Category: The Drax Files

The December 19th Drax Files Radio Hour podcast tackles something of a difficult (and emotive) subject: the Digital Millennium Copyright Act (DMCA), and its potential for good and bay in environments such as Second Life.

The DMCA, which is somewhat matched by the European Union’s Directive 2001/29/EC, is intended to protect the rights of copyright holders and to prevent copyright infringement, whilst simultaneously providing ISPs and other intermediaries with exemption from direct and indirect liability in situations where infringement is alleged to have taken place (what is referred to as their “safe harbour” status).

While it is a shame there was no qualified legal voice on the show, it does feature two extremely competent and level-headed commentators in the form of Tracy Redangel, co-owner of {NanTra} Poses, and Kitty O’toole of Kittywitch fame. Drax also chats with former IMVU content creator Fatima Mekkaoui (Imokon Neox in SL), and she also profiles excellent insight into matters and a balanced view of things.

The show was prompted by the  recent Belleza DMCA situation, which although now resolved, has been the latest in an increasing new of cases where the DMCA process appears to be employed as a means of harassment or in anti-competitive behaviour.

This is because of the manner in which the DMCA operates. In essence: if party A believes (emphasis intentional) that party B is using material that infringes upon their copyright, they issue a DMCA notification to party B’s service provider.

The service provider must then act “expeditiously to remove, or disable access to, the material that is claimed to be infringing or to be the subject of infringing activity”, and then notify party B that the content has been removed to comply with a DMCA notification.

Party B can challenge the claim by filing a counter-notification, which is passed to party A (at which point the original notification is passed to party B).

Party A then has 10-14 business days in which to indicate they have filed a claim with the court. If no indication is forthcoming, then the content must be restored by the service provider within 14 business days of the counter-notification being received.

The bias here is clear: a claimant only needs to indicate they are acting in a good faith belief that their copyright is being infringed to warrant content removal. No actual proof is required.

Thus, the door is open to potential misuse of the process. Google, for example, has indicated that around 37% of DMCA notifications it receives “are not valid copyright claims” (as opposed to incorrectly filed claims, which account for just under 10% of all notices filed in the USA). The Electronic Frontier Foundation’s Hall of Shame further demonstrates how the process is frequently used for questionable reasons by corporations and businesses.

In terms of misuse of the process, the Belleza situation is particularly interesting / worrying, as it appears to be rooted in harassment. Not only did the DMCA notification come at a time when the brand was facing significant issues in-world, up to and including the crashing of their store region, it now appears that the DMCA itself had been filed entirely fraudulently, using the details of someone not even involved in using Second Life. In other words, it was a deliberately fraudulent document aimed at disrupting Belleza’s business.

Continue reading “The Drax Files Radio Hour: DMCA explored” →

I’ve not covered recent Drax Files Radio hour shows, primarily due to time constraints. However, show #49 features a special guest whose work has brought fun to a lot of people’s lives in SL (including my own), Steve “Cubey Terra” Cavers. Given his work has had such an influence in various aspects of my SL life, I couldn’t pass-up writing about this show.

The interview kicks-off after the usual preamble,  at the 21:35 minute mark. Cubey Terra may be a name unfamiliar to those who have come to SL in recent years, particularly as he decided to take a break from the platform for a couple of years. But to many in the SL aviation community and who have been around for a while, his name is instantly familiar, and often linked to the nickname “the grandfather of SL aviation”, a term he’s personally uncomfortable with, for reasons which are explored as his conversation with Drax unfolds.

As well as being active in SL from the earliest days (that is, from just after it opens its doors to the public in June 2013), Cubey also spent time working for the Lab as a part-time support volunteer. As such, he is ideally placed to discuss Second Life from several perspectives: content creation, the very early days of the platform and the users it attracted, and that of providing user-focused support and assistance back when the platform was just starting to grow.

However, before all of that is reached, the conversation kicks-off with an interesting exchange on the subject of alt accounts and our level of comfort with them, but from the perspective of using them ourselves, and the reactions from friends and those around on on discovering we have alt accounts.

What is interesting here is the somewhat divergent views Cubey and Drax, as individuals who don’t use their avatars as characters, but rather fully invest their personality into their avatar, have about their alt accounts. On the one hand, Drax finds it constraining, and consciously feels more of a puppeteer with his alts, while Cubey perhaps find his alts somewhat more liberating when used. These reactions aren’t uncommon; I’ve particularly identified more with Drax’s perspective in the past, although my view has perhaps started to lean towards Cubey’s more recently and in certain situations.

While he worked for the Lab “only” for a year, Cubey provides some fascinating insights into what it is like to be involved in user support back when Second Life was a lot smaller than it is today, and matters could more easily be handled in more of an on-going, hands-on and proactive manner:

Right from the beginning of Second Life, Linden Lab decided that it would be a good idea to have staff in-world, standing around in welcome areas or going around from sim to sim, making sure that things are running correctly, problem-solving, putting out fires – literally, because people would rez fires and worse. And so it was more a personalised experience than what you get now … so that’s basically what I would do.

As a personalised experience, it was, inevitably, something that couldn’t easily scale given the sudden and missive influx of users Second Life gained during the 2005-2007 period. This is something Cubey notes in the interview, explaining how the influx resulted in the support staff logging-in to the support service outside of their assigned hours in order to to try to ensure problems could be dealt with. Such was the situation, that even as early as 2005, those working in support were openly voicing opinions that the approach simply wouldn’t scale to meet the constantly rising demands for assistance – something which helps put the pivoting of support and assistance towards other means and channels into better perspective.

This part of the conversation also touches on broader aspects of governance and on the needs for some structure and rules, and Cubey offers-up so sage observations on matters of finding a a balance between creative freedom and a balance, open social environment.

Around half-way through the interview, matters turn more to Cubey’s involvement in the Second Life aviation community. In particular, Cubey touches upon how he got started in aviation via the Kazenojin aviation group, and Andrew Linden’s first aeroplane script. It is because his work was pre-dated by Kazenojin and Andrew Linden that he feels uncomfortable with titles such as “grandfather” of SL aviation.

Even so, for many of us who came into SL around 2006/7, his name is pretty synonymous with flying and aeronautical matters in Second Life. To use myself as an example; long before I started flying aeroplanes in SL, I was deeply into SL skydiving as a direct result of discovering the Terra range of parachutes, which in turn led my to joining a skydiving club  / group in SL (and I still use the TerraSport III Pro ‘chute in-world to this day). And when I did start flying in earnest, it was the Terra Stingray I turned to to get started (and I still fly that today as well!).

The end of the interview turns its attention to what draw Cubey back to SL after his break, and start creating once more. The answer is given pretty much in one word: mesh. Through it, Cubey now has the opportunity to learn new content creation techniques and develop the kinds of aircraft he’s always wanted to create, but has been unable to do so due to previous constraints within the platform.

All told, another fascinating interview (and one deserving of a full hour, frankly), providing a lot of insight into times past in SL, and not a few thoughts on times present and times yet to be.

Time has meant I’ve not had time to mull over the last few Radio Hour podcasts, which is a shame as there have been some gems. If you’ve not already done so, do try to catch show #41 for a brilliant interview with Justin Esparza the man behind one of the great legends of SL – Salazar Jack. Then there’s show #44 with Jaimy Hancroft, one of the great talents behind Dwarfins and the creator of the magnificent Hope’s Horizon at the 2014 Fantasy Faire.

However in the latest podcast, show #46, Drax ventures out on his own to visit the Lindens on their home turf, dropping in on the Battery Street offices for an informative visit, offering a lot to listen to and absorb.

The first big interview, kicking off at the 18:08 mark into the show, is with Monty Linden, who provides a clear-cut explanation for the Content Delivery Network (CDN) and also talks about his HTTP project work. Such is the level of information in this conversation, rather than condensing into a couple of paragraphs here, I’ve included it in a separate article, as it really does help frame both the CDN work and the HTTP work in non-technical terms.

That said, Drax also leads Monty into a discussion about net neutrality starting at the 24:50 minute mark in the interview (and continues through until the 30:13 mark), which is also something worth listening to in detail (and which I’ve deliberately excluded from the article on Monty’s CDN / HTTP discussion).

Elsewhere in the show, Drax gets to try out the DK2 with Second Life (36:27), with Ebbe revealing that a popular destination when demonstrating the Oculus and SL to journalists is Mont Saint Michel, which for those who have not visited it, is a glorious Second Life reproduction of the “real thing“. Ebbe also makes mention of one of the problems that preclude SL from being an “ideal” companion for the Oculus – the render engine isn’t up to consistently manage the 90 frames-per-second already utilised by the Oculus Crescent Bay prototype in order to eliminate issues of image judder when the wearer turns their head.

In discussing the Oculus Rift, Ebbe indicates that the Lab is working to make the abstraction layer for input devices as open as possible on their next generation platform, so that new devices can be added as easily as possible. He also reveals the new platform already works with game pad devices and the Leap Motion.

The discussion of the Oculus and Leap Motion is particularly interesting as it opens the door on the myriad of challenges encountered in user interface design. For example, with gesture devices, not only do you need to define the gestures required to move an avatar and interact with in-world objects, etc., you need to consider what’s required in order for the user to interact with the UI itself – to press buttons, make menu selections, and so on. These complexities of user interface design get even deeper when you consider that not only do they have to work across multiple client platforms, they have to work across multiple combination of client platform, input and other devices (screens, headsets, etc.).

Mont Saint Michel – a location the Lab uses to demonstrate the Oculus Rift and Second Life to journalists

Mention here is also made of High Fidelity. While the two are entirely separate companies, there is an intimation from Ebbe that High Fidelity may be one of the “technology partners” the Lab is talking to with regards to facial recognition capabilities in the next gen platform. Given that the Lab did provide some seed money towards High Fidelity’s first round of funding, this would make some sense.

As Drax tours the Lab’s office with Ebbe (35:13), some interesting snippets of what is going on are provided – such as the work that’s already going on with the “next generation Marketplace”. This is further touched-upon in a conversation (43:59) with Brooke Linden from the SL Commerce Team. She not only discusses aspects of the the Marketplace such as trying to address performance issues, improve search and so on, she also confirms that the Commerce Team is working closely with those working on the next generation platform to ensure that lessons learned in operating the SL Marketplace are carried forward in support of that project.

A potentially interesting snippet about the SL Marketplace from the conversation is that it handles a larger volume of sales than most on-line e-commerce sites. As Brooke points out, given that it does deal with micro-transactions, it is somewhat easier for the Marketplace to generate volume sales; however, this still makes it a challenge when trying to manage things.

One interview that didn’t make it to the podcast features Jeff “Bagman Linden” Peterson, the Lab’s VP of engineering, who is heading-up the next generation platform work (Don “Danger Linden” Labs having the lead on Second Life). Apparently, a little too much was revealed about the new platform considering the growing commercial interest in virtual world spaces, so the Lab has requested that  Unfortunately, dues to the fact the Lab is keeping a tight lid on the new platform for the time being, the interview has been shelved for (hopefully) a later date.

All told, a really interesting podcast, one that shouldn’t be missed.