Creating Collaboratively: Virtual Worlds, Legos and Ownership

Kevin Braddock posted Lego: thinking outside the box last Sunday, and it gave me pause. Legos have been important in my life; back in the 1970s they were my chief mode of entertainment - and for a while, in the mid 1990s, they resurfaced again as LEGO Mindstorms - allowing me to connect a computer to Legos in fun and interesting ways. So, with Kevin Braddock's article in mind, I re-explored Second Life for a bit of comparison.

Second Life allows one to build things as Legos would - except you don't have to buy prims (the building blocks of Second Life), and you can twist and texture the pieces until they scream. Like Legos, you can 'play with them by yourself' or 'collaboratively', but there are some differences.

With Legos, a collaborative work requires people to be in the same area - a novelty these days - which means direct interaction between human beings, as scary as that may be for some. It requires an understanding of who owns the Lego set(s) being used, as the parts belong to the owner. At the end of the day, the derivative work of the Lego set belongs to the person who owns the set; I suppose that if 2 or more people had sets involved they would both own the work but it is hardly practical to try to separate the pieces of two sets after they are used together unless you have Law Enforcement in riot gear nearby. Few people, if anyone, sell creations made of Legos.

With Second Life, a collaborative work requires people to be in the same virtual area. There is stunted interaction between human beings. Since prims can be created at will, the collaborative build's ownership is not dictated by who owns a 'set' - each creator has a real world copyright implicit in their work, but for all intents and purposes one individual has to own the creation afterwards if it is to be linked together as a single object - like a Lego building. We also have scripting involved, with different people owning different scripts. At the end of the day, each part of a collaborative creation is owned by the specific creator - and can be taken away at a moments notice to make the collaborative creation less than whole. One can collaborate within a group in Second Life and work together, but at the end of the day - if the collaborative work is to be linked together more permanently, one person has to own it to link it.

The same problem exists - ownership. With Legos, there are practicalities which enforce a certain set of unspoken rules when creating something with more than one person - ownership is fairly clear from the start. Within Second Life, it is not always so clear. Legos are good in their own way, as is Second Life, but they are distinct in that one is physical collaboration and one is not.

The non-physical collaboration which is available to anyone with an internet connection (17.8% of the global population right now) is inherited by Second Life because it has inherited the culture of collaboration from the web with one major exception: Collaborative licensing. On the regular web - where you are probably reading this - licensing along the lines of Creative Commons, Free Software and Open Source licensing allow derivative works with parts that were created by others - and these are largely seen as an asset. Second Life does not have that sort of licensing implicit in the code that runs it. There was a move to add some sort of licensing ability within Second Life along those lines some time ago. Making collaborative efforts better in this regard would certainly make a virtual world more worthwhile...

After all, look what it did for the Internet.