Second Life Bits – Week 49

No Blogger Illuminati

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Mezzaluna
Mezzaluna

I think this is funny. There are people that are friends with various members of the development community, Linden and third party. It isn’t so much that developers help out their friends more than others as it is familiarity with a person allows you tell when they are up to something or holding something back. That is a sign to start digging.

Often we know a new shinny is coming because people start clamming up. 

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OpenSim: Kitely’s Market Place Second Look

My recent article OpenSim News: Hypergrid Market 2014-12 drew more comments than most of my posts. Maria Korolov, WhiteStar Magic, and Ilan Tochner commented making good points I feel worth further consideration in regard to Kitely’s new market place.

Kitely Market in Android S4
Kitely Market in Android S4

Maria believes the Kitely market will help with the DMCA problems. Her thinking, if I understood, is that having a single market for many OpenSim grids it reduces the work one needs to do to file a DMCA take down notice. Rather than keeping track of all the grids and filing with each, a merchant/creative can file with just Kitely. This is a good point and addresses the concern I raised about the added complexity of the Hypergrid spreading products across a number of virtual worlds.

If each grid has its own market, we have to deal with all those markets and defend content in all those markets. I see that as a big problem. Maria is likely right that a concentrated market would simplify the problem and not present the massive work load I foresaw.

Filing only with Kitely does not get things removed from all the grids. But, that may be a temporary thing. They hope to be able to implement that feature with cooperation from grid owners. For now once an item is in a grid’s asset database it is there until the grid manager removes it. A DCMA take-down will stop sales from Kitely and that may be all one really needs to worry about. More about this farther on.

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OpenSim News: Hypergrid Market 2014-12

You probably know that in the Open source world of OpenSim they have a thing called Hypergrid. The basic idea is one can live in a grid and visit other OpenSim grids. The really neat thing is your avatar and it’s stuff go with you. So, if I put on my red dress in OSGrid and go to Kitely I look the same in both grids. My dress, skin, etc. came with me to the other grid.

OpenSim - OSGrid - By:  Linux-Screenshots, Flickr
OpenSim – OSGrid – By: Linux-Screenshots, Flickr

IBM and Linden Lab were cooperating on building the Hypergrid. The problem was they could not find a way to protect Intellectual Property Rights. So, they gave up. As much as novices think: there must be a way, there isn’t. After 25+ years the movie and music industry have not been able to find a way to protect digital content from theft. They have spen millions trying to figure out a protection scheme. They have failed. 

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