Dousa Dragonash is talking to Chalice Yao, one of the Emerald Viewer Developers

by Dousa Dragonash | October 20, 2009 | No comments

Last week MBC News Debate tackled content copying and one of the criticisms that came up time and time again was the lack of policing of new viewers by Linden Labs. The main name that came up was of the Emerald Viewer. Now I had heard a lot of praise for the viewer as well from builders, so were these two
things related?

It is only fair to hear from the other side, so I interviewed Chalice

Yao one of the developers of the Emerald viewers …

Chalice has been in Second Life since early 2007. She is a scripter and has been working with The Omega Concern for around a year.

We started off talking about content copying and Chalice had a builder friend who was a victim of theft. I asked Chalice if there was always going to be the probability of the code on the viewers being corrupted.

Chalice: “You can always save information the client displays. Object geometry, animations, textures, sounds…there is no way to stop that.  As the data resides on your computer. Hence my notion that the solution is to more easily report copied content.”

That was a view that certainly concurred with the majority of creators that I had spoken with. I have always found it a mystery how anyone in this mass of information that Second Life is, how you can find content that has been copied other than by chance.

Does Linden Labs have more access to that side of it? I asked if I was being totally ignorant.

Chalice: “Not quite. All LL sees is that objects are being built. It really solely relies on people finding the stolen content. Which actually isn’t that hard, sooner or late, since the content thieves try to resell it. The main problem are the resellers that damage brands by reselling stolen items, but they have to expose themselves sooner or later to do the resale.”

I told Chalice that I resell from the creator. She was talking specifically about thieves making cheap shops with content they copied/stole and not affiliate programs. (I am a licensed reseller I have to add here!!) (Note to self: put up the license.)

Chalice went on to talk about so called casual copying. She gave as an example someone handing you a box with free sculpt maps in. A friend has given you this perhaps. What do you do? Your friend did not steal it, nor did the person that gave it to them but somewhere down the line, said Chalice, they had been copied
and now nobody is aware. She cited as an example the newbie sculpty that took SL by comedic storm recently and told me that the original was created by a Rezzable artist. Then the sculpty was copybotted and ‘tossed out’ into the public.

This I thought ironic given that Rezzable themselves had developed a sim copier called Builder Bot in order to take their content with them before  leaving Second Life to concentrate on Heritage Key. It is generally felt amongst the residents of SL that it was a ‘screw you’ Linden Labs farewell move thought Chalice.

Getting back to the point though, Chalice noted that copybot has existed since 2006 or thereabouts and she was not sure that we are seeing an actual increase in copying. She said that people had the same outrage and debate then as now. History repeating itself except this time there is the lawsuit of Stroker Serpentine.

Stroker Serpentine has brought action against Linden Labs as follows:

“Plaintiffs Eros, LLC (“Eros”) and Shannon Grei, d/b/a Nomine

(“Grei”) (collectively, “Plaintiffs”), bring this class action

complaint against Defendants Linden Research, Inc. and Linden

Research International, Inc. (collectively, “Linden Lab” or

“Defendant”), headquartered in San Francisco, California, for its

practice of violating the real-world intellectual property rights of

proprietors of virtual content within the Second Life virtual world

(“Second Life”), which Linden Lab owns and operates”

Chalice: “I hope something good comes out of it”

However there is uncertainty as  a ruling in Los Angeles by US District Judge Howard Matz dismissed a 2007 suit in which Universal Music Group had taken out a copyright suit against video website Veoh Networks Inc. The Judge found that Veoh had ‘taken reasonable steps’ to take down the infringements.

As Chalice said the blog announcement that Linden Labs made two months ago with regard to making the content reporting easier might go against the lawsuit as well as a blog by Cyn Linden released today

https://blogs.secondlife.com/community/community/blog/2009/10/20/third-party-viewer-policy

Chalice went on to say that as for Emerald the basic idea behind the export/import simply was to allow people to back up their things they created themselves. She, for one, has made extensive use of it for that function and her inventory is much emptier now. She said that it felt good to know that her stuff was save on her hard drive and that was simply the idea behind Emerald.

I asked her what her view was on using any viewer to back up everything in the inventory. Whether one had created it or not.

Chalice: “A big no no, in my opinion. The bad part is that it’s hard to put in correct checks. Currently we use the simple logic: ‘You own it, and it is fullperm’. Which applies to all your creations, and all content that was fullperm in the first place.  Checking by creator does not work, as one can simply link an object to one you made yourself, and you’re the creator. So it was the best solution. But anything besides that..no. one should not be able to export items that are not fullperm.”

Me: Ok, as devil’s advocate, people have spent many Lindens on many things in their inventory. Should they be able to back those up?

Chalice: “If there somehow was a method for content creators to flag items as ‘okay to export by the owner’, I could see it somehow working. Actually people suggested an additional permission along those lines, but…it’s tricky.”

She saw the solution there, in content creators simply doing good customer support and replacing broken items saying it works if done right.

Me: When the barrier is broken and we are able to transport between Virtual Worlds, what then?

Chalice: “That’s what that flag was for, actually. That new permission. ‘allow my content to be transferred to another grid’”

She said we need something like another checkbox like mod, trans, copy and only items with that flat set should be able to be carried over into another grid by tp.

Drawing the interview to a close I asked if there was anything that had not been said. Chalice reflected and said that she felt people should not panic and go on witch hunts. She had recently witnessed the storming of a simple reseller store by people after someone had said it had copybotted items. It turned out to be untrue. Witch hunts will not help but being vigilant about it will. She added that creators could apply to Linden Labs to definitely make the IP theft reporting easier with the ability to watermark content; the sort of watermarking that will work for all assets. A hidden additional data field or marker. That would make it easier for creators to compare.

This seemed like a blindingly simple idea. Why was it so difficult to do I asked. We had no resolution to that one.

Dousa Dragonash.