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Tali Rosca

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Everything posted by Tali Rosca

  1. That is exactly the point. The ToS requires you to give LL the right to use the content in any manner, for any purpose, in any media (and warrant that you have the necessary rights to do so). No license allows you to pass on such extensive rights to a 3rd party. By uploading under these terms, you will be violating anything but a pure Public Domain release.
  2. Ebbe Linden, since I know you sometimes answer questions directly here on the forum, I am reaching out to you in hopes of you addressing a question which has so far gone unanswered, despite a lot of talk about related issues. As you know, there are worries about the Terms of Service section 2.3. While you have updated some text in that section, a problematic part still grammatically reads that we are required to give LL a license to do, in essence, “this, this, this and everything else”. This turns the sentence into a list of examples, akin to the “including, but not limited to” lists you often see in such licenses. This is widely regarded as legally problematic in relation to 3rd party content libraries or commercial work for 3rd parties, since it requires us to give away rights which are simply not ours to give. I hope you will take the time to address this directly, and either 1) Give a convincing and legally binding explanation for why “and otherwise exploit in any manner whatsoever, all or any portion of your User Content (and derivative works thereof), for any purpose whatsoever in all formats” does not actually mean “and otherwise exploit in any manner whatsoever, all or any portion of your User Content (and derivative works thereof), for any purpose whatsoever in all formats”. 2a) Explain why you believe it is in SL’s best interest to block such use, or 2b) Confirm that it is LL’s official stance that content creators should violate 3rd party licenses and hope nobody protests. If there is another option I have missed, I would love to hear it, but please do not tell me that “LL is not interested in stealing your content”. I am aware of that, and that is not what I am asking about. This is purely about the legal compatibility of the terms of service with common licenses; something I find critical if SL (and SL2) is to be the platform for creation and international commerce and sharing you talked about when joining Linden Lab, and not just a toy for loyal residents who know and trust LL. Bluntly, I feel LL has dodged this specific question for long enough, and it is time to give the community an answer.
  3. Interesting. I think you're right. A previous version of that clause said "Post, display or transmit any Content or conduct or host any activity that is explicitly sexual, intensely violent or otherwise designated as Adult under our Maturity ratings, except as set forth in those ratings." Terms of Service Archive That seems to be another casualty of the "we write something in our legal document, but don't worry, we don't mean it" 2013 update. ETA: As Therea writes, in this case the intention seems pretty clear, given how explicit and detailed the description of the maturity rating is in other places of the document. It is still curious that they chose to reword an existing clause to introduce a contradiction.
  4. ...except that they then add "and otherwise exploit in any manner whatsoever, all or any portion of your User Content (and derivative works thereof), for any purpose whatsoever in all formats, on or through any media, software, formula, or medium now known or hereafterdeveloped, and with any technology or devices now known or hereafter developed" which makes all other parts of the sentence a pretty moot point. "We can do this, this, and this. Oh, and additionally, anything we please". I have a strong suspicion that LL didn't intend to update the section 2.3 at all. They just realized how bad it would look if they could update the "Skill Games" section with a week's notice after having promised to work on the ToS for almost a year, so they threw some extra, inconsequential words into the sentence.
  5. When it comes to content rights, there are no changes. They have kept the "and otherwise exploit in any manner whatsoever, all or any portion of your User Content (and derivative works thereof), for any purpose whatsoever in all formats, on or through any media" which overrules anything else they say about it.
  6. Also remember that you can set the "Physics Shape Type" in the features tab of the build dialog, to have the sim physics see your prim as a simpler object than it visually appears. This can cut down a *lot* on LI.
  7. In short, many libraries specifically do allow you to resell final items which contains parts from the library. Others would, say, allow you to upload it to SL for personal use even if they do not allow resale. Both uses will be blocked by LL claiming the right to use the textures as they please; that is exceeding the license, so you cannot allow that, and hence you cannot upload. And as you say, you were previously "allowing Linden Lab the right to resale/utilize in any way that would promote SL in any fashion". Under the new ToS, they claim the right to use it for anything, whether SL-related or not.
  8. I still consider it simply a screw-up in wording. I really don't believe LL has any intention of invoking "the scenario", even if they claim the right to do so. (And I also think it could be challenged if they attempted, but it's a theory I really don't care for testing). My guess is that this is a cut'n'paste spillover from their work on making one ToS applicable to several services. But the incompatibility with any other license is a practical problem. I can't help but notice, though, that it mirrors LL's rules for object export: That you must have created the object; not merely have the rights to it. It would be pretty harsh to enforce that for uploads, too.
  9. "If you take the time to copyright anything you create and import to SL, nothing in the TOS can override your copyright." While technically true, it is beside the point. For one, you do not need to "take the time to copyright" anything. You automatically have copyright of your creations. (Berne Convention, since 1886 in most of the world; 1989 in the US, though in the US, registering it allows for higher damages on infringement). And you already grant some rights to LL, since you allow them to distribute your items to other users. You can't suddenly say "I have copyright in this texture; LL has to pay me royalties for showing it to other SL users". -It is exactly this the clause we're talking about here is written to provide and protect against, and it is common amongst all hosting providers. Elle is right in the sense that this does not mean that the ToS "overrides your copyright". You still hold that. You have just granted LL the unlimited and irrevocable right to use your work, but you can still decide how others are allowed to use your work. (Though, of course, since LL also claims the right to sub-license, that could get out of your hands, too). Now, whether the new ToS is so over-broad as to be unenforceable is an open question, and I lean towards believing so. It’s a general principle that the law provides a minimum baseline, and you can’t go below that in a contract, and I think that’s what Elle alludes to when saying that the ToS “can’t override”. It is simply not reasonable to hand all commercial rights away simply by uploading to a hosting provider.
  10. ImaTest, if you've always believed that LL could take your textures and, say, sell them on Shutterstock as they please, then no, nothing has changed for you. That is, however, a pretty big change. Previously, the ToS allowed them to use your textures to run SL, not to make a business elsewhere. This is what people are concerned about. This change also effectively prevents almost all use of 3rd party textures, whether from CG Textures or any other library, paid or free, since those libraries almost never allow resale; something LL now demands that you give them the right to. (Credit to you for doing your textures 100% by yourself, but the use of a - often commercial - texture library is common in 3D modeling). This is not the same as LL "also has free use of those same textures they didn't create". They would have to obey the license of the library, just like everybody else.
  11. Just to make it clear: CG Textures did not change any rules. Their license is still the same. They merely pointed out that SL changed the ToS to something which is now incompatible, now demanding that you hand over rights (to sublicense) which you do not have (and never had) according to CG Texture's license.
  12. If LL doubles down on this wording, it is actually a pretty big problem. It has little to do with CG Textures; they just spotted the change. I must admit it had gone under my radar as "just the usual legalese for "we can actually send the content we host"." But as it stands now, LL can take anything you do and, say, sell it to other companies. Wouldn't it be interesting to see your landscaping models show up in other games, as "stock art"? I can hardly imagine that is what LL actually means (and I doubt it would hold up in court if challenged, especially given the non-announcement of such a substantial license change), but it is what they say currently.
  13. Vick is not entirely correct. I dug out the May version of the ToS from one of the earlier rounds of comparison, and the parallel clause there states: "You agree that by uploading, publishing, or submitting any Content to or through the Servers, Websites, or other areas of the Service, you hereby automatically grant Linden Lab a non-exclusive, worldwide, royalty-free, sublicenseable, and transferable license to use, reproduce, distribute, prepare derivative works of, display, and perform the Content solely for the purposes of providing and promoting the Service." Notice the "solely for the purposes of providing and promoting the Service". That is the critical part.
  14. It seems CG Textures is right. They highlight the problematic sentence here: http://www.cgtextures.com/content.php?action=secondlife_licensechange Almost all hosting services have a similar scary-looking clause which essentially amounts to "we need to be allowed to send copies over the wire to the users, possibly in another file format than what you uploaded". The problem is that the wording here does not include a "...for the purpose of delivering the Second Life service" which such clauses need to limit the use. LL does, indeed, claim the right to do it for "any purpose whatsoever".
  15. I'm seeing something like this as well. After a while, my usually-decent framerate drops to below 2. If I ride it out (for several minutes), it *may* recover somewhat, but not all the way to previous levels. It can even hit the general performance of other programs (sound stuttering in a media player, for example), but that is not consistent. I am pretty sure it's an issue with one of the later viewer versions, somewhere in the 3.5 line; it started happening without any other changes to my configuration. I too am on nVidia (a Quadro 3000M), but on Win7. I'll see if I can coax some diagnostics out of the graphics driver. ETA: Ok, I just realized I totally necro'ed this thread. I checked the date and saw "April; that sounds around the time it started for me", and for some reason didn't see the *year*.
  16. On a bit of a tangent, I've found that for moving a lot of data, it is easier to reverse the flow and let the offworld server contact a HTTP-in prim. Those can handle connections as fast as the script can process them. So the inworld prim initiates the connection by sending its HTTP address (and possibly addresses of slaves) to the offworld server, and that one pulls from SL as fast as the prims can deliver. -You can even have in-flight requests queued up so you don't have any latency from one pull is done until the next is triggered. Obviously, this style will not work for all uses, but it can move data an order of magnitude faster than the throttled outgoing connections. I am not sure if this qualifies as an "exploit", but I've never seen any mention of throttling that direction.
  17. Does specular work on alphas? I am almost entirely sure that it was once mentioned that lighting would now work with alpha surfaces too, and I went YAY, finally! Shiny reflections in glass!
  18. I think it was a bit of a mistake not to impose some LI limits on worn items while the system was being redesigned anyway. I've seen wearable with literally more than 2000 LI.
  19. As for the performance issue: If you have a graphics card from the last 10 years, it will have this technique embedded deep in the hardware, as part of the rendering pipeline. And in this case, pipeline is a rather literal image of it, as calculations flow from one part to the next; projecting to 3D, coloring, lighting etc. The feature is simply unused by SL currently. Using it means beginning to take advantage of a step which is really already there. There is obviously a tiny performance impact, as the hardware needs to move the extra textures into active memory, but the calculations are pretty much free, as part of what is already being done by the hardware. And since the normal mapping allows you to very convincingly fake details which would otherwise need to be calculated and projected as actual 3D modeling, if done right, this can actually help performance.
  20. Wait, what!? You're arguing that being able to stalk your partner with a secret alt is an important use case??
  21. Good to see some comments on the thoughts behind it. To add my 2 L$ here: "Code complexity: It is unfortunate this this flag is really not in the right place to easily use and would require significant code refactoring - while probably a good thing to do it would require significant effort for development and testing beyond what you would naively expect." That's unfortunate, but just the way things are. Nothing much to really comment on that. Expectations: It has never been expected that this flag would control online visibility to scripts and while it might be reasonable to extend it's features in this way changing the meaning of any long-standing feature should be undertaken with great care. I'd argue that it is fully reasonable that an option to "Hide online status" hides your online status, and that any other interpretation is what breaks expectations. As for changing the meaning of a long-standing feature... well, the whole issue here exploded exactly because it will be changed, one way or another. Usability: it would be quite reasonable to only want scripts to have access, or only some scripts, or no scripts while still allowing profiles to show online status- none of which would be possible if re-using this flag. In theory. I am skeptical about the practical use. Few people would be able to make informed choices about such a fine-grained control system. (And as a side note, keying it to some entirely unrelated rule about original script creator was an utterly baffling design choice which really, really needed to be scrapped). I have a hard time seeing any other option than to bite the bullet and do the refactoring to actually support the flag. Think of it as what you need to document to a new user. You really, really don't want to write a complicated series of rules and descriptions of ways the choice can and will be circumvented if certain criterias which a new person know nothing about has not been observed from day one.
  22. Does the "success tolerance" of 0.1m hint that the function is for some reason prone to hitting with that wide an error, or is it just a very, very, very safe margin for a floating point roundoff of the requested location?
  23. I got really annoyed trying to figure out what "Gain" really was, and ended up going to the source, literally. The mysterious "Gain" factor: Boobceleration -Not that it may necessarily help you choose a good value.
  24. I am fairly sure that is not correct in general. That would make pretty much everything fair game if you just take time enough to copy it manually, since very few things are trademarked, which is an active process, as opposed to the passive granting of copyright simply by creating something. It may be more true when it comes to blackbox reverse engineering of software, as you mention, since in that case, you're copying the non-copyrightable idea of what the software is doing (unless you run up against patents, which is a whole other kettle of fish). I am a little unsure about the "inspired by" thing. My feeling, and experience from what I've seen, is that it's a matter of making it perfectly clear that you're not endorsed by or affiliated with the original brand in any way, but it can probably be a fine line where it's better to simply recommend to err on the side of caution.
  25. Once your computer has a Facebook Connect or Facebook cookie in it, that innocent little "Like This" button whooshes up your browser history and all sorts of other data as soon as you start loading the page. No it doesn't - it just lodges a cookie on your computer saying you visited that page. That helps Facebook with targeted advertising (love it or hate it). It does not send your browser history to Facebook! Specifically: It doesn't touch your "Browser history" as such, in the technical sense of what makes your "Back" button in the browser work, and what you yourself can see you have visited. It allows Facebook to one by one gather your unique browsing history between pages which has a "Like" button as you hit them, whether you have a Facebook account or not. If you have a Facebook account, it is also identifiable to that account.
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