Self Hosted User Inventory

Content and digital goods cannot have value without scarcity. Art and other digital assets are expensive to produce and should be considered a valuable contribution to the virtual world, supporting trade and commerce.

The distributed platform nature of HiFi in the spirit of Apache or Nginx means that the asset server must be distributed, if not built in to the region servers that come with everyone's download. The goal would be to make this viable for commerce by providing safety for content creators, and opening up avenues to distribute and sell content, as a single unified market place and asset server would be impossible for the new virtual world to scale properly without imposing too much strain on any one entity monetarily, as well as placing too much power in one place.

I see the new virtual world as belonging to everyone, and regulated fairly to provide equal opportunity for all creators by ensuring safety of their work.

-- Raz

Main Goals:

• Purchase from anybody with any method of payment (e.g. shopping cart websites, or paypal)
• Enforce content protection
• Content authentication to original creator
• User responsible for backing up their own inventory
• VR Interface and also Desktop Interface

Thoughts:

• The easiest but most likely wrong way would be to sign and authenticate "official builds" that join a network, but that would go against the open source nature of the project, and would put too much power to a select group of individuals who code sign.
• Sign and authenticate official builds, however allow unofficial builds onto the network but block their capability to push self-hosted content whether they have a certificate or not, unless in their own sandbox?
• Using one of the copy protection methods below, reject rendering objects or mark copied objects in an obvious fashion when a client finds a copied object when matched against loaded/cached inventory. Certified object would take precedence as the authentic object.
  • This would mean that content protection would depend on first occurrence in blockchain.
    • How to deal with stolen content brought to blockchain before original owner does? (e.g. - model brought in from sketchfab or turbosquid without creator permission)
      • DMCA may still be viable here, however it should be affordable/approachable by individual artists who may not be able to afford legal fees or anyone to work on their behalf.
        • https://www.dmca.com/faq/How-much-does-it-cost
        • Provide a blacklist accessible to judgements and law enforcement which utilizes copy protection and blockchain certificate?
  • Creators should have the ability to mark their content "remixable"
    • Remixed downstream content should not be allowed to supersede source content and lock out further remixes, or preceding source content.
    • Should only be available on certificates, not URL pulled models.
  • URL pulled models should still incur copy detection, even if its a game asset, there should be a clear marker that a copy has been detected. This alone as an annoyance be enough to deter commonplace rips and encourage original assets or builds.

Possible Approaches

• Use a blockchain technology like ethereum to maintain certificates

Copy Protection Methods

Post copy protection technologies here. Will need a way to figure out how to employ these without a central server.

• Reed-Solomon Codes
  • https://www.cs.cmu.edu/~guyb/realworld/reedsolomon/reed_solomon_codes.html
• Cyclic Redundancy Check
  • https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Cyclic_redundancy_check 
• Steganography
  • Redundantly store creator information throughout model.