A basic tenet of copy protection and digital rights
management (DRM) is if the key and the data exist on the same machine, the
system is fundamentally not secure. Another way of looking at this is “if you can see it, you can copy it.” The web is an especially open example of
this. Any part of a website that travels
to the client computer, whether textures, audio, HTML, or client-side
scripting, can be copied. We all saw
this in the early rollout of the web, where sites would copy markup from
particularly clever sites. Of course,
this helped the development of the web, since easy copying drove down the cost
of learning, helping to spur innovation. Plus, while the technology of the world-wide web didn’t stop copying,
intellectual property law still applied, so site owners could take legal action
if they felt it was worthwhile for them to do so. This balance is at the heart of intellectual
property law: balancing temporary monopolies and the incentives to create that
go with them against the myriad societal and cultural benefits of copying.
I am not a lawyer, nor do I play one on TV, but I have read the
Copyright Law of the United States – contained in Title 17 of the US
Code – and I encourage those wishing to better understand the issues to do
likewise. What is perhaps most
interesting about it is what it doesn’t have. Nowhere in the text does the word “steal” appear. This is important, especially given that most
discussions about copying in Second Life tend to involve statements like “they
stole my textures.” As Title 17 makes
clear, copying isn’t stealing. In fact, copying
isn’t necessarily a violation of copyright. Section 107 discusses a specific limitation on exclusive rights, namely
fair use. Of course, fair use isn’t fully
defined. Instead concepts like the
purpose and character of the copying, the economic impact of the copying, and
the completeness of the copying all factor in. Copying a piece of a book as part of your review? Arguably fair use. Copying the entire book in order to sell
it? Probably not. The lines aren’t all clear, but this is
intentional. Whether a copy falls under
fair use is a judgment call and thus needs humans in the loop. Merely copying something does not instantly
violate copyright.
So how does this all relate to OpenGL? (read on)
