BuilderBot Could Have Saved the Dinosaurs

I was on the Designing World inworld  Treet tv interview show last night talking about BuildberBot and IP and some other stuff. (I don't think I said anything too useless, but it was sorta late here in the UK, so probably I did. I did react a bit unkindly to what seemed like a snarky jab from Angelica--but I think I got that wrongly and we kinda virtually shook hands after the show.  No need to make debates personal. )  As the show ended, we noticed that LL posted a detailed err, roadmap/wishlist for what copying is about in their view. It is quite a long piece and raises lots of issues and opens doors to discussion with them, which is a good thing in general--but also a little late since so many sims have been wiped and content lost forever.

Why is LL reacting now? I have given up trying to guess about why they do anything a lot time ago. But they have some obvious issues themselves as they have already copied entire sims at Zimbo the porno/ultra-violence/drugs "adult ghetto grid". Did all the parcel owners own everything? LL must be concerned about how content could be used on the private behind the firewall grids. If you buy something fro $0.50 is it really licenced for commericial use to the military? Can IBM move your content across to their OpenSims from SL copies (wanna guess if they have done that already?).

As a completely random aside, I took my 5 & 3 year old kids to see Ice Age 3 (they hated it btw also) and the preview here in London had at least 3 loud annoucements about "Content Piracy" and get an aggressive threat about how they use "night-vision" technology during the show to look for people filiming.  It seems that awareness is important, but isn't this getting out of hand? Plus, my kids love Pirates thanks to Johnny Depp...

Anyway, it all made me think about how the BuilderBot could have saved the Dinos (and 40+ others of our sims). In fact though, we never owned the Dinos (although Madcow probably would have sold us some rights to move it over to our grid---hmmm, maybe he still would?? /me makes note to find him). So assuming we had an agreement with Madcow we could have used BuilderBot to grab the entire sim and put it in an archive offline. But we didn't have it then so all that is left is tons of photos and a little wacky vid.

Recap of some of the points I tried to make on the Designing Worlds show:

* We made the BuilderBot in the first case to support our need to move our content off the SL grid. We have always secured all the rights to our stuff via legal contracts that we have used with content creators we commission.  We anticipated from the first day we worked in SL that we would need to be able to manage our content outside of SL. So we never had any risk of infringement when we copied and moved our content.

* Copybot and Sec Inv already exist. They can be exploited to copy all the stuff on a sim. Libomv already exists and can be grabbed by clever enough developers to make something like BuilderBot fast enough. We are focused on providing tools to legit builders and content owners while not making the existing situation any worse. We take the feedback, which we asked for, about adding some perm checks and constraints. We will do something in this regard.

* Putting the software out as BSD opensource reflects our support of opensource software. We got the core of the BuilderBot from libomv, so it made some sense to carry along down that path. Our use case for BuilderBot is perhaps unique and we felt that other people could further work the code to make it do what they might need. Of course this would expose SL content to rippers on a larger scale--is that a real risk? We don't really know at this time, but we can accept that a lot of people are worried about it. So we will not release under BSD and are looking at adding some type of perm checking to assist people that want to do the right thing, to do the right thing in copying only stuff they have rights to. More info on this shortly as we work through details.

* SL perms absolutely do not have anything to do with licencing of content. This has always been a gap in SL. It is important that content creators have a way to set a licence and for buyers to agree to it. That does not exist now and will not for some time. A click-wrap and some metadata would be an obvious improvement. The post from Cyn linked above is at least encouraging that they have some idea about doing something. Cyn even sent me a letter asking for discussion on this topic (yes, they do listen sometimes and we should engage on these occassions).

* Some question about BuilderBot functionality after the show ended which I answered: In terms of planned features for BuilderBot there are 3 main things: 1) Sim2Oar 2) OAR Editor 3) OAR2Sim. So we hope this would be a useful combinaiton to allow content to be archived, worked in an OpenSim grid and then potentially brought back to SL.