“What has apparently happened - and I am extrapolating here, as I have been unable to obtain the actual details from Flickr, though it seems very likely - is that a DMCA notice was filed by Ms Eagle to Flickr alleging copyright infringement, and the company is then obliged to remove the article automatically.”

The problem that you and many other people have seen is that the DMCA takedown notice is mostly effective for harassing people who displease you while creating a lot of paperwork for a bunch of people, and generally making social media companies much harder to deal with.

I would argue that the Lindens would better serve the future they advocate by pursuing a Second Justice system, albeit streamlined and webified. The important difference in my assertion is that nothing happens until evidence is actually submitted by both parties and weighed by a third party.

As a quick sketch it would look something like this:

1) An IP complaint is filed via a website. The plaintiff gives their account of what they believe has transpired, and supplies the owner of an offending object, if possible the object’s key, and the key of the object of theirs that was the subject of theft (I think it is only reasonable that the plaintiff is assumed to be the wronged party)

In the event that there is meta-evidence, there should also be a few fields to include this sort of information (for example, in the recent brou ha ha regarding the sale of textures from a real life 3D texture broker, the broker would be able to state that they own the copyright and where the originals can be examined)

2) Not being familiar with the way the SL works, I’ll assume this might be necessary: The inventories of the plaintiff and accused are snapshotted on the submission of the step #1 form.

3) The accused is notified of the complaint and advised of how to respond (same website, same evidence submission options).

4) A group of Lindens (this might be a great internship for pre-Law students interested in IP if there isn’t sufficient interest in funding a position) review the evidence for “obvious” verdicts, e.g. the accused bought the item and afterwards “uploaded” or came into the possession of the same item. A number of methods could be used to streamline this process for the judges, for example a program that could analyze textures on a pixel basis to determine how similar they are.

(note: I don’t expect 5 would ever actually happen)

5) In the case where there is not a clear truth, a trial should be held. Obviously, jury selection is difficult since it can’t be compulsory — but I would say any account in good standing with a certain age (3 months? So much time spent at the keyboard in world?) and a fairly clean record should be eligible to be available to serve on a jury. It could be handled by people indicating their willingness to assist and sit on a trial, and when trials occur anyone who has never interacted with either party would get an invite the day before the trial and in-world to be be ready to serve.

I’m sure a positive in-world compensation could be imagined for people who were willing to participate in civic responsibility.

This idea, like yours, is only workable if Linden Labs is willing to actually sanction people for violation of in-world laws. I agree with you that content that violates IP should be deleted (although what happens to the innocent people who bought the content? Do they get their money back?).

A system like this would need to carry several levels of punishment:

1) Deletion of content. This is pretty simple, and would apply probably mostly in cases of Texture theft. There should be a provision for restitution of goods or services to people who innocently bought items with infringing IP.

2) Fines (removal of $L or property from offenders). A quick google reveals that “Under the Copyright Act, each plaintiff is entitled to a sum of not less than $750 or more than $30,000 per act of infringement.” In the Linden’s case, this should probably be more hard set. I’m not sure what the penalty should be in cases where fins far exceed the total amount of liquid goods the avatar owns. Perhaps this is where #3 & #4 come into play.

3) Sanctions - for egregious offenders, all accounts they control could be set to “no commerce/no upload” or maybe even temporarily suspended?

4) Death/Permanent Ban - this would be the most serious, and obviously not the same as the real world death penalty since the Lindens couldn’t really keep people from making a new account, but it’s certainly a serious deterrent for people interested in building a business in Second Life.

5) Eminent public domain of content - in some cases it might make more sense to convert content to copy/mod/trans and mark it as public domain. This would apply in cases where individuals were selling IP in the public domain with use restrictions on use. I’m looking at you, texture sellers who sell restricted use textures which were scanned from books. (ip note: Accurate photographs of two-dimensional visual artworks lack expressive content and are automatically in the public domain once the painting’s copyright has expired (which it has in the US if it was published before 1923)*. Anyone who uploads the Mona Lisa and claims they have any “rights” to it is not talking about the IP system we have in the US)

* http://www.constitution.org/1ll/court/fed/bridgman.html

I think there is some truth to the event based business Prokofy talks about, but it could be centralised content as well, events just add the factor time. Gather enough real people, for a certain amount of time, in a certain place - and it will be valuable. The ‘attention economy’.

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Funny comment about Active Worlds by the way - though not a fan of their community client (which is actually just a ‘fan build world’ version of the white label application) - Active Worlds never had an interest in the community application, partially because of the implications as mentioned above - but the company behind the white label world has a far better grip of their platform as a the ‘beloved lab’ and flourishes behind the scenes in corporate environments who don’t seek value in content, but in service.

Well said, Ordinal. Factually correct, top-to-bottom (despite some deeply held, religious beliefs to the contrary)

First of all, re: “No, this cannot be encrypted without utterly crippling the already tardy speeds at which SL operates, and being crackable in any case.”

That’s tekkie talk, and I realize it’s a terribly deeply held religious belief, but it’s a socially-driven hacker-culture belief, that need not pertain. You can say: baloney, of course you can. Of course you can encrypt it daily and automatically and offer more features in that version — the fastest loading or best-looking or specially tagged or whatever client is encrypted and that’s the one people pay $9.95 a month for and live in (while leaving an open source one for script kiddies or rich corporations to hack with if they like). So what if it is crackable? Who cares? Another one will be generated/encrypted the next day.

This idea that encryption causes lag doesn’t track for me. World of Warcraft and the Sims Online encrypt or obfuscate or do what they do — they aren’t any more laggy than SL. Sorry, but I’m not buying.

Obfuscation is a matter of political will. Extremist hacker tekkies say ohnoes we can’t do that because if you can see it you can hack it and ohnoes you must not understand the physical impossibilities. Baloney. Sure you can. Companies do all the time. They make keys on their software and you can’t crack them…unless you work at it. So, keep people busy cracking every day, whatever.

And I do think that creators will not create under these circumstances.

I actually think that something else will happen, however, rather than this lovely idea being bruited around about the 8 generatives and what Ordinal is saying here about the services and customizing. Content creation is hard enough. People will not add to that the picky, awful, unrewarding work of making more service and more customizing — it’s just too hard for what you get (except for the very highest end of certain designers who will have clients who will pay for their ermine-tipped robes with their initials etc.)

Rather, I think what’s going to happen is that large corporations will create sort of Hollywood studios of content creators that they will sustain. They will use their content to advertise and basically those creators will be in indentured servitude to them or perhaps a lighter form of apprenticeship but they will be “bought”. The team of people at Rezzable, the Linden Dept. of Public Works for $10/hour, the Sheep — these are all early examples of these studios.

And for these people, copying of their content will not matter. They can create, and they’ll want it copied because it will help satisfy customers and build the brand. You come to the Sheep Show or the Rezzable Show or the Linden Show and you get the free t-shirt but even more, the free dress and free boots and free rave stick. The content creators will get paid by the big corporations. The corporations will advertise Coke or Tide or whatever they need to drop in. It’s like the King Biscuit Flour Hour. Neither the corporations nor the content producers will care about copied material and won’t even care if their freebies are resold in some micropayments economy well beneath their feet — they can afford to be magnanimous. And for each show (live music, poetry meeting, dance, discussion, educational lecture, whatever)

Event organizers in corporations will become the new people with a copyright. That is, the production of their event will be the secret thing everyone will want and won’t be able to copy. Their magical management of a troupe of performers, content-makers, scripters, set-builders, program managers, advertising executives, etc. will become more important than any one of those content pieces because they will bring in eyeballs, eyeballs bring in clicks, clicks bring in purchases. There won’t be any new thing under the sun here, but just a rearrangement of the relationships.