In the previous part we learned that all gamers cheat, Linden Lab aren’t real people, and the OpenSim community should support its own trolls. We still don’t know who “they” are, and it’s not clear if we still want to know, but there are still more than 40 minutes to go, and with the wild turns of Tessa’s talk, who knows where we will end up this time.

Previously, SpotOn was about to wrap up the “outreach” event, when, literally at the last minute, Maria of Hypergridbusiness came in and is greeted by an echoing Tessa who introduced her as “Maria from Hypergrid”, then, for no apparent reason whatsoever, starts talking about the new improvements SpotOn has been working on for “at least the people who participate in our community” and mentions (again) Hot Swap, which is “gonna make a major difference in creators and their ability to make money and also the ability for business and education to come in and really utilize this environment without having to spend hundreds of thousands of dollars”. She still does not tell us what Hot Swap is, though.

Adressing Maria, she again tells us about her disappointment in the OpenSim community, how nobody showed up at her invitation, and how she feels treated. While waiting for Maria to respond, she continues to talk about Hot Swap: “Hot Swap is… Sunny Salamander (phon.) he’s our… Thomas …, one of our lead coders on our team and just a genius, I have to say, and this was an idea we kinda threw out there, and it doesn’t use our technology, it uses our database to pull up whole scenes that have been put together by either one creator or many, and it will allow us to sell the rights to use these things without actually giving the content over in an ownership way. (…) Hot Swap works like a ‘holodeck’, and that you can buy these other rights to use these Hot Swap scenes and from a inworld web window you can pick the scene you want to materialize, or rez, on your sim, you step out and then go back in, and there you go.” This basically sounds like loading an .oar through a web module, except that the .oar is not bought, but merely licensed, but I think depriving customers of their rights is one of SpotOn’s lesser worries.

Tessa mentions that she’s a creator too, and a lot of things on SpotOn have been made by her, which is one of the reasons she partnered up with Stevan. Going back to her previous argument in Part 3 (where it’s less worrisome to “steal” from Linden Lab than from a user) I wonder if she’s okay with the same argument applied to her own creations. She tells us that she and Stevan were “right in think as far as the worry about copyright, the worry about IP rights, the worry about people’s careers, and how they were feeding their children. And let’s face it, a lot of people in the OpenSim community are on disability, either for autism or some kind of mental illness, like bipolar, and they have a hard time coping in real life. Then there are the mothers who have children and are stay-at-home, and the people who are unemployed right now, and these people, if we attack them by taking their content, aren’t we really attacking the most vulnerable people in our communities in real life? And that’s one of the reasons why I feel so strongly about content protection.”

She shares a little tale about how she got “DMCA’ed” once over some plants, and how people expect her to know which content is whose, which is also one of the reasons why they’re doing double dutch delivery, so people don’t have a need to “steal” content. At this point I’d like to mention that it’s not my fault when things don’t make sense, I’m just writing stuff down. She continues to talk about something called “sticky IP” where a creation can be shifted between grids, and that SpotOn is in negotiations to make that happen but can’t make any promises. She then repeats her sermon about how you need money to make all that happen, and in order to get money you need investors, and to get investors you need patents when you don’t have any other assets. Stevan also repeats his previous statements.

When being asked if a programmer can explain the technology: “No, I don’t have a programmer who is going to explain it; it is certainly what it is, I’m not going to ask my programmers to sit here and explain the technology at this time.” Tessa adds that, if it really was that easy to do, then “why weren’t people using it in this way? Obviously we’ve done something quite different or this technology would’ve been existing and readily used everywhere, and as it’s not, because somebody else made it before us and didn’t give it back to the community, why are we being beaten up for it?” Which is a bold statement, especially keeping in mind that Gareth Nelson has made his own Firefox plugin for SL available under the GPL.

She goes on to talk, again, about “the exploit that people found” and that they have to close it at some point, because “it definitely has impacted our goals”, which makes me even more curious about it. She now mentioned this particular thing three times without having any reason to do so, as it doesn’t have much to do with the plugin, so it must be something that’s important to her.

She then states that she’s also not a programmer. Stevan, when asked if their patent pending plugin is different from someone elses work, reminds Maria that the patent will take many many years to issue, “so we haven’t done a sit-down-and-compare between his technology, and our technology, so there’s no way to know if it’s infringing or not, and it sort of just doesn’t matter right now.” Sort of. Doesn’t matter. Right now. Sort. Of.

Tessa tries to explain the patent process: “See, the idea when you do a patent is (…) you kinda holler out and say: ‘Hey, we’re getting a patent.’ And people say: ‘Hey, wait a minute, that’s me! You know, I think I got that already covered.’” Stevan interrupts: “You don’t ‘holler out’. We list it in the patent application.” Tessa: “There you go. And that way, people who do feel it’s infringing on their rights can come forward…” Stevan: “No, it’s a process, Tessa.” Tessa (somewhat unnerved): “It’s a process.” She sounds a little like all these details don’t really matter much and are too tedious to get into, which makes her previous statements that all this “proves that the patent process does work” even more invalid than it already was.

Stevan: “Trust me, the patent examiner that’s gonna review this will look at everything that you guys have already listed, plus probably lots more that many people have never heard of, because this is gonna be a person that’s an expert in the field. (…) People have the ability to write in to the patent examiner and say: What about this is prior art, what about that is prior art, after the 18 months publication period.”

Tessa: “… there’s a really huge misunderstanding between the real nuts and bolts of legal business, IP and trademark and patent law, and what the layman believes should be done, and believes should be carried out with.” Coming from her, that’s either speaking of experience, or rather ridiculous. I’m not sure. “And unfortunately, you know, we have to follow the law, we have to do everything right.” Unfortunately, really?

Again she reminds us that this proves that the patent process does work. She said that now so many times, and it’s just so much bullshit. First off, there has no patent been granted yet, so we don’t know anything about the outcome. What we know is that there is a process, but the fact that a process exists does not automatically mean it works. Also, the way it is designed does not mean that a.: the design is good, and b.: the design is applied correctly, and c.: the design leads to the desired result. Stating, at this point, that anything here proves anything, especially about the patent process, only proves one thing: The person saying that has no clue whatsoever.

Again, she says SpotOn is honest, transparent, etc., then compares the patent process to content on her grid, that she can’t possibly know every content by heart and sort out what’s legitimate on her own. What this has to do with the patent process remains her secret. She concludes: “The point is, because we are a business, because we do need assets to get investors, because we are running a production level grid, not the ultimate sandbox for creators, because we are the selling place that those venues go through, and we bring in the ideas, we bring in the audience, from a large, large, large user community out there, so we bring that market to these creators.” This. Coming from someone who is running a grid that has hardly one person online at the same time. From someone who has failed for years now to bring any kind of traction to her own grid. From someone who has been overtaken left and right by commercial and non-commercial grids alike, both in users and regions. I don’t even know what to call this. Hubris? Desperation? Misleading? A lie? Let’s call it “Tessa’s little wonderland”.

Maria has a question: “I think people are worried that it will be approved despite prior art, like the bread warming, or the Amazon one-click patents, and that it will be too expensive for OpenSim startups to fight it.” Stevan: “Two points. One: Everything everyone listed out there is listed in the patent. All the prior art was listed as prior art. Two: There are a number of other patents out there, that show methods on doing exactly what we’re doing, using slightly different twists. I don’t know what other people who are building plugins are doing, but they might be infringing those already-issued patents, that are already out there, not only published, but issued within the patent system.” He states that one needs to trust the legal system, as it’s the only system we have. The thought that systems can and may need to be reformed doesn’t even seem to cross his mind.

Maria asks what the other patents are, and Stevan promises to look for them after he returns from a business trip. Tessa thinks that’s important, so they don’t give out licenses to something they have no right to do so.

Maria asks about the licensing terms, and Stevan says at this point they don’t know yet what they will be.

Tessa repeats, one more time, the ways she “reached out” to the community and got flamed, ignored, etc., how they are a production grid, and take things more serious. There’s still no pony. She tells us, again, why they can’t contribute code back and how they found an exploit in the viewer, but won’t explain the way it works, “because that would be inappropriate”. I think it would be very appropriate. In order to get it fixed, they went to the core contributor working on the permission system, who asked for 600 $ to fix it, because nobody in OpenSim was interested in the permission system. I think that’s a very reasonable thing to do, if someone asks for custom work to be implemented, they should pay for the work it takes to implement it, and for a grid who can spend 20.000 $ on shows (and is, according to its own statement, “one of the better-funded grids”), 600 $ doesn’t seem to be too much. But Tessa says: “I have a problem with that. In most people’s minds it would be inappropriate behaviour, especially for an OpenSim coder.” Personally, I think it’s much more inappropriate to not even be willing to invest 600 $ for custom code in a project that your whole business is based on, and which you got completely for free.

Tessa goes on to talk about how the exploit still exists, and they have to close it up every single time, which, I imagine, costs more in man-hours on their development team than the 600 $ would’ve cost, but I guess that’s money better spent.

She talks about her show Grid Wrap again, and how they gave the 600-$-lady ear time there. She talks about the double dutch delivery again. About something called SpotOn Synergy. And how all this is about the ability to help other grids, who obviously, in Tessa’s mind, can’t manage without SpotOn’s help. Again, this is from a grid who can’t even help itself.

There’s a little bit of conversation between Tessa on voice and Maria on text chat, that’s hard to follow as it’s not clear what Maria’s typing, and finally Tessa says their recorder is running out of harddisk space. Asked about the usage of her grid, Tessa says that she doesn’t think the stats are really that important, and that it’s more about how many sims and residents one has, and what they do, but states that they have 200 residents and realizes that they’re very small. This realization doesn’t keep her from having great ambitions though, because “there’s a huge market here about to explode as we do this facebook app”.

She talks a little about their dispute resolution process and Stevan says he needs to go, which somewhat marks the end of the recording.

In closing, there was little information about the actual patent, there was a lot of marketing speech about SpotOn’s products, with very little substance about what exactly they are, and very little understanding for things outside the SpotOn production-grade business sphere of thought. We learned that little knowledge is no detriment to big speak, and there’s no limit to the good intentions that pave the roads to hell. Also, nobody really said it, but I think “they” are really THEM.

To sum it up, I think the cat finally got skinned.

(CC-by Suicide Girls – WARNING: Clicking the picture is not safe for work.)