Attribution in SL
June 21, 2006 on 1:26 pm | In Uncategorized |Mark Wallace over at 3pointD asked if SL’s IP Rights infringe on Innovation and an interesting discussion followed in the comments. Intellectual Property (IP) considerations have been at the heart of the discussions around SL and for good reason. Linden Lab did famously let residents retain IP rights over their creations which helped kick start this booming SL economy we’re experiencing now.
How you currently grant rights over your creations were based on Creative Commons licenses, so you can choose to allow other residents to copy and/or modify your work. The system has worked pretty well, but a discussion of possible improvements could be very interesting.
I have heard frequently that SL is not regarded as very conducive to larger scale collaborations. I know that we are seeing more and more of them but as it is now it is more often with one clear owner that contracts creators with special skills to help out. The current system only lets you see who owns an who created a given object. Considering how often these collaborative endeavors are motivated by things like social capital maybe this is something to look at.
It would be interesting to talk about how SL can make “Who did what” in creative collaborations more visible. In for instance Wikipedia we’re seeing people being attributed in a sort of quantitative manner: You see who edited but it is a little harder to get an overview over what they edited. Rethinking a model for giving good attribution in SL would be an interesting experiment.
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The problem with group builds isn’t so much attribution. The attribution is on the pieces of the build, and group projects find a way of making it known who the builders are. Rather, people are discouraged because of the buggyness of the group-set and group-deeded items.
Right now, group-set is completely no-go, because griefers join the group if it is on open, then invade the object on group-set to put in malicious scripts.
If you give someone mod rights on the friendship card, that goes so far, but what it means is that scripts and items and contents you drag into content then instantl become non-editable, so you can’t work on them within the object.
Group deeded and group-built items often lock out everybody, even the person who created the item. You give up after awhile struggling with the buggyness.
Comment by Prokofy Neva — July 18, 2006 #