LoC Project Seeks Summit on Copyright Rules for Virtual-World Archives

The Preserving Virtual Worlds project is talking about gathering representatives of the interests involved, to develop “protocols” under which rights holders can allow archiving, said Henry Lowood of Stanford University, the project’s co-principal investigator. Lowood hopes to involve other bodies in arranging the conference and to hold it this year, he said. The project, under way since last month, is funded with $650,000 from the Library of Congress to participants at the University of Maryland, Stanford, Rochester Institute of Technology and the University of Illinois, Lowood said. He expects archives to collect everything from video captures and source code to developers’ communications and product sales records, he said.

Kahle accused Lowood of using “words that are going to poison the conversation: ‘Ownership and property’… These are fighting words. You're playing somebody else’s game.” Creative Commons makes the same mistake, Kahle said. Creative Commons writes and promotes some-rights-reserved licenses and distribute technology tools to automate their use. “Creative Commons is really using the property metaphor,” Kahle said. “'Everything is property except for this park land’… I think that’s the wrong way to think about what we're doing.” The correct way is as creating cultural oases for people “to play and work and grow,” he said.

Game consoles and cellphones are controlled so tightly that simply grabbing virtual-world scenes from them “is the only way we're going to have a chance to preserve this stuff,” Kahle said. Instead of taking “negative examples from the real world” and installing them in virtual worlds, “let’s build a world we want to live in,” in the digital realm, and develop improvements to “apply to the real world,” he said. He sought conference participants’ help on an analysis that relates copyright, serfdom, debt and authoritarianism to one another.

“Lawyer groups and thug groups -- they're called trade associations” -- hurt their members’ business interests in addition to creativity by cracking down at the fringes of reuse of copyrighted material, Kahle said. Giving “slack” on that is out of favor in the “hyperpropertized climate” in the U.S. and elsewhere, he said.

Lowood said his “nightmare” is that after archiving is well under way, a copyright holder will complain -- and instead of a prompt pulldown ending the matter, as Kahle said it always has for the Internet archive, the rights holder will respond, “No, I want your money.” Kahle replied that copyright owners always can “run off to court.” But he said that, in his experience, that won’t happen much if an archive is “respectful” and “open” and “it doesn’t feel you're being taken advantage of.” He said “being nonprofit helps in that situation.” The goal is for potential opponents “not to… be pissed off” -- to “feel like they're better off having” the archive around “than they are without it,” Kahle said.

Kahle urged unaggressive assertiveness in taking copyrighted material for archiving. Each medium expresses its own culture in copyright enforcement, he said. The Internet Archive helped set expectations online in 1996 by starting a collection of Web pages that since has grown to two petabytes, the equivalent of 10,000 hard drives of 100 GB each. Each month the Archive collects content the size of the Library of Congress, Kahle said.

“Lawyers told us bad things would rain down on us” if the archive just started collecting copies of Web pages without asking permission, Kahle said. “Ask permission? From 50 million, 100 million, 200 million people? What the hell? So we just did it… We were very responsive when people griped at us… We just took it down.” And the lawyers who expected a gold mine “don’t get any fees out of it at all,” he said.

Archives create demand that can’t be anticipated, Kahle said. The Internet Archives’ Wayback Machine interface on the Web draws “a couple hundred thousand users a day at least,” he said. “It’s turned out to be wildly popular. I don’t know why.” Besides machinima -- narrative videos made from captures of virtual-world scenes -- Kahle’s archive includes about 2,000 videogame “speed runs,” recordings of creators’ “efforts to go though these games as fast as they can,” he said. “These things are downloaded tens of thousands of times a day. These things are enormously popular. We don’t know why.”

Archiving virtual worlds will inspire creativity by giving participants reason to build creations that are worth saving, Kahle said. Users will decide that “if they invest in your world, it will really last.”

Archiving must be redefined in the preservation of virtual worlds, Kahle said. “If we don’t keep things in use, they will die,” Kahle said. A virtual-worlds archive has “got to be interesting enough to the next generation to keep it alive,” he said. Current Web sites should link to old but working versions of virtual worlds in which users can “hang out,” he said. “Wouldn’t that be a fabulous remix opportunity,” taking snippets from different virtual times and places in new works, Lowood said. That would let “people work with history in a way they can’t in the real world.”

And inexpensive Web cams can redefine oral histories that have been long “dull” recollections, Kahle said. “We can reinvent oral histories to be much more vibrant” by taking a journalistic approach that, for instance, captures developers “sweating just before the release.” Promising to withhold release of recordings for a year encourages subject companies not to “go into PR mode,” he said. -- Louis Trager

Metaverse U Notebook…

Google will release technology tools to increase the use of Google Earth in activist campaigns, a company representative said. And the representative, Google Earth Outreach Manager Rebecca Moore, wouldn’t deny speculation Sunday at the Metaverse U conference at Stanford University that her company will take on Second Life by creating a virtual world based on Google Earth. “If I were to talk about any of those [efforts] -- boy,” Moore said. “I definitely think the two” -- mapping and virtual worlds -- “need to come together.” She spent most of her presentation discussing successful uses of Google Earth to create advocacy pieces. They involve disasters and land-use matters in remote places. Moore cited the actual examples of farmers in India seeking seek compensation for property losses, indigenous peoples trying to protect the Amazon, West Virginia opponents of a coal-mining technique that blasts away mountain tops, and her own opposition to logging in the Santa Cruz Mountains near Silicon Valley, which led to her job at Google. Activists embellish Google Earth captures with colored shading, icons, text, animation and sound to create persuasion pieces on topics that journalists won’t cover, often because of government censorship or unwelcoming geography, Moore said. Mapping can be “a form of propaganda,” she said. “I will admit it. But one of the advantages of Google Earth is that it’s objective… What is put on it is up to you.” She wouldn’t specify what tools Google plans to provide activists or when. “There’s not a great deal of narrative control now,” Moore said of Google Earth. “It’s something we know we need, and that’s all I'm going to say about it.”