Lillie Yifu wrote an interesting blogpost on DRM and Second Life’s future. She touches on how copybot wasn’t necessarily a bad thing - making good quality virtual goods available to all - but probably a neaded evil, on how we are ugly - *sobs* and people not realising in time we will look better, on businesses in a box, on how new designers and content creators need to struggle for a place in this grid and with that launches a very intersting idea on how Linden Labs and the Second Life community could help the starting content creators and new residents at the same time.

Residents, remember, how we threat our content now, determines how our Second Life’s will look in the future! ;)

From Lillie Yifu’s blogpost:

The way to do this would be to change the start page of avatars, which are obsolete and too few, and have LL purchase the rights to much of the better freebied content out there (Vint: LL, or other companies that run welcome areas), the prices of which are very modest indeed. People could be walked through builing an avatar, from shape to skin, to hair to cloths to shoes and accessories, which is much more like the process of building an avatar in world.

The content could be turned over every 6 months, on the assumption that a designer has made it or not by that point. Designers could be paid a bounty for each avatar that goes premium who selected their goods in the sign up process. LL wins: more retention.

New designers win: a market for goods that is in line with the quality they are producing.

The community wins, because once content is no longer selectable on entry, it would be released into the public domain, forming an open source base where new variations could be produced.

But believe me, the whole article is worth reading!

Tags: digital rights management, second life, virtual goods

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