Dear Prokofy…

A civilized response to an uncivilized troll.

 

 

 

I’d like to begin this article by breaking a cardinal rule when dealing with trolls, in that I understand completely that one should simply not feed them. However, you are a particularly troubling case of small mindedness and vicious personal attack that I really shouldn’t let rest. Personally, I don’t mind opposing ideas or strong personal thoughts concerning a touchy subject, in this case it is the handling of Intellectual Property in a Virtual Environment. After all, I live in a free country where freedom of speech is celebrated – even if what is said is disagreeable.

 

That said, there have been quite a lot of disturbing accusations and name calling directed toward myself (and even those close to me) over what was, and remains, an active demonstration of the fallacies of Intellectual Property handling in an open ended virtual environment such as Second Life. As I’ve stated quite clearly time and again, intellectual property is something that needs to be upheld and honored, not to mention the very rights of the IP holders to determine usage or revocation of that usage at will.

 

I have stated this quite clearly in the aforementioned article “Kill Them All, Let God Sort Them Out”, not once but multiple times. I also had stated in no uncertain terms that it is the right of the IP holders as well as Linden Lab to carry out DMCA notices as they see fit, which is perfectly legal. I’ve even mentioned that I was not bitter about the DMCA notice and removal of the arcade machine in question, because it was an intellectual demonstration of a hypothesis put forth in my book chapter, with the up front understanding that such would inevitably be revoked. The purpose of that hypothesis was to actively demonstrate, from the consumer and producer aspect, the process by which these items are created, filed and even revoked, and document where the process can be improved, as per the book chapter.

 

But this idea goes farther back than 2009, and indeed reaches as far back as 1999 with my original research on this very subject during the budding phase of open ended virtual environments, namely within the Activeworlds environment. Originally, a number of designers and myself had built a virtual environment in order to better understand the implications of missing branded content within a virtual environment. Would that type of content be understood as marketing placement, or would it fall under producer and levy a hefty licensing fee? There was, and still remains, no clear answer for this question as we found out over the years.

 

Since, Prokofy, you have such trouble grasping intelligent rhetoric or the implied and obvious meaning contained within such, I’ll turn it down a few notches for you and simply tell you a story. I apologize for the lack of pictures with this story, as I simply couldn’t be bothered to draw anything with crayons for you at this time. Hopefully my assumption that you are capable of actually reading is not inaccurate (though based on your responses publicly about me, it would seem you are at least half illiterate in your refusal to actually read publicly available articles in entirety)

 

The idea that in-world content could be created as a viral and natural marketing option had not crossed anyone’s mind from the perspective of content creators in an open ended environment, nor had the companies owning the IP thought about this future, and to add insult to injury the very companies responsible for the open ended virtual environments hadn’t thought about the implications of what they had created or how to harness it.

 

A perfect example of this situation can be illustrated from the movie E.T. whereby the script called for M&Ms to be used, but when the producers approached M&M/MARS they were told they were welcome to use M&Ms in the movie but had to pay a hefty licensing fee to do so. As we all know at this point, it was Reese’s Pieces that were used in the movie E.T. because Reese’s saw a branding and marketing opportunity whereas M&M/MARS saw only the usage of IP and the fees they wanted for the usage. It is two very different styles of thinking, but Reese’s won out in the end and the popularity of the then new candy skyrocketed, to the chagrin of M&M/Mars who had clearly missed a golden opportunity.

 

This was, of course, before the time when the word “prosumer” had entered into social media vernacular, and possibly before the widespread frenzy that is social media as it exists today. We were on the edge of understanding something that hadn’t been addressed before, but were limited in our scope of definition between consumer and producers of content. We understood that the consumers of content were also the producers in this media, and that it is human nature to want familiarity in a virtual environment. The trouble was, and still is, social media marketing ideals do not reflect the practices of the 20th century where companies are accustomed to controlling the message, yet companies still practice this mentality with decreasing success 9and outright negative backlash).

 

I mentioned M&M/MARS earlier because that company is actually tied to my professional life and I’ve had a history with them in prior projects. Years later, around 2004/2005 I was hired as the CTO of a company named VR5 Online, whose purpose was to figure out this whole Prosumer / IP relationship, as well as figure out how people responded in a virtual environment to different marketing experiences. It was my job to both push the limits of the technology we were using (ActiveWorlds) as well as follow a yearly guideline checklist of questions I was to find answers for, reporting back to the CEO of the company with the findings each year.

 

During that time, we ran one of the most visually stunning, technologically capable, and trend-setting worlds in the ActiveWorlds system. This is mainly due to inviting high-end content creators, builders and designers from the existing community to help with the project – giving them near free reign to work on their projects to push the limits of the system. We were striving for excellence and as the world admin, I was quite critical of second-best attempts.

 

One of the projects that was explored in that virtual world was, as I have noted, how to deal with the marketing aspect of virtual environments when the system is open ended. It also covered concepts of metaphor shear – does something break the immersion and cause aggravation or does it cause a feeling of acceptance and foster replication? We had found through this study that metaphor shear plays a large part of our virtual lives, and should be avoided at all costs; however the cost of actually avoiding metaphor shear in a virtual environment was actually negligible compared to the costs involved with trying to control the message.

 

A demonstration was proposed, then, based on original hypothesis put forth in 1999 – to create a vending machine and a billboard, tracking how many people interacted with either one, and gather feedback from visitors as to what they thought of both. The branding of that item was chosen carefully, and selected to be M&M/Mars (because we were eager to see if M&M/Mars had changed their mindset after E.T.), in that we wanted to create a virtual vending machine branded for M&Ms that would allow people to customize and receive M&Ms from their site in real life.

 

Luckily, M&M/Mars was a local company, Hackettstown, New Jersey and my boss made the call to their marketing division to set up a demonstration. The general idea of filing for IP usage is to somehow demonstrate or describe how the IP will be used, and in this case it was agreed that because of the circumstances involved with the experiment (meaning there was no clear cut approach that could be filed), a live demonstration would be in order. M&M/Mars agreed fully and arranged for one of their IP/Marketing department heads to come “in-world” and see the demonstration. The company had also expressed utter excitement at the possibility of the new media and what it could do in terms of marketing potential – which is why they were eager to arrange a demonstration with us.

 

What happened next remained in my research logs for the company, until now.

 

The gentleman that “arrived” in-world cheerfully greeted us and was eager to see what we had in mind for this demonstration. As a precursor, we had created a single M&Ms vending machine and linked it up properly to the website, as well as ambient sounds, etc to increase the detail. As the demonstration, we simply “rezzed” the object in-world before him and began to explain the purpose, usage, and implications.

 

He was very silent.

 

A number of minutes passed before he finally did say something to us, faced by this near perfect digital replica of an actual M&M Vending machine.

 

His reaction was something I had warned my boss about prior to attempting the experiment, in that I detailed the fact that what we were doing was above and beyond the scope of what companies were likely to have any protocols to handle, let alone comprehend at the time. The representative from M&M/Mars, for lack of better words, had a small nervous breakdown.

 

At first the gentleman told us that we could not have the vending machine on display because it was the IP Property of M&M/Mars. We agreed, but reiterated the reason for that demonstration was to explain the proposed usage of the IP and obtain permission and that the usage constituted good faith on the part of the company on behalf of M&M/Mars. He insisted we could not have it and asked us to remove it. Of course, we complied on the spot, but what happened next was unexpected.

 

The gentleman then blurted out “No! You can’t delete it either. It’s not your property.”

 

Confused, my boss and I asked if that meant we should place the item again, and we put the item back as we were saying this. The gentleman said again – “No! You can’t have it here!”, to which we replied “So we cannot have it here, but we cannot remove it from here? We could, if you’d like, make it blink in and out of visibility to accommodate?” – to which we made the vending machine blink in and out of visibility on a ten second timer.

 

After much ranting, the gentleman finally instructed us to leave the vending machine exactly where we had rezzed it until he or somebody at M&M/Mars contacted our company for further analysis. For months we literally left that vending machine in the middle of the virtual sidewalk, untouched, before my boss decided to call M&M/Mars again to find out what the verdict was.

 

It was brought to our attention that the gentleman had moved on from the company, and upon closer examination of the experiment by M&M/Mars they admitted that they had no protocol or manner with which to officially deal with such a thing. They were still excited about the prospect and apologized profusely for the reaction of their former employee, but was at a loss how to file an IP usage claim in this circumstance.

 

Clearly we were consumers and producers. We had no intention of monetary benefit from the usage, and indeed it was purely for the benefit of marketing M&M/Mars without cost in the process during our experiment. It would, of course, foster a gain on our part to in-world users who would clearly seek out the branded item, but nothing tangible. Asking us to pay a licensing fee would have been out of the question, and they expressed that, but they weren’t in a position to authorize marketing funds for the project, let alone had any idea how to properly authorize the free marketing we were offering. After a number of hours and a few days of phone tag, the best that could be agreed to was limbo.

 

There was no official manner by which they could classify what we were doing, but they were clearly interested in having it persist. This would have clearly caused a clash with the IP department versus the marketing department, in that the IP department would send us a DMCA type cease and desist notice (and quite legally) even though the marketing team there approved otherwise.

 

So the solution was simply to get an approval from the marketing side, and understand that it would exist until such time as the legal team decided to revoke that verbal agreement. It was the best we could come up with at the time, and we left it at that. For the record, the M&Ms vending machine remained in our virtual world (along with multiple copies through the virtual town) for the entire life of the project, which was a number of years, without any discontent from M&M/Mars.

 

The idea of “limbo” is a recurring one, and I’ve found it quite hard to illustrate what exactly the implications of this are. On one hand, a prosumer (content consumer and producer) can go to great lengths to acquire the forms to fill out and return to the IP holder for approval, but the usage of that IP in an open ended virtual environment poses a long standing problem for IP holders as to where to classify it, if at all, and by what circumstances approval should be given. This point is crucial in the understanding of the dilemma because it is unlikely that any prosumer will find success in filing paperwork with any company for IP usage – first with the implicit “no solicitation” policies most companies have concerning the average person attempting to submit ideas or even request permission for projects, and later in the event they can actually get past that hurdle and file the paperwork, such paperwork is crippled by the unclear understanding of how to classify the usage circumstances, and thus sends that paperwork into a limbo of neither approved or unapproved, or in many circumstances the approval is entirely ambiguous and subject to revocation without a moment’s notice.

 

It can be said that a Pacman machine in Second Life would have required licensing on the order of six figures of payment to Bandai/Namco, and that would be correct some of the time, based entirely on the circumstances. In my circumstance, I described the usage in a non-profit manner, explained the reasoning, the pricing model, and exactly what it was I would do with the money it earned. For brevity’s sake I’ll simply say that the price was 250L per machine, in order to circumvent the proposed costs of offering the item for free on Marketplace, to which that money would be recycled back into the costs of promoting the items as the amounts added up to the costs required to do so. It was also explained that the purpose was for an academic exercise in digital marketing and that I was intending to demonstrate the practice of such through arcade machines, which would constitute digital marketing without cost to the IP holder. It was also explained that the ulterior motive for the creation of those items was to make an attempt to offer a high quality replacement for inferior products using the IP in that context, and alleviate illicit items or the propagation of illicit versions through the availability of a high quality official version.

 

Again, the results of this weren’t unexpected. With the paperwork sent in to Namco/Bandai, quite some time passed without any response. I had seen this happen before with M&M/Mars so I knew what had happened. The IP Paperwork had indeed gotten to NAMCO/Bandai, but the company (upon reviewing the description and circumstances) found it near impossible to justify approval or disapproval of the items in question, nor could they really find an adequate manner by which to classify such an endeavor with the IP options they were used to with their process. And so, I was informed (in all cases) that it was neither approved *nor* disapproved.

 

I expected this chain of events, and quite literally outlined them in the book chapter in 2009/2010 but also had the same experience as far back as 1999 – 2007. Nothing had really changed in the IP landscape to keep up with or accommodate the rise of social media and the prosumer. As of the filing of the paperwork, I was both non-infringing and infringing the IP of a company at the same time, and thus was stuck in a grey area.

 

The term “common criminal” was aptly used by you, Prokofy in a comment on this blog (since removed for vicious and callus personal attacks) to describe me. I say “aptly” used because there is some manner of truth to that statement, but clearly not the truth that you had in mind. The problem with being a “common criminal” in the virtual world and social media is that, sadly, it’s all too common. If you’ve ever owned or currently own a media screen TV in Second Life, you’re an accessory to criminal acts – each of those televisions offers pirated movies, and even pirated movie rentals on-demand, which is not covered by the DVD Rental laws concerning physical media. There is a reason why services like NetFlix are required to make special agreements with the MPAA and movie studios, and it is unlikely any content creator in Second Life has the resources or clout to make the same agreements for usage on in-world televisions.

 

There also exists the onslaught of items available on Marketplace as “Inspired” – but the truth is this: They are all IP Theft and infringing. Cybersuits that are replicas of TRON Legacy suits, Lightcycles, Smurf Avatars, Televisions, and more. The list is endless, and the “problem” persists further in-world where those IP clones propagate on an exponential basis off the radar, in countless iterations and circumstances.

 

But this isn’t an attempt to justify IP theft or misappropriation, nor is it to condemn the practice in a blanket statement. What this is, quite honestly, is a hard look at the problem we are faced with, from the perspective of the consumer and producer of content in a virtual environment, and to illustrate the process along with the severe weaknesses inherent. It is also a willingness to offer not just the criticism of the failures but outline a possible solution which keeps in mind the ability to be beneficial to Linden Lab, IP Holders, and the Prosumer Community it is designed for. An innovative, and unorthodox, mindset for how to actually address this situation. A situation which will only be made worse in the coming years as more and more people use virtual environments.

 

Clearly it is human nature to seek familiarity in a virtual environment, and given the tools to bring such into being, we can only expect that residents of a virtual environment will gravitate toward familiar things, or in the case of such being non-existent, will make them on their own. In the case of branded real world items in a virtual environment, such does not officially exist in Second Life (save the poor marketing attempts by companies and their defunct islands), but the nature of the human spirit says that such things will always exist unofficially if you know where to look – or if you are capable of making it yourself.

 

This makes us all “common criminals” through technicality, but more importantly through human nature and a lack of proposed solutions.

 

Clearly there is demand, and always will be, for familiar brands in a virtual world. Whether or not an IP Holder “officially” authorizes such to exist has no baring on the situation. It is human nature to want familiarity, and they will have it with or without approval. The recourse of DMCA notices to remove content is merely an address to the symptom and not the cause, and thus cannot offer a solution to this mindset of prosumers and remix culture. If such content does not exist, and the IP holder refuses to sanction such to exist, and there is a demand for it, the population with the demand will find a way to have it regardless.

 

It is better to figure out a solution to this now, than to sweep it under the rug and pretend that none of these circumstances exist. Just as the IP situation in virtual environments regularly becomes a grey area, so too is how to actually handle the circumstances. It cannot be solved with a blanket approach, but it can be addressed through innovation and unorthodox thinking.

 

This is one of the many reasons why I was invited to and am actively involved with the IEEE Virtual Worlds Standards Group, and also why I’ve been involved with research on this subject for many years. I deal with what the future of virtual worlds will bring, and am concerned about the lack of certain things which will be required going forward. I write about these things publicly here in the blog, as well as in depth for research papers and college reference books. I have given numerous lectures on various topics and have even been invited as a keynote speaker in Berlin a number of times for a Metaverse conference. My name appears as a contributor to the Metaverse Roadmap, Solipsis Decentralized Metaverse (INRIA), as well as the credits of the Second Life viewer itself with many others who offer constructive contributions.

 

I’ve helped shape the roadmaps of virtual world companies, as well as even a well known gaming company. I’ve been involved in the virtual environment industry before there even was an industry to be involved with. I’ve written for gaming magazines, opt-in features, and done numerous interviews over the years. I’ve won multiple awards for technological innovation in virtual environments and have gone on to continue innovating and pushing in an unorthodox manner for the benefit of not just myself but for something I truly believe in: Virtual Worlds and the People who inhabit them.

 

I’ve forecasted the troubles of corporations, verbatim, months and years before they happened, while outlining the steps they could/would take to rectify the catastrophes. I don’t boast very often, or wear it on my sleeve, but I’m seldom wrong.

 

I cause contention quite often, but for entirely different reasons than say, you do Prokofy. While yours is simply for the act of being vicious or for personal attacks, which has earned you much infamy in the community you scorn all too often (and cries of attention starvation), the type of contention that I cause is positive.

 

I choose to cause that contention over best practices or lack of understanding. I cause contention in an industry that needs a little radical adjustment, a reality check for virtual reality. People often disagree with me, and quite verbally at times, but most of the time it’s only because they have so much riding on their point of view that they can only pray to whatever god they believe in that I’m wrong – often finding that I wasn’t wrong in the end.

 

You, Prokofy, have earned your notoriety in the opposite manner and have nothing of intelligence or inspiration to offer the industry or its residents. Nothing but belligerence, scandal, and slander seems to leave your mouth. You are a walking nightmare, pitied and ignored by the population you have consistently abused, save for the personal group which reads your blog, enjoying the misery you create, and gladly perpetuating it.

 

Spite, scorn, and vicious personal attacks are the last recourse for a person that has nothing intelligent to add to a discussion or debate. It is better to remain silent and let people think you are ignorant, than to open your mouth and remove all doubt, Prokofy.

 

You are the reason why explaining big ideas to small minds often fails miserably.

 

The only intelligent thing you could possibly say at this point to me, and the rest of the community you have severely wronged and verbally abused over the course of quite possibly years, is to simply apologize and show a shred of human decency for once. But I know you won’t; instead you’ll run to your blog and twitter and bash me and others some more, in some delusional ideal that you are somehow getting the last word. You will run to your blog and twitter, and continue the vulgarity and slander… because you have no human decency left inside.

 

Go run to your blog, and your twitter… bathe in the comfort of misery you so enjoy. Spew onward with verbal abuse.

 

This will be the last time I acknowledge you publicly. I’m sure this will come as no surprise, since most people you interact with take the same stance. Enjoy the comfort in knowing you are branded a Digital Harpy and shunned.

 

Sincerely,

 

Will Burns

Aeonix Aeon