Terra Virtua a perfect VR Creative Commons Licensing platform?

Kish Hirani
Virtua
Published in
3 min readNov 6, 2018

Wikipedia (combination of citation from various academic papers) defines Creative Commons license as “one of several public copyright licenses that enable the free distribution of an otherwise copyrighted work. A Creative Commons license is used when an author wants to give people the right to share, use, and build upon a work that they have created. Creative Commons provides an author flexibility (for example, they might choose to allow only non-commercial uses of their own work) and protects the people who use or redistribute an author’s work from concerns of copyright infringement as long as they abide by the conditions that are specified in the license by which the author distributes the work.”

A number of industries have put in a lot of work in ensuring artist who create content are then protected under the Creative Commons Licence so others can legally use their work with the original artist/creator getting the credit and any usable fee attached to it. The music industry has had this well established.

Along comes Blockchain and Smart Contracts and it seems the perfect use case for Creative Commons licencing. Well, that’s because it is! With a software platform like Terra Virtua it is a no-brainer, at least in the Terra Virtua metaverse (TerraVerse), as all user-generated assets are digital and on the Blockchain so it means that every asset can take advantage of creative commons licensing. With our API, developers can easily take advantage of this for all the VR titles they develop for Terra Virtua benefitting both players and acquiring additional revenue for themselves.

Let us define what is an asset in the digital world can be: Well, it is digital so anything. Anything created by someone who then wants to give the right to share, use, and build upon their work to others, so it can be something obvious like a character, an item, texture, any prop. This gets more interesting when we extend it to a piece of audio or even the full music soundtrack.

A typical use case on a Terra Virtua platform:

A developer has defined some asset within their VR title as a creative common licensing asset.

A player carries out an action like bet the ultimate boss in this game. They now earn that asset under the Terra Virtua creative common licence binded by smart contract.

The player now owns a unique texture (with the final battle boss battle-scars).

The player now can show that character with texture, weapon, anything else the developer set as a creative common attribute in their trophy cabinet inside the Terra Virtua TerraVerse as well as have an instance of that reflected on their avatar (Vflect) if the player chooses to proudly display it.

Given the player now has this trophy attribute, they can play another game that recognises this and be able to use the attribute as their unique look or just have something unlocked as the other games acknowledges this creative common attribute.

The player can now get a unique asset or attribute added from the second game and so on.

This hybrid asset belongs to the player as well as partly with all the developers

The Terra Virtua platform will make sure we future proof such assets.

Blockchain will certainly enable some exciting and unique use of creative commons licencing and we at Terra Virtua are designing the platform to take full advantage of it.

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Kish Hirani
Virtua
Writer for

CTO of Terra Virtua, a subscription based entertainment-focussed VR World with all assets and transactions secured on the blockchain. www.terravirtua.io