OpenSim is a creative tool and everything in-world has been created by you or someone else. most of the time, those objects have been created by individuals – although there are company created objects as well (things created by the owners of In-Worldz, things created and given to commercial grids – such as “exclusive” content, and premium member freebies from Linden Lab)
the other day, Maria at Hypergrid Business wrote this:
I recommend the “Enerific” license, which allows people to do whatever they want with the content, including using it for commercial purposes, without having to give credit to the original creator.
that is true for most freebies on EnerHax.com – but . . . is that stuff, or any OpenSim content, really free?
OpenSim/Second Life-based content is pretty much first generation – it’s all recent from the last 10-12 years (with the exception of some mesh models)
in virtually all countries, creators automatically have and own the copyright to any work right at the moment of creation. this is true of something someone creates on Sim-on-a-Stick or song lyrics written on a napkin in a pub
however, not all creations can be copyrighted. if graphics are very simple, like the USB “logo”, then they can’t be copyrighted because they would effectively stop all creation (an Australian did patent the wheel back in may of 2001) =D
you can give away your copyright to a person or a company – to a singular entity (so i can’t give my copyright to the OpenSim community in general, but i could give it to Overte)
if you get paid to make something for someone else, or for your employer, they typically own the copyright instead of you (for example, all the stuff i make for Enclave Harbour belongs to I Live in Science Land which is a bona fide company in the United States) *it’s practically an avatar sweat shop – help!* =p
also, in virtually all countries, you don’t need to formally register your copyright – that act of creating it is the copyright. there are countries that do allow for formal registration and doing so helps prove it is yours should it ever be contested
proving who copyrighted something first is where the burden comes in. let’s say i create an amazing OpenSim region and save out the OAR. that OAR is copyrighted to me regardless of whether i want to copyright it or not. placing it online helps prove when it was created (even a snapshot of the region uploaded to Flickr would help prove provenience)
proving who is the copyright holder isn’t a casual thing and ulimately involves the judicial system – a costly proposition in most countries
my creation of a “thing” makes it mine and regardless of my “Enerific” license or anything i put online (such as “this is yours – no strings attached”). the copyright is always mine – well until 50 to 70 years after my death (most countries recognise 70 years). after 70 years, if my work was not passed on to an entity (like my estate as a foundation), my work will become “public domain”
copyright is intended to always protect the creator (author, song writer, playwright, artist, et cetera) despite what the creator wishes (unless it is given to another or belongs to an employer). i suppose this is the case because something that you create that doesn’t seem valuable today, may become valuable later and you might change your mind about giving it away
there are proposed alternatives to copyright, such as the Creative Commons licensing (CC like in the footer of this blog), which attempts to ease the tight grip that copyright holds. the reason for this is that some people believe that copyright stifles creativity such as improving on something already made (creating a mashup, for example). despite the intention of Creative Commons, international copyright law always trumps it
the power of CC is that it offers a reasonable assurance that others will not end up in court if they use a CC item in accordance to its license – but there are no guarantees. you could be sued for monetary gains from using a CC licensed “thing”, but you’d most likely just have to stop using it (depends on how reasonable the court is and how good your counsel is)
some musical artists create music that they license freely – Wired Magazine released a sixteen song CD years ago on behalf of artists like the Beastie Boys and David Byrne that were intended to be as copyright-free as possible. the license was very clear that these works could be used in anyway you wanted. chances are that those artists would never assert the ever present copyright protection and it would be up to a court to decide should anything ever arise
this is my interpretation of copyright and it is a subject that many people think they know but maybe not as well as they think
ps – please stop using “all rights reserved” as legalese, its legal meaning ended in 2000, and it drives me nuts =)
wikipedia’s entry for Copyright
interesting Amazon policy regarding Public Domain works and a reminder that Amazon is not a public institution
I don’t think anyone using virtual content is ever 100% safe.
You might think you’re downloading a legitimate copy of, say, a music video, but it sometimes turns out that even big, brand-name companies mess up on the licenses and sell or distribute something without all the permissions. Licenses are a tricky thing, especially for works that have a lot of constituent parts which each have their own license terms.
But when you have an item that is created from scratch — say, a 3D object with all original textures, scripts, etc… — and the actual original creator tells you the license terms, then that’s about as safe as you can get.
Yes, the creator can be lying. Or accidentally infringing — that solid red texture could actually be copyrighted by someone (there have, in fact, been cases of companies copyrighting colors!). Or using a building part that came from somewhere else with a more restrictive license. So it’s not 100% safe.
But if you ever have to stand up in a court of law, you will be able to honestly say that you did your best, that you did your due diligence, that you complied with the license terms as you knew them to the best of your ability, that you didn’t infringe willfully. And that counts for a lot.
You know what you need to do Ener? Set up a little page outlining the terms of the Enerific license — just like the CC folks have pages outlining their license terms. And people who use the Enerific license can simply link to that page so that everyone will know what they mean.
I believe an Enerific license is really important for people who want to create building blocks that others can use to create the metaverse. Given a choice between a building block that, say, requires attribution or prohibits commercial use, and a similar building block that poses no such restrictions, people will choose the latter. The savings on bookkeeping alone would be huge!
Imagine that you’re making an OAR to give away to educators. And you’ve got 15,000 prims on there — hundreds, or thousands, of textures, objects, scripts. If each piece of content had a different license, and required attribution, it would be a nightmare to keep track of, and a nightmare for users trying to figure out what they’re allowed to do with the OAR and what they’re not allowed to do.
If the buildings blocks — the textures, scripts, etc… are licensed under the Enerific license, that greatly simplifies things. And it gives you a free reign of what license to distribute your OAR under. You can give it away to non-profits only, you can sell it, or you can do the full Enerific. And the more flexibility creators have, the more stuff they can do, and the faster the metaverse will grow.
Maria Korolov
11 Sep 12 at 10:41 am
very well stated Maria =)
i would not have much of a case if i tried to enforce copyright on something like my freebie trash cans (a trash can manufacturer could sue me for copying elements of their design!)
big companies do mess up – NBC is being sued for S3.5 million over a font (this is the third time)
http://www.hollywoodreporter.com/thr-esq/nbcu-sued-harry-potter-font-theft-lawsuit-351823
Ener Hax
11 Sep 12 at 10:54 am
I always use ‘all rights reserved’, I didn’t know it stopped existing. I need to do some read up on copyright law UK and worldwide XD
Eros Deus
11 Sep 12 at 12:16 pm
Where are the good old times of freeware?
Sad World We let it be!
One that would be the door to escape from the real messy one and it becomes even worse to leave in!
Internet become a worse image of the greed that rules our lives!
ZZ Bottom
11 Sep 12 at 12:35 pm
there is nothing wrong with using “all rights reserved” but it has no meaning for copyright. some argue that using that phrase adds additional emphasis that you should not steal content, but someone stealing is not going to be detered by that
another “legalese” phrase that bugs me is “we reserve the right to make changes” – that is incredibly vague from a legal standpoint – much better to say “we may make changes”
Ener Hax
11 Sep 12 at 12:36 pm
well ZZ one good thing about stuff created by avatars, it would be an extra burden to prove it was mine, for example, because i’d also have to prove who the real person is behind Ener Hax!
programming code has some different considerations, so i am not certain how freeware works
Ener Hax
11 Sep 12 at 12:44 pm
I’m curious about the consequences of CC BY-SA for OARs as with Universal Campus.
graham mills
11 Sep 12 at 5:20 pm
Graham — the “BY” means that you’re supposed to attribute the content. So, for example, if you create a new OAR based on the old one — Universal Campus With More Cowbell, for example — you should mention the creator of the original OAR in some prominent place. For example, on your download page, or in an attached “read me” file, or in the land description area — some location likely to be preserved when the file changes hands.
The “SA” means that anything you create must have a similar license. So your Universal Campus With More Cowbell OAR should also be CC-BY-SA.
If you combine two OARs into one, each with a different license, the most restrictive license is the one you would have to apply to the whole thing. So if one OAR is CC-BY, and the other is CC-BY-SA, the combined thing would be CC-BY-SA. If one source allows commercial use and the other doesn’t, the combined product must not allow commercial use.
I can see why a creator who spends a lot of time and energy making something might want to ensure they get credit for their work, and might not want to see other people profiting from it.
It’s totally their decision. I certainly wouldn’t argue against it — I certainly use very restrictive licenses on some of my creative works.
However, it’s harder to use such products as basic building blocks because of those restrictions. So if a creator is feeling particularly selfless and generous, releasing their works (or some of their works) under the most general license possible, such as the Enerific license, will allow others to make the maximum use possible of the work.
That doesn’t mean that the original creator can’t ALSO release the work under a different license — the share-alike restrictions, etc… don’t apply to the original creator.
So, for example, I can make an OAR and distribute it for free as CC-BY-SA. And I can sell a copy of it under the Enerific license. No reason why you can’t charge for stuff under this license — it just says you can do whatever you want with it. For example, if I sell you a bunch of concrete blocks, you can build anything you want with them and resell it or give it away, and you don’t have to tell anyone where you got the concrete blocks.
Or you can make an OAR and distribute it free under the Enerific license, and add some extra content — maybe some customization — and sell it under a limited-use site license to individual corporate customers. The original content is yours, so you can do what you want with it. Just because you distributed it free once doesn’t mean that you can’t charge for it later.
There are software companies, for example, that release open source versions of their products, and add some proprietary management tools and sell commercial versions of them at the same time. The original content creator can do that.
(I wrote a story about this for CIO magazine last year and talked to a bunch of legal experts on just how this works: http://www.cio.com/article/693028/Vendors_Releasing_Same_Software_on_Parallel_Tracks )
Maria Korolov
11 Sep 12 at 5:53 pm
Thanks, Maria. So if I add (or subtract/modify) one prim to Universal Campus I have both to license it CC BY-SA and make it available someplace? Moreover, I can’t reuse a minor element like a microscope without the same licence applying to the new OAR? Does the SA imply you must make the modified OAR available by default, even as a work-in-progress, or only if someone asks for it? Do items change licence by being combined in this way, i.e. become more restrictive, even if licensed as CC SA elsewhere? It confuses me that the same content could have two different licences depending on context or am I misunderstanding something?
graham mills
12 Sep 12 at 12:29 am
Sorry, that should have been “even if licensed as CC BY elsewhere “
graham mills
12 Sep 12 at 1:05 am
Comment deleted by author
graham mills
12 Sep 12 at 2:57 am
PS I’m not being implicitly critical of the UC creators but I am concerned that folk may not appreciate the implications of deploying it as the basis of their own campus, especially as it is a supported default upload for Kitely megaregions.
graham mills
12 Sep 12 at 2:57 am
“I can’t reuse a minor element like a microscope without the same licence applying to the new OAR?”
That sounds right to me. e.g. if you combine elements where one is allowed for commercial use and the other isn’t, then the resulting build isn’t.
“Does the SA imply you must make the modified OAR available”
I don’t see why, but it would mean that if you do make it available, you must use the same licence.
The actual wording is
“you may distribute the resulting work only under the same or similar license to this one ” – says you can, doesn’t say you have to
http://creativecommons.org/licenses/by-sa/3.0/
keith selmes
12 Sep 12 at 3:32 am
Some colleagues were involved in this informational project which has a horrific amount of information on the topic and attempts to offer guidelines, decisiont tools etc.
http://www.web2rights.org.uk/
I’ve never reasd it all through! The flowchart posters are useful though.
Like this one http://robstillwell.info/?p=82
keith selmes
12 Sep 12 at 3:41 am
One that has caused me some confusion is when people release work for non commercial use but to be used freely in education.
I don’t know how it is in the rest of the world, but British universities are generally non profit commercial institutions.
I have found people quite unwilling to make an official statement on their status, but in discussion with senior lecturers in recent years, they are very much in agreememnt that universities are commercial. I assume that most schools, non university colleges, and for example the NHS would be non commercial.
Anyway, if work is intended to be used freely in British unis, I think it needs to be licenced for commercial use, or perhaps specify non profit rather than non commercial. Sometimes CC won’t cover it, and you need to roll your own.
keith selmes
12 Sep 12 at 3:56 am
As I read the enerific licence, I think “use it any way” would include passing on to others ? and with “no need for attribution”.
It might go as part of a bundle, or an OAR I suppose.
What bothers me is that 2 or 3 steps along the passing around, there will be someone who has no idea where this came from, and without provenance, it would be unwise to use it. So if I did in some form pass on an Ener Hax product, I’d want to say where it came from anyway. Which in any case they need to know for the “sending pics and allowing me to post about your use”. I expect I’d pass on the enerific licence with it, including a link.
Perhaps I’m just stating the obvious, but I had to think that one through – I feel I do need to pick my way carefully through the IPR minefield.
Incidentally, someone else is distributing enerific stuff http://nuworldresearchcenter.com/en/111-enerific.html , but they’re in a different line of work so I don’t expect it matters. Sigh. Should’ve studied law.
keith selmes
12 Sep 12 at 7:08 am
Thanks, Keith. There was an interesting recent discussion on the JISCmail OER-discuss listserv about use of SA content in a Canadian non-profit university and the gist seemed to be that a teacher could use it in a closed fashion (behind some kind of registration wall) provided an open web version was provided as well. Admittedly most of the discussion was about the NC aspect but the summary comment on SA went unchallenged.
Graham Mills
12 Sep 12 at 7:33 am
i will add the “more cowbell” clause to the Enerific license!!!
if you are not familiar with “more cowbell” it is worth a quick search on YouTube with speakers turned on! =D
this has been a great discussion and shows how confusing this license issue truly is. part of our challenge is that virtual worlds are very new and their creations combine many things – textures, shapes, scripting, and even sound
there is always the underlying copyright issue which, despite DMCA, will always lag behind
the “Enerific” license is as valid as a CC license in that the ultimate controller is copyright
here is my own take on what i call Enerific licensed content (the post was about copyright with Enerific just as an illustrative point)
my “work” tends to be very low in textures because that is well covered by the DMCA and i don’t want people hindered by that. the textures i use are typically very simple and easily swapped thus removing that restriction
apart from that, my creations all use regular prims and, imo, those are so simple that i truly can’t copyright them no more than the USB symbol can be copyrighted
so, any element of one of my builds can be separated and used in any way someone else wants (i think i’ll write a post on that today!)
ultimately, my builds can be divided until a single prim exists and i would say that no single prim can ever be copyrighted
=)
Ener Hax
12 Sep 12 at 7:39 am
Having read the long version I tend to agree with Keith that there is no requirement to distribute modified versions.
http://creativecommons.org/licenses/by-sa/3.0/legalcode
graham mills
12 Sep 12 at 10:45 am
OMG!!! lmaorotfpimp! KEITH! you made my day, i finally went to the Enerific link in your comment! that’s awesome1 =)
my name, Ener Hax, comes from Dungeons & Dragons like woot does where ener hax were “energy hacks”, just like woot is “wow, loot”
and that is something too regarding the license – it’s all based on a pseudonym!
interesting on the Canadian University – if they accept government funds, they might be obliged to freely share that content with Canadian citizens – much in the way that any NASA and US military images and video are copyright free for American citizens to use
Ener Hax
12 Sep 12 at 1:25 pm
That would be something like JISC funded projects in the UK, they have to put their research results in the public domain, i.e. available freely. So program code might be published on google code with a gnu licence for example. So an LSL script starts like this
// PIVOTE Second Life Interface
// Copyright (C) 2010 Daden Limited
// This program is free software: you can redistribute it and/or modify
// it under the terms of the GNU General Public License
keith selmes
12 Sep 12 at 2:04 pm
A lot of good stuff here, with a few minor exceptions.
I have started to use more CC-BY-NC (non commercial) in my scripting work at the free script library at http://free-lsl-scripts.com because I hate to see people charging even the ‘allowed’ $25, let alone $2,999 and $3,000, for scripts that are actually free. Some of these creations took hundreds of hours of work, and years to dream up. I always release the user to build things with them and sell those things, but scripts that I want to be free should remain free.
The ‘official’ USB-IF logo is trademarked, not copyrighted. To use it, you have to test the device for compatibility and get a Device ID. http://www.usb.org. Or are you talking about the 3-prong logo? The USB trident icon is defined as part of the USB 2.0 Specification which is copyrighted by the USB 2.0 promoter companies. A license agreement is not necessary in order to use the trident. But it is copyrighted.
You said “…something that you create that doesn’t seem valuable today, may become valuable later and you might change your mind about giving it away”.
Once you release something, you cannot take it back!
If it allows copy, it may be copied again and again, under the original license which ‘belongs’ to each copy. You cannot make the license more restrictive on any of those copies. You are, of course, free to re-license the original as you wish, but that does not change the stuff that’s already out there.
I’ve been in a quandary about this, since I posted GNU licensed scripts, and later the developer asked me to pull them, as someone was selling them for big bucks on the marketplace. This is allowed. I pulled them out of courtesy, even though I didn’t have to, as I am sympathetic to people getting ripped off on the marketplace with overpriced freebies. The policy of $25 Linden sale price (10 US cents) is a reasonable compromise. But it still rankles when I see something for sale on the marketplace, at any price, that took years to dream up and hundreds of hours to code, debug and document and was intended to be free. Thus, CC-BY-NC.
Copyrights only protect an expression of an idea, and not the idea itself. So anyone is free to make something similar to what you have made (almost exactly in some cases such as scripts) without violating your copyright. This makes scripts very difficult to protect with just copyright, as they can be re-written to do the same functions with no legal penalty possible. Scripts (and many other items) really require a 3rd party agreement that is enforceable under law, including a general release of liability.
The ‘Enerific’ license does not pass the liability test, as it leaves you, the author, liable for damages if the content damages a user monetarily. For example, if your OAR or IAR crashes my server do to some undetected spam script that gets me booted off a virtual world, YOU are responsible and thus liable.
It’s too bad patents cost so much, there have been some very useful things I give away that I could have patented, but what’s the point when the monetary value is so small and the costs so large?
Ferd Frederix
3 Oct 12 at 3:56 pm
excellent work and link Ferd! thank you for sharing that (try http://www.free-lsl-scripts.com/ if his link fails, it would not reolve w/o the www alias for me)
yep, the trident is what i was referring to and i still understand it to not be copyright-able because it is comprised of only simple geometric shapes
it’s not a matter of taking something back, if i write song lyrics and somehow document the time of it (some formal recording like a postmark, blog publishing, etc) and later someone else makes a hit song with it, those lyrics are mine, even if i said they were free for the world to use. it is very difficult to make something truly Public Domain (thus the reason Creative Commons came about)
as to protection, the “license” (very loosely termed that for mine) does use appropriate language with “AS IS” and caveat emptor” BUT, of course, anything can be battled in court. additionally, the freebies are distributed under an American Limited Liability Company, which affords a modicum of protection. agin, anything can be fought in court
overall, you and i are very similar – we want to create and share and it is too bad that patents are as they are. i don’t agree that they should just be removed – some protection should be afforded to people who, like yourself, have spent time, sometimes years, developing something
there is a need for an overhaul of the system so that people like you and me have as equal a protection as say Apple with the billions and their team of lawyers
thank you for the very informative comment – i will be re-evaluating how my presence is online! =0
Ener Hax
4 Oct 12 at 9:10 am