developer platform in which someone else is worrying about all the back-end stuff – something that strikes me as a decided, um, game changer: it puts the tools for MMO development in nearly everyone’s hands.
Only problem with CryEngine is that it’s still not Mac or Linux compatible correct? It does look better than SL, no question, which is why they must be so eager to look at mesh imports and rendered shadows etc just to try to keep up.
@Cube Thats rather odd, i installed and everything went perfectly.
@Dusan Yes, the only ‘problem’ that the CryEngine has is its incompatibility with other platforms, but Avatar Reality is currently researching into means of making Blue Mars compatible with all platforms, there are a few technologies out there that could help make the game accessible even on cell phones through unique streaming setups. OnLive being one of those services.
I agree with Dusan that Blue Mars is more of a MMO than a platform alternative to Second Life and OpenSim.
For example, I still haven’t been able to get Blue Mars working on any of my computers — either the wrong graphics card, or the wrong operating system, or a computer too old. Second Life browsers, by comparison, run on all of my computers, even the oldest ones.
In addition, SL/OpenSim have extremely low barriers to entry for non-pro content creators. This means that schools, small businesses, networking organizations, and so on can set up their own grids or regions to use for classes, training, and meetings.
Given OpenSim’s open architectures, we’re likely to see an explosion of content management tools in the near future. We already have the Diva Distro, which is a hyper-grid enabled megaregion with an automated upgrade function. http://www.hypergridbusiness.com/2009/11/opensim-deployment-gets-easier/
And Zonja Capallini recently released an application, Zoe, which allows saved regions to be rotated, shifted, or merged. http://zonjacapalini.wordpress.com/2009/12/16/zoe-version-0-1-released/
(I can’t wait until the first Wordpress-style Web-based app comes out for OpenSim content management.)
BlueMars seems to be going after a subset of the Second Life crowd — folks who like open-ended social games in a rich, immersive environment.
Personally, I prefer seeing platforms that lower the barriers to entry and open up the 3D worlds to a larger audience, instead. I just heard that work on the Web-based Xenki viewer for OpenSim has been put on indefinite hold, and the folks at 3Di still haven’t fixed the avatar appearance problem with their Web viewer.
We’ve been “months” away from a usable Web-based viewer for a couple of years now. I’m seriously considering heading out, raising some money, and paying a team to finish the work. Anyone with me?
– Maria Korolov
Editor, Hypergrid Business
I also noticed a little bit on this blog that says something about being an ‘approved developer’. Anyone can be a developer, and when items are uploaded they are only reviewed to make sure that they work(if scripts are in them) Avatar Reality has stated that they will not and do not judge quality of uploads. So anyone can be a dev.
My only concern when it comes to Blue Mars if I make a joke on my blog about someone will I get banned, LOL. Otherwise I am good to with the exploring and getting to know this new world. I am looking forward to seeing how things in Blue Mars unfolds.
Lizzie – I also love that we need to be careful about being “invasive of another’s right of privacy or publicity,”….meaning, they have a right to publicity so we should respect that, or they have a right to privacy so we shouldn’t publicize something?
Zet – I stand corrected on ‘approved developers’. I guess with fees now in place that makes sense. I wonder how someone would feel though about paying a $7,500 set-up and $15,000 a month to support 1,500 concurrent users. There aren’t many MMOs that can get away with charging more than $10/month per user…although I suppose it’s concurrency that counts.
Have any of the worlds instituted “fee for entry” yet?
@Dusan Well what we need to remember is that the fee is for 1,500 CCU which means that you can only have 1,500 in there ALL AT ONCE at ONE TIME. So in reality you could have many thousands of members, but the chances that your city will up all 1500 for long periods of time is very low, so in reality your member flow could be thousands a day, not 1500 people staying put throughout the day. even someone who only has a 50 CCU package, if their idea is popular enough they’ll get a few hundred members, but not all of the members will be there all of the time. Based on this, the concurrent users sell point is very good.
At this time no one has implimented pay to enter.
The Blue Mars TOS raised a few red flags for me. Which, interestingly, you don’t seem to have mentioned. I’ve been planning to do a short piece on it anyway, so I’ll get on that soon
[...] And this is where I liken it more to a console than a virtual world: like X-Box or Playstation, the … [...]
I joined the early beta and despite the download size I was very impressed by the graphics. Now the “official beta” has launched and the bandwidth increased the install only took me 10 minutes and not 5 hours like it took to get the early beta working.
I find I often have to disconect and restart four or five times to get in world and when I do get in world I am usally all alone. When you run at full screen resolution despite a high end PC and a half decent GPU the experience is not as immersive and the performace is slow in comparison to sony home running in 1080p.
Although I do enjoy the high fidelity graphics I find the barrier to entry a to high. Also the need to use expensive or complicated graphics tools to develop content is a concern. The SL / opensim solution where anyone can right click and rez a prim allowing multiple people to build in a collaborative environment is much more compelling than being able to develop content locally and upload. The good news is for those who do like realistic graphics and to work with mesh the Opensim Modrex solution provides this level of functionality.
[...] Dusan Writer’s Metaverse » Decoding the Blue Mars Terms of Service – Virtual worlds and creativity, business, collaboration, and identity. [...]
Good point, Dusan ~ I need to get my Avatar Rights docs declared for Blue Mars also; they are in full force of course but it’s just one of the things I haven’t got around to posting yet.
Blue Mars is more of a platform… one should *expect* to have different rights in different places, I think.
Caledonia may be a free society, but if someone makes a postapocalyptic wargame simulation (utterly possible with the platform) I don’t expect zombie team will be reading Miranda rights to the opposing vampire team.
Game and society start to blur…