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Several years ago I <a href="http://stringofbits.net/2006/11/decentralizing-second-life/">mused on the decentralization</a> of <a href="http://www.secondlife.com">Second Life</a>, Linden Labs' virtual world. Shortly after that post, I dropped out of the metaverse entirely for more than a year.<br/><br/>While I was off not paying attention, it seems that almost all of my predictions have come true. An open-source server for running a simulator and/or grid, <a href="http://opensimulator.org/wiki/Main_Page">OpenSim</a>, has been created. OpenSim appears to have solved many of the problems, and implemented many of the predictions, of my post from 2006.<br/><br/>One "problem" that remains, though, is economy.<br/><a name='more'></a><br/>The problem I outlined in my original post was that without a robust permissions scheme, economy would break down. Looking back, this seems terribly unlike me. Even in 2006, I had a strong dislike for anything that reeked of <a href="http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Digital_rights_management">Digital Rights Management</a> (DRM) even for the me that wrote that post. The permissions scheme employed by Second Life, after all, is just a DRM scheme. Like all DRM, it attempts to keep the user from using the things they purchase the way they would like, and like all DRM it is ultimately futile.<br/><br/><h3>Economy on a Closed Grid</h3><br/><br/>On the Second Life grid, you use real money to purchase virtual goods, which might have any of a number of permissions associated with them (modify, copy, and transfer). This permissions scheme is enforced by the fact that Second Life's grid is a walled garden; Linden Labs controls the asset server, so your data all exists in their hands. They safeguard it, preventing nefarious users from copying your creations.<br/><br/>Except, not really.<br/><br/>Like all DRM, this scheme just plain can't work. It can't. It violates information theory. It is mathematically impossible to give something to someone and then keep them from having it. This is a corollary to the <a href="http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Have_one%27s_cake_and_eat_it_too">Law of Cake</a>. I will elaborate.<br/><br/>For the Second Life viewer (aka client software) to render the object, it needs a copy of the object. This copy is necessarily sufficient to reproduce the object. Since any viewer that can speak the protocol can connect to Second Life, all you have to do is create a viewer that copies the object data being sent to it.<br/><br/>In fact, exactly <a href="http://wiki.secondlife.com/wiki/Help:CopyBot#CopyBot">such a viewer</a> has been written. Linden Labs responded to this viewer's existence by appealing to their Terms of Service. Whenever a user is caught using CopyBot, they are banned from Second Life.<br/><br/>In other words, there is no technical solution, only a social/legal one. This is because DRM is fundamentally flawed; it is trying to achieve the impossible.<br/><br/>Even without CopyBot, you could just decode cached objects from the official viewer's data cache. Programs have also been created which do this as well, although they are harder to use than the infamous CopyBot.<br/><br/>The point of all this is that the assumption that the Walled Garden protects your Intellectual Property is simply false. As with the rest of the Internet, piracy is a given. Anyone creating and distributing content on the web must start with that assumption.<br/><br/><h3>Economy on an Open Grid</h3><br/><br/>I haven't explored OpenSim enough to determine whether it supports any sort of monetary transaction, but let us assume that it does. In other words, assume that you can, via direct credit card payments or via a virtual currency, purchase virtual goods. Even if you can't do this yet, I have little doubt that OpenSim will support it eventually.<br/><br/>Now, let us further assume that I connect to OSGrid via a region that I run myself. This means that I control my own asset server, where my inventory resides. If I purchase an object with restrictive permissions on another region,
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