Late last week, Linden Lab announced plans to increase protections of Second Life creator content in a Zoom call with community devs and bloggers/social media leaders. Unfortunately I wasn't able to attend due to a scheduling conflict, but here's a pretty good summary by Salt Peppermint. Some top line points:
[Linden Lab outlined plans for introducing stronger measures against intellectual property theft [including]:
- Targeting the most egregious offenders with stricter legal actions.
- Collaboration with external platforms [i.e. other virtual worlds] to address cross-platform content theft.
The conversation included idea for helping enforcement, including AI, digital watermarks, even "blockchain-based mechanisms". However, Linden Lab tells me specifics have not been announced:
"In the meeting," the company tells me, "several types of tools and technologies were discussed but we haven't publicly confirmed the specifics yet. You can expect that we will be leveraging AI thoughtfully in the near future to help us combat content protection."
Also, some specifics still seem to be in development. You can tell that in this Bluesky conversation between /SecondLife host Coffee Pancake and Linden CTO Philip Rosedale:
Coffee raises concerns that allegations of "content theft" will be sloppily applied by some creators against each other, even weaponized against competitors.
"Agree we need to be careful to not allow weaponization, but also want to take adequate action," Philip answers.
So again, enforcement details are still very TBD at this point -- stay tuned!
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