Case in point. Residents of a virtual world environment called Second Life enjoy a certain amount of anonymity when it comes to revealing who they are. You sign-up for a free profile, select a name, and away you go. This is nothing new or subversive in any way. People have been using alternative identities to tell their stories for hundreds of years. Consider the game dungeons and dragons (the old school one – not the electron versions). People are often known by the characters they choose to represent and assign names of historical or personal importance as part of the role playing experience.

Gamers do this all the time. From XBOX to Playstation to World of Warcraft to Second Life. It is a means of developing confidence in oneself by insulating yourself from looking foolish during the learning and development process. This is a very common psychological phenomena that people are often more at ease with risk taking when they don’t have to put all of themselves on the line.

Then there is the aspect of personal privacy and security. Some people just want to be able to interact with others without having to worry that some nutcase is going to wind up on their front door step. Only once they are comfortable with someone are they willing to go that next step to provide more information. Sound familiar? It should because its something that everyone who has gone to a bar or college has done or experienced at some point in their lives.

The idea of a virtual personae will often times extend beyond the limited circumstances of the role play scenario and cross over into everyday life. Those people who go to work dressed up as Captain Kirk for example. For the most part its harmless. More importantly however it allows us to tell our stories, those narratives that are important to us as individuals, in a ways that are imaginative, unique, and memorable. Everyone has a fish story, but we remember the ones by “Old Man McKinley down the road yonder” because the personae is larger than the individual and in so doing provides a contextual means of connecting with others that just doesn’t happen under ordinary circumstances.

So – back to my case in point. There has been a series of recent terms of service violation reports by some anonymous person (who I’m not about to justify by stating his/her name or website – check Google if you are really that interested) who is searching almost every Facebook profile seeking out Second Life residents for the expressed purpose of having those accounts banned. To be fair the Facebook TOS does have a provision that says people are expected to use their real names in establishing a profile. However this is not the way the service is being used and I would hazard a guess that at least 50% of the profiles on Facebook are bogus if you were to compare birth records.

You don’t need to look at Second Life residents to see this principle in action on Facebook. Look at any number of the applications and groups related to things such as World of Warcraft, Triumph, Plane Crazy, etc. A good percentage of the profiles used are clearly alternates to a main profile or just simply in no way representative of who the person is in real life. This is probably one of the most broken TOS aspects of Facebook imaginable. Nor does Facebook have a mechanism by which people can verify their identity. To say that Second Life residents with profiles on Facebook are corrupting the moral fabric of the online community is akin to suggesting that children watch Saturday morning cartoons are going to grow up to be violent offenders. Is there an influence, sure. Is it corrupting the moral fabric of society, absolutely not because at the end of the day most rational people understand the difference between constructive social interaction regardless of whether you are dealing with Kevin Feenan or Phelan Corrimal.

I would in fact take this one step further. Linden Lab, the developers of Second Life, actually have very strong identity proving processes included as part of their environment. Something Facebook doesn’t have. The likelihood that a hard core Second Life resident has been both age verified and confirmed their identity through an independent 3rd agency is greater than 1 in 3. Beyond this, all educators have to provide proof of having gone through a police background check if they have any intention of working with those under 18 years of age on the teen grid. If there was a true argument to be made that any particular group needed to be the front edge of the wedge for deconstructing the “avatarism of the nation”, Second Life is not it.

So what is driving this move? Fear maybe. Paranoia of what a world might look like where you could be defined not only by your legal name but by the personae you choose to wear in telling your story the way you want to. In point of fact however we are already there. Virtual world environments are simply providing a much more visible look into what lies beneath social norms and values in our society at large whether you are talking about bars, gaming, virtual worlds, social networking platforms, or personal ads. There has always been this undercurrent of people wanting to risk while at the same time not wanting to be hurt in the process.

I would think that anyone who fears what the future holds should really take a very strong look in their own backyard first before using a measuring stick that changes scale based on context. If you are fighting for a fundamental concept of human-social interaction then you can’t eradicate a single symptom and assume you’ve found a cure. You need to understand what it is you are fighting for and then need to realize that fundamental paradigm shifts in social paradigms are not fought on a single battlefield.

Clearly this person doesn’t understand what it is they are fighting for and that is unfortunate because even if they are somehow right, they have already lost the war despite the havoc they are wreaking on the battlefield. They have also lost any potential to open up true dialogue on what their issue is really about. And that I feel diminishes us all regardless of which side of the argument you are on.

Essentially what he was talking about here is the right of avatars to be declared legal entities under the law. While this may seem inappropriate under the law, the precedent for this has already been established in the form of corporations who have for centuries been considered to be legal persons. In fact the opportunity for the creation of new law in this domain isn’t quite as far off as people would generally think.

Consider the ongoing practice in Second Life of corporations to establish one or more avatars whose function is specifically to hold land and create content (terraform land, buildings, programming, graphics development, etc..). While this is specifically against the Second Life terms of service the practice is becoming more wide spread owing to the not so unique issue of employee turnover within corporations.

On a small scale it has been an ongoing issue that when two or more business partners in SL split, the assets go to the owner irrespective of copyright and intellectual property. So for example, if I create a development complex for a business and the person to who I turn the creation over to leaves the company, that person could technically walk away with copyright and intellectual property that was never specifically contracted to him/her in the first place. However, because they are the owner, they could take everything and run leaving the business high and dry with very little recourse.

To combat this, businesses have taken to setting up ‘administrative’ accounts for which the organization has a greater degree of control rather than the individual. So when an employee leaves, the organization can ‘lock out’ someone from their various accounts and once a replacement is hired, put that new person into the same avatar role as the previous person. As an aside: Yes I’m aware of the complexities that involves and how easy it would be to circumnavigate however at the moment this is the level to which the technology allows us to establish some level of audit and accountability.

So herein becomes the problem: I have an avatar which I use for both work and off hours. And lets say just for fun that I created my avatar first and the company I work for developed a presence after the fact. I create some form of intellectual property using that avatar which then develops to the point where it can be monetized – who owns the IP?

Immediately we are into a turf war over legal terms of service because ever since Mr. Gates pulled out the rug from under IBM with the introduction of DOS, most organizations now include terms in their employee contracts that say any IP developed using company resources belong to the organization and not the employee. Loosely translated this applies to pretty much everything someone does so long as a single dollar of value can be traced back to the organization for which that person works. So once an avatar which is used for both work and play starts to create things the organization’s terms of service and Second Life’s terms of service immediately are irreconcilable as they contain two mutually exclusive provisions for copyright and IP.

The assignment of legal standing of an avatar then gets called into question and is something that eventually needs to be clarified in terms of a right to own and control IP. However businesses have a genuine need that such rights must necessarily survive the death of the agent behind the avatar – essentially having the requirement to treat an avatar as a business within a business each of which have the same set of legal rights, privileges, and obligations.

This opens up a whole new level of complexity within society then because if an avatar has the right to control copyright and IP independent of the agent behind the avatar, then it is not too far a walk to establish that such avatars would necessarily have the right to purchase real assets (land, other businesses) for which current legislative and regulatory rules and regulations are not adapted to address.

For example: Persons can marry; Businesses can merge; so Avatars with legal status as individuals under the law and whom are necessarily neither persons nor businesses can …. what ?  marge? Its not exactly going to be simple having to sort out all of these issues at a time when technology is the driving force behind social adaptation rather than social narratives. It is no wonder post-modern ideologies have replaced traditionalism as the dominate mechanism for adaptation as it seems to be the only mechanism by which individuals (real individuals) can cope with ideals that have no easy method for reconciliation.

Note to Spammers: What part of ALL COMMENTS ARE MODERATED are you failing to understand. – SHEESH!

550 spam messages in 3 weeks. I don’t know whether to be impressed or insulted. I’m thinking insulted as all of them are for drug companies and nothing for anything really all that great either. I mean really – amoxicillin? Just how many people are out there with ear infections anyways. Not one good product offering in the lot. No timeshares or toys or sex novelty items or vacations. Heck – I get better spam in my regular email than I do here.

Maybe this is a question of whether we are reaching a better class of spammer. I have a hard time buying this thou because a number of the IP addresses are spoofed and following some of the links you get into these round about situations where you aren’t actually taken to someplace where people can make a purchasing decision. As any good sale person knows – if you are going to sell someone make sure you have a contract in hand and don’t have to run back to the office to get one. The last thing you want to do is allow people to actually THINK about their decision until after the ink is dry and the contract is non-revocable.

Supposedly, the lastest stats to have out suggest that people who actually do fall for spam comprise only 1% of 1% of 1% of all spam messages that go out. So on a typicaly email campaign that equates to 20 sales for every 20M emails. While the cost to send out 20M emails is fairly small I really wonder how much money the spammers are pulling in compared to those that sell the “marketing” lists.

Of course then there are other purposes behind spam which are more nefarious. Finding email addresses which are actually valid – servers which have firewall gaps. These types of things. Much of the illicit spam that is being sent out there is the result of innocent people’s computers being compromised. Lack of firewall software and malware protection.

A number of governments are trying to find legislation that will actually work in order to solve the spam problem. Policy alone however I doubt very much is the answer. In order to really solve the problem we likely need to redefine the simple mail transport protocol (SMPT) and include sampling intrusion detection at key routing points throughout the Internet backbone.

First – you need to get some idea of whether an email is being spoofed or not. It is actually very easy to spoof an email and ip address for mail. For direct connections to something like a blog its a bit harder but not by much. So at key points in the overall network you include an intrusion detection device which reverse look-ups the sending IP address. Why is this important? Because if the real connection path is coming in from China but the IP address says its coming from Florida, you can tell from the number of hops between where you are, where you are coming from, and where you are going to if the communication is fraudulent or not.

For example: Lets say the average number of hops from Tampa to New York is 7 hops (i.e. physical router devices). If an email shows up in Los Angeles bound to New York from Florida, for that type of connection to work in reality it may require 14-20 hops. Even if one section of the network were down for some reason a doubling of hops is not realistic so you are pretty much assume that the communication is being spoofed through some other source. In addition, the local ID device would know what the last hop was. If it happened to be Tokyo – well that would certainly clinch it.

Next is tracing back communications. After the fact this is fairly difficult to do however if the SMTP were to be adjusted so that it had to show all hops in the path as part of the mail headers then there would be a logical trail to follow back to the originating source. In addition, this would make the tracking of such communications easier for post-delivery follow-up.

Once you have these two pieces in place now you have something to build a policy around. For example, any IP provider or carrier which knowingly transmits communications for which the source cannot be verified will be subject to regular bulk postal mail rates for each communication allowed through their network.

The cost could range but lets take $0.199/item as the general bulk rate for postcard barcoded items.

$0.199 x 20M pieces of mail = one hefty incentive to not send spam.

Of course if someone wanted to pay the same rates as the US postal service or other postal carrier then they should be, within reason, allowed to send mail all they want. I doubt however that the attractiveness of bulk email would be sufficient that people would be bothered by the same quantity of spam email that we have been subjected to in the past.

Notice though that similar to how the US government tackled the gambling industry problem by going after the banks rather than the gambling establishments themselves, a similar policy is likely to have similar effect for spam. 

Now if politicians could just grow a genetically modifiable backbone we’d be all set.

I’m not talking about religious or political ideology, albeit both play a role. What I am talking to is the nature of copyright, intellectual property rights, and ownership and how it impacts on the way cultures reconcile differences.

Over the next several months I am going to be expanding out on this concept as I don’t have it completely clear in my own head right now. But what worries me, or excites depending on your point of view, is the fact that a number of ’signals’ have been present in society for the past 10 years or so – and made far more manifest due to the nature of chaotic systems and how the Internet has changed the way individuals react to change within this chaotic system.

The general gist of what is happening is this: We live in a society that is based on political and governmental rules dating back thousands of years. It doesn’t matter if you live in a socialist or democratic state – the fundamental principles we all operate on have been established through tradition and passed on generation over generation. Those traditions are based on a world where the sphere of influence of ideas was determined by the number of miles a person could walk in a day. And because ideas were localized, political, ideological, and religious systems could establish ‘reasonable’ limitations on threats to the established power base simply through the control of movement of individuals and groups.

Today, we are well past the point at which ideas are restricted to political and geographic boundaries. Beyond this however is cultural thirst for more. The human mind craves stimulation and in doing so will latch onto new ideas that – while they may be second nature to the culture in which they were derived – are new and innovative to the culture that has never experienced them before.

We know for example that the thoughts and ideas of Chinese culture differs from that of Western culture based in part on both language and those social narratives which define the cultural idioms to which the culture relates. In short – group think. Culture constrains innovation and creativity and not necessarily for bad purposes. Consistency of cultural tradition is a stabilizing factor in ensuring that human social groups limit physical danger to themselves and hence are a competitive factor in different societies becoming more or less prosperous than others. It is a survival tactic which has worked well for centuries.

When ideas cross geographic and political boundaries however, radical elements are introduced which may have a destabilizing effect on cultural make-ups. Now, instead of a homogeneous culture, we are faced with a heterogeneous culture with varying demands that are not necessarily capable of being reconciled. Do you, or do you not, for example, pledge your allegiance to the Queen in Canada – or to God in the US – if you don’t happen to believe in the symbolism that they represent to both the culture and the traditional values on which each society was originally based?

Political correctness assumes we should be all encompassing but the reality is that each postmodern ideology which introduced challenging the status quo destabilizes almost every aspect of a society and how it functions. The implication is that we are headed towards a global culture – one in which there are no geographic or political boundaries. Unfortunately that type of dramatic cultural change means threatening the established power bases not through force of arms but through people’s social constructions of what they see as being their reality.

Governments and businesses may be able to impact on this using the political tools at their disposal – legal systems, monetary policy, and force of arms. The reality however is that economic systems, while they may be influenced by these measures, are only capable of influencing populations in so far as the population has a belief that their system is protecting the greater good. Governments that lose that battle over the belief in their economic and governance policies lose the war by a thousand cuts – not by a single blow.

Essentially the core rots from within despite outward appearances of strength. Civil wars begin long before the first shot is fired or the first dissident is placed in jail for their beliefs. Chaos theory shows us that as an idea gains momentum there is a point at which policy makers have influence and a point at which it doesn’t matter what they do, the train is going to run them over no matter what types of policies, rules, and threats are put in the way. Usually that point is well before the halfway point.

Currently I believe we have passed that point when it comes to intellectual property and copyright law. These provisions are well and truly outdated considering the global marketplace and the entire system needs to be dismantled and rebuilt from scratch. The problem with this is that it is a two edged sword. If governments do nothing, the wave of popularist ideology towards open source and public accessibility will eventually reach a breaking point at which government regulation and legal threats from businesses can no longer threaten people into submission. Current legislation before numerous governmental bodies is trying to strike a balance between the interests of business and content creators, and those seeking to use and create derivative works based on those new ideas. This is the other edge to the sword. If governments open up legal and policy restrictions then the interests of those content creators will also be damaged and there will be little incentive for people to invest in new ideas if there is no hope of being compensated reasonably for the effort they put into the development of those ideas.

While the primary conflict seems fairly straight forward the issue is by no means black and white. Copyright legislation impacts on just about everything from monetary and government policy to the very fabric of almost every system of economics whether it is based on a socialist or capitalist ideology. In the meantime however, the individuals making up these economic systems are not standing still. Such is the nature of a chaotic system. People are making their own ideological decisions in real-time. It is the nature of economics that flows of wealth do not wait for the regulators to finally make decisions which are already 10 years out of date before they become policy, or worse, law.

It is here we are going to see the next civil war. It is not going to be fought over territory, or politics, or religion. It will be an economic war, a cultural war, a global war, and one in which the civil populations those beliefs support the power base of the status quo will shake those institutions to their very core.

Issues over DRM are not the opening shots fired. They are a wake-up call that something radical needs to change – that the fundamental nature of how we value and distribute knowledge and ideas will, in the long run, not be subject to the traditional economics of today’s society. Once we hit that tipping point the change will be fast, it will be radical, and it will leave the old guard scratch their heads as to how things could have gotten ‘out of control’ so quickly even through the signals that this change is coming have been there for those that care to look.

We are that generation that is living in interesting times. – K

In his ruling Judge Louis Stanton granted 3 of Viacom’s 8 motions. Those being

1. Access to all videos removed by YouTube since it’s inception.
2. Access to all logs of videos watched including IP address and User Ids
3. Access to Google’s Video Schema which also connects to YouTube

What is disturbing about the ruling is a number of factors. The primary issue however is that there is no stated limitation in the terms of use of such information provided by Google to Viacom. That means there is no requirement for 3rd party verification of the disposal of such information once the purposes for which this information has been requested has been fulfilled. Essentially, Viacom can use any of the information however they choose to including the conducting of civil suits against individuals who upload copyright material similar to what the recording industry has been doing for some time.

While the judge ruled that access to an IP address and User Id does not, in of itself, constitute a break of someone’s privacy unless combined with other information, because there is no limitation of the terms of use of any information collected from YouTube, Viacom is free to do that data matching using other sources of data at their disposal.

For example, an IP address can allow someone to narrow down where that IP address physically resides by determining the sub-mask and range that it belongs to. You could narrow down to with a couple of blocks the exact neighbourhood the IP address belonged to. Using the IP address, subnet mask, and personal profile based on their YouTube ID, or even just the ID name itself, data matching could be done on anyone that has accessed a Viacom website or partner in order to uniquely identify who that person is.

The potential for mis-use of such information is far in excess of what the court has determined as part of its judgement. The fact that such a wide breadth of information has been made available, essentially with unrestricted use, as a legal precedence is something that should concern pretty much everyone. The problem is not just Viacom – its the fact that Viacom has cleared a path down a slippery slope that others with far less benign intentions will use to justify the erosion of personal privacy.

As the saying goes – the road to hell is paved with good intentions. – K