A statement from the Not Possible IRL group regarding Rezzable's BuilderBot

Posted by Bettina Tizzy

The members of the Not Possible IRL group held two meetings and shared many thoughtful notecards and IMs today expressly to discuss Rezzable's BuilderBot, and reach a consensus. The conclusions are as follows:

• The overwhelming majority of those who participated in today’s two meetings agree that Rezzable’s BuilderBot appears to be a useful – even important - tool for serious/professional creators and contractors.
• NPIRLers denounced the death threats expressed in comments on Rezzable’s blog and expressed concern about the sanity of the people posting them, as well as the safety of the Rezzable employees.
• We were reminded that Second Life® residents have been asking for viewer-side back- up tools for years, and statements made by Philip Linden on April 16th during Rob Linden's Open Source Viewer office hours were recalled:

[14:30] Philip Linden: on assets... i definitely think we need explicit perms for off-grid to make it OK to move content to other grids.
[14:30] Philip Linden: NOT ok to copy stuff otherwise.
[14:30] Philip Linden: And I'd say we'll act as much as possible to protect folks rights in that.

[14:32] Philip Linden: full perms doesn't mean off-grid, because the creators may well not have understood the implications.

• Members concurred that most content creators in Second Life are at little risk of having their creations ripped by BuilderBot, largely because it is much easier to use a CopyBot instead of devoting hours to ripping a sim, importing it to one’s OpenSim, and then using a CopyBot to put it back into Second Life.
• Numerous members noted that Linden Lab did not anticipate or think through many of the issues we are dealing with today and that Second Life sits on and is as vulnerable as any digital content is on the Internet. It was remarked that even before the viewer went Open Source, it was not too difficult to hack the cache. Moreover, content is moving off of Linden servers and “joining the cloud.” How ownership is handled in the cloud needs to be determined now and the solutions to these issues, within the context of Second Life’s current infrastructure, are legal, not technical.
• A number of members suggested that Rezzable should code in an ownership check, and that including a pay method and a license key associated with each copy of an item created by the tool might be a reasonable way to track copies. “If (Rezzable) could find a way, others will too, but at least they will have the legacy of doing the right thing.”

Free nOObs for all! Art Laxness releases new versions including mix-and-match heads

Posted by Bettina Tizzy

Musician, fine artist and 3d-modeler Art Laxness (aka Will Segerman) is releasing five full-perm sculpted prim Noobs into the wild today, as well as a pack of interchangeable and amusing modifiable heads: Shakespeare, Sherlock Holmes, Maid Marian, and a couple of your more basic noobs (read: blank expressions). Also included: Noob textures so that you may export and modify them to your own specifications. These are mostly derivatives of a project for the British Council that Art worked on as lead artist for metaverse developer, The Magicians.

According to Kim Anubis (aka Kimberly Rufer-Bach), who heads up The Magicians, Art made a test model of a default “newbie” avatar’s head – the first Noob model, before making the Bard’s head. “Then he made a giant head with four faces and topped it off with The Magicians’ top hat! Next, he created the first complete Noob in Appearance Mode pose before he went on to create the Away Noob which you’re familiar. Since then, he’s created other Noobs and Noob parts, many of which are in the Noob Pack.”



Several months ago, the AFK Noob was copybotted and then offered full perm on Xstreet. I asked Art how he felt about this and he provided a surprising response:

“The copybotting incident has made me think about how copyright works and I have come to some fairly extreme conclusions. Over here in the UK, there are trailers before DVDs which ask "You wouldn't steal a car, would you?" which then, of course, leads onto not stealing films. But that’s not really how it is, is it? The actual question is: If you saw a nice car in the street and you could take a copy of it without taking anything away from the owner, would you? If everyone in the world could have a nice car for nothing should we restrict that? What if I viewed the noob model I made as I view music? Everyone in the world has "illegal" music. Obama gave an iPod full of music to the Queen: ILLEGAL. Walle gave a tune to Eve: ILLEGAL."

Art continued: "Let’s take this to a different extreme: How many people will die needlessly because of patents on medical drugs keeping the prices of those drugs high? The answer is an awful lot. The counter argument is that if the drugs companies can't make money out of what they do, then they won’t do it, but that sounds to me like a problem with society rather than an argument (in favor of) an obsolete business model. It strikes me that if everyone could build on each other’s advancements, rather than hoarding things to themselves, then humanity would get further faster. Artists and companies need to be rewarded for their output so they can keep producing, but a new business model is needed, as the current one is f**ed and is holding the world back. I'll throw the Clockwork Quartet out there as an example (his steampunk band). We're giving away all of our music for free. We intend to make our money off merchandise and gigs.”

You can pick up your own Noob pack at Abracadabra (teleport directly from here), and at British Council Isle in Teen Second Life (teleport directly from here).

Graham Stanley, manager of the British Council's Learn English Second Life for Teens project added, “Amongst other things, we are using the Noobs to give out clues on our language learning quests for learners of English. They have to ask the right question to get the right answer.”


See also: The most complex sculpture in any world, real or virtual?

A Fair(y) Use Tale

Via Second Life® forums (interesting thread initiated by Dnali Anabuki going on there on U.S. copyright law and Machinima, by the way), Bel Yawn's YouTube stream, and finally, Stanford Law School's "The Center for Internet and Society," comes this informative parody on copyright principles, created by Professor Eric Faden of Bucknell University.