Interesting

Copyright – Fair Use

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Copyright is basically a way for authors of books, songs, music, pictures, and movies to protect their work and profit from it. In Second Life™ we have to deal with copyrights. A new court case just clarified the requirement for consideration of fair use prior to filing a take-down notice.

This is an example of the problem:

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=gjmbcLhtMYo

In the video above people are taking candied videos of their kids and those got compiled into a YouTube presentation. You probably noticed but didn’t think about the background music caught by the video camera. In a case known as The Dancing Baby Universal filed a DMCA take-down against a Ms Lenz because a song by Prince was playing in the background of her video. It wasn’t added later. It was what the baby was dancing to when the video was candidly captured. 

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YouTube Gaming and Second Life

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If you are wondering what YouTube Gaming is, click over to Ciaran Laval’s blog and see: YouTube Gaming Launches And Second Life Has Its Own Channel. The short explanation is this is Google’s answer to Amazon’s Twitch… and if you don’t know what Twitch is… well… you are hopelessly sheltered. To pop your bubble… Twitch is a site that allows gamers to stream their game play. People can watch a video stream of a person, in-game, playing in almost (?) real time.

The recent news is Jimmy Kimmel thought it was a funny idea and made fun of YouTube Gaming. As they point out, considering how poorly TV is doing these day he hasn’t much room to talk. But, I thought the video funny. 

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Star Wars Trailer

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I know a portion of Second Life™ users are into Star Wars®. We have tribute regions in SL. This Christmas a new Star Wars film is planned to come out. Today everyone is excited by the new trailer for the movie that just released. 🙂 Watch more than 30 hours of panels, interviews, and floor … Read more

Second Life & NGP: Voxels…

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At the recent VWBPE 2015 in Ebbe Linden’s (Altberg) speech he mentions voxels. This suggests, at the very least, the Lab is looking at voxels for possible use in NGP (Next Generation Platform – SL’s probable successor). But, what does that mean for us? And what is a voxel?

In the comments of one of my articles in the series Max Graf pointed me to the web site Procedural World. They are big on voxels and use then in ways that may be similar to what we could see in NGP. 

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Source of Creativity?

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I know some people are way creative and others way less so. A new study from Northwest University may give us clues to what makes one person more creative than another.

See: Creative Genius Driven by Distraction

Lobby Cam oil painting
Lobby Cam oil painting by Bryn Oh, on Flickr

The hypothesis suggested by the research is creative people have trouble filtering out distractions. I suppose a noisy and chaotic environment would be the most common distraction. But any irrelevant sensory information could provide the distraction.

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Login2Life Documentary

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You’ll be seeing the blogosphere for Second Life covering Login2Life, a documentary video that runs an hour and 26 minutes. This video starts in English and English is scattered throughout. It uses English subtitles where needed. About 87 minutes is in various languages. I think I hear; German, French, Arabic, Japanese, Chinese, and … This … Read more

IDOBATA 2.0 Freeware for Second Life

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This is a tool for turning Skype and Second Life Viewer text chat to speech. The idea is that with this running you can multi-task and not miss business IM’s and chats in Second Life. This is apparently a two way chat. https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=skJozy95SDs Yuzuru’s English is a bit broken. But, way better than my Japanese, … Read more