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Manufacturing, Trade, and Intellectual Property in Dual Universe


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In the devblog "LUA Scripting and Distributed Processing Units" there was an intersting line that caught my attention, when talking about building ships.

 

"If you are smarter than others, you can get the job done in a better way, get an edge in battle, or in trade by launching the new Falcon X-42 superfighter and change the balance of game combat with new tactics and possibilities."

 

The developer presents the possibility of using your fancy programming and engineering knowledge to design a kickass fighter, and then selling it. Right away a concern appeared for me, whats to stop someone from taking apart my fancy X-42 superfighter, figuring out how to build it, and making their own? More importantly, if i run a small time Weapons Manufacturing company, whats to stop a rival from creating their own after reverse engineering it? In the real world there is the concept of Intellectual Property, where even if someone does steal my design, i can sue them as recourse. Outside of a highly advanced emergent geopolitical construct, that sort of recourse wouldn't be available to me. 

 

The only thing i can think of is using the tag systems so that when i sell a construct to another player, i'm only selling them the "pilot" tag to prevent reverse engineering, but would that work in game? Does the game currently support a way to prevent a player from reverse engineering like that?

 

It seems to me like this would be a pretty crucial thing to consider when it comes to emergent gameplay. If you can't prevent reverse engineering, at high levels of emergent gameplay,  alliances, coalitions and such, independent or semi-independent Manufacturing groups of all stripes would be severely penalized. If the Mega-Corp can just copy your slick new design and mass produce it, why bother?

 

I am very interested to see what you guys all think! I would also like to say that as an off and on EVE online player, i am crazy psyched for this game even at a really early stage of development

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I'm concerned about this too. I do think using tags will be one way to do it. The only problem I see is if you only give a person the "pilot" tag are they not allowed to repair it? Wouldn't they be able to figure out most of the engineering just by looking at the exterior anyway?

 

Maybe the developers can create a script that evaluates any ship/weapon for similarity to other assets on the market? Like if your ship is greater than 80% similar it won't be allowed to be put on the market until you make further changes... Unfortunately, I can see a system like this having workarounds.

 

I also think that you should be able to but your design on the market to be mass produced by other players, just so long as the original designer gets payed a cut every time the ship is produced.

 

I'm interested to see if anyone else has ideas for a solution to this.

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I'm concerned about this too. I do think using tags will be one way to do it. The only problem I see is if you only give a person the "pilot" tag are they not allowed to repair it? Wouldn't they be able to figure out most of the engineering just by looking at the exterior anyway?

 

Maybe the developers can create a script that evaluates any ship/weapon for similarity to other assets on the market? Like if your ship is greater than 80% similar it won't be allowed to be put on the market until you make further changes... Unfortunately, I can see a system like this having workarounds.

 

I also think that you should be able to but your design on the market to be mass produced by other players, just so long as the original designer gets payed a cut every time the ship is produced.

 

I'm interested to see if anyone else has ideas for a solution to this.

Well one solution would be to have a review system but that would take time and things would still slip though. Or just literally have a legal system ingame.

 

I'm also interested how this would be done as I like to reverse almost everything (and your Objective Driveyards has a whole section for reverse engineering things)

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I'm also interested how this would be done as I like to reverse almost everything (and your Objective Driveyards has a whole section for reverse engineering things)

 

Oh yeah, looks like my Co-Founder Sgt.Toothpaste put that in there and I didn't even notice  :lol:

 

Another perspective is that reverse engineering isn't such a bad thing in the long run, so long as you aren't creating direct copies. As players continue to produce more and more quality designs, you would hope that best-practices become common knowledge in the universe. I guess the key is to make reverse engineering challenging enough that it can't be abused.

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Well one solution would be to have a review system but that would take time and things would still slip though. Or just literally have a legal system ingame.

 

I'm also interested how this would be done as I like to reverse almost everything (and your Objective Driveyards has a whole section for reverse engineering things)

The way I envisioned it, ODY would only reverse-engineer tech salvaged from wrecks or captured ships in war time, to get an edge on whoever we are fighting. Simply buying a hull and picking it apart is completely different in my opinion. I added the reverse engineering section (sorry Code lol) because I realized it would be a vital part of an organized war effort. 

In war time, whatever restrictions that prevent reverse-engineering of the slimy, economic-trickery kind will hopefully be lifted to allow reverse-engineering of the tactical kind.

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Establishing a brand could be a good way to counteract design stealing - if it was an original, one-time produced construct though, I don't know how much that would help. And of course, a higher power to manage brands and patents would be necessary to issue copyrights and patents.

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I'd argue that reverse-engineering constructs/blueprints is actually a good thing and makes the game more entertaining if done right.

 

tl;dr: An encryption system allows you to protect the important technology so a player that spends a lot of time discovering something isn't cheated, but also allows for others to use your innovation to invent other things.

 

First, I think there are two things to discuss: what you are protecting and the motivation for protection.

 

What you are protecting

 

Say I invent a computer monitor. Do I get to have protection over all electronic displays? Just ones that connect on a certain interface? Just ones that are shaped like mine? When you file for a patent in real life, it's not usually the physical form you are looking to protect, but the technology underneath it. There are many different computer monitor technologies, and the reason we keep getting bigger, faster, more 3D-ish, curved, etc. monitors is that it's the underlying technology that is patented, not the form it comes in.

 

With that in mind, I propose that players aren't allowed to patent something like "rocket engine" but instead "solid-fuel rocket engine using this grain I found on a planet". Allow for the protection of the technology, not the particular form it came in. That way many different types of rocket engines can be invented, even many solid-fuel rocket engines, and if what I really did was figure out how to turn a resource I found into a fuel, it starts to allow for other applications of my technology to be found.

 

Motivation for protection

 

I get the idea of wanting protection. It takes a lot of time and money to get a working construct/blueprint. When you have completed your design and tested that it works, you want to be able to reap the benefits of your innovation. If you then don't have any protection from someone logging in and reverse engineering what you have done in a much shorter time frame, the original innovator loses out big time and you'll lose the interest of innovators.

 

However, there are some drawbacks as well. If I'm allowed to protect my invention too fiercely then I have effectively created myself a monopoly which would allow me to set whatever price I want without worry of competition and ruin the economic system that is being built. I can also just sit back and not bother innovating anymore because I will have a continuous revenue stream that is not threatened. This also gives me an unfair advantage in the economy because my buying power will be so much greater than others (assuming my tech is popular). So I feel both the extremes would both lead to a negative gameplay experience, and I feel the answer is somewhere in the middle.

 

Proposal

How about an encryption system for the core technology of your innovation? You have a certain level of security, but is still leaves the possibility for a thief or copy-cat who wants to spend enough time and money (just like you did to create the construct/blueprint) to crack the encryption and get the design. A side benefit is this system would allow for an encryption market to also be created and sold to innovators. Going one step further, this also opens up the market for decrypters  (maybe black market?), which I think would lead to a really interesting cat and mouse security struggle. The longer you want to be the only game in town, the more you need to invest in encryption. Hello security industry!

 

The other benefits of an encryption system is that not only you can choose to sell your technology to the other players, but you'll also be able to license it. Did you discover a way to turn a resource you found on your planet into a fuel source? Is that resource the only viable abundant fuel source in that sector of the galaxy? You might have discovered how to make a rocket engine out of it, but what about someone wanting to make a automobile engine or power plant? License the tech to them and profit when they do. This will bring a real interesting business aspect to the game that I think has been missing from all the builder games I've played.

 

Whatever system is decided on, I think we need to be careful how much protection we give on what so that the game isn't dominated by the first wave of players and prevents newer players from joining later on.

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Well... lets see...

 

The outward design anyone can see... but depending on how robust the voxel editing tools are... not everyone is going to be able to reproduce it.  I've seen and played with voxel editors before and seen people do amazing things that I will never be able to do.  But that's just how something looks...

 

What really will give your design the edge is the code you've written to get all the parts to work well together.  And that's all wrapped up inside the control boxes placed throughout the ship.  If you simply make those unreadable to anyone but the creator... then no one is going to be easily copying them.  

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I don't have experience with voxel editors, so I can't really speak too much to that.

 

As for the DPUs (I just read the blogpost about them), I think you should be able to copy them, after breaking the encryption protecting them. I think that would add a really fun element to the game.

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Well... lets see...

 

The outward design anyone can see... but depending on how robust the voxel editing tools are... not everyone is going to be able to reproduce it. I've seen and played with voxel editors before and seen people do amazing things that I will never be able to do. But that's just how something looks...

 

What really will give your design the edge is the code you've written to get all the parts to work well together. And that's all wrapped up inside the control boxes placed throughout the ship. If you simply make those unreadable to anyone but the creator... then no one is going to be easily copying them.

This is it. Just about everything in game (that you'd actually care to protect) is the code for how things operate. If the devs have a creator protection on scripts, which they'd better or the game probably won't be worth playing, then it shouldn't be a problem. Copying the construct without the code would leave the copier with a nice ornamental paperweight. That's about it, unless they put in a ton of work to recode everything.

 

That said, do we really need a legal system in game? Maybe the players could set something up if they can convince everyone to follow the rules. But I think that will be unlikely.

 

I will be a builder/coder in game. And I intend to protect my creations. If people decide to copy my work and sell it to others, I will be willing to pay large sums to any mercenary who can prove they have terminated said copycat and destroyed everything they've built.

 

Ruthless? Yes. But it should be a sufficient deterrent.

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I will be a builder/coder in game. And I intend to protect my creations. If people decide to copy my work and sell it to others, I will be willing to pay large sums to any mercenary who can prove they have terminated said copycat and destroyed everything they've built.

 

Ruthless? Yes. But it should be a sufficient deterrent.

I would happily do that job.

 

I think that a system where tag creation, simiriality of designs and players protecting their own designs themselves would probably do the trick

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Protecting scripts is pretty easy, after they're set up they could just be marked as "unreadable" by the creator and its done.

Protecting hardware is a lot harder, but there could be a way for that too, like creating a blackbox surrounding the hardwar that destroys everything inside if its broken, the question for that is, will we be able to create such a thing ourselves or do we need something prebuilt for it.

 

I myself will most likely try to add triggers for explosives on critical parts, that means if the voxel covering it is removed, as long as thats possible.

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from what i remember from reading the dev blogs is that partly there is an idea of taking something that someone made and improving on it. to that end i dont think being able to recreate and add onto a ship is a bad thing. but i do think that the script that comes with a ship should be locked from anyone but the original creator. BUT! i also believe that when you sell a ship you sell its blueprint not specifically the ship. or maybe you can sell the blueprint and the ship and the blueprint helps you build it, and if the script is prebuilt into the blueprint and the person building your ship from blueprint cant see the script then they would still be able to figure out how the ship is put together on the hardware side, just not the coding side. 

 

so i understand the desire to protect your property but at the same time there is a beauty in people reverse engineering and improving upon. but perhaps this should be limited to people that are in the same organization. When this game first comes out i may dabble in the scripts but depending on the complexity i may have to wait till iv finished some more schooling in real life on coding and such before i can really get into it. so on that note ill happy hire myself out as a merc lol

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Sounds to me like a great opportunity for emergent gameplay. You infringe on my copyright? I'll hire a mercenary group to "enforce" my copyrights.

Perhaps players could form some kind of legal system, as was mentioned. If rebuilding civilisation is the goal, building a democratic legal system would be a hell of an achievement, as opposed to just lawless space cowboys.

 

There's also the possibility of DRM style code in LUA, which could wreak all manner of havoc if certain conditions weren't met (ie, hash of shipID + license code doesn't match stored value, turn on all the engines and overload the power core).

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Basically the same as in RL would be cool.

The code usually gets protected really well, and the mechanic side of things, well, you can just open things and look, how it was done.

And that is, what they stated.

 

As the true knowledge goes into manufaturing the components, and the code.

Plus making sure everything on the mechanic/Electronic/whatever side is working.

If the Voxel mesh will be static, that one might be somewhat easier...

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  • 4 weeks later...

Let them reverse engineer it, but make it difficult to engineer in the first place.

 

If you can fund a team of 20 scientists work for months to reverse engineer something, then you should gain the rewards. However, if you have a copyright system, as part of a greater legal system, then you might be only able to use this item in the frontier planets, as central planets will prosecute and confiscate.

 

Yes, police (or mercenaries) are sent to recover gear. Lots of game play opportunities to have a footprint of a tech that belongs to one group, and you find others who are using unregistered copies, they instantly become targets.

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Informations should be valuable, so there's need for at least an option, to choose to encrypt the file to make it readable or not. 

Perhaps a "hacking" tree in the same tree giving access in the DPUs creation, to be able to decrypt a DPU. If you find one intact that is. I expect professionals to set a deadman's switch if the DPU detects the ship being immobilased and having extensive damage or borded beyond a security point by unauthorised personel. Which would give birth to ruffians of course, but hey, if you didn't vet, you took a bet.

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