It would seem that in a sudden spur of either progression or panic (probably spurred on by Rezzable‘s recent announcement)Â Linden Lab has decided, “Hey. Maybe it would be cool if people had a place to report bad avatars or bad stores. Like a Better Business Bureau.”
Ah, there are lights on sometimes at the Lab! Cyn Linden posted, “Our Content Management Roadmap“, which includes:
- Improvements to our intellectual property complaint process, enabling intellectual property owners to submit online requests that we search for and remove all copies of an identified item created by a particular Resident;
- Promotion of standard industry practices for tools copying content from Second Life to help protect against intellectual property infringement;
- A content seller program to help the community trade content safely and trust one another;
- Clarifications to and updating of our policies to promote awareness of intellectual property and protect against infringement; and
- Development of “sticky licenses,†or additional licensing metadata, for content to help facilitate a content marketplace outside our hosted Second Life virtual world.
This means:
-Business rating system, for praises or complaints
-Restrictions on Copybot
- Web-based DMCA form that will also eliminate DMCA’d items from inventories the grid over. (Ummm… what about that whole maliciously-filed DMCA thing I was talking about last week?)
And in a very sincere but not always following example declaration, Cyn says
“We are committed to empowering content creators to better manage and control their content. Taking a holistic approach to content management, we are hard at work on new and improved content tools, programs, and policies. Because we know that content management is of paramount importance to our community, we’re going to lay out our current plans, and then invite you to help us shape them to best meet the community’s needs.”
Aw, Cyn. I love you for trying – but after several years of association with the Lab, I’ll believe it when I see it. In the meantime, however, I’m rooting for you!
I had commented on this blog, that they should have this over a year ago. I’ll believe it when I see it too.
Ill believe it when i see it as well.
Thats all I was thinking the entire time I was reading it.
They may be talking about it but at their pace it will be atleast 4 years.
Me too (in small voice) in terms of posting on the linked one on
https://blogs.secondlife.com/message/7234#7234
I’m feeing cautiously optimistic (must be the drugs).
Sounds good in print and all, but I doubt they’ll take their own words seriously.
There’s nothing that you can really do about malicious DMCA filings. It’s a legal procedure mandated by American law, and the way you’re supposed to deal with malicious filings is counter-filing and taking them to court where malicious filers are likely to be nailed for perjuring themselves. But in the penny-ante game that is in SL, very few people indeed are going to be willing to risk the financial outlay. That’s not LL’s fault, and it’s not their business, but that’s how it goes.
I could see a repeat malicious filer getting enough people angry to try some sort of class action suit, to spread the cost around. I suppose, too, that LL might come to notice that someone with low “trust” scores sends out scores of DMCAs which are all dutifully counter-filed, and then they might decide to look more closely at their activities. But I wouldn’t hold my breath on that one.
On the whole, these things all sound pretty good. The one thing which strikes me as exceptionally important, however, is that maybe you should have payment info on file if you want to sell anything between residents. While this would doubtless hamper the creation side of SL for a lot of people, I think it’d be the single biggest step you could take to kill off content ripping.
I doubt these new measures will protect the innocent designers who get caught up in malicious DMCA filings any more than it does now…
Like most stuff from LL, it’s just words.
The cautious side of me wants to question how well this will go. I’ll keep an open mind we need something like this but it has to be done the right way.
I like how LL wants to start something like BBB when they themselves receive a failing grade. http://www.bbb.org/greater-san-francisco/business-reviews/video-games-wholesale-and-manufacturers/linden-lab-in-san-francisco-ca-57373
LOL