Permissions, copying and search oh dear

On the day that England beat the Aussies in an Ashes test at Lords for the first time in something like seventy five years I glance around to see that Second Life is pretty broken for content creators, people performing search and an irresponsible new copying tool created by Rezzable is on the horizon.

Where to start with this, let's start with the permissions glitch. I knew about this, I'd received notecards about it but now that Linden Lab have gone public on the issue let's look at this first.

In short, stop using the bulk permissions feature, it is not working as intended. I have tested this with both the Second Life viewer and Boy Lane's Cool Viewer and can confirm the issue is reproduced in both. However, I should point out that items I set some months ago using Boy Lane's Cool Viewer are not exhibiting these symptoms, so something has gone badly wrong in the last couple of months. There's a Jira about this, go and vote for it if you're concerned and if you're a content creator who has been using this feature you damn well should be concerned.

Next up we have the search issue, this is an issue for business owners. If for example you sell furniture, you'll find that people who search using the places tab and have PG and Mature ticked as search preferences won't find you, in fact they won't find anyone as search returns no results. So if you're wondering why your sales are down this may explain it although i'd wager that most people will understand that something isn't right when they search for furniture and find no results. Furniture isn't the only word that causes a problem, land is another and probably several others.

I'm not sure what is going on with the places tab at all, a PG search for furniture will return parcels with adult keywords so something is wrong with the query and filtering in that tab.

Now I'd hope that the search issue can be resolved quickly, I mean we've gone from it working to it not working which suggests a query has been changed, change it back? Wouldn't that work? I'm sure they document these changes, it shouldn't be that difficult to fix (in theory). However as we don't know what they've done to break this, it's not that straight forward to know how many things have been changed.

Again there's a Jira entry and again you should vote on this if you're concerned and if you're a business owner in the furniture category you should be concerned. I really am not a fan of this voting on an issue business, this sort of thing should be fixed without requiring lots of votes.

Then we have Rezzable releasing their sim copying tool. The blurb reads nicely to start with, they've used this to move their sims to their own grid, it works nicely and with the growth of grids and interactivity in the pipeline they see this is a useful feature, it sounds it too. However here comes the kicker:

"Our intention is to make tools for serious builders. So now someone can more easily take a copy of their build off SL and archive, keep it safe. Taking stuff linkset by linkset is really slow and painful. BuilderBot allows for significantly better way to handle content. You can then save versions of builds to make a sorta library and then use these versions to make new iterations. It is your stuff, so now you can take care of it. The risk is that rippers can also use the tool to take unauthorized copies."

That's more than a risk, that's plain irresponsible to release this tool in this fashion. Not only will this tool work to export content to other grids, it can be used to import content back into Second Life. Can we see the problem here? My previous blog post already covered the frustrations content creators within Second Life face that leads them to consider throwing in the towel and now we're faced with a new toolset to enable this?

Rezzable's justification for this:

"Rippers don't seem to care much about DRM and already they can use copybot to take (and sell usually) illegal copies of content. In fact there is really no way to stop this technically. It is more about not giving content thieves safe haven to sell and benefit from their theft. I don't think this is any different that issues with music being copied or dvd films. It is just a reality of creating digital content and virtual content creators need a better way to address
rather than just filing DMCA protests."

Whilst I do agree that content creators need a better way adress the issues of content theft other than just filing DMCA protests, I find it disappointing that Rezzable brush this aside. Music and DVD have been trying to find ways of preventing people from copying their content, wouldn't it be nice if Rezzable developed a tool at least with the illusion that it respected the rights of content creators? I mean, even if people were able to get hold of the code and doctor it to bypass checks of who the owner of content is, Rezzable would be releasing an ethically acceptable tool where they could point out that they make the effort to respect the rights of content creators.

Rezzable are content creators, how about they put some checks in place to show they respect such rights? I know this will make development of this tool more painful, but it would also make the tool more ethically acceptable.

Rezzable claim that putting in a DRM check would make the process longer and more unstable, over at SLU Adam Zaius, who knows a thing or two about such matters has a different view:

"Yeah; I personally dont see releasing it without checks as being helpful at all.


We already have enough time invested into chasing down things like the freebie garden on OSgrid; without a convenient tool out there to do the ripping. Implementing permission checks is a fairly simple and straight forward process if you are already gathering the property data (which any complete exporter should be doing.)"

Alternatively how about Rezzable release this as a service and as a responsible company only backup the content the sim owner actually
owns? Wouldn't that be a much nicer use of any such tool? Releasing this into the wild is not going to end well.