Category: News-Opinion

Of copyright, IP and product licensing

Posted on by Inara Pey

I’ve been watching a semi-interesting forum discussion going on since the weekend

In essence, some are getting upset over the fact that CBS, who now own the rights to the Star Trek franchise world-wide, have apparently “clamped down” on Trek merchandise for sale in SL, with the result that at least one creator has had all wares removed from vendors and the Marketplace, and may have also been banned.

While one may initially feel sympathy for those involved, it has to be said – as several have in commenting on the forum thread itself – that at the end of the day, copyright is copyright, period. Just because the holder happens to be a major entertainment conglomerate doesn’t make the fact that in building and selling content derived from their products, and thus potentially impinging on their copyrights, any less “wrong” than finding the guy on the next parcel over to yours is hard at work copying your own original builds.

Some of those expressing upset at the move do so on the basis that CBS (and before them, Viacom / Paramount) may have flip-flopped over matters in the past, and that holders of other franchises are more lenient. Sadly, none of this matters a jot. Nor does the issue of “fan loyalty” or any other argument.

The major issue in this matter, and the one that gets little or no mention in the topic, is that of licensing.

The fact of the matter is that over the years those holding the Star Trek franchise have made a considerable amount of money through licensing deals with other companies, allowing the latter to make Trek-related products (both real and digital) wither exclusively or in cooperation with others. These deals generally involve a significant upfront payment from the licence holder, usually coupled with a royalties payment scheme based upon unit sales.

As such, while CBS / Viacom / Paramount may well have wibbled over some matters, that licences have been granted at the exchange of large amounts of money, they do actually have an obligation to ensure said licences are protected, period. It doesn’t matter if the person in violation is a fan or not.

There are many great Trek-related (and other franchise-based) models and other goods on sale in SL. While there is no doubting the skill and dedication of those making them, many nevertheless are open to accusations of copyright / IP infringement

Some posters in the thread are calling for LL to get involved in matters. Yet the fact is, LL do not need to involve themselves in matters. I’d actually suggest that, on balance, it is far better that they don’t get involved in this, or any other licensing situation in terms of negotiations over rights even if they were so minded, as it is very likely that things would not end well for anyone.

A far better solution, as some have suggested, is for the Trek fans themselves to address the matter with CBS – and the roadmap for them doing so has already been drawn. At the end of 2010, the Battlestar Galactica community faced an identical situation Universal Studios took issue with BSG-related goods being sold in SL. At the time the fans responded by engaging with Universal and discussing the situation with them.

The result was that in February 2011, Universal Studios agreed to allow BSG-related merchandise to remain available in SL, so long as it was not being sold for personal profit / gain. One might question how actually effective this arrangement has been (there are admittedly a fair proportion of BSG-derived items on active sale in the Marketplace), but the arrangement at least leaves people knowing where they stand, and that those persisting in selling franchise-related merchandise which may be subject to licence arrangements elsewhere and / or are liable to be looked upon as copyright/IP infringing would know precisely where they stand.

At this point in time, there seems little reason to suspect CBS would not be willing to enter into such an agreement if approached positively, and I would hope that if they are not already doing so, Trek fans in SL are making overtures along such lines already. In fact, I’ll be rather surprised if this isn’t already the case. In 2010/2011 the Universal deal was reached through the able assistance of Anthony Haslage, (Ntanel Swordthain in SL), himself of the International Federation of Trekkers (IFT), and Entertainment Consumers Association (ECA) Second Life Chapter President. So not only is the roadmap there, the chief architect for bringing it to pass is himself well-placed to represent SL Trek fans.

In the meantime, perhaps the biggest question this situation leaves open is what will happen with regards to Star Wars merchandise in SL now that Disney has acquired LucasFilm, and, presumably, the rights to the highly lucrative merchandising arrangements related to that franchise.

Slightly Mad Avians: Humble talks Creatorverse, Versu and Dio

Posted on by Inara Pey

Update, February 19th, 2014: Creatorverse, Versu and dio were discontinued by Linden Lab on February 19th, 2014. Links to their websites, etc, have therefore been removed from this article.

Looking through the pingbacks on my blog comments, I was curious to see one show up on the 23rd October 2012 linking to an article I wrote back at the start of the year. Curious at to why someone would be linking to an old article, I went to have a look.

Turns out the article linking to me is from Kotaku, a games-related blog run by Gawker News – and the article itself is an interview with Rod Humble. (which came to me via Kotaku’s Australian site) Needless to say, I was more than a tad surprised to have someone interviewing our own Rodvik linking to my blog (oh, be still, beating ego!), so I decided to have a read through.

The piece itself is obviously about the Lab’s new and upcoming products, and it gives some interesting insights into the thinking behind them.

“Just about everybody I know who isn’t in the games business or programming business comes to me with a game idea or a website, and the truth of the matter is, quite often, they can’t make it.”

the article quotes Humble as saying. He then goes on:

“There’s this big barrier. They look at something like C++ [programming] code and, frankly, it looks like a big equation. It just looks like gibberish.

“The more we can make tools that are just fun to use—all of a sudden you are making something you wanted—you can focus on the creativity than mastering this arcane set of symbols. We can hopefully bring more people into that fold of ‘hey, you made something!'”

Thus is the broad thinking behind Patterns, Creatorverse and the still-to-be-seen Dio and Versu, which are apparently going to be appearing something in the next month – if not before the end of this one, depending on how you read quotes from elsewhere.

Creatorverse itself comes in for some attention in the piece – Humble describes it as being his five-year-old daughter’s favourite game at the moment, and it is referred to as coming out “later this year”. Whether that is a result of the interviewer misunderstanding Humble (the interview was via ‘phone), or whether it is because the release date may have shifted while the wheels at Apple (or elsewhere) turn slowly, isn’t clear.

What is clear, however, is the novel way Creatorverse is pitched in the interview:

In the near future, his company will put out a program for iPad called Creatorverse, which will let people use shapes and physics to create basic 3D systems and, yes, games, then share them for anyone else to download and play. Think of making a game that lets you fling shapes into other shapes—your own “Slightly Mad Avians”, he offers as an example, if you get what he means.

Creatorverse

While Slightly Mad Avians could stand as a title in its own right (along with Perturbed Pigeons, a name Darien Caldwell suggested to me the other evening in an entirely unrelated conversation…), it’s nevertheless a curious hook on which to hang a description of Creatorverse – but an interesting one in terms of mental images….!

What is of greater potential interest, however, is the comments about the upcoming Dio and Versu.

Dio is described as: “A website that lets people create rooms out of their personal images and videos, connects them to other people’s rooms and lets people share the space.”

While it has previously been described as “A room creator, in which players can do everything from construct a choose-your-own adventure to develop an interactive wedding album,” and Linden Lab managed to accidentally give people something of a quick peek at an early iteration of a website connected to Dio back at the start of the year, the comment in the Kotaku piece implies that the website appears to be the product, rather than in support of it. It’ll be interesting to see how people react to this.

Versu, meanwhile, gains a little more flesh on the bones given in an interview with Giant Bomb, with Humble describing it as, “A platform that lets you make real interactive drama” by giving you “the ability to create characters within a story and then, thanks to the AI, see that “those characters will have emergent properties as you play through the story.” He goes on to admit that this is pretty ambitious and admits to an element of “Tilting at windmills” in order to bring it to a wide audience.

The article goes on to talk in more detail about Patterns, which many of us – and many more in the gaming community – are enjoying even in its nascent (or as Humble puts it, “not even pre-baked”) form. It also talks about Humble himself and his arrival at Linden Lab, which leads to a good mention of Second Life:

It makes perfect sense that Humble would wind up at Linden Lab, the company best known for the virtual world Second Life. It’s as successful a canvas for the communal creation of a virtual world as there’s been. It’s been a viable digital canvas for about a decade now has been populated by users who make their own buildings and vehicles, who design contraptions, contort physics, stage elaborate events, form societies, and pioneer the art of inhabiting elaborate second skins that express inner or otherwise impossible creativity and desires.

It’s a positive read, and well worth taking a few minutes out to read through.

Related Links

Commerce Team: upping the tempo with more of the same

Posted on by Inara Pey

Following Rod Humble’s entry into the ongoing Marketplace issues discussion, the Commerce Team have posted an update. At the time of Rod’s entry into the situation, I commented that overall, more than just a stepping up of forum posts is really needed if issues are to be sorted with any degree of satisfaction (and I didn’t just mean the technical issues – I was referring to the entire loss of trust many merchants have with the Commerce Team), then more pro-active steps are need.

Sadly, if the latest update is anything to go by, rather than moving to build bridges, the Commerce Team is simply going to give more of the same.

The update opens with a report on Direct Delivery delivering items “2.3 times faster” than Magic Boxes and at “2.5 times” the success rate. This might be taken as significant but for two things.

  • Many of those hit by the problems remain unable to use Direct Delivery
  • Many of the issues impacting merchants at the moment are occurring regardless as to whether they are using Direct Delivery, Magic Boxes  – or both. Issues such as WEB-4441, for example, which was originally raised in relation to Magic Boxes, but which was opened-out by the Commerce Team to include a number of Direct Delivery issues (WEB-4559, WEB-4570, and WEB-4595) as well (which also served to confuse the purpose of the JIRA).

As such, talk of the “success rate” and “speed” of Direct Delivery is pretty much pointless.

Direct Delivery stats: irrelevant for those experiencing the ongoing Marketplace failures – such as not being able to use Direct Delivery, or facing mechanisms within the Marketplace which are broken regardless of whether or not Direct Delivery is used. (Also: spot the missing line in the comparison)

The rest of the update is, frankly, bland. It offers no more information than previous updates; in fact in some respects it is less informative. At least the previous updates (which appear to have been removed from the forum with the publication of this update) recorded a consistent list of JIRA, allowing merchants to properly identify issues and look them up (all the relevant JIRA remained public access after the switch-over to the Bug Tracker mode in the JIRA system).

The one ray of sunshine in the update is that it would appear that the overcharging for listing enhancements has finally been resolved some 10 days after it was originally reported as fixed. While this is indeed welcome (if correct), it really is overshadowed by the lack of genuine information being provided by the rest of the update.

Of course, keeping people more informed is to be welcomed. However, the key point here is keeping people more informed. That implies passing on meaningful information and making some effort to explain what is going on: what are the priorities, where are the possible bottlenecks in dealing with maters, what has been done to date in order to understand the issues, and so on.  As it stands, it would appear that the Commerce Team’s response to Rod’s comment on “upping the tempo” appears to be “more of the same” in terms of bland summaries – only possibly more frequently.

So far, the update has been met with a deafening silence, which may reflect the fact that it really doesn’t say that much more about core issues than merchants already knew from previous updates.

And while not entirely unexpected, it is nevertheless disappointing. Again withe respect Rod, and to precis my previous post on Marketplace communications:

It’s not just the tempo, Rod, it’s the quality of the information supplied.

Rod Humble hints at more virtual worlds in LL’s future

Posted on by Inara Pey

On October 14th, and thanks to Lelani Carver, I commented on an article in VentureBeat’s Gamebeat in which Rod Humble discusses LL’s new products and mentions Second Life (see Rod Humble talks-up new products, creativity and Second Life).

In my piece, I included a quote from him which appeared in the article:

“We are still investing in 3D virtual worlds,” he said. “But shared creative spaces is what we do. There is an opportunity to embrace the new way of developing things. A lot of this could be done inside Second Life. But you get more creativity in the hands of more people by building on new platforms”

Rod Humble: “Yes, the plural is deliberate”

At the time I was writing, Humble’s initial wording caught my eye: “We are still investing in 3D virtual worlds” (note the plural). I thought it an odd turn of phrase; why not simply, “We are still investing in Second Life”? In the end, I dismissed the various thoughts floating around my head and assumed the quote was either misinterpreted by the interviewer or that Humble was simply using a broad term by which to define Second Life without using the name itself.

However, it would appear the quote was accurate and intentional. Dropping a comment after my article (which you can read in full here), Rod himself had this to say on the matter:

My comment about also investing in virtual worlds is correct. As you know I don’t like to detail things until we are close to something actionable, but we absolutely are investing in the large virtual world space which I think will make Second Life users, business owners and developers very happy…. but its a ways off :).

In replying to my response to his comment, he went on to add:

Welcome! Yes the plural is deliberate :)

Now this is undoubtedly going to open the doors to speculation (why on Earth do you think I’m pushing this article front-and-centre 🙂 ). For my part, I find the comment “I think will make Second Life users, business owners and developers very happy….” possibly telling. After all, business owners and developers are by definition Second Life users – so why distinguish them somewhat apart from “Second Life users”?

Also of interest is the use of the phrase “the large virtual world space”, which is also open to a lot of speculation.

As Rod points out, it is going to be some while before anything further can officially be said. However, it is obviously fair to say that he wouldn’t have gone even this far without having a reasonable level of confidence that whatever is in the pipeline is going to come to pass.

So what do you think? Do you think he’s referring to the “SL 2.0” some have been writing about / wishing for? Is it “SL+” – perhaps with additional features such as larger regions? A whole new generation of virtual world solutions, perhaps cloud-based? Or something else entirely?

And if you decide to reply, please remember what else Rod said in his original comment: “Our commitment to Second Life remains key and central to our company.”

Related Links

Rod Humble talks-up new products, creativity and Second Life

Posted on by Inara Pey

Lelani Carver pointed me towards a further interview with Rod Humble on the subject of new products which appeared in the Gamesbeat pages of VentureBeat on October 12th. The interview is pretty much what has been said elsewhere insofar as the new products are concerned, but there are some very interesting nuggets of information sitting within it.

Pride of the father: Rod Humble shows-off Creatorverse (images coutesy of VentureBeat)

Patterns and Creatorverse are primarily mentioned in the piece, with Humble again commenting on the company’s new-found philosophy established out of Second Life:

“At Linden Lab, we believe that creativity is within all people and that it empowers them like nothing else,” said Humble. “We make digital spaces where people can have fun while exploring and sharing their creativity with others. Millions of people around the world have enjoyed that in Second Life, and we look forward to inspiring even more creativity.”

Some people have already taken issue with the use of the past tense (“have enjoyed”) when used in reference to Second Life on the Lab’s corporate website, and they are liable to feel the same way seeing Humble use the same phrasing here. While I don’t necessarily support such views, I would say that when commenting on Second Life to the wider community, media or otherwise, use of the present tense might underline the fact that SL is still out there and people are enjoying it and what it has to offer. Hope you’re reading this, Rod! ;-).

The feature is light on details for both Dio (which gets a throwaway mention) and Versu (which gets no mention at all); whether this is down to the interviewer missing them, or Humble not being in a position to speak about them at the time of the interview, is unclear. However, what he does say in reference to all three which do get a mention (Patterns, Creatorverse and Dio) is that people will be able to monetize them.

Patterns: users to be able to monetize it in the future?

This is something he lightly touched upon in his interview with Giant Bomb, specifically with reference to Creatorverse, and I mused in passing on his comment and whether it would be applicable to all of LL’s new products. Well, it would seem so.

For those curious about Linden Research itself, the article contains some interesting elements:

Today, Second Life survives with 1 million monthly active users. The world generated $75 million in revenues last year and it is operating profitably. That has allowed Humble to expand his team to 175 employees and go after the markets beyond the virtual world.

There is also mention of the 2010 lay-offs, although these are again referred to slightly out-of-context, failing to mention that during his tenure, Mark Kingdon actually recruited some 125 people into LL, expanding it by as much as 50% in order to fuel (for the most part) the company’s failed (some would say misguided) attempt to enter the enterprise market. As such, while the lay-offs did hurt, at the time they actually returned the company to more-or-less the “pre-Kingdon” expansion, a move in line with the company also dropping all aspiratiosn of entering the enterprise applications market.

However (and ignoring the perjorative “survives” in the Gamesbeat comment), the reference to “expanding” the team to 175 is an eye-opener; it suggests that the continuing run of those departing the company / being asked to leave has been cutting somewhat deeper than may have previously been appreciated given that 200-220 employees has tended to be the considered figure for the number of people employed by the Lab.

Nor does the article ignore Second Life. In referring to SL, Humble tells Gamesbeat that it is also getting a major upgrade this year, and that Linden Lab is “still investing in 3D virtual worlds.” This is liable to lead to some speculation as to what the “major upgrade” may be. For my part, and given that this week sees some shuffling of regions onto new hardware together with the recent network optimisation tests, I’m thinking Humble is talking more in terms of the company’s much-touted hardware and infrastructure investment, rather than a mega new in-world feature.

Also quoted in the article, LL board member Will Wright makes mention to SL in a maner which may draw frowns from some:

Rod has a great sense of player communities and the forces that drive them. At Linden Labs [sic] I know he’s focused on trying to evolve a very established community into something much broader and more inviting.

While this probably refers to opening-out Second Life to Steam and potentially generating a wider appeal for the platform than is currently the case, that Wright refers to Humble trying to make the existing SL community “more inviting” might easily be taken the wrong way. Many within SL are already feeling increasingly alienated as a result of some of LL’s actions under Humble’s tenure as CEO; so the idea that some at board level are still of the opinion that the existing SL user community is somehow less-than-inviting isn’t going to do much to dispel these feelings or that there is perhaps something of an adversarial attitude within the Lab towards its existing users.

Issue might also be taken with Humble’s own closing statement in the interview, in which he says, in part:

“We are still investing in 3D virtual worlds,” he said. “But shared creative spaces is what we do. There is an opportunity to embrace the new way of developing things. A lot of this could be done inside Second Life. But you get more creativity in the hands of more people by building on new platforms”

This could be seen as something of a dismissal of Second Life; however, I’d hesitate in seeing it that way. The sentiment behind the comment could just as easily be born out of an acknowledgement that from a business perspective, 3D immersive environments are still a niche market and are liable to remain so for some time to come. Thus, it is actually easier for the company to rapidly grow a new user base (and revenue streams) and leverage new platforms through the development of new products. As such, when looking at Humble’s words from the persepctive of SL, perhaps the the key phrase to focus upon is, “We are still investing in 3D virtual worlds.”

You can read the full article here.

Marketplace: it’s not only the tempo, Rod, it’s time for practical steps

Posted on by Inara Pey

The SL Marketplace has appeared in these pages a few times these past couple of weeks, and not in a good way. First was my coverage of the latest errors relating to listing enhancements, to be followed by the news that LL’s Commerce Team had apparently seen the error and taken steps to correct it and refund people. Only as it turned out, they’d only fixed half the problem, which resulted in people again being incorrectly billed.

Marketplace: a dispiriting place?

Some Good News

On the 8th October the Commerce Team issued the following update:

Merchants,

There has been quite a bit of discussion on Product Listing Enhancements and stuck orders over the past few days on this Forum. Here is an update on these issues.

Product Listing Enhancements:
Last week, we deployed a fix for Product Listing Enhancements to allow them to start billing again. We refunded all PLEs for the prior two months.

After we refunded merchants, billing for Product Listing Enhancements started again. Not all of the billed enhancements correctly updated their renewal date, so we stopped billing. We have updated the PLEs that had an incorrect date and will be releasing a fix this week before we start billing again.

We are aware that there are some Merchants who have Product Listing Enhancements stuck in the “Charging, cannot edit” state. We are continuing to look into this and investigate what we can do to get those PLEs unstuck.

Stuck Orders:
Late Friday night through early Saturday morning, many orders got stuck in the being_delivered state. This morning we were able to force those orders to a completed state (allowing payments to Merchants to complete) and are working to prevent this from happening again.

If you are seeing anything different than [sic] the behavior described above (or have an additional problem), please contact support or file a JIRA. Please include order numbers or listing information as needed.

The Commerce Team

On the whole, this is welcome news, regardless as to how the problems originated.

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