more on SecondLife
I've written before about SecondLife's decision (1) to assert what is denied in There -- that creators own the stuff they create, and (2) to experiment with CreativeCommons technology to enable them simply to signal the freedoms they grant with their stuff.
I think this is a great and important move -- as (1) I believe in the rights of authors, and hate the vWorlds being created where those rights are taken away, but (2) I believe the existing copyright system has become so insanely complex that it requires (3) a second best solution like the GNU GPL, or Creative Commons.
Reports are that my hero Yochai Benkler criticized SecondLife for this decision -- though the reports are about a question he raised at a conference, and I've not yet seen anything he's written about this. James has a great and balanced piece on LawMeme.
Maybe it's time for Yochai to get a blog to explain his views a bit more?
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Comments (7)
As I recall, he didn't like the idea that what was at issue was property at all. He was not, however, responding to the idea that SecondLife's solution is second best, as you said.
Perhaps Jack Balkin will convert him to the blogging community.
I can vouch for Prof. Benkler extreme disappointment with SecondLife's decision as expressed at the Virtual Worlds conference. The point he made, and I thought it was a good one, was that SecondLife had the opportunity to create an economy where the mistakes of our intellectual property system were not imposed. He suggested that the CC licenses and the GPL were 'jujitsu moves' necessary to work around the system... but that a whole new system could be created in that space built around the idea of sharing and not control.
I couldn't help but agree... they had such a great opportunity to show what the world would be like if we created an IP regime from the ground up, instead of applying patches like the GPL to a messed up system. I think the VP from SecondLife, who made the announcement, was rather shocked to hear such criticism.
I just don't get the complaint. In There, if you create something, There claims rights over it -- in game, and out of game. In SecondLife, if you create something, you own it out of game, and it is free for others to use in game. One might dream away the world out of game, but if we don't, why isn't this exactly the right answer? And what about the ingame rules upsets the utopians?
In SecondLife, if you create something, you own it out of game, and it is free for others to use in game.
Perhaps there's been a development that I'm not aware of, but in the LawMeme article you linked to, in the section "Anarchy, Game, and Dystopia," Mr. Grimmelmann discusses the possibilities of copyright infringement between players on SecondLife.
The piece seems to suggest that because SecondLife's decision was made with mainly the control of works out-of-game in mind, it has opened the door for the legal regime of real life to trample all over this particular game life. The article goes on to state that an extension of the EULA could fix this problem, but that the current one does not contain these provisions.
The idea of the oft-maligned EULA becoming the social contract of virtual worlds is extremely powerful, and it will be interesting to see if more formalized methods of changing the EULA based on user opinion develop, beyond protests and message board flame wars.
Content within Second Life already could come under real-world laws because we allow users to upload textures and audio. If they upload content that they do not have rights to, the copyright holder may contact the Linden Lab DMCA contact in order to have the content removed. They could also take real-world legal action against the infringer. This was true before we changed the EULA.
What has changed is that now content generated in-world is allowed the same status as content created outside the world. Where Creative Commons comes in (and why I've been working with the cc team) is to change our current in-world permissions structures to have legal meaning within the cc framework, so that users can easily specify exactly the rights that they wish to grant to other users.
That being said, Second Life currently tracks what users do with content the create in world. For example, did the user give her outfit away to 4000 users with the "allow other users to modify this" permission on before she decided to sue them for infringement? While that permission doesn't have legal standing (hence the desire for cc) it could certainly be used by the alleged infringer.
Users currently can control content they create, including who they give to, whether it is for sale, whether the recipient can modify the object, and whether the recipient can copy the object. Again, these currently aren't legal definitions, but they do allow creators a lot of options wrt how other people use their content.
Cory
The issue of where exactly the property rights existed was a hotly debated issue at the conference (at least at my table) because the VP was so vague as to the implications of the decision. There was a pocket of lawyers who saw this as a clever way to introduce the legal system into in-game property disputes, thus alleviating their own conflict-resolution system from such burdens.
My impression from the announcement was exactly what Prof. Lessig indicated in his most recent post: this is an out-of-game licensing question that provides individuals with certain rights beyond the world of SecondLife.... while property inside the world is still managed by the system imposed. However, the property rights within SecondLife are still essentially the same as outside of the world, with one particular exception.
Every player who creates an object may chose to keep that objection for themselves or give it away (for free or in trade). If they chose to give it away, they must select a combination of 3 properties.
1) the right to give away
2) the right to copy
3) the right to modify (implies the right to copy in-game)
What is most interesting about their system is that they have mandated the enforcement of the 1st sale doctrine by requiring one of these options to be selected. It is not possible in SecondLife to give someone a thing and require that they never pass it on.
All that being said, SecondLife could have been much clearer as to the extent of their proposal and how exactly it was to fit into the virtual world itself.
Lessig says, "I just don’t get the complaint. In There, if you create something, There claims rights over it — in game, and out of game. "
I guess I don't get your complaint. I commented on your mistatement when you posted it originally on November 14.
There Inc. has been recognizing the copyright of the content submitted by their members since April, 2003 as defined in their Developer Agreement. This agreement is separate from their member agreement (TOS) and controls in the case of the conflict.
The agreement states (in part):
"Subject to Company’s ownership of any underlying code incorporated into Content that you create with the Software, you retain ownership of the copyright in the Content. "
This seems pretty clear to me. Am I missing something?