Fixing and Improving Licensing

 

Hello Sansar Community,

With the release of our Licensing system last week, we made some mistakes that negatively impacted our creators. We are sorry for that, and our team is working hard to fix and improve Licensing. As a result of your feedback, we are making some changes to Licensing.

In our latest update, The Thumbs Up Release, we added “Save to Inventory” and “Licensing”. “Save to Inventory” allows you to add lights and scripts (and more) to an object and save that as one combined object into your inventory. “Licensing” allows a user to upload an item to the store and have it remixed and resold by others.

This combination of features means that someone could sell a Desk Lamp on the store and you could buy it, add a light, save it to your inventory and re-upload it to the store, and both creators will get paid Sansar Dollars. Pretty cool.

However, this created a few issues, particularly with items created prior to the implementation of Licensing.

So what’s changing?

Items in the store are now either considered “Unlicensed” or Licensed. Please note this does not apply to wearable items. We are referring to items that can be placed in an Experience: objects, scripts, objects with animations, objects with lights etc.

Items uploaded to the store before the latest release on October 9th 2018, including items bought before that date that are in your inventory, are now considered “unlicensed”.

That is to say they have no License, because they were made before we implemented that feature. By extension of this, we cannot give them a License, because we did not have the systems in place to track the necessary information. Therefore an unlicensed item can never be re-sold by another user. Once an unlicensed item, always an unlicensed item.

Items created and uploaded to the store after the implementation of Licensing are considered “Licensed” items.

With that out of the way, here are the changes you can expect very soon:

• All “unlicensed” items (items that were created before the latest release on October 9th 2018) will once again be editable. That is to say they will be as editable as they were before we implemented Licensing.
• This includes editing values in scripts, editing materials and all other object properties.
• In addition to this, you will be able to use Save to Inventory on “unlicensed” items.
• However, you will not be able re-sell these unlicensed items on the store. This would be a personal use of Save to Inventory. This will be the same for any future purchases from our store of these older unlicensed items.
• For newer Licensed items (created since our latest Release) we will be adding the ability to set permissions for editing materials - either locking them, or allowing people to change them - without having to give “Full Permissions” on said item.
• However, to enable this option we have to make any item uploaded to the store between the last Release (October 9th) and before our next Release, automatically have editable materials, as well as being a Licensed item.

This is an unfortunate part of exposing editing materials as an option. We apologize for the inconvenience this causes you, particularly if you have already uploaded Licensed items to the Store.

Further down the line in a later Release, we will update this system again to surface what is, and what is not, an editable parameter on an object.

For instance: you buy a Licensed item from the store with a script, that does not let you edit its parameters. We still want to allow you to see everything you might want to know about that script’s parameters. This will come in a second update to Licensing.

This design is not necessarily the final design that will make it into Sansar

 

This has become a huge focus on the Sansar team, and know that we are still open to hearing your feedback. You can reach out to us in Discord, or on Twitter, and you can join us for our next Product Meetup in Sansar tomorrow.

We plan to get these fixes and improvements out to you as soon as we possibly can, once they are cleared to be safe to implement (without breaking something else along the way).

Thanks again for believing in us,

- The Sansar Team

FAQ

I have something in my inventory I imported prior to October 9th, that I have never uploaded to the store. Can I still do that?

Yes. If you have an object in your inventory that you have never placed in an experience while in Edit Mode, then you can still upload it to the store as an Unlicensed item. If you have ever placed it in an experience, even if you didn’t Build it, then it can never be uploaded to the store.

 

How do I update items in my inventory/in an experience to be Licensed items?

You cannot. If it was imported into Sansar before October 9th it will always be an Unlicensed item. The only way to create a Licensed item is to re-import it into Sansar.