[okfn-discuss] SL currency and digital copies...

Wed Dec 6 13:31:03 UTC 2006

dear all,

I am slowly cleaning out my 2000-message-strong-postponed-mailbox
and found this which is slightly old news but i liked the connections
in it...

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http://secondlife.reuters.com/stories/2006/11/14/outcry-as-copybot-threatens-copyright-protection/

I'm not sure if i'm more startled by the fact that Second Life has its
own branded version of Reuters, or by the fact that i'm reading it, or
by the contents of this article. 

Short version goes, open source project reverse engineer the Second
Life protocol (but endorsed by Linden Labs? why? The judgement was
that reverse engineering was inevitable, and likely to be a generator
for economic activity?). A kind of 'universal replicator' that will
copy any object in SL regardless of a no-copy flag, leaks out of it. 
'Some people' connect this to a devaluation of SL's in-game community
currency. 

[[the company's plans to open-source Second Life have raised
concerns among in-world businesses that protecting intellectual
property may become increasingly difficult in the future]] 

http://www.libsecondlife.org/protocol/index.php/Bad_Ideas
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Copybot
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Second_Life_issues_and_criticisms#Legal_position_of_the_Linden_Dollar
http://news.bbc.co.uk/2/hi/technology/6198362.stm <- attempt at a
"community buyout" of a less flourishing MMORPG in order to open
source and keep it running after corporate collapse...

Why am i thinking out loud about this? One hears talk at O'Reilly
conferences and the like about a new set of "intellectual property"
concerns and constraints over the design of physical objects in a
brave new 3D printing era. Right now traditional copyright legislation
is being used to attempt to restrict the distribution of in-game
creations. The means of 'extracting value' in SL participation is very
much couched in terms of rights: [[ Because residents retain the
rights to their digital creations, they can buy, sell and trade with
other residents. ]], says the home page.

By talk of the drop in dollar value of the SL currency i was reminded 
of this old article about how currency exchange was run by an in-game
community for a while, before the Linden company set up their own
exchange: http://www.escapistmagazine.com/issue/25/3
"We want to ensure that new residents have easy access to additional
L$ without having to take yet another leap of trust to sign up and
give payment information to a third party,"

What you're buying with L$ is storage rights for your own media, and
the ability to acquire more; on an open platform both these things
become commoditised tending to free...

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This has been a bit of a disconnected rant, feel free to provide
critique / deeper thought :) 

jo