the second life community has spent the last week following a reasonably important controversy now referred to as "emeraldgate."
if you're a member of this community, it's hard not to have heard about it. for the benefit of those people who don't follow second life closely, here's a brief backgrounder.
so linden lab has this virtual world called second life(tm). the state of the virtual world is held on servers operated by linden. these server remember things like where people and things are, who owns what, and what direction things are moving, etc. second life users access the virtual world using a "viewer application." the viewer communicates with lindens servers and renders information from them in a nice 3d scene on the users' personal computer.
to spur innovation in virtual worlds, linden open sourced it's viewer software a couple years ago. several teams started adding new features and fixing bugs linden was slow to address. one of the single most popular "third party viewers" was a project called "emerald."
we recently discovered that the emerald viewer has been doing some "bad things." for a couple months people have noticed some weird encrypted data being sent from emerald installations. turns out it's information about the client's PC. granted, the emerald viewer isn't trying to sift through your hard drive trying to find credit card numbers, but the information it leaks (user name and emerald executable location) could help skilled bad guys compromise emerald user's systems.
very recently people discovered a distributed denial of service (DDoS) attack being launched by the emerald viewer. blargh! thousands (if not tens of thousands) of users were unwittingly being co-opted into attack on the rival of one of the emerald developers.
needless to say, a lot of people are beginning to question emerald's ability to manage their developers and produce quality software. twitter and facebook are filled with status updates from users saying they're ditching emerald for linden's official viewer or another third party alternative.
the most recent entity to weigh in on the issue is linden themselves. philip rosedale, linden's CEO published a quick blog post on the issue:
Malicious Viewers and Our Third Party Policy. linden is removing the emerald viewer from a directory of third party viewers linden maintains. the "third party viewer directory" is a list of viewer applications (most of which are based on linden's source code) which purport to be essentially well behaved.
emerald's removal and rosedale's blog post were not surprising; the emerald viewer did a couple of bad things they should have known were bad. the lab's actions are hoped to distance the second life service from a few bad developers.
the good news is that some of the old emerald team is reforming and will be trying to build a project where "bad things" like what came to light last week can't happen. we'll see if they can convince their user community and linden of their ability to follow through. the jury's still out on this issue; but it's early in the project cycle so it's anyone's guess how this all resolves itself.
but there is one aspect of this crisis that bugs me: why do we need a third party viewer directory in the first place?
to understand why there's a third party viewer policy and a third party viewer directory, you have to understand a little about the second life virtual world. second life is frequently described as "the 3d web," but there are some notable differences between the web and second life.
first off, second life is not "open" in the broadest sense of the term. the lab has done some wonderful work open sourcing the second life viewer and supporting the ecosystem of third party viewer developers. but the limit of their openness is to release the source of the viewer. this creates the unsatisfactory situation where the protocol used to communicate state of the virtual world is owned by a single entity capable of making unilateral changes.
in the web browser development world, core standards like HTTP, WebSockets and even JavaScript are defined by industry standards coalitions. linden did support the VWRAP effort to develop open standards, but withdrew support for the standard and laid off the staff responsible for it's implementation in the lab.
but maybe one of the most important differences between second life and "the web" is the idea of content. on the 2d web, content is embedded only in the place. it is rare for content to follow a user around from site to site. yet this is the moral equivalent of what's going on in second life when you move your avatar from one location to the next. when you see other web users, it's usually as an image icon right in front of some text. second life users know that their avatars are much richer and more varied. second life users are represented in world as collections of shapes, skeletons, meshes and textures.
and this brings up the next major difference between the virtual world and the web: content protection seems MUCH more important in second life. don't get me wrong, i'm not trying to discount concerns of content thievery on the web. but the web's business model is that content "lives" on a web page and isn't supposed to move. in the virtual world, content creators sell content to individuals with the intent they'll move from place to place.
and it's this expectation of content content control that lies at the heart of the third party viewer policy (and directory.) were second life like the web, content creators would sell content to people and be done with it. but the primary technique for monetizing content on the web is to sell advertising next to it (or sell memberships to content that remove invasive ads.) the web seems to reward content that persists in one location long enough to be indexed by google or microsoft.
tracking down DMCA violations are pretty straight-forward when you can refer to the google cache and the internet archive.
but not so for the virtual world. in second life we rarely extract value by advertising. sure, linden is happy to take a cut when you search, find and buy something from xstreetsl, but the full content is not available on that site for bad guys to purloin.
content creators in second life make their living from selling their goods directly. there's a marketplace here for goods because, quite honestly, the direct cost to users is pretty low. for about the cost of a discount cola from my grocery store, i can purchase a very fashionable outfit for my avatar. for the cost of a latte, i can purchase a complete meeting center to hold virtual meetings with friends or co-workers.
revenue on individual sales are low, but the distribution and copying costs are effectively zero for content creators. the primary costs for second life vendors are non recurring production costs and the cost to maintain a store front. but with xstreetsl offering people a web experience to discover and purchase goods, the "real" costs of doing business in second life boil down to paying yourself for the time you put into building something.
and this is why "less than moral" actors in the virtual world fall to temptation. it's laughably easy to copy someone's work, repackage it as your own, and sell a few on xtreetsl before anyone notices what you're doing. why bother going to the trouble and expense of actually making content when you can just steal it?
in the web world, this content would likely not be of any use to you until it's been optimized and indexed by google's search engine. if you were a purveyor of purloined content on the web, the same tool that provides you the ability to monetize your stolen content is the tool that lets content creators detect your theft.
but search in second life is "sub-optimal" and advertising has been effectively quashed in the interest of user experience. it turns out that people don't want to wander around a virtual world filled with billboards.
the second life economy is dependent on scarcity. there MUST be some scarcity in content community's creative output in order for the virtual goods market to work. but these are digital goods we're talking about, and it turns out that if you're reasonably handy with a C++ compiler you can quite easily make illicit copies of restricted content.
left unchecked, high margin content would be hoovered out wholesale and sold at discount prices by IP thieves. at the end of the day, there is very little linden lab can do about this from a technology perspective.
if it can be rendered on your screen, it can be saved on your hard drive and later re-uploaded. this is the main reason you'll frequently hear people say "put all the value of your content in your scripts." LSL scripts are the only bits of content that are not downloaded to the client. bad guys can't easily copy them with hacked client software.
it turns out that yes, bad people are making a living off stealing other people's content. and there's little that can be done to completely eliminate it. the linden third party viewer policy is an attempt to slow down the dissemination of tools that make content theft easy.
it's a great idea, and i think linden is demonstrating the best possible motives here. but we have to be realistic about what the policy can and can't do.
it is extremely difficult to craft technological prohibitions that will keep all the bad guys out. client IP addresses are rarely stable for long periods of time and the "bad guys" have already figured out how to hack the client software to present fake MAC addresses and viewer strings to the second life servers.
but what _is_ a little easier to do is to crack down a little on the distribution of software with illicit intent. linden's third party viewer policy tells the community what third party software can and can't do and still be considered "virtuous." the third party viewer directory gives users a list of viewers made by people who have promised to honor that policy.
and what's at the core of emerald gate is not that the stock emerald viewer is being used to steal content, but that it was doing things with encrypted messages that made it difficult to figure out if it was stealing content as well as coercing user's PCs to behave in a "bad" way.
so given the current state of the world, and the fact that it would likely be economic suicide for linden to abandon it's content creation community, the third party viewer policy makes a lot of sense.
there is still an open question about "walled gardens' like second life. one can certainly imagine a service where content flows easily in and out of the virtual world. where content doesn't live on linden servers, but lives on public (or semi-public) web servers. the value of the content is not in it's raw bits, but in the way it's marketed, aggregated and distributed.
maybe in future virtual worlds value will derive from creator reputation and recommendation in social networks. maybe the future will see a world of abundance where value and monetization potential is extremely ephemeral.
but we're not there yet, and that's why the third party viewer policy is a necessary evil.
