On 16 October 2011 21:47, Mike Chase <[email protected]> wrote:
> Did you get them as a work for hire? Have a contract that says you can > reuse them? This is no different than software or other intellectual > property. Ownership vests in the person that *created* them. You paid for > a right to use. And in that case, only in the context of SL; A given since > there's no way to export them legitimately. People who create textures > often include terms of use to address this because textures are more easily > moved around. But if you "buy" textures in SL you get them with a right to > use them, possibly spelled out in a license. Ownership is still only the > creator. At the risk of getting OT here, virtual worlds highlight the probles with the whole concept of intellectual property. Physical property is a convention we are relatively comfortable with by virtue of using it for millenia. Some people (e.g. anarcho-communists) may hate the idea, but even then it doesn't _confuse_ them. If the law says an object is mine, I can do what I like with it, including selling, lending or giving to another person, at which point it may or may not become theirs according to our agreement. Intellectual property is a metaphorical extension of physical property and it _is_ confusing because (a) as a society we are not used to treating ideas as if they were objects and (b) treating them as though they actually were objects is impractical. We thus have a legal system (or rather, a plethora of systems, as V pointed out) which treats ideas as though they were objects in some ways but not others. In a virtual world, this gets more confusing because the ideas look like and are treated as objects in that world. If a buy a physical chair, I can put it in any home that I own, so I expect to do the same with a virtual chair and my virtual homes. OTOH, the content creator thinks they own the chair they created in the same way they would own a chair they made physically. Both are making reasonable - but incorrect - assumptions based on the conventions of property in our culture. Robin -- "We prefer that you make up whatever rule you like. We are going to take an aspirin and lie down." ~ The Chicago Manual of Style Q&A Robin Turner IDMYO Bilkent Üniversitesi Ankara, Turkey http://about.me/robinturner _______________________________________________ Opensim-users mailing list [email protected] https://lists.berlios.de/mailman/listinfo/opensim-users
