Q4 Townhall Q&A Answers

IMVU staff Joepez not only introduces a very special guest to everyone but also answered 10 of the questions from the thread based on user comments and moderator feedback. Those questions regarding Tiers, previewer, flagging, derivations and copyright have been “answered”. However, the fate of Dev Tokens is not decided yet and they also stated that “This will be the first time we do a real hard look at our economy” ….. Read on to get the details.

1) What are the plans for Previewer? What are the plans to support other 3d tools?

[Joe’s Response]
First let me say that the previewer is still high on our project list, now let me explain where we stand. Over the last few weeks we’ve been trying to decide what to do with the previewer in the long run. Our internal debate comes down to two issues: Resources & Core Business. IMVU’s core business is our shared experience platform, not in writing C++ previewer applications. Similarly we only have two resources allocated to all three of my areas of responsibility (Content Creator, Reseller, and Economy programs). So, what we are debating right now are two options:

Option 1 – Partner
We’ve exploring a potential partnership who makes a similar tool with a lot more features. Since a previewer-esq tool is core to their business, they have plenty of resources allocated toward its development. These talks are in a very early stage, so it might not happen, but if it does then we’d actively work with them to ensure no functionality is lost and their tool will meet our needs in the future.

Option 2 – Build & Support
If Option 1 doesn’t work out, then we will need to come up with a better plan than we currently have to maintain the previewer. Right now we allocate a little bit of time each development cycle to address previewer bugs. What we would most likely do is start allocating 2-3 months worth of time over the course of the year to address features/functions enhancements until such time more resources become available.

Regardless of which option we end up with we will come up with a viable long-term solution. Under both options we are planning to support the Collada file format which will open up the previewer to dozens of 3d apps. And I would suspect sometime in Q1 there will be a complete previewer overhaul (either a replacement all together from a partner or a revamp from us).

2) Flagging and being able to alter flagged items?

[Joe’s response]
As stated in the summer Q&A, we’ve done some concept work on a new flagging process. We are in the process of fleshing out how to implement the new process to support a revamp of the flagging process to make it more automated.

The long-term plan (scheduled to start in Q1 of 2008) will be to automate the majority of the flagging process as it relates to products, and provide CCs with the opportunity to address their product flags before anything happens. As soon as this project starts we’ll let the community know.

3) What’s going on with the economy, credits, DTs, etc.? (Merger of several questions)

[Joe’s response]
Whomever said analyzing the economy is easy should be beat. For the last month we’ve been working on a project to analyze our economic information. It is sort of like peeling an onion, you pull off a few layers, and there are more layers underneath or you realize you’re missing the other half of the onion. This will be the first time we do a real hard look at our economy, so we also want to make sure we do it right.

The outcome of this work will allow IMVU to make some thoughtful decision on the future of our economic structure. So at this time I can’t tell you what the fate of DTs might be, but we are considering all possibilities and want to back that up with hard data and analysis. In the meantime if you have any ideas on what we can do with DTs, please email us at: contentcreatorprogram@imvu.com with your ideas.

4) Future progress of tiers.

[Joe’s Response]
As many of you are aware we launched the 1st Alpha iteration of Tiers in October. So far to date tiers are functioning as we expected. Our modeling predicted that we would have a lot of people at tier 1, and few at tier 7, which is the case. However this can and will change in the future as people’s activities carry them up and down the tier curve. For the Alpha we wanted to test the engine to make sure it works and expose some of the workings to gather feedback.

The feedback to date has been mixed. There are some folks to love it, some who have criticism, and some who are indifferent. We are taking in all of the feedback and mapping that to our next steps where we can.

Since tiers are critical to many other core infrastructure projects that we are working on, we have decided to change the roll-out/development plans. Originally we had planned on a series of separate projects to further flesh out tiers. Instead we will now be wrapping future tiers updates and enhancements to other core projects. So the next update to tiers will happen with the Peer Review project currently underway. This approach will ensure that the tiers project is continuously being reviewed and tightly integrated into the other projects we are working on.

5) Happenings in staff communication

[Joe’s Response]
I’d like to think that staff communication has improved since the start of the year. While I’ll be the first to admit that I have slacked off a little bit in the last month because of this economic analysis and some projects, Cliff has been doing a commendable job given his many community responsibilities. But in the end that’s not really good enough. So we are in the process of interviewing several very highly qualified candidates for a full-time community manager role for the CC and Reseller programs. They’ll also be responsible for establishing our tier 1 technical support as well for the same communities. We are pretty far along in the process and expect to be bringing on someone in the very near future. (Fingers crossed for December).

Once we hire that resource we’ll be sitting down to map out how we can better support the community as a whole and step up our response times.

6) Derivations

[Joe’s Response]
We get this question a lot and I want to make IMVU’s position on derivations very clear: We are all for them. We believe derivations offer up a great way for folks to share their work. Think of derivations as the closet thing the IMVU economy can come to as raw materials. I won’t go into all of the reasons why this is good in this Q&A, but derivations serve a very important economic and creative function at IMVU. That being said we also recognize that there are legitimate reasons to not allow derivations in specific cases (unique item, personal item, etc), so everyone has the ability to turn-off derivations when they submit their products. Derivations are left on by default, since this supports our philosophy, but can easily be set to no.

For those who do turn derivations, you get the benefit of any income from those who derive from your goods (you do get paid when someone uses your product), and contributing to the creative pool of resources at IMVU. If you believe you aren’t getting paid your derivation fees please email: contentcreatorsprogram@imvu.com.

7) CC Bill of Rights?

[Joe’s Response]
We have been working on a document that covers this concept. The reason it hasn’t progressed as quickly as liked, is as we have explored creating a document, we discovered some areas of our business that needed shoring up. For instance, we don’t have a publicly available document about our penalty structure. So we are in the process of writing that. Similarly we wanted to add in a line about privacy and realized that it wasn’t covered in the recently updated ToS, so we had that added.

Now I do have to say a “Bill of Rights” is probably not what the final document will be called. The reason for this is, the term Bill of Rights implies a very specific type of document, a set of rights that could conflict with our other policies, leading to confusion. So while the name isn’t finalized we are taking our lead from JetBlue and putting together a document which summarizes in plain language the key rules/expectations that are spelled out in other policies across IMVU.

We are actively moving this one forward, and it is very important to me that we get as much of the parts rights as we do this single document.

9) Copyright

[Joe’s Response]
As we have stated in our ToS, VG policy, and numerous forum posts, IMVU as a company respects the copyright laws and takes any infractions very seriously. We follow US laws as they apply to the enforcement of copyright, which is why we have the DMCA take-down process. Without getting into the legal specifics, IMVU is considered a service provider, and thus covered by the safe-harbor positions of the DMCA. Accordingly we are not responsible for policing other’s copyrights: 1) because we don’t own the copyrights and thus can’t enforce them and 2) we don’t know what an individual company’s position on the usage of their works might be.

Let’s talk about 1 for a second. IMVU owns its copyrights (to our name, logo, etc), and we can and do enforce our protections as spelled out in the DMCA where we can. However no-one but IMVU can enforce our copyright, since we are the author of the works, and the rights owners, we have the responsibility of monitoring and enforcing our rights. It is not expected that others would take up the enforcement on our behalf, as this would place an unrealistic burden on the shoulders of others to monitor and know how to enforce our rights.

Now let’s talk about 2. Every rights holder chooses to enforce their rights differently. Some rights holders are very strict about their works usage, others choose to take a more relaxed approach. For example: Disney is very good at enforce their rights around the globe, while many smaller entertainment brands let their communities use their works so long as they aren’t damaging the original brand. No intermediary (such as IMVU) can possibly know who wants to do what with their rights in what medium. There are many companies that choose to enforce their rights in one place and not in another. So we can’t just guess at what a holder wants to do, and according to the law, it is the rights holder responsibility to do just that.

Now to make this matter even more complicated, IMVU is an international company, and even in the US we have more than 1 method of protecting a work. There are: patents, copyrights, TM, Trade Secrets, Creative Commons, and numerous licensing processes (GPL, EULA, etc). The US our system is complex already, now toss in international and it becomes mind boggling.

So IMVU has to figure out how to maneuver in this complex world, but we need to tread lightly. In the case of copyright we believe we are doing our best and complying with the law as required, in line with the rest of the industry, and protects both IMVU and our community.

10)3 in one: A) Feedback for the CC program (missing transactions, feedback, etc); B) Name changing; c) Reporting

[Joe’s Response]
A) For any ideas, feedback, questions, concerns, problems please email: contentcreatorprogram@imvu.com . This is the OFFICIAL email address for the program and the one that gets tracked and monitored.

B) We’ve been making a slow transition to the CC name. We’ve changed the forums and now navigation and most pages. We are working to change over everything, and most likely you’ll see it referred to as Creator program in our navigation and other spots since that’s a little shorter and easier to navigate.

C) While we may make some enhancements to the reporting, long-term our plans are to provide the basics, and the APIs to the reporting system and let the community develop their own tools and methods to handle their reporting.