Melanie speaks sense. Consult a lawyer before someone else's lawyer
contacts you. If you're willing to brave the legal worries this could
cause you, the only sound policy to default to is one that respects how
the content is licensed. This includes OSGrid, which respects user's
copyrights.
Right now, there is no export permission. There easily could be, but it
would require support from both the server and viewer side. Support for
it would need to be virtually (heh) universal, or have a default that
was agreed upon. A mantis for this feature request on the server side of
things exists [1]. Supporting this on the viewer side would take a great
deal more effort. You'd at least want those viewers with specific
support for OpenSimulator on board (Kokua, Zen, Firestorm, Teapot,
Singularity, Cool VL, and Radegast all come to mind). There will of
course be legacy viewers (like Imprudence and Phoenix) hanging around
that may not ever get patched for it, necessitating the need for the
legally safest export flag default.
Things can get even messier. Even with an export flag, will this
software preserve the creator name when the content is exported to
another grid? More than a few licenses require attribution to be
preserved. Will it allow upload to a grid or standalone where
permissions have been disabled? I'm sure many content creators would be
unhappy to hear they could be. With more caffeine in me, I might think
of a few more important questions, and I have no doubt that others who
follow this list will be able to supply them.
I don't want to give the impression here than I'm against the idea that
a user should be able to backup their inventory. I would opine that most
users would love this ability, and that many would respect creator's
rights. But many of those same users want their copyrights and licenses
respected as the law requires, and steps taken by software like this to
ensure this was so.
Marcus
[1] http://opensimulator.org/mantis/view.php?id=5892
On 11/15/2012 5:03 AM, Melanie wrote:
The reason StoredInventory is closed source and very restrictive is
that exporting/importing of items that are not compatibly licensed
is, in effect, copybotting.
The risks in making such a tool open source is that any restrictions
can be trivially removed by the knowledgeable user, creating what is
in effect the ultimate copybot.
The people who made StoredInventory were particularly worried about
SecondLife, since open sourcing the project would have allowed
people to remove the protections that were placed to enforce SL
compliance.
This may result in SL suing the program creators as well as the
program users and also may result in users of the program, whether
these individuals infringe SL TOS or not, being banned from SL,
possibly permanently.
Exporting content not licensed for export, or protected by a grid's
TOS, is theft. Uploading it to another or even the same grid is
copybotting, which legally is plagiarism. Profiting from it by
selling the copies may also be fraud in some legislations.
My advice is to consult a lawyer at your place of residence, as in
some jurisdictions producing software capable of performing these
actions is a criminal offense.
IMHO, open source is a very bad idea for this type of software.
Best regards,
Melanie
On 15/11/2012 10:44, Snowcrash Short wrote:
Hi
I've been working on a client side tool for decentralizing user
inventories, which I will release as an open source tool in two weeks, some
of the features may be relevant to grid operators.
The basic premise of the tool is that the inventory and the backing assets
of the inventory items really should be controlled by the user. The tool is
born out of a frustration of having visited a number of grids. Each visit
to a new grid presents me with an empty inventory, and I can then spend
time searching for suitable item, clothing, attachments and
other accessories.
For this purpose I have created a tool which will allow me to backup my
inventory to a local cache and then upload the contents to another grid.
If my tool becomes popular, both the upload and download mechanisms may
have some impact on the grid-operators, hence this email to serve as a
notice.
The basic architecture is pretty simple, consisting of a number of import
agents, which can import the users inventory and backing assets to a local
database, and a number of upload agents which can upload inventory content
to a specific account.
Backup/Import
There are two import agents, one which will import .iar files and one which
works very much like I believe "Stored Inventory" works, which can backup
the inventory of an avatars inventory. Avatar backup/Import is governed by
a policy. Currently there are two policies, one complying with a very
restrictive interpretation of the Linden Labs policy on backups, and a
completely unrestricted policy, where anything that can be downloaded will
be downloaded.
When a new account is registered in MyInventory it checks if the account is
for a Linden Lab grid and limits the choices of policies to policies
suitable for LL's TOS, I cannot and do not know if other grids have similar
policies, I can well imagine that Avination has a similar restrictions, and
would like similar logic implemented to restrict the download. Any grid
operator which would like to have backup governed by a more restrictive
policy are invited to notify me and I will attempt to implement the policy
prior to the first release of the source code. or supply patches at a later
time.
Upload/Export
MyInventory supports two mechanisms for uploading inventory
content, traditional upload using UDP/CAPS and direct access to the
inventory and asset web-services.
Due to limitations in the UDP/CAPS protocol each upload will create new
assets, and as of my latest read of the Open Simulator code the asset store
does not support "single instance assets", i.e. it does not use a checksum
to verify if the asset already exists, for this reason MyInventory prefers
to upload using direct access to asset and inventory web-services.
I would propose that the grids which chooses to support MyInventory augment
their "GridInfoService" entries with the url's for the asset and inventory
web-services, e.g.
[GridInfoService]
assets = http://assets.osgrid.org
inventory = http://inventory.osgrid.org
Best regards
Snowcrash
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