Your philosophy shines through loud and clear here, and again, that helps expose your extremism. You see the world of IP operating like a giant Creative Commons. If you “see somebody’s photo copied on Flickr” you’ll “tell on them” and you’ll “band together” with others to browbeat that person. Ugh. What a system! Ugh! What a tribe! But that’s not what IP is about. It isn’t merely freely copying and merely getting credit. It’s being able to SELL content and make a living by having that content not merely credited, but protected to prevent resale.

There’s nothing “complicated” about this. In SL, we have a very primitive but effective operating mechanism that really does implement copyright and is not cumbersome nor does it cripple creativity. It’s the copy/mod/transfer — yes/no — regime. Simple and effective!

Your claim that if you “lock down” content you are harming creativity is bogus. If you don’t protect content you are harming creativity! Not everybody can work as a highly-paid IBM programmer! Creating the simple but effective regime — and demanding that similar regimes be installed in all hook-ups to the LL servers, through TOS obligations — would do *enough* to deter theft. It’s not a perfect solution, duh, we get all that, no need to tell us that a million times. But schemes such as that devised by Gwyn Llewelyn recently on her blog to encrpyt and make digital signatures for browsers and such are workable, and we have no real evidence that they make a hit on performance. They need to be tried and retried.

The hoary old chestnut that tekkies and copyleftists always thrust on us is this idea that DRM is evil because “it restricts my own use”. There is absolutely nothing wrong with being able to paly itunes on ipod. That’s how it works. That’s how the overwhelming majority of people using ipod use it. There is absolutely nothing wrong with having Spore only on three computers. The overwhelming majority of users have NO problem with this! It’s a total geek affectation to demand more.

Oh you “suspect” do you? Please, epredator. Do not take us for fools. There has been a decided discouragement of such systems, and you know it. There was even the need to fight over a bug fix to implement one. It is nowhere near the philosophy there, and you are being intellectually dishonest to slough off any concerns for ownership systems to other OS developers who can put it in there “if they want”. Please. Then the ritualistic cop-out “I have no idea what the answer is”.

Others do. And they are not the horrors of DRM cumbersome lockdown, as you always describe it, nor the ineffectuality of “call your lawyer,” which is what you do to “make it complicated”.

Now here’s what I want to know, if you’ll talk.

1. Why didn’t IBM have a stand? That seems incredible to me. They’ve had them at the last few fairs run by Virtual Worlds.

2. Did IBM know about the RRR/LL partnership with “Immersive Spaces” or did they find out about it when everyone else did? You seem to be declaring them an “alpha” tester “after the fact”.

3. I find it interesting that RRR’s project stresses “firewall” and “protection of corporate data, privacy, experiment” and does NOT stress “interoperability. The word “interoperability” does not occur in any of their literature.

4. And that’s a good thing. What I find destructive about the whole IBM/Architectural Working Group caper is that IBM triumphantly gets a firewalled sim arrangement *for itself* where *it* can protect its own data, IP, privacy, experience, and the rest of us chickens have to make do not only with the open wilds of SL, which has its advantages, but also have to watch as IBM (Zha Ewry/David Levine) busies itself undoing our IP protection and land/current/content value by trying to make interoperability with OpenSim, which is defiantly a project of copyleftism with no built-in implementation of IP protection inworld (except as a module add-on, but it’s not an integrated philosophy.

5. We are treated to endless lectures about “the analogue hole” and the “impossibility” of protecting content except…obviously RRR *does* protect content and experience with a *firewall solution*. As does IBM! So I’d like to hear: why isn’t what’s good for the goose, good for the gander?

6. Aside from all that, it doesn’t seem as if IBM is actually getting anywhere fast with the interop project, but I wonder how you square this circle of, shall we say, incompatibility: ordinary people get to have their content swiped; corporations get to hide theirs securely behind a firewall; those corporations also busily work at undermining such IP protections as the non-firewalled world has.