Kitely Forums

When you are setting your items to exportable, is it possible to block a particular grid? I've had several people ask me this lately and I don't have an answer.

Hi Morrigan,

Anything that is exported to some grid can then be taken by the receiving avatar into any grid that that avatar can teleport into. As a result, there isn't much to gain by preventing export of items sold with the Export permission to particular Hypergrid-enabled grids. Merchants can therefor elect to either keep items Kitely-only or sell them with the Export permission and increase their customer base to anyone who is willing to pay them for their items, regardless of which grid their avatar belongs to .

It is unfortunately the case that making content exportable at all makes it exportable to all, simply because the architects of Opensim have in the past generally been anti-intellectual-property and refused to consider proposals made 8 years ago to create a more robust permissions system based on smart contracts. Linden Lab also refused to implement smart contracts, even when it became clear with copybot that the existing DRM was wholly inadequate, so SL is in no better shape in this regard. That all being said, a dedicated thief does not need to buy your product to steal it. Anything that can be seen can be stolen: prims, meshes, sculpts, textures, and animations. Scripts are however the hardest content to steal. Even then, any DRM is like a lock and key on your home: it really only keeps honest people honest and establishes evidence for use in court against wrongdoers. Criminals intent on crime will always find ways to pick locks.

This all being said, I sympathize entirely with your predicament, as a strong defender of IP, I wish the OS community would take a stronger stance against piracy, including having a governing group that ensures that users IP rights under WIPO are protected by all grids that join the hypergrid, and if pirate grids refuse to respect IP rights, to have an ability to remove offending grids from accessing the hypergrid. There are unfortunately too many in the community who oppose the idea of intellectual property, as if creators don't work as hard to create their products as anyone in a real world factory or artist in their RL studio. As VR becomes more common there will be an increase in both violations of IP but also more real world attention to the enforcement of creators IP rights. Those who reject IP rights are deluding themselves if they think they will be able to prevent consequences. One of the biggest objects we find at the Opensim Embassy to people moving to Opensim is the popular perception, often promoted by LL, that OS is a den of copybotters, as if such people don't steal content from SL ever. Most of the pirated content in OS is by creators who have refused to offer their products in opensim, and have gotten botted as a result.

Infinite Metaverse Alliance Is running a poll:
"Lets take a poll of 5 areas we are seeing hot topics or immediate needs. Please do comment, ask questions, etc - let's get the conversation started so we can put out a more detailed survey."
One of the items is Identifying Intellectual property issues. As of now that item has only 5% of the votes. IMA could form a working group to identify and seek ways to resolve the IP issues if there is sufficient interest.

Vote in the IMA poll here:
https://plus.google.com/communities/111 ... 0887039334