Category Archives: Karma

CopyBot

Great article by Jennifer Granick, on the issues facing Linden labs, the creators of Second life, due to the bursting on the scene of CopyBot. For those not familiar with the havoc a new program called CopyBot, is causing to the economy of second life, below is the summary of the issue from the article:

Businesses in Second Life are in an uproar over a rogue software program that duplicates “in world” items. They should be. But the havoc sewn by Copybot promises to transform the virtual word into a bold experiment in protecting creative work without the blunt instrument of copyright law.

Second Life, operated by Linden Labs, has developed differently from other virtual worlds because it allows custom content and encourages in-world enterprise. It’s a hospitable place for creators to sell virtual goods like clothing, furniture and hairstyles.

As in any economy, the value of those goods depends on their scarcity: people will pay more for a fantastic hairdo that no one else has. If Copybot can indiscriminately duplicate these items, no one has to pay the creator for them. Copying is a value killer.

As a result, Second Life merchants are understandably up in arms over the software, reportedly closing their stores until the problem is resolved.

In the short term, Linden lab is looking to allow copyright holders to sue folks using CopyBot for infringement in courts. This is unlikely to solve the problem as most people don’t have the time or the money to pursue such a case. The other longer term approach Linden Labs is looking at is building a system of norms, kinda like a reputation system, I guess, to incentivize copyright compliance without getting legal about it.

The idea that innovation can flourish in the absence of copyright enforcement is not as heretical as it might seem.

Take the fashion industry. As law professors Chris Sprigman and Kal Raustiala write in their paper on the subject, neither copyright nor patent law prohibit copying fashion designs. There is some protection for the brand associated with the apparel, but no law prohibits a knock-off Chanel suit, peasant skirt or narrow lapel. And yet fashion is highly innovative, with new styles several times a year, despite low IP protection.

Similarly, professors Emmanuelle Fauchart and Eric von Hippel write that haute French cuisine (.pdf) is another area with low IP protection, yet high levels of innovation and creativity. No law prevents copying recipes. Instead, French chefs have developed social norms, much like those Linden Labs seeks to empower, against exact copying, dissemination of tricks of the trade and adopting significant innovations without crediting the chef responsible.

Failure to follow these norms results in reputation harm, including ostracism.

Such a norms-based (rather than law-based) system might work in Second Life. Norms-based systems are context-sensitive and highly responsive to the concerns of the relevant community. They are also cheaper and quicker than litigation. But norms-based systems can only work if the people in the community value the rewards the community can bestow or withhold.

The issue is how can Linden labs expose enough information on individuals without compromising their privacy, such that the community is able to make a judgement about the individual’s compliance of established norms. This will require Linden labs to strike an interesting balance between privacy and transparency.

Another issue is the one pointed out in the article. How will Linden labs make sure that the norms in the community discourage copyright violations? In some real-world communities like some places in China and India etc., it is acceptable and even considered wise, to buy a fake Gucci purse instead of the real thing despite a difference in quality. In the virtual world, the quality of the copied products would be identical to the original products and so the downside of buying copied products will be much less. Would such communities develop in the virtual world of second life?

How would CopyBot effect the pricing power of the creator of the original goods? What is to prevent other vendors from ripping off the original goods and selling them at a lower price? This kind of arrangement will also provide a “plausible deniability” to end users and make the norm-based enforcement almost impossible.

I have no idea how these things will evolve. One thing is for sure…This is going to be interesting to watch.

Some other takes on this issue:

CopyBot, Community and Controversy

Second Guessing Property Value in Second Life

What is reputation?

There has been a lot of discussion about how to define and operationalize reputation for on-line communities. Bob Blakley in his beautifully written post – On the Absurdity of Owning One’s Identity – defines reputation as follows:

Your reputation is my story about you. You can’t own this by definition; as soon as you own it, it’s no longer my story about you; it instantly becomes an autobiography instead of a reputation.

James Kobielus has a different take on what reputation is:

Reputation isn’t an attribute of our identity, and it isn’t a story, really. It’s simply an assurance, confidence, or comfort level in which others regard our identity. It’s a vague, qualitative, holistic, often semi-conscious impression, calculated somewhere in the reptilian mind that has descended to us down through the ages. Quoting myself again:
…
“Relying parties—-the ultimate policy decision and enforcement points in any interaction—-need many levels of assurance if they’re going to do business with us. They gather assertions and data from many IdM “authorities” (authentication authorities, attribute authorities, etc.) before rendering their evaluations and opening their kimonos. They—-the relying parties—-make reputation evaluations based on information fed in from trusted authorities, from their own experiences with us, from whatever reputation-relevant data they can google across the vast field of received opinion and public record.”
Reputation is a computed halo—positive or negative–around our socially contextualized identities.
…
Reputation is a score computed by relying parties in order to determine whether or not to authorize the reputed party to access resources such as jobs, communities, romantic encounters, time of day, etc.
Reputation is an assurance that someone is worth our while.

This is an interesting take although it almost seems like James is defining the process of generating and evaluating trust based on reputation rather then reputation itself. Phil Windley et al in the paper “A Framework for Building Reputation Systems” have a multi-faceted definition of reputation

Reputation is one of the factors upon which trust is based. The is much confusion between trust and reputation. We consider reputation a building block for trust. We are not concerned in this paper with what other factors go into trust, how trust is built, or how trust is exchanged.

Reputation is someone else’s story about me. I can’t control what you say about me although I may be able to affect the factors you based your story on. Every person should be able to have their own story about me.

Reputation is based on identity. Reputation, as someone else’s story, isn’t part of your identity, but is based on an identity or set of identities.

Reputation exists in the context of community. Any given context will have specific factors for what is important in determining reputation. This is different than saying “communities have a reputation about someone.” Communities do not have beliefs, only people have beliefs including beliefs about what others believe.

Reputation is a currency. While you can’t change reputation directly, reputation can be used as a resource. For example, Paul Resnick et. al. has shown the value of a positive eBay reputation [Res00a].

Reputation is narrative. Put another way, reputation varies with time. Reputation is dynamic because the factors that affect it are always changing. Reputation may require weaving together plot lines from different contexts.

Reputation is based on claims (verified or not), transactions, ratings, and endorsements.. How these factors are used in determining reputation is up to each individual. Individuals may use various evidence in making claims or proposing a certain rating or endorsement. The penalty for making false claims or giving false endorsements varies from context to context.

Reputation is multi-level. A reputation isn’t just based on facts, but is also based on other’s beliefs about the target of the reputation. These beliefs are signaled to others in various ways depending on the context.

Multiple people holding the same opinion increases the weight of that opinion. Reputation systems should have some way of weighting scores. As a related issue, repeat behavior is another way of weighting reputation.

Most of these points make a lot of sense…Reputation is really a key ingredient for establishing trust…and trust really is grease to the wheels of commerce and social interactions. Reputation is more then sum total of a person’s transactions on sites like eBay, it is really more of a person’s interactions in various communities.

One of the other characteristics of reputation, which is not captured in any of the definitions, is that reputation can be transferred. E.g. if a high reputation person recommends a particular person, it improves the reputation of the recommended. It’s almost like the recommended person can bask in reflected glory of the high reputation recommender. We should know, as we are in the process of approaching a number of people for help with our startup. In this process, one of the key things we think about is, what is the best way to approach and get introduced to the target, such that we maximize our potential for success. It will be interesting to see on-line reputation systems account for this critical characteristic of reputation.

Karma in the Business World

The Times of India has an interesting article on the inflence of Bhagwat Gita on corporate America.

Suddenly, says Businessweek magazine in its latest issue, phrases from ancient Hindu texts such as the Bhagavad Gita are popping up in management tomes and on Web sites of consultants. Top business schools have introduced “self-mastery” classes that use Indian methods to help managers boost their leadership skills and find inner peace in lives dominated by work.

BW calls its “Karma Capitalism” — a gentler, more empathetic ethos that resonates in the post-tech-bubble, post-Enron zeitgeist. And where it used to be hip in management circles to quote from the sixth century B.C. Chinese classic The Art of War, it says, the trendy ancient Eastern text today is the more introspective Bhagavad Gita .

May be our blog byline had something to do with it too :-)…I have received a few emails about the meaning of the byline…I’ll explain it in a later post.

Social networks and the profit motive

The Blog Herald had an interesting review called Diggs for sale in organized fashion

User/Submitter is a new service that connects publishers with diggers. Have a story? Then hand over the cash and User/Submitters’ dig users will digg it for you – and you might even end up on the frontpage of Digg. That’s serious stuff, The Blog Herald knows that.

Publishers get to pay $20 and an additional $1 per dig, and digg users can get paid $0.50 for every 5 stories they digg. It seems real enough but I don’t really know, we’ll find out soon I’d reckon since the blogosphere tends to flush out the frauds.

Similarly there was another startup called PayPerPost profiled at TechCrunch.

The service is a marketplace for advertisers to pay bloggers to write about products for a fee. Commenters to our original post were polarized into those violently for and those againt the product. The key area of controversy is the fact that advertisers can mandate that posts be positive on the product, and disclosure of payment is optional for the blogger (screen shot at end of post shows sample available writing opportunities).

The main issue here is how can we incorporate the profit motive in the social networks? If a social network becomes useful enough, somebody will try to make money from it. Take comment spam as an example…No sooner did the blogs gain some popularity, spammers were creating splogs and comment spam to make money from them. So what can be done about it?

I think the answer is not a whole lot can be done to completely eliminate people from trying to make money from social networks. The issue is that in physical communities, in all interactions, users have to identify themselves. In online communities, it’s easier for users to participate without the constraint of location or without even identifying themselves. The communities pay for this ease of use and participation in terms of enabling various profit driven actors. There are still a few simple things that can be done with the design of the communities to be more effective in handling profit driven participants:

  • Community oriented monitoring of content
  • Incentivize positive participation
  • Penalize negative participation

This is not going to eliminate the profit motive from the social networks but it will help communities be more effective dealing with the issue. Slashdot did all these things and as a result is a whole lot more spam-proof than Digg. Also as expected, Slashdot pays a price for its sophisticated community design, in terms of more sophisticated user interaction model that reduces ease of use.

Mystery of online community

John C. Dvorak, the often controversial and flamboyant columnist at the PC magazine had an interesting post, related to the problems with virtual on-line communities.

The problem with on-line communities has been the lack of an identity infrastructure and other word-of-mouth mechanisms typically available in real-world communities. In real world communities like a church group or a professional group, word-of-mouth mechanisms provide a strong incentive to all participants to contribute positively to the shared interest of the group. In the virtual communities, where there is no physical presence required and there are no costs of joining new communities, none of these identify or word-of-mouth mechanisms that provide incentives for positive participation, exist. As a result most of the web conversation degenerate into a series of venting or spamming entries. So is it impossible to have a workable virtual community?

One of the communities John looked at in the article is Slashdot. Slashdot is a very successful community (over 100K members) that a number of my techie friends swear by. Slashdot replaces the real-world word-of-mouth mechanisms with its Karma/reputation scores in order to provide incentives to all members to contribute positively to the community. A lot of what Slashdot does is manual member-driven management of the moderation and meta-moderation system but the results are a vibrant community that provides a lot of value to its members. The takeaway then is that if one can provide the right incentives for positive participation along with a reliable identity mechanism, it is possible to have a vibrant on-line community. Now who is up to that challenge :-).

Introducing KarmaWeb

BIO
Jitendra has over 15 years of experience in software technology. He started his career as a software engineer in the EDA industry. In 2000, after his MBA, Jitendra joined Siebel systems as product manager for Siebel web platform – the platform used for all Siebel application to the web. When he left Siebel in April 2005, he was managing a team of 4 product managers and 3 product lines. In May 2005 Jitendra joined InQuira as director product management. At InQuira, he managed the company’s flagship search product. In his role, Jitendra set the course of product development and participated in closing a number of sizable deals.

Jitendra obtained his MBA degree from University of Chicago in 2000 and his B.Tech degree in EE from IIT Kanpur in 1993. At Chicago, he developed and marketed chibus.com, the on-line edition of university of Chicago GSB school paper. He won the best PM award in PM group at Siebel for his efforts on the initiative to make the Siebel architecture more flexible.

Update 5/20/2009: Jitendra started (late 2006) and sold (March, 2009)  SezWho – an online reputation service for social media participants. In the process Jitendra raised $1.3 M in VC money, built up massive distribution, met a lot amazing people, did some innovative deals and all in all had a blast…