User:Robin Cornelius/tvp mods

based on IRC discussion some ideas how to change section 7 to be more acceptable to everyone involved

How about :-

2b)

You must not use any functionality that Linden Lab’s viewers do not have for exporting content from Second Life, except in a way that does not infringe 
on any copyright of any component that is being exported. Even if the content is set to “full permissions,” you must have an additional license from all 
copyright holders of each and every content component to be exported before exporting it.

7. Your Responsibility for Third-Party Viewers

If you are a user or Developer of Third-Party Viewers:

  1. All use and distribution of Third-Party Viewers must comply with Linden Lab policies and applicable law and must not:
        1. Violate or promote violation of the Second Life Terms of Service or Community Standards.
        2. Violate or promote violation of any applicable law or the rights of any individual or entity; or
        3. Expose Second Life users, Linden Lab, or third parties to legal liability or harm as determined by us in our sole discretion.
  
  2. Use of a 3rd party viewer is entirely at your own risk. Linden Lab shall not be responsible or liable for any Third-Party Viewers.

  3. Linden Lab does not provide customer support services for issues related to Third-Party Viewers. If you are a user of a Third-Party Viewer, you may
     contact us for customer support, but if we believe your issue is related to your Third-Party Viewer, we may not be able to assist you and may
     direct you to the Developer of the Third-Party Viewer. If you are a Developer, we urge you to provide customer support services for issues related
     to your Third-Party Viewer.

  4. If you are a user, we suggest taking reasonable precautions, including virus scanning, before installing and using a Third-Party Viewer. We suggest
     these precautions even for applications in the Viewer Directory because self-certification is no guarantee of an application’s compliance with this
     Policy.

9c . By “Third-Party Viewer,” we mean any software not supplied by Linden Lab that connects to our servers that support Second Life. Third-Party
     Viewers include software for viewing Second Life, any chat clients, utilities, bots, and proxies as well as applications that may not be listed
     in our Viewer Directory.

Proposals received

"and distribution" in 7.1 should be omitted, because a TPV may be distributed (under GPL) by random parties, such as people who roll distros, or fix security bugs for a distro. So "All use and distribution" is too wide an umbrella clause.

7.1.3 "as determined by us in our sole discretion" is not appropriate, and adds nothing useful to the TPV. So I'd suggest simply omit it, finish sentence on "harm".

---

Comments by Fleep Tuque:

QUESTION:  Can Linden Lab simply disagregate the "developers" and "users" in the policy?  It seems that that alone would resolve a large number of complaints.  If there were one TPV agreement for developers, and a second TPV agreement for users of TPVs, I think that would address many developers' concerns.

---

Comments by Aleric Inglewood:

There are sections that use "Third-Party Viewer" and apply to a "User" and a "Developer" at the same time. This is a problem because "Third-Party Viewer" should have a different meaning in those cases. In the case of a User, it is as described, although I'd change it to the following:

9c . By “Third-Party Viewer” we mean any software, not supplied by Linden Lab, that connects to our servers that support Second Life.
     This includes all software for viewing Second Life, any chat clients, utilities, bots as well as proxies,
     independent of being listed in our Viewer Directory or not.

Note that the action of actually connecting defines what a "Third-Party Viewer" is here, and logically the sections applying to "User" should then be applied to the user using it to connect.

However, the distinction between "Developer" and "User" in this policy makes clear that some sections should apply to "Developers" that are not a "Users" at the same time. In that case the "Third-Party Viewer" is not defined by the act of connecting, but by the fact that the developer writes and distributes the software for use with Second Life. I don't think that in that case it is possible to have the Developer "Agree" with anything (he never connects), so I suppose the intention here is to have the Developer agree at the moment that he uses SL himself, as a User. For such a developer/user the definition should be:

9c . By “Third-Party Viewer” we mean any software, not supplied by Linden Lab, intended to connect to our servers that support Second Life.
     This includes all software for viewing Second Life, any chat clients, utilities, bots as well as proxies,
     independent of being listed in our Viewer Directory or not.

By using "intended" the action is put with the Developer. Ie, if a developer writes software that is not intended to be used with Second Life, but someone else does (so it connects to), then why would the developer have to agree with anything? Assuming that the developer, in that case, does not want any responsibility, he can either never use SL (not even using the official viewer) or make it impossible to use his viewer on SL. However, if then someone removes that restriction again, with a most likely very small patch, then who is "the developer" of that connecting viewer?

Whatever is being done, I think that it is necessary to make a separate document for Users and for Developers. It is extremely unclear how Linden Lab can make Developers, that are non-Users, agree to anything. The GPL allows a developer to do anything they like within applicable law, meaning that if then that person agrees to a TOS and subsequently breaks it, there can be no legal consequences; at most the situation can be reversed by deleting the account of that person (which was already possible for ANY reason under the old TOS). While if someone does something truely illegal, like break Trademark laws, or stealing passwords with a key logger or a trojan, or launches a Denial Of Service attach against a SL server, such that legal action can already be taken even if this person is truely not a user of Second Life, then also no additional sections in some (user) policy are needed!

Bottom line, none of the references to "Developer" make sense and should be removed from the policy. I would therefore use the first 9c as written above by me, which applies to Users, and then remove "Developer" from every section that refers to Users and Developers and uses the term "Third-Party Viewer".

For example, section 2 states

(Things that apply) If you are a user or Developer of Third-Party Viewers [...] a) You must not circumvent our intended limitations on Second Life features."

This is not enforcable (assume it is not against a real law), and therefore should read instead:

(Things that apply) If you are a user of Third-Party Viewers [...]
a) You may not use a TPV that can circumvent our intended limitations on Second Life features.
We reserve the right to block any such viewer from our network, and to ban users that actually did circumvent our intended limitations on Second Life features.

---