 Hello everybody. Welcome to this afternoon session about intellectual property rights on the hypergrid and in the metaverse in general. My name is Maria Korolev. I'm the editor and publisher of Hyperprogrid Business. And here I was today at the founder of a major commercial grid and the founder of our biggest online content sharing site for OpenSim. Intellectual property rights are subject to a lot of discussion and have been talked about in other panels, both today and yesterday. Is there enough content protection for virtual content in OpenSim? Too much, not enough. One thing that everyone can agree on, however, is that OpenSim users need and deserve a wide variety of useful and engaging content. So here to talk first is Vanish, who's been living in second life since 2007 and then OpenSim since 2009. He creates items, writes tutorials, does talks, manages communities and runs his own grids. And he's, to me, he's most famous for OpenSim creations, a site where anybody can upload content, original content and distribute it under a creative commons license for the general public to use on any grid. He's also a singer, guitarist and songwriter. He's been writing songs for 15 years and has released four albums. Vanish, would you like to start off this discussion by talking about your take on intellectual property and content rights? I would like to. How much time do I have? Not enough, not enough. Basically, I would say, I don't like the word content to start with, because that kind of looks at it from the perspective of the people who benefit from it. And that's usually not the artist. I prefer to speak about creations. And I followed OpenSim creations with the premise that creations for OpenSim users should be easily available. They should be downloadable and they should be able to be imported into any grid, including people's own stand-alones that they run at home or wherever they want to. So to make access to creations easy, free and convenient, that's pretty much the premise. Okay. And so where do you stand on the whole? Is there enough or is there too much protection for content right now in OpenSim? I'm a pirate. No, I'm serious. So for me, there is, well, I don't care about protection really, because things can get copied anyway. So much protection, little protection really doesn't matter. If things want to get copied, then they will get copied. Okay. So to talk from a very different perspective is Melanie Thielker. She's the founder of Avination, a commercial grid. She's also an OpenSim core developer and has been one of the more active contributors to virtual world software in general and OpenSim in particular. She's a long-time second life resident and has been involved in a number of virtual projects and has created her own spin of the OpenSim software. Most recently, she has produced a new content and permission for OpenSim and export permission, which eventually will make it a safer for content creators to distribute their content on hybrid-enabled grids while deciding for themselves whether the content can travel further or not. And Melanie, can you talk about your background, especially in how you feel about the content protection issue? Yes. As a matter of fact, even though you may think that I'm completely diametrically opposed to vanish, that's not so. I believe that such content as what he's outlined needs to exist. It must exist. Otherwise, we would be looking very bare. However, I don't believe that all content should be free because vanish may have spoken from the standpoint of somebody who creates content as a hobby or who distributes content out of the goodness of his heart. That's all fine and well, but there are those of us who live off the creation of content, the intellectual property. Now, vanish rejects the term content. A lot of people also reject the term intellectual property believing that all ideas are free and that essentially all virtual objects are ideas. I can't subscribe to that. Virtual objects represent a certain amount of time that's been invested in creating them and such time is worth money. So I believe that protection for the creators of such objects is something that is very much needed even though it may be optional. It can be optional on the grid level. A grid can declare that it only allows free content and that anybody who imports content into that grid agrees that the content will be free and freely copyable. A grid can do the opposite like Avination did and say we protect content creators' rights, we protect intellectual property, we proactively prevent or remove copies, we educate, we help. Of course, that places a bit of a burden on us, but that's one that we shoulder gladly. We've designed the permission system that is as secure as we could make it. Then we created the long talked about, but never done, export permission bit. The way that came about was that I made contact with the developer group, the Singularity viewer, and in a process that took quite a while to accomplish, became a part of the team and able to make contributions to that viewer and have them accepted and put into the viewer. To discuss the export permission and the need for open sim worlds, especially HyperGrid enabled worlds to have such a bit, so we created it. We created it in such a way that it's as flexible as open sim itself. We love options. We really love options. We got hundreds of them, literally. Read open sim defaults for a nice laugh. So for content creators, there needs to be a way to make sure that their content is not copied illegally. Now, you're saying content will be copied if it wants to be copied, and yes, you are right. That's actually true. There is no way to stop a determined, technically savvy person from copying something. Absolutely no way to do that. Anything that can be seen, displayed, downloaded can be copied. However, there is a lot of what I call casual copying. This is copying by people who do not know the exact legal situation. People who believe that if they bought something in SL, for instance, they're allowed to export it because it's their property. It's like if you buy a piece of furniture and when you move, you have to leave it because you only bought a license for that furniture in that apartment and people don't understand that. So they actually copy the item believing that they are allowed to do so because they consider it to be physical property because it looks like physical property. I'm hearing here that there's no audio. I have a question for you that I'm hearing a lot about and that there's no content protection and open sim at all. Could either of you briefly outline how content protection open sim differs from other virtual worlds, like say second life, and what tools are available for content creators and how they differ? Open sim is not a single place. There's actually different grids. Can one of you talk about that? Yes, it's been shown in a different session and also at the keynote that people often equate open sim with OS Grid. That is a common misconception. That is because OS Grid is the official testing place for open sim. One has to see that open sim is a software that has a nearly infinite configurability. So a grid can choose to load a permission module or no permission module. Open sim can be configured to be as secure as second life, which is just the same level of security as you have for, say, World of Warcraft content, which means the only way you can download it is by making an effort investing criminal energy. It's not something that is possible for the average user if things are configured to be airtight. However, it is possible. Anyone can download anything that can be seen, as I said already. But some open sim installations have configured the system to have no permissions. Either that everyone is a guard or that there's just no concept of next owner permissions. Everything is full permanent stays that way. Now enter the hyper grid. When you go to a sim that has permissions enabled, you take an item and hyper grid somewhere where there is no permissions enabled. You can then make copies. You can set the next owner permissions as you like. Take the item and hyper grid back to where it came from. You will have that item with full permissions to do with as you please. That is the danger of the hyper grid, which is what the export bid is for to prevent. Content creators in grids that have object security can now elect to not have the item exportable to prevent people to jump to other sims and change permissions on it. If the item is not exportable in the final version of this, it will not be able to put it in a suitcase. They will not be able to download it using viewer tools. Obviously, they will not be able to have it in IAR or OAR files at the discretion of the region owner. For instance, in a grid like Avination, and if Avination were already hyper grid enabled and you were asking for an IAR of your inventory, then things that are not export enabled would not be part of that IAR. If you put them in the suitcase, they would not go in. If you try to download them using the viewer tools export, they will not export. Any other thing that has the export set would do all three of these things. The word grid God and grid God powers comes up regularly. Is this something that anyone in OpenSim can do? Or can you talk about the times when someone can give themselves God powers and reset permissions and do these other kinds of things? OpenSim has several settings pertaining to God powers. First off, in the stand-alone or hyper grid stand-alone, the owner is implicitly a God and they can set it up so that even parcel owners are implicitly God's or they can turn off permissions altogether. In a gridded environment, no matter whether hyper grid enabled or not, there's additionally the concept of grid God's that it comes on top of these other concepts, which means that the grid owner and operator can designate certain people as God's and they will be God's on all regions, unless the region system is federated, like OSGrid or I believe MetropolisGrid, where everybody can operate their own regions and then of course they can set allow grid God's to false in the config file if they don't want the grid operators to determine who has God mode in SM. Regardless of that permissions and God mode, while they are linked, they're not the same thing. You can configure SM not to have permissions enforced without anyone being God. You can configure SM so that everyone is God, but you still have permissions enforced. It sounds really complicated. Yes, we love options. Some people including some of our audience members are suggesting that maybe it should be easier to purchase content than to copy it. For example, the iTunes or the Amazon DRM free model where you can buy music without DRM because hackers are going to hack anyway and the only thing DRM hurts is legitimate customers. Where do you stand at this? Do you think this is a direction that eventually virtual worlds will move to as well? Well, there is one problem with that. First of all, let me say it's a great concept. I use iTunes for those things that iTunes has. Obviously, most of the things I buy are DJ mixes that I have to buy from other sites. But where iTunes has it, yes, it is easier to use iTunes to buy something than it is to go and try find a torrent. I'm generally against pirating music, but I have seen how difficult it can be to find something that's actually clean and how easy it is to buy something on iTunes for just pennies. So yes, the concept is great and it does work. iTunes actually makes pirating music harder than buying it and it makes it so cheap that there's no reason not to. But in virtual worlds, this doesn't work yet for lack of mass. Even 80,000 concurrent users, even 8 million registered users will not all buy the same item. Now, there are people who have made lots of money. Thousands of US dollars per month on virtual content have had the pleasure to know a few of those. They would not make that kind of money by pricing their items that low. Because of that, the iTunes model will not yet work. But once the 3D internet really takes hold and this is going to be used by not 8 million SL users but by 200 million internet users. By 800 million internet users, if we have people like Facebook has people, then that concept will work and it will come to pass. I can pretty much guarantee that. At the moment, though, we have a situation where that's not the case and content creators need to charge more money to amortize the amount of work that they put in. Because of that, the casual copying, the, oh, you like this? You have a copy without thinking about it, has to be suppressed. I know DRM is not a total solution. I know DRM can be circumvented and will be circumvented. It does eliminate a lot of that casual passing around of objects. Can I comment on that? Yes. I don't agree. I have, in fact, I mean, open sim creations for those who don't know it is similar in that it makes downloading and importing items for open sim easy. I would argue easier than trying to get them through the hypergrid, but that's arguable. I don't know if there's a market or not, but I do, I have always encouraged anyone who wants to try to set up their own shop on the internet and sell their stuff as a download for open sim. I have actually written a tutorial on how to do this using WordPress and a little plug-in for WordPress. It's really not hard to do. For those who still don't want to do it themselves, I have set up a site called opensim-shops.org where you can set up your shop using my server. I don't charge anything for it. It's just for you to try and sell your own stuff if you want. Can you post a link to that in local chat? We're in local chat. Open sim-shops.org. I have a question about that. If you make a store, you have your content that you probably exported using a viewer's export function or whatever, or you have just textures on there, and you put that up for sale. Somebody comes and buys it, imports it into, for instance, Second Life, or Avination, a grid that has a closed permission system. It makes them full-perm owners and creators of the object. They can then put it in the store on that grid and resell it, possibly at a huge profit to people who don't know your website or where that comes from. They may be in violation of license terms attached to the item, of course, but they could do that. Is there any way that any steps you're taking to prevent that and protect the rights of the actual creator to that money which they will not receive? I find it always interesting that we who are in Second Life or OpenSim live in this little bubble where we always think about permissions and have to use the permission system to prevent people, because it seems like the general assumption is that people are evil and you have to prevent them from doing evil stuff with your stuff. Otherwise, they will hurt you. I don't think that is necessarily true. It works in general terms as well. If you buy something on iTunes, who is going to stop you from selling the album that you bought on iTunes? If you bought something from TurboSquid, who is going to stop you from importing the mesh into a Second Life and selling it there? Nobody is. Yes, the legal system. Yes, and the same legal system applies to OpenSim in Second Life. Unfortunately, it doesn't apply because an item that costs less than one cent you cannot go and sue for damages of $2,000 US over this item. Like a song in iTunes. They will be laughed out of court. The song is different. The music industry is different. They have a ton of money. Same for the movie industry, but OpenSim creators and cell creators, they don't have that. They do not have the financial breath to pull through a process in court that will cost them $2,000 even though they may yield $3,000 at the end. They just don't have the kind of money to sue. So that's where DRM comes in. It prevents them from having to sue too many people. I'm getting several questions in about people looking for content in OpenSim. Sean Emerald asks, my world is essentially empty because I'm not a builder. No one will sell me stuff. I don't like to copy stuff found elsewhere because I might be copy-botted. I'd love to buy stuff. Tanya Souther asked, ever since I first got on OpenSim, I've been looking for a Tigris avatar. I've never been able to. I've spoken to Avatar creators and the universal answer is the same. Why should they make stuff for OpenSim if they'll simply get ripped off and passed around? Realize against the idea all you want, but the creators are the ones you have to convince and they're not buying. How would you guys address this? Should I start? Yes, go ahead. Yes, probably. I think it's actually more than me. Okay. First of all, OpenSim Creations has currently... Oh, I don't even know. More than a thousand items for Virtual World. So if your SIM is empty, just go to the site, download what you want and import it and I'm sure your SIM will be full in no time. Likewise, we have a forum there where people regularly post stuff that they would like to have made and somebody else might see it and actually do it just for fun. So if you want a Tigris, go there, ask for a Tigris. The question for the quality comes up all the time. Quality is all over the place, just in Second Live as well as in OpenSim Creations. If you don't like something, don't download it. Well, but what about selling it to the creators? You say you have a thousand items, but I'm asking you this, how many of those people who sell items to your website are people whose real-life living is made creating Virtual Content? I don't really know. I don't know much about the people who post stuff on OpenSim Creations. I'm not really interested in their real life. I know at least a couple of them do make some income with actually selling stuff for OpenSim. Making some income is one thing, but having that be your principal income as possible in Second Life and other closed schools. I don't know why the assumption is that only if you can make an income from it, you do create quality stuff that is not the case. No, it's not the case. I agree. Other people make quality stuff too. But obviously, those people who do it full-time, they have more experience and invest more time, and they expect a certain return. I do not think that they can get that if they sell it on a website to download it imported to the world individually. I believe the markets for those are still in closed grids, and that's primarily a sale. Well, okay. As you said, it's a marketplace. I guess everybody needs to find a niche and we'll see where the marketplace goes. One of our audience requires that content protection is in place. It needs DRM as an option. No, I don't think so. There is no evidence to support that, and there are lots of websites or lots of marketplaces who do just fine without any kind of DRM in place. Yes, but there are products that can be prosecuted in real-life courts if they are stolen, and that's not true for virtual clothing items, for instance, or primed geometries that make up furniture. Well, so you mean you cannot, like, extend a DMCA notice to every nation if you see something that you think is stolen from you? Of course, but that's because we do have DRM in support copyrights. That means if we get a DMCA, then we take it down. However, the person who has sent the DMCA is not entitled to damages, and they don't have the money to sue the person who imported it for damages either, because it takes money to sue people. Well, I can count on one hand the number of times that the music industry actually sued people here, in my case in Germany, and in the most cases, there aren't any damages being paid. Well, I know about the software industry, for instance. They did sue someone who I know, and they did so successfully. Yes, it happens, but it's just nothing that's feasible for a subset of content. Okay. Somebody in our audience mentioned the reverse problem of content being acquired in OpenSim and sold in the Second Life Marketplace because in Second Life Marketplace is where you have the users with the money who are buying stuff. Could either one of you address that issue? It's just a scenario that I put to vanish when I said somebody downloads stuff there and puts it for sale in Second Life or I have a nation to make money with it. I've seen that happen. I've seen people actually download stuff from OpenSim Creations and sell it in Second Life, and I've seen people download my own stuff and sell it in Second Life. Personally, I don't really care. The licenses I use for my items are such that they actually are legally able to download my stuff and sell it anywhere for any price they can. If they can really compete with me putting it on the web for free, then they deserve every dollar they get. The same applies to a lot of other OpenSim Creations users. They choose licenses that are for commercial use as well. Commercial use means you can use this item and sell it. Or they say, please don't sell it without really having any way to prevent you from selling it. I guess it's a trust system. Some people break trust, and that's the world we live in. Most people break trust. Most of them do it unwittingly. They don't know that they should not do things. People log into Avination. They go and get a bit of money so they can upload. The first thing they do is upload the Second Life appearance. We see them change. We see skins appear for redgrave or whatever. We ask them, where did you get that skin? They say, I uploaded it. I said, where did you get it from? You know it's illegal. No, why did you upload it here? Because it's mine, I bought it. When you have to start explaining, you have to educate them about copyright and about the license that they bought for the content that MSL doesn't transfer to Avination. You have to delete this stuff and make sure that their promise is not to do it again. You have to keep more on the watchlist to see if they do it again. What if they come from a country that might be legal in that country without even our service? Okay. It's part of our terms of service. So if somebody breaks our terms of service and is educated, then that's it again. They're no longer one of the people we desire on our grid and we will remove them. Well, okay. You can end on your duty whatever you wish, but that doesn't mean they don't do it once somewhere else. Of course, but that's why I'm saying it needs to be prevented everywhere. I don't think you have that. If a creator does not want the items to be free for all, they need to have a means to enforce that. Since the legal system doesn't give us any recourse, here we need to have DRM. DRM, by the way, I saw that question fly by in chat, a service site. It's based in a server code. It's not based on the item. So unlike un-CDs, many of you may know what an un-CD is, the DRM does not adhere to the object. It's part of the grid and the object does not become unusable just because DRM is up updated. Like for instance, the export permission doesn't make existing items unusable. They're just not exportable because we choose to have not exportable by default. But it doesn't make them unusable. It's different than CD protection. Okay. Douglas Maxwell asks if he runs a big grid for the Department of Defense, for those of us who use open-sync for serious business, we need an ability to acquire content cost effectively. We cannot just wait for some kind sold to accommodate us. And I'd like to weigh in personally on this because I became an unwitting pirate when I got a plant from a reputable freebie store. The freebie store took the plant down when they realized it was infringing. So they did the right thing. I still had a copy of the plant in my inventory, put it up online in my grid, posted a picture of it online, and it created a lot of bad press for me and for my company. So even though I did the right thing all the way through, like some of our audience members are saying, I have become extremely nervous about using content that's generally available on open-sync. Can you guys address this issue? Well, the situation is this. First of all, the good faith doctrine applies. Meaning if you bought something in good faith and you had no reason to suspect that the item is infringing and you have not been aware specifically that the item is infringing and has a good reputation, then you have acted in good faith and you are not required to do anything but take the item down and delete it once you do get the knowledge of it being infringing. Of course, the press is a different story and being thrown about on the blogs as a copy-botter is not a nice thing. But that is something that neither the creators nor the grids nor the affected persons have any control over. Bloggers will blog. Generally speaking buying something from a freebie store like in SL, it is not legal to export it. Even if it's a freebie, even if it's full-perm, it's not legal to export it because the SL2OS forbid it. So it's only open-sync creations and sites like that where you can legally buy these things and I encourage you to do that and it will be legal and it will be okay because it's the actual creators uploading things there. You can buy it in a freebie store on some grid and then export it. Buy it from somewhere where it's actually licensed legally so you can use it. First of all, you cannot buy anything and open some creations. Everything is free. But that was just a side note. I think the use case that is being discussed here is somebody it's work for hire. That's the term that's used for that. When you pay for someone to make something for you and that is actually pretty clear cut case. You go to somebody who is a reputable creator for OpenSim or Second Life and you tell them please make my Tigris avatar and I pay you $1,549.60 and the person makes the Tigris avatar and you pay them the money. I think DRM has nothing to do with the process of work for hire and delivery of those items. DRM has everything to do in protecting those items from then getting stolen by the parties. Several people are asking about DRM and real licenses. What about using licenses instead of DRM and again can you guys talk about that? Well, licenses can override those things that are otherwise statutory limits meaning content is proprietary unless licensed more openly. If you license something to be CC for instance or if you license something to be BSD share like also such licenses then legally you are allowed to export that content in ported elsewhere use it any way you have to give attribution when the license says you do otherwise you do not. You can sell the content if the license allows you to do that or not. However if you're using a privately owned service the TOS of that service governs the transactions that you have for that service. So if somebody has something uploaded to SSL that is a CC and the SLTOS says you are not allowed to download things you did not make then the SLTOS governs it still is not illegal to download it you may get banned though and they would have just cause. I am fully behind using real life licenses instead of DRM that is what we are using in OpenSim Creations that was how I set up OpenSim shops. I have personally also uploaded stuff from other people on to OpenSim Creations because these other creators either made it publicly available and with the license that allows you to export to copy it and share it somewhere else or because they just told me to do that to do that. So the licensing thing in my experience works much better than DRM which are very unspecific and well as Melanie said is only limited to the grid that the item is on. Lani Global who runs the science fiction themed role playing region Lani on OS grid says so those of us who are content creators in OpenSim really don't have an expensive unauthorized copy enforcement. This is the same situation as images on a website. The best enforcement I found is a listing in Second Life Marketplace. Simply list your product there as soon as you release it in OpenSim then you are first to file for intellectual property purposes in a prime commercial market and their takedown system is inexpensive free for that market. I can't control the copying of my products however I can't get takedowns and I do this by listing them in the commercial markets when I release them. Is this a solution that you recommend for other OpenSim based content creators? It's definitely something that they can do listing the item in a Second Life Marketplace even if they don't intend to actually sell it in Second Life or don't expect there to be a market in Second Life. Yes, if the item is stolen from an OpenSim grid and subsequently import it into Second Life that doesn't make it infringing. Yes, the first to file rule does apply for copyright and that means that they can prove that they have to create the item first. Put it into Second Life first and they can get a takedown on these items that is correct. The same thing goes for Avination only. It's not that you'd have to list it on a Marketplace because we don't have one by choice. We prefer to have live malls rather than dead websites. However, if you bring the item into the world and have it for sale somewhere then you also first to file with us and then you can send us a takedown notice. Now we're not subject to the DMCA but we usually act according to it because it's the way of least persistence and it helps the content and creators the most. Other grids may be similar but this is a grid specific thing. Okay, I'm curious now. You say you're not subject to the DMCA. First question is what are you subject to and the second is why do you follow the DMCA if you're subject to copyright law? Regular international copyright law being UK based and the DMCA what's usually called the DMCA is actually a specific provision the so-called DMCA. They save harbour provision. The safe harbour provision is only a spelling out of something that has always been part of copyright which is the aforementioned good faith doctrine meaning unless we know that there's something infringed we are not guilty as long as once we find out we take action. That's basically the same procedure. We get sent DMCA requests on DMCA forms because people are not aware, US people are not aware that we may not be subject to that particular law and we don't have to work with that particular form. However the form has all the data we need so we just go and process it as if you were aware. We also honour formless requests we also honour requests that specifically cite British law. We honour all requests basically as long as we can see that the creator is actually the legit creator we are always on the side of the creator never on the side of the thief. How do you see that someone is a legit creator? Usually what we do is if the item is on SL, on the SL marketplace we can determine how old it is in SL. We use that as the indication of prior filing. Otherwise we see when the item was created by the original creator versus when the item was created by the person who allegedly copied it. We also check other sources if the complainant can name them. Okay, thanks. One of our audience members has suggested and I've heard this repeated multiple times this weekend is that the problem is you drive away the high-end creatives that could grow the use of this technology by not respecting their rights. This kind of stuff is killing the potential world potential for future use. The flip side of it is that the World Wide Web had no built-in protection for copyright creations, still really doesn't for images, for text and for many different file types and this did not hinder its growth. It's fully pretty much licensed based as opposed to DRM based. How do you guys address this growth potential question? It's already been addressed twice actually, saying that the internet and generally the real world is indeed licensed based. But licenses need to be enforced. Licenses are enforceable to the courts, which means that a certain value has to be attached to an item. If you have an image, for instance, you can attach a value of $2,000 for it, then you can ensue someone who infringes that for $50,000 based on the supposed number of people who may have seen the image on their website and you will get that award maybe $20,000 but we're talking about amounts of money that are sufficiently large that you can pay the lawyer out of the award. This is not so for virtual worlds because it's the low price of virtual items which is generally seen as being the official low price because that's the sale price of the item. It means that anything that you do in terms of lawsuits about virtual items can happen only in small claims court. Small claims court limits the awards to amounts that may not make it possible to pay the high powered lawyers that are needed to win such a case. Those would be landmark rulings and they may need to go up to the instances and that is just not going to happen for a 0.012 pair of virtual pants. The question was about the quality of the items and driving away the people that make the good stuff, right? Well, you're not driving away the people who make the good stuff by protecting their rights. I think that's quite an arrogant stance to say that I'm a creator and I'm better than the ones who make free stuff. What we've seen on the internet is that people voluntarily create much, much, much more stuff than we had pre-internet from all those so-called professionals who did it for pay. YouTube is the biggest TV channel I guess that we've ever had on the planet and people make videos for it for free. I don't think this is going to change I don't think it's going to be any different in open sim. Have you ever posted a YouTube video? I have. Monetization options the ad options that you have when you post them you choose not to use them doesn't mean that other people don't. Most people monetize their videos as soon as they get popular. If the people don't monetize it then YouTube will. But this way it's business and it's big business don't be mistaken. It's not all nice people making all free stuff for everyone. YouTube's big business and yes YouTube also has copyright protection. There are so many music videos from YouTube that are not allowed to be there for some countries that's been negotiated that they can be shown but for instance one country that's been very, very obstinate against allowing internet distribution content is Germany when I'm in Germany and I open YouTube 80% of the time when I'm looking for music video I get this video is being blocked in Germany for gamer purposes whereas when I'm in the UK I can open the video just fine. So you see DRM comes into it and so does business. That's not really DRM is it? Of course it's DRM if they don't play it in a country where it's not licensed and they use technical means to prevent that that's DRM, that's exactly what DRM is. You're talking about DRM as in terms of DRM being embedded in music files of watermarking and things like that but that is just one sub-aspect of DRM. Fair enough. Yesterday we heard a presentation about a kindly multi grid marketplace and there are several other multi grid marketplaces as well. Do you see this as another potential solution for content creators looking for a centralized place to post copies for legal for legal purchases that people can get to and also as a way to prove their authorship of the content. There are two technical approaches to the multi grid market place. There's the one that's used by Kylie and some others where it's delivered into one of the worlds where you can go pick it up then you can take it elsewhere via hyper grid. Expert permission is a vital part of that and the system is definitely something that is viable. The other one is a content delivery system that's called Double the Dutch and it's done by Spot on 3D. Apparently they are based in such a way that you upload the content to each grid individually and then have magic boxes there and just a central go-to place. I believe there may also be Karayama who try to do something similar. I don't know if they're still around but in that case again the DRM protection and protections of the grids where the stuff is uploaded to apply. So those market places are a good place to find things but if somebody uploads something that is stolen there or somebody steals something that is uploaded there and brings it to another grid or re-uploads it to another marketplace you still have the infringing problem you still have the problem of content that is illegal and needs to be taken down you still have the whole shebang it's not like it makes things any easier or different, it's just different ways of the distribution. If I sell a CD in a store and the CD has no DRM and I make a copy of the CD to give it to my friend it's not fundamentally different from me downloading a file off of iTunes that has no DRM putting it on a memory stick and giving it to a friend is a different point of sale but it doesn't change the facts we are not the only fresh approach that I have seen is actually Vanish's website which is a place that I would call a safe place to get stuff to import into grids and not get into hot water and we don't have DRM or the DMCA that's quite an achievement Somebody asked about reverse engineering if you can't buy a particular content but wishes as you could if he just observes what it looks like and reverse engineers it from scratch is that legal? There are legal requirements as to how close or how far away the result has to be definitely first of all many people go and duplicate the primed geometry that's of course just as illegal as using a viewer tool or another ripping tool to also duplicate the geometry those people who can make significant changes to the textures so that they become work in their own right rather than being a derivative or straight out plagiarism those people usually are better at creating things than they need to be to make the item themselves without copying someone else's design on the other hand Samsung versus Apple go figure It's always easy to copy something then invent something from scratch That is actually how creativity works nobody really creates something out of thin air we always stand on the shoulders of giants Alright we're getting close to the end point for this talk Are there any other questions I haven't asked oh yes there's one that's sitting around top one of our in world listeners asked what about people who are investing their own money in creating their own web server and setting up a commercial grid and renting out land they have to get money to at least cover their costs and in world of course marketplaces are a great way to rent land to merchants and this can be really hard to do if content protection isn't in place can you address that I don't understand what the actual question is here as a creator it's really not in my business to tell you how to get back the investment that you put into your grid and that's not my problem sorry I saw a much more interesting thing that I would like to mention scrolling by me this was studies Maxwell again asking about certificates this is something that is actually it's been looked into and it's not been discarded it's just been determined and it's too complex to do for the current technological level but certificate based authentication for the hyper grid is something that I'm definitely looking at and doing the same thing for content would then also be possible that would allow content to be digitally signed and it would also allow content to be fit with an ACL that allows where to take it where not at least with participating grids that would give an extra level of security both for the buyer who would know that his item is authentic or who can be sure that the item cannot be copy-botted without it being clearly visible okay and we're coming to the end of our lot of time Vanish and Melanie would you like to give any final statements before we close this out go forth and prosper Melanie I believe everything has said so I'm just hoping that everybody here has taken something away from this it seems quite heated the discussion and I wish you all a good evening morning or day or whatever way you are well thank you very much both of you for coming and talking about this this sometimes contentious issue and thank you everyone in our audience here and streaming audience on the web for coming and listening and asking your questions coming up next in this same presentation area I will be giving a talk about the numbers about the growth of the hyper grid the growth of open sim and then later on tonight we're going to have some social activities check out the conference website for all the details and locations and again thank you very much and this concludes this panel thank you