The Rule of Law in Second Life

To date, with nearly three years of existence, Second Life has no rule of law. It has a strong executive, federal power, with a loyalist clique, as the ruling class and oligarchs and FIC who benefit the most from this set-up. The rest of us have to scrape by as best we can, dodging arbitrary rulings, trying to bend unjust rulings to obtain fairness, engaging in all the strategies that people engage in when they live under injustices.

There is no court, no judges, no lawyers. That is, there are now actually lawyers, and that's a good thing, at least 2, Jake Reitveld and katykiwi Moonflower (and probably others I haven't heard of) who have begun to take up cases like "takedown notices" involving copyright. They've also taken up issues like the "bait-and-switch" problem of the telehubs' removal and p2p. It was katykiwi Moonflower's letter to LL that I believe played a crucial role in alerting LL to do the right thing with the telehub buyback offer.

Building the Supreme Court (and the United Nations for that matter) are hardly any part of any authentic rule of law in Second Life. They appeared out of the sky as just some guy on the Internet's dream to build a big building and put himself in charge of it. Justice Soothsayer, the ego behind that particular exercise, is a RL law professor, but by his own admission, has no ability or resources to take on any kind of 24/7 or even 4 hour a day

He's already raised some issues about his credibility, in my book, not only by claiming the Supreme Court of the United States "engages in dispute resolution" (when its chief purpose is to issue rulings on Constitutionality).

Perhaps such exercises feed the dreams of people who always envision themselves at the heart of any justice-dispending fantasy --  arranging resolutions of disputes in magnanimous fashion, with accompanying applause on the forums, media coverage, and beaming Lindens flying overhead.

The SCOTUS-among-us (as I call it) can't possibly bring justice to our world because it has no legitimacy. Um, we have no government. Many people don't want one! We don't have the necessary conditions for government -- we don't have first a clear winner of a war, or a clear claimer of territory with an army raised to protect its borders. That is, we do have that -- we have Linden Lab who own and operate (or at least lease and operate) the servers. That's as good as it gets, and many people would prefer the Server Farmers and Software Coders as the government since they figure their chief purpose is to keep the servers turned on and working, and the new code patches coming, and everything else they add on when they have too much spare time (which they obviously have too much of, which is why they do stuff like mimic and displace resident business).

If this Server Farmers and Software Coders, Inc. were to really settle down and become a real government, they'd first have to have separation of powers: executive, judicial, legislative.

That wouldn't mean taking one of these traditional branches and renaming it "Science" like they did in Neulatenberg, which is just a hilarious way of giving the executive branch another branch to run, in a coded world (ROFL with that one!). They have to go by the thousands of years of human history, for my money anyway, if they don't want to botch it.

Many international conferences have been held, especially since the one in 1950 in Bangalore or whatever, which established solemly that separation of powers is really a good thing. And it is! It's one of the things that keeps America free and prosperous and makes it an attraction to immigrants the world over from places that only have executives, and judiciaries totally in the pocket of the executive so that they become abusive.

The SL Supreme Court had a very short life. It was formed by two college kids on winter break or something, and as soon as they got back to the paper chase in law school, it fell apart. I think it did have a big building in Cecropia or something (that may have been unrelated) but after being told by LL to change their name so as to not appear to be "official," and changing it to the Metaverse Supreme Court, like all things with metaversal aspirations, it foundered on the rocks of real life. I have no idea where these people are now. I wrote to them a few times to suggest cases -- I had some great cases, ranging from just ordinary builders' fraud on a contract, to more complicated suits against Lindens for punishing under law they had not yet disseminated, etc. Anyway, so much for that.

Next, we go SL Mediators. I had a real problem with this group, not only because it was secret and its member secret. (They claimed this was due to "griefers" -- and of course that was a reference to just one "griefer" -- me -- who challenged some of their beliefs, practices, and members LOL.) SL Mediators grew out of the Thinkers milieu -- not a milieu strong on rule-of-law concepts and universality of human rights, to say the least (they favour the ideologies of the left, Neualtenberg, etc. as their rule-by-laws).  It also was sustained primarily by the determination of Traxx Hathor to create either a blacklist or a whitelist -- on the forums, this took the form of a long and torturous debate about a Better Business Bureau (challenging business interests by advocating consumer rights and transparency). What some people really mean by that concept of "Better Business" was literally a list of groups *they* viewed as the "Better Businesses" by their own lights, without any rigourous, public criteria. Or they had in mind some vague municipal concepts more like a Chamber of Commerce (protecting business interests) where they get to pick the businesses they like and put them in a white list. Many have come and gone with this idea among the FIC and their hangers-on. It is unlikely to get any traction in SL. I formed a Consumer Advocates group with tenants, but they come and go when they have a case, and don't care to spend the time on the larger issues (as I don't). That is, when there's a broken TV and an irresponsible TV manufacturer, they gather in droves; when there is a stolen handbag design they show up for meetings to pressure that person out of malls; but then it all dies down LOL.

SL Mediators, despite its vaunted reputation, and its inclusion by Zarf Vantongerloo in his very important Nota Bene effort, turns out to have not really mediated a single case. That is, there is no track record. I had figured they had at least 10 if not 30 cases, the way they carried on about themselves and their need for secrecy -- and that they served large corporations like Nexcom or something, close to them. Turns out the secret is there is no secret! SL Mediators apparently never got a single case -- or had one it studied or got so far on, but didn't continue. So much for that! Of course, failure to act is never reason for an SL group to disband. It is a matter for consumers to look at, however, given the really urgent need for dispute resolution systems to appear and thrive in our wartorn, injust, just plain crappy world of SL on many sims where many suffer from things ranging from signs ruining their business to insane neighbours putting up huge pink rotating towers to grief people for mysterious reasons.

Nota Bene was and is a good institution to build -- the ability to take a notecarded conversation and put a hash mark on it so that "not even the Lindens" can change it. Most people think of this as useful for prepared agreements. It's also useful for capturing a chat history and getting several parties to affix their John Hancock to a statement claiming that the chat history is true -- so they can't later impugn it. Impugn it...where, I don't know, as we have no courts, but it's a start.

Nota Bene had two fatal flaws, however, crippling it as an institution that could help promote the rule of law in Second Life.

1) Nota Bene recommended as "mediation services" that could even be incorporated into an agreement between parties the "good offices" of the SL Mediators. This was wrong. For one, Zarf Vantongerloo himself was a member of SL Mediators. In some societies, where the barber has to also serve as the postmaster and the county sherriff and perform some routine surgery, this is "normal". I don't think we have to accept this double-hatting in the vast Internet where resources and people can be accessed more easily. It's a conflict of interest to both notarize and serve a notary system AND be the mediator for the agreements under it. Furthermore, SL Mediators are impugned in my book, by their secrecy and by the track record of behaviour of some of the participants, but more to the point for the public's concern, by their failure to do any mediating or have any cases. So they should just be taken off the agreements or just not promoted. Perhaps a kiosk with a variety of mediation services/lawyers/facilitators etc. could be posted on the same site as Nota Bene, but this should be reviewed.

2) Zarf Vantongerloo went and became a Linden. He says as much in his notecards. He is confirmed as now working for LL. Well, that's how it goes, LL always poaches, and sucks away from civil society, any sort of fledgling individual/institution that might help make it viable and independent. Zarf went willingly, and fails to understand these issues, as I've determined in hours-long debate with him. Neither he nor LL sees any issue whatsoever in claiming, on the one hand, "not even a Linden can tamper with this hash mark" and then BECOMING a Linden.

Now, duh, we realize that technically, not even a Linden probably can't tamper with a coded, machine-produced hashmark. It's like saying not even the makers of Crazy Glue can unglue the thing you stuck together with Crazy Glue -- there are certain laws of physics or laws of coding that even the coders can't override. But of course, like those manufacturers, the Lindens have their corrosive capacities as well. They can easily impugn the truth of a document, made client-side, if server-side, they essentially control the documentation. They can easily come up with a notecard copy or chat history of their own, that they may tamper with, and say "here's what we accept as true". Of course, you except the Lindens not to do stuff like that. But server-side, who's to know?

It's like when Lindens comes forward and says the bork in the "buy for group" the other day is "user error". Then when it was finally beaten into them that it wasn't a "user error" but a bug, they said "it will be fixed". Well, it was...but not quite on the timetable expected. And its appearance is the sign of a more distressing feature, not bug, etc. Lindens are not infallable, and they pursue their own agenda. See above re: separation of powers. There are no separation onf powers in Second Life. There is no independent judiciary, and when attempts begin to appear, they destroy them (tell them to change their name), co-opt them (Zarf) or ignore but tacitly fete them by showing up and cheering at Thinkers' Meetings (SL Mediators) or tacitly supporting them (Democracy Island). There's also no legislature. Of course, these could all be tortuously brought into being in this toy world -- but only by indigenous forces, not by plunking down some big-ass replica of SCOTUS and opening it up for business as a "resource" for the "community".

(We could have a separate debate whether a resource of SCOTUS decisions in a library are really relevant to the very executive-run SL, that's another story.)

The picture does indeed seem bleak in SL. There isn't justice, and a whole range of issues nevertheless crying out for justice, and people urgently in need of justice, from billing problems that never get addressed, to failure to enforce the existing TOS against the Bush Guy, to allowing favouritism in enforcement on the forums, to very unclear laws about how Lindens can participate in resident groups (they appear to be currently using their "work-related groups" escape clause to let themselves take part in all kinds of groups, from the wild, like Suicide Girls, to the hip, like Digital Cultures and Free Culture, to the troublesome, like Bedazzled Studio --oh, well, it's their game, what can you do.)

Into this breach steps the Law Society of Second Life, founded by Frank Lardner, a fellow who describes himself on his profile as not only an afficionado of certain sex groups but a retired guy, evidently from a successful business, on the East Coast.

The Law Society of Second Life is a highly troublesome organization on many fronts. Start with the fact that it has only one officer, Frank Lardner. I've come to understand, over the months in SL, that organizations that have only one officer -- one person who can expel members, one person who can invite other officers, one person who can change the charter and perform other officer functions -- can become very unaccountable and authoritarian.

Of course, anybody can do anything they want in SL; that's its charm. But people taking on functions like promoting law in Second Life can expect a special public scrutiny and more demands than others for being accountable.

It's noteworthy that this group, which once had respected RL lawyers Jake Reitveld and katywiki Moonflowers, has lost those RL lawyer members. Other than Frank, who one assumes is or was a RL attorney, there is only one other law-related professional, Justice Soothsayer, a law professor.

I've objected to the choice of Frank -- supported by two very active members, Traxx Hathor and Ferren Xia -- to embark on "case studies" of only selected communities that help skew the very concept of law itself and which impugn the classic notion of "rule of law" by substitution of the "rule-by-law" socialist norm or the arbitrary rule of one or a group of authoritarian leaders such as the Gors.

I've long had a critique of Traxx Hathor, as many know, and for many reasons. My public critique, however, is mainly focused on something I view as symptomatic of virtual worlds, and a grave danger to the freedom of Second Life:  the takeover of tools, groups, influential platforms, etc. by people who do not believe in the rule of law as something higher than themselves, who believe by dint of their own superior intellect or technological skill that they have an ordained right to rule others, and who have no inner moral compass of any sort to guide them by any universal standards, whether drawn from the world's greatest religions, drawn from real-life classic models, or drawn from any modern notion of a democratically and liberally drafted set of norms and laws accountable, impartial, and transparent in development and practice. The first thing that people who wish to overthrow the rule of law higher than themselves do is to claim that such a "rule of law" is itself suspect, owned and operated only by the powerful, the evil, the greedy, the rich -- the suspect. The throw up hysterical cartoon-like images of "some guy on a sim lording it over everybody" or "authoritarian personalities running rampant over the sims" to get everybody salivating and knee-jerking, and then, of course, following their own suspect leadership. Of course, that overlooks that whatever the abuses of the rule of law are by the powerful, that doesn't negate the value of a rule of law higher than all of us, a greater power to which we can be answerable.

One of the first thing such groups do is try to operate in secret -- secret groups not on the forums or listed in the groups list, access-only secret or hidden sims, secret societies, back channels, etc. -- they know the light of day would make many of the rats among them scuttle.

The concept of the "rule of law" in the world is weak in some societies, at some times. We can start with our own American society, where torture of foreign suspects in U.S. custody became sanctioned through a trampling of the rule of law and many other grave issues. Indeed, it is the concept of the rule of law that helps us fight our way out of this dark passage  -- it was the City Bar of New York, and conscientious Attorneys General, who began to raise troubling questions, and leak the right critical reports, to begin to bring to light the entire mess of our responsibility for torture in Iraq. Lawyers are important to fight for the rule of law; but the rule of law cannot be replaced with "rule by lawyers" nor by "rule by laws". Many authoritarian societies make use of the "rule by laws" formula, substituting a plethora of regulations, often arbitary, for something higher than themselves.

I've come to see the environment of SL as one conducive to the "fuck-you hedonist," the person who not only seeks his own pleasures, but is happy to seek them at the expense of others, and tell them "fuck you" to boot. "I can do what-the-fuck-I-want on my land" is their clarion call. They have absolutely no sense of the rights of others, of the rights of all serving as a curb even on the *other* rights of all. This concept -- that no one right should be used to overthrow the other rights -- is engraved in Article 5 of the International Covenant on Civil and Political Liberties or in similar wording in Article 30 of the Universal Declaration of Human Rights. The Article 5 notion applies to non-state actors as well as states. You cannot use your own pursuit and enjoyment of rights (say, freedom of religion) to injure the rights of others contained in the same covenant (say, the right of equality of women). Article 5 is fertile territory for a lot more promotion and work internationally in the real world; in SL, as exotic as the concept is, it could use some promotion as well.

Several slights of hand have been perpetrated by the Law Society. First, a conscious decision was made to have the group only communicate on group forums on the SL forums. That was a deliberate choice to ensure that I never posted with any criticism of the group or its choice of case studies -- case studies which drive readers away from any "rule of law" notion and drive them toward the "rule-by-laws" cases and the My Sim, My Rule sort of model in the name of "freedom" (freedom to control others with impunity and without accountability to anyone). Frank and others know full well that being permabanned, I won't be able to post, so they can look like their group is open by having me in it, but never have me post. I've repeatedly called on this group to meet inworld and discuss these issues openly and critically-- they refused, because they don't want the public challenge.

Frank Lardner, with the enthusiastic approval of just some of the awake and aware members of the group (others in it aren't following, or in fact left to make room for more groups), has selected as his case studies Neualtenberg and the Gorean communities. These reflected his own personal tastes and proclivities; that's his right, it's a game, it's a passtime, and nobody has to study anything they don't want to study. But it's of concern when these "case studies" are palmed off as a "work product" which is "peer reviewed" only by a few active -- and heavily biased -- members of the Society. It's of concern when through forums-posturing and huffing and puffing, such "case studies" are served up to the unfortunately all-to-fashion-following Lindens as "models" that they shoud use in their creation of the world.

I raised the issue of how the selection of the case studies were made. I view both of them as little better than cults, run by very strong authoritarian personalities, who, despite the trappings of elaborate rules and regulations and "democracy," do not at all represent a mainstream, "normal" model for the life of communities of peoples on sims in this world. Celebrating either of these communities in any way, by venerating them in "case studies" that are even going to be vaunted as "peer reviewed" simply seemed inappropriate -- even misleading.

As fascinating as it is for males to go study how strong males subjugate females sexually and psychologically, or how strong females subjugate males politically and philosophically, this is n't the norm of life in a world that is to have a million members. Such communities deserve tolerance in the sense that any community deserves tolerance, freedom to do as they wish in their private space, and unmolestation from those who don't think as they do, under the TOS.

They don't deserve a free ride from public criticism when they invade the public space, however, the public commons which must be kept free of sectarian ideologies of the left or right always seeking to hijack it. Then, they should be robustly criticised. So to take these groups and exult them as case studies is only fueling their claims to the public space -- illegitimate claims entirely.

Hearing no "objection!" to his one-officer-only group formation and rules, and his heavily-controlled group forums where there is only a few loyalists in an amen corner, Frank Lardner is putting up these "case studies" and merely taunting any critics that they should "make their own".

I personally don't have time for case studies; I live them in the grand experiment itself called Second Life and my demanding rentals business in it. Perhaps some day when I retire from this demanding work and my RL jobs I might consider it. I'd be eager to sustain others doing this work, but not do it myself.

Aside from all these philosophical differences with the organizational pattern and case study selection of the Society -- which I remain in only due to my own great devotion to see legal institutions, societies, and the rule of law upheld in Second Life -- there is another grave, misleading post that really deserves the most rapid of attention.

I quote it in full:

Forum Moderation Guidelines

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Group Forum Moderator Guidelines

As moderators (for now), Traxx Hathor and Frank Lardner will responsible to maintain your forum. The following are the guidelines provided to us today by Linden Labs. We expect to follow them and will appreciate your cooperation.

While Linden Lab values freedom of expression and allows a great deal of latitude in the use of the Second Life Forums, there are certain kinds of discussions that are inappropriate in this venue and that diminish the community by their presence. The following types of threads and posts should be removed immediately when encountered in the Second Life Forums:

_ Personal attacks on the character or reputation of another Second Life Resident
_ Accusing a specific Resident or Residents of Second Life Community Standards and Terms of Service violations or real-world crimes
_ Inviting or encouraging other Residents to target a specific Resident or Residents in a manner objectionable to the targeted Resident
_ Inviting or encouraging other Residents to violate Second Life Community Standards and Terms of Service or real-world laws
_ Revealing personal or real-world information about a Resident beyond that contained in the Resident's First Life Profile
_ Using hateful or derogatory language to describe a specific Resident or Residents.
_ Linking to third-party content that violates the Second Life Community Standards and Terms of Service

If we see a problem we will endeavor to edit the forum. Should our forum consistently fail to meet Second Life's Community and Forums Standards, our group's forum may be closed.

Thank you for your cooperation with this experiment.

Frank Lardner

As I understand it, groups are allowed to moderate their own forums on their own. This seems like a reasonable concept, given that only groups read the group forums (and possibly only groups can post in them) but it seems like a slippery slope in itself unless that forums moderation can take place under the TOS and CS very explicitly -- especially given the horrid biased and tendentious nature of forums rules enforcement, all too readily visible now under the resmod system especially.

It would be one thing if Frank Lardner had put out guidelines that merely represented  a re-telling, in simpler form of the TOS and CS of Linden Lab itself. It is surely not. What he has done has subtly rewritten the rules to serve his ends (and those of a minority of other members) in a very insidious way (one would like to hope it is unconscious, but given the direction it is going in, it can only be seen as deliberate).

Linden Lab has no rule or policy, in their TOS or CS, of banning the linking to third-party sites that could be deemed to violate their TOS or CS. They routinely permit the linking to third-party sites that indeed do routinely violate their TOS or CS. One can think of www.sluniverse.com, for example that routinely publishes chat histories from SL without the consent of the parties involved, and which also allows another TOS violation, accusation of a resident of a RL crime (this happened to me on sluniverse.com, where I was maliciously accused, on the basis of mistaken identity, of a RL crime, that of plagiarism as a journalist, an offense of which I had never been accused, nor which I had ever committed (a person with a similar RL name had committed this offense).

The Herald routinely engages in writings that many would perceive as a "violation of the TOS and CS" -- indeed, this blog consciously violates the TOS as a public service on matters of public interest precisely because Linden Lab contains no clause in their TOS or CS that links to third-party sites cannot be contained. Indeed, the Herald, sluniverse.com, and I all routinely post links to our blogs in "fansites" and in other forums (I am still allowed to post in fansites).

Linden Lab has never exercised the overreach that other games exercise, i.e. World of Warcraft or the Sims on Online through Stratics, banning the linkage to sites that they view as "violating their TOS". Of course, a third-party site can't violate a TOS it hasn't signed! Of course that *is* overbroad and *is* overreach!"

So while Frank may wish to practice his own freelance sort of guidelines of what he thinks is correct on his own little group forum, he sure can't represent that as Linden policy; it is not.

Indeed, many long battles were fought by the Herald with Stratics over this issue. I remember I once was banned for 2 days off Stratics merely for having within a post about something else, some URL link to the Herald. The Herald, in turn, contained on its front page, a list of fan sites, one of which sold Sims currency (simoleons). So even unto the third generation of links, Stratics believed that they had a right to ban me for my link to the Herald, merely because the Herald had a link to another site, which in turn illegally sold the game currency.

Many civil libertarians and electronic frontier freedom-fighters work very hard to make sure these game companies don't take away freedoms outside their domain with this type of overreach. It's bad enough they take them away inside their games.

There are other troubling aspects of this "rewrite" of the TOS and COS; I invite lawyers anc close students of the Linden TOS and CS to study this. I"m going to investigate in particular this one: " Inviting or encouraging other Residents to target a specific Resident or Residents in a manner objectionable to the targeted Resident ."

This would seem to endorse some highly subjective and arbitrary notion of what anybody would find "objectionable". That means any resident gets to decide what "targeted" means and what "objectionable" means. That opens the door to numerous frivolous and specious cases. Of course, this could well be a flaw within the Lindens' own TOS writing. They have other clauses within their TOS and CS that are very subjective and discretionary in that way, which invite arbitrary abuses of power all too easily. If it's a Linden flaw, one would expect a lawyer not to replicate it in a re-write. I suspect it goes much farther though.

It's no accident that Traxx Hathor and some others in this group tout the book "Order Without Law". It's been said by at least one lawyer I know that this book is highly flawed by forgetting the previous 150 years of history that went into the establishment of such "order without law" practices as grazing of cattle. That 150 years including a lot of hangings, shootings, and cattle-rustling! Sure, it's easy to put in nice little neighbourhoody Mr. Rogers kind of practices of "order without law" AFTER justice or the strong or both have prevailed over the management of scarce resources!

I find that tekkies, socialists, hedonists, and other modern Internet lords and masters love to grab on the "order without law" concept because they figure they'll get to be the ones who establish the order, and they sure as hell don't want any law that they will view as in any way curbing their freedom.

But it's a lot of bullshit, covering up the same-old, same-old, of a few authoritarian personalities wishing to use Bolshevik-like methods of duplicity, revolutionary justice, displacement and distraction techniques, and all the old well-worn tactics of taking control of others, that start and end with the very notion of "the end justifies the means".

The "end" that is always justified by the hardline socialists, utopian tekkies, etc. is always "My Kewl Space" or "My Superior Architecture" or "My Secret Sim" that is unaccountable to any rule of law by man or machine.

In fact, the people coding the machines want to make sure that always and anywhere, they get to do what they want by their own lights, brooking no dissent. That's how you could get a handy thing like the Linden voting mechanism that does not let you vote "no". For that, I personally hold Cory Ondrejka responsible.

Not being able to vote "no" is what enables a posse like "Rock the SL Vote" -- another group with only one officer, Lasivian Leandros, who routinely comes to harangue me and drove me off at least one listserve. This group contains many of our usual suspects, ranging from Maxx Monde on down -- it is filled with tekkies who figured out what many people are asleep to (except the Goreans) that if you work up a posse of your like-minded tribe, you can go and "throw" just about any of the propositions on the "ballot" now. Of course, that's their right. Of course, in a democracy, any PACs, or interest groups, or lobbying groups, get to form and act! Hooray! But when a group is unaccountable, with only one officer, when others can't join it by any publicly-scrutinizable criteria, it's right to ask questions. If a group of residents puts up a proposal to either remove the functions of the bounce script (the aggressive security script), the posse will go and create another proposal (they can't vote no in any accountable way) and get that passed with more votes. GIven their use of the notorious back-channel the SL IRC Channel, given their technological superiority, they're likely to "rock" a lot of votes their way. Too bad for you, non-tekkie! You're fucked!

(Of course, we see a  lot of the tekkie lobby also going into big business, like Electric Sheep Company and GIGAS, and that helps us know that this isn't just about superior-minded folks who Care About the Community, they mainly care to make money for themselves and their friends but even more importantly, gain the reputational enhancement and Linden attention that goes with technological superiority.)

This is supposed to be the "Internet norm" now -- but it's a system that will, in its own way, be just as evil and accountable as the meat-world system it purports to overthrow -- representative government in democracies, where (so the theory goes) there are all these politicians and PACs bought out by big business. That is, half or more of the people in these "tribes" can just obediently follow the bidding of a few just for the sake of a sense of group membership and cohesion.  They can decide they like this or that feature of a sub-culture, join it, and never have to think for themselves.

The answer, I suppose, is to try to strengthen the voices of individual dissenters (that's where I come in, willing to take any amount of harassment and abuse to try to keep speaking up against the group-think) and to try to ensure that groups with a variety of opinions are created and sound off on the voting page with their own organized propositions and their own posses to "rock the vote".

I'm also confident that as more and more people come into the world -- we can already see from all the increasingly brave posts on the forums -- there will be people who are normal businessmen, here to make money in an engaging and fun way, lots of householders and romance-seekers, and creative people not tied up to the existing SL diva machine. These people, collectively, will exert a force of moderation on the forces we see now at the extreme right (creator-fascism in the Platform Party) or left (the tekkie wikinistas and utopians, who are often so left they're right). These extremists want to overthrow the Rule of Law, whether in the forum of TOS/CS or any kind of universal, grid-wide or metaverse Law, by constantly impugning universality itself, so that they can get away with an "end justifies the means" sort of approach.

In the name of "host my own server" and "do my own thing" and "anything goes", they will seek power over others, especially those they've gotten to most enthusiastically sign up for the "anything goes" philosophy.

In the new post-covenant configuration, if Daniel Linden and others have their way, any community will be able to override the Community Standards and set as yet unspecified "local standards". The Lindens were extremely vague about what this meant in terms of violations of their CS.

We know what the Goreans want. Magnum Serpentine made it abundantly clear. They want to rule over other people, spouting the "voluntary, with their own will" cover-all clause constantly, even in face of any actual facts of abuse (and the mere presence of so many self-help sub groups to address abuse in the BDSM community lets us know that the "voluntary" stuff just doesn't fly in significant numbers of cases.)

Magum wants to have all abuse reports coming out of lands under his domain going to the Lindens to come back to him, unopened. That is, the Lindens will let him serve as judge and jury of all his own abuse cases. A legitimate cry for help could come of someone severely griefed, and the Lindens will boomerang it back to the person in charge of the abusers, if not implicated. Sounds like Russia or worse to me! Very bad system! The Lindens blandly look on, when urgent queries are raised about this severe flaw in their concept. They want people to host their own servers and get out of their hair, full stop. They aren't thinking of their responsibility as world-creators in the slightest.

But then, these are the people who sit around like deer in the headlights and tell you in start surprise that they had *no idea* that people were going to use the idiotic circle-jerk hippie tools they made for groups *for actual businesses*. Gosh, and look, they did?

I've seen many RL situations, some of the most stark nature, where the rule of law can begin to take root by groups of people behaving "as if" there really were a rule of law. That is, if they make model constitutions, or magna charters or what-have-you, but more importantly, if they document and publicize abuses of what everyone can recognize as injustice; if they create weak rhetorical precedents at least by making courts that issue rulings even when the powers-that-be have no intention of enforcing them. That's why the original SL Superior Court was a great idea -- let them issue rulings that the community comes to see have merit and trust, and the powers-that-be will sooner or later have to take note.

We need the rule of law in Second Life. For that we need a whole complex set of factors -- lawyers, bar associations, consumer advocate groups, mediators, dispute resolution services, courts, judges, legal drafting committees -- parliaments! The rule of law usually can't happen without a government. Yet in many countries of the world, where the government is hopelessly resistant to change, and has no intention of letting citizens really rule themselves in a just manner, they can make changes and prepare for the time when they will be free to have an independent judiciary. That's why the formation of various lobbying groups, interest groups, political parties, movements, etc. are an important step toward the Rule of Law in Second Life.

There's a significant -- though small-in-number -- group of influential forums posters and tekkies and socialists with the Lindens' ear and likeminded chumminesss that believe that we don't need a Rule of Law in SL, we need My Rule on My Sim.  They think to fight against the meatworld's injustices of the Tropica's "I Rule" type of problem ("You Rule" is the slogan of Tropica), they need to overthrow law in general, universality, and create a host of particularized and subjectivized laws.

But their notions of socialist justice (which is to music as martial music is to music) and revolutionary justice and so forth are not sufficient or beneficial to the virtual world, whatever their short-term gains. More and more, people will come to see the need for larger forms of community recognition of the rule of law, and community dispute resolutions.

It's wrong for a group of Lindens and regulars on the forum to band together fiercely and declare that "selling freebies is not cool and is wrong". That's an example where they are trying to put over on us a feature of their self-interest -- the desire to distribute freebies and gain reputational enhancement and loss leders -- over the free market's interest -- the desire of newbies to find useful things "just-in-time" -- that mainly other newbies will sell to them. Tekkis, IRC back-channelers think they can come up with a social norm -- an "order without law" like "selling freebies is not cool" and put it over normal, common-sense thinkers operating with a different sense of more universal law based on the actual appearances of that law in RL where there are free markets -- selling stuff is ok.

I get a reviewer's copy of a book for free; after I write the review, I sell that free book at the Strand. Neither author nor book publisher can do a thing about it, nor would they want to. They send me free books knowing that I'll review a good portion of them and they'll get their "page hits" or sales. It's a loss-leader, part of promotion. None of my neighbours hiss at me as I walk to the Strand with my bag of free books. They happily go to the Strand and buy the Strand's marked-up resold copies of my once-free book that I got payment for. Hey, that's life in the big city. It's a very good example of how freebies in RL are given out and sold freely. The publishing company doesn't scream on forums that their business on amazon.com or at the bricks-and-mortar Barnes and Nobels have been irreparably harmed by the sale of freebies. People who scour the Reviews' Copies bins -- myself included -- for just-in-time bargains are going to buy those versions. Those who want a more pleasant shopping experience at home on the Internet or in the fancier store will pay more money. That's life.

Honestly, I can't wait til the world grows! It's already growing! It's great!

Comments

[jauani]

"To date, with nearly three years of existence, Second Life has no rule of law."

that's because it's a virtual world community hosted by a corporation that we pop in and out of at our leisure, and not the real world. if you stop to think about the fact that SL is not a country, but a media tool, you might realize why everyone is going to skip everything after the first (ill concieved) sentence.

expecting there to be laws within SL is like expecting laws withing the www. it's plainly ridiculous.

[Prokofy Neva]

No, it's not plainly ridiculous, it's normal. It's a country, with a GNP -- they even hired an economist to calculate that GNP! It has foreign currency, and even imports and exports and stuff.

Yeah, for some people it's a media tool for their own self-aggrandizement , but I find it pays to take them at face value, too, and criticize them at that level. Imagine, building the Supreme Court of the United States of America in a virtual world? ROFLMFAO!

[jauani]

what are you talking about? it doesn't have a GNP. it's not a nation. castranova needs to publish articles to get his tenure. get real!

face value: i don't have to sign a tos to be borna canadian citizen.

[Prokofy Neva]

Yes, but you have to abide by the laws of Canada if you want to stay out of jail. I don't get your point.

I didn't make up the thing about the GNP. When the Lindens announced this new gal Vasudha, they said she'd be calculating the GNP *shrugs*. I didn't think of it as a country until Philip started calling that. Castranova might be a two-bit economist who could only make a career as a virtual worlds economy guru, but he's right, it's going to seem very normal in 5-10 years.

[beau]

Prokofy, I am not sure what you are talking about with the "barely scraping by" comment. You depend mainly on the land side of the economy to make money right? I can name more than a few people who specualte on or rent land, and they come out with a nice ROI. No offence but I think maybe sometime you have to evaluate your own business strategy.

[Prokofy Neva]

I'm not seeing where your reference is to "barely scraping by" as those words don't appear in a FIND. What's the point?

Life on the mainland is hard, the Lindens make it harder, and since the telehubs were taken out, it has become even harder. Still, it's compelling enough to stick it out.

Oh, I evaluate my business models and strategies all the time. But I'm not really in SL to make money in some boring, routinized way. Most of the people who make money off rentals do so on the islands, where it is much, much easier and where customers don't mind being charged a full LL tier level like $25 US for a 4096 m2 because they have grief-free, ugly-free, etc. living. Mainland rentals aren't economical, and everyone in the business knows that, and combines renting with other kinds of activities.

On the mainland, sure, there are people with whole sims who can save money by building themselves if they are talented, or they make what I think of as micro-climate sims that have a club/shopping/activity/ and rentals also to produce the income. Some are heavily dependent on dwellopers' awards.

I find it more interesting to rough it out on the mainland with other people on sims, not to just work on one sim by myself, but have neighbours, challenges, interesting problems to solve.

And if you chose that route, you are always buying the view out of the water, and always struggling with asswipes with huge spinning pink towers. It's interesting!

I know you'd like to do some sort of smackdown and prove I'm an incompetent and a failure, but you can take that elsewhere.

I don't like islands. They are big, and hard to sell off. They have black voids around them and I find the terraforming on the with those drop-offs wierd and ugly. They're more expensive to start up, whatever their income later. I also don't like bidding on the auction against Anshe and buying overpriced land, I gave that up ages ago. And I don't like buying land and speculating and flipping, it's arduous work to do right, and I'd rather spend that time on customers and developing areas.

If you get stuck half way through your tier month with an empty tier, you're drive to buy MORE land even if the prices aren't good at the moment; or vice-versa, if you are stuck with trading tiers at month's end you have to shave your margins or hold it over another month and see the margins erode and disappear -- it's not for the faint-hearted. I first learned this from Jauani Wu, who made these realities clear, I tried it, I made money when it was to be made and bought land when it was cheap, but it's not a consistent means of income given the falling Linden and the falling cashouts.

I prefer more of the micro-brew type of selling when I sell only to neighbours or interested people who have come into the commmunity and know exactly what they want, or when I have a few things like good flat mature waterfront or flat mature roadside for building stores that I can rent, or sell if it doesn't rent.

I do a variety of things from selling and renting land to actually making and selling my own content -- imagine that! Geez, it's hard to picture, eh? But true.

I also have philanthropic activity -- the public land preserve, the newbie communities, public discussions, etc.

I've tried my hand at all the investments from Ginkos to Cyberlands even to camp chairs as experiments, I've had clubs and malls, and I also have casinos going in some areas.

While it may not be a game, it's play. I always feel like every night, I get a hand of cards dealt by the chance of the game -- some nights they're good, some nights they suck, every once in awhile there's a royal flush. I try to make sure I come out even if not ahead.

Sure, you can figure out a mathematical formula to buy Daimani marble houses, plunk 15 of them out on 4096s on a sim you bought for $1000, put up a rentomatic, and lather, rinse, repeat. That would bore the hell out of me. I have RL jobs that pay real money. This job I look on as a part-time job that enables me to do a few less boring RL things every month to make money. I also save on TV and magazines, which I never get any more lol.

What's your point, Beau? I think it would be goddamn boring to copy poses off the Internet and sell them in animation boxes and make money. I have CDs in the bank for boring but interest-bearing stuff like that : )

[beau]

"The rest of us have to scrape by as best we can, dodging arbitrary rulings, trying to bend unjust rulings to obtain fairness, engaging in all the strategies that people engage in when they live under injustices."

Its right there, in your first paragraph. It is sad you utter such complete nonsense you need to use a "find" feature to remember the word that rolled off your very own finger tips.

Your constant cried of favoritism, disagreement with LL decisions and fight against content creators really contradicts the statement you just made about not being too worried about how much money you make with in SecondLife.

I do agree with your interesting ways to make money statements. Though if you choose to be truely inovative in regards to that, prepare to have a longer harder road to success. I think its more of a trick of taking a proven business model that works and creating a balance of originality.

As far as The SL Supream Court thing you speak about. I remember hearing about that at SLCC and thinking to myself how it would be long gone before the next SLCC.

[Prokofy Neva]

Oh, this:
"scrape by as best we can
is about the question of justice and fairness, not about business success or failure. It means "we have to get along as best we can".'

Funny -- sad, really -- that you should view a statement like that only in business terms. Shows just how you view the political struggles of SL, as a winner-take-all for certain businesses fighting others, I guess.

I did a search on "scraping" and racked my brains to think of where I had written about any struggles for business to get along. Business booms in SL. I have more customers than ever before. But I have constant costs, too. And the Linden is falling, making the cashout less. And stuff happens like an entire day of work with placing buildings, etc. gone down the tubes when there was a power outage, and another entire sim completely borked, with all the builds tossed up in the air, and delinked, scattering literally hundreds of pieces of builds all over the grid, returning in bits for days and days. I lost 2 tenants that way who literally had all their buildings smashed. This was due to a "hardware failure".

Honestly, people who just stick their vendors out on their old free 4096s, plunk down $5000 for the classifieds, and log off, have no idea of the struggles involved in trying to cope with this game's vicissitudes.

I imagine you've never had the experience of an entire sim's builds being destroyed in a second. I've now had this happen four times on four different sims -- when you work with enough sims, you see it happen. It loses me tenants, and some of those tenants even just quit the game, they get so angry -- the Lindens really do nothing about this, nor can they.

Yes, scraping by means having no justice to address not only basic complaints like this but larger philosophical issues like unfair favouritism and insider bids.

Re: "Your constant cried of favoritism, disagreement with LL decisions and fight against content creators really contradicts the statement you just made about not being too worried about how much money you make with in SecondLife."

See, there's a very stark indication of how YOU see the world -- a world in which complaints against insiderism could ONLY be seen as some economical death-match, in which one group cries foul merely to get the perks the other has.

The concept that one could complain about justice just because it's injust and unfair is probably over your head.

If I wanted to make money in a big time way with this game, I assure you, the first thing I'd do is suck up to people on the forums and never even write a blog. But I don't wish to sacrifice freedom in that fashion : )

I don't think the Supreme Court tried a single case.

As for "business models," I think that one of the things that amateur business people do in Second Life to kind of show off their new-found entrepreneurial personas is to sit around talking sagely about their business models, or to whack at somebody else whom they believe to have a poor business model.

But come on, what's a business model in Second Life? Let's not be too precious here. Most of SL business models that succeed in extracting cash from avatars and making avatars stick so they dwell and spend more money are really only repetitions, or variations on things discovered in the 19th and 20th centuries, like P.T. Barnum's "There's a sucker born every minute," and Johnny Wannamaker's concepts of putting out huge amounts of cheap but diverse merchandise in huge bins and rows over vast expanses to make it easier to see and get at and not be fetched with that old method where they used to send little metal baskets back to a stock room (ever see one of those? They actually have them still working in the stores in a small town I grew up in).

Johnny Wannamaker was also credited with the concept of the "99 cent item" and sometimes it was punned about his name, "wanna maker her buy" -- because the "99 cents" was supposed to fool even sharp housewives into thinking they were spending thriftily under a dollar or a quarter or a nickel. They were called "five and dime stores".

I really don't think we've done much more than those two giants of merchandising and entertainment, because most success in SL revolves around finding a fool who is eager to part with his money (and we're in the first line-up of fools, of course) and dealing in huge volumes to ensure a cash flow.

[Gwyneth Llewelyn]

Just a question, Prokofy, from your text it wasn't clear how exactly a legal system could arise from Second Life.

Usually, legal systems are tied towards enforceability by an authority, and in SL, this means Linden Lab.

Now, since LL are reluctant to pass that authority upon other "enforcers" (and I may well understand their position), my question is, what alternatives are there?

The long roll of "failed" experiments of self-appointed "legal support groups" or whatever people care to call themselves just seem to indicate that they have something in common: without authority, and delegation of power from the ones that they really have it (eg. Linden Lab), how can a legal system be created?

I'm all for it, though — the only solution so far seems the "My Sim, My Rule" which in turn can exchange information with neighbouring sims with their own rules, and create "international law" between sims (ie. my rules will apply to your sim, if your sim accepts to abide my mine as well). This is a very painful and slow progress. What alternatives do you suggest?

[jauani]

"Castranova might be a two-bit economist who could only make a career as a virtual worlds economy guru, but he's right, it's going to seem very normal in 5-10 years."

it will never seem normal. you can't have a country which people can just log out of without consequence. you can't have a country that is privately owned and legally bound within the laws of the united states of america.

SL is not really a country. country is a metaphor. all i know about castranova is his talk at sop3 and basically he was saying that like .coms, there will be ".SLs" listed on the nasdaq, except in a really wierd mataphorical way that really undermined his message. it's not a revelation that if sl shoots of that companies like ESC could become a big thing.

[Prokofy Neva]

>>>Just a question, Prokofy, from your text it wasn't clear how exactly a legal system could arise from Second Life.

I already explained here and elsewhere that interest groups, grassroots citizens' initiatives, invoking existing real-world universal law and values, as well as universalist laws and norms that have developed in the virtual worlds, are the basis for a rudimentary rule of law. A constituent assembly, with the election of a representative government, and possibly some kind of correctives in the modern forms of individuals and groups consulting in a more integrated fashion with elected representatives (as they increasingly do in RL), would be the minimum start of some eventual formation of a "government".

And I already said that if lawyers, bar associations, courts, justices begin to grapple with injustices that occur even under the very limited "law" of the TOS, it will have the kind of gathering momentum that goes beyond rhetorical value and begins to influence decisions and behaviour on the part of the rulers and the inner circles.

>>>Usually, legal systems are tied towards enforceability by an authority, and in SL, this means Linden Lab.

Well, yes and no. Those are RL concepts. If I enforce the return of prims on my sims against griefers or even just non-tenants, there is authority and enforcibility. Nobody has really studied suitably that I can tell the real realm of enforcibility in virtual worlds, preferring to just toss it all off as a log-off problem. It's not, when people spend 4 and 8 and 12 hours a day online. They don't log-off. Thereofre you have a persistence of their participation and the worlds they are in that require taking seriously.

Everybody always says the Pope doesn't have an army. Without any army, the Pope has played a significant role in a lot of issues and countries, i.e. the overthrow of communism. The spiritual realm is important, too. Enforcement in the spiritual realm is of a different order.

>>Now, since LL are reluctant to pass that authority upon other "enforcers" (and I may well understand their position), my question is, what alternatives are there?

Oh, come off it. We've seen our dear Jeska just pass off all kinds of authority in the resmod system, replete with little hortatory lectures along the way about letting residents take up the reins, etc.

All they're doing is putting in their own reagants and overlords to do their bidding given the limits of their reach.

>>>The long roll of "failed" experiments of self-appointed "legal support groups" or whatever people care to call themselves just seem to indicate that they have something in common: without authority, and delegation of power from the ones that they really have it (eg. Linden Lab), how can a legal system be created?

Oh, I disagree. There's a long roll of failed groups. But that's ok. They will eventually pick up steam and coalesce around a burning issue, most likely in the consumer rights realm or in the issue of governance on forums or in land use or some issue that affects people, and that will galvanize interest and participation.

Groups fail not merely because there's no force to call upon to enforce the rule of law, but because they cannot keep and express their solidarity long enough to force the enforcement from below. That is really how it has to be. And each time "law" comes up as a subject, there's always some asstard who wants to be the one to be that law and that force over another, and so elaborate structures are created for government, or enforcement with secret police, security, and police, or the privileges and trappings of executive power, but the real force for the rule of law, people sense of justice, their solidarity with each other in the face of injustice, and their refusal to tolerate injustice -- that takes awhile to form and is of course always being betrayed, coopted, and derailed.

>>I'm all for it, though — the only solution so far seems the "My Sim, My Rule" which in turn can exchange information with neighbouring sims with their own rules, and create "international law" between sims (ie. my rules will apply to your sim, if your sim accepts to abide my mine as well). This is a very painful and slow progress. What alternatives do you suggest?

No, I don't advocate the formation of "international law" as merely a set of transaction between My Sim and Your Sim -- I don't buy that various nodes in the "archipelago of assholes" should trade notes and white lists and black lists and then arrogate themselves as the "international law" over me.

I don't see any other way but through various umbrella groups, movements, groups, discussions, forums, newspapers, etc. getting together and moving all these ideas and debates, as people sort themselves out, to eventually have a parliament of parties. It might not be a parliament as rigidly structured as a RL parliament, as it might have more permeability to individuals and groups.

I don't think, like Lenin said, every cook can run the state. And I don't think that, like Beth Noveck comes across as saying, that groups are going to run the state, either. Especialy if her vaunted groups are merely virulent little insular possesses of aggressive, single-minded zealots bent on throwing this or that forum. The personalities and tactics on the SL forums ought to give one pause there.

It seems to me that rule of law wise, things are going along in SL not so bad, given that it is really a repressive, third-world like dictatorship. To be sure, there have been people executed at dawn, and some stadium shootings. To be sure, some people have been coopted and are now spouting nonsense. Some have simply disappeared (where is Colin Linden???).

But, meanwhile, a group of influential citizens, banded together in the Metaverse Justice Watch, did compel the Lindens to put out a deck of cards about their own internal rules for governing themselves and their relations with the citizens. That's progress. It was thin and flimsy, it lacks important stuff (no sexual abuse policy) but it's progress.

Getting the executive to at least live under a Reichstat, or a state that governs by law (there's still the question of whether it will submit to a higher law than itself), that keeps to its own law, is always the first step in the struggle against injustice.

Separation of powers, delegation of powers -- this all has to happen to. One of the reasons why the Resmod system can seem so phoney and disingenuous is that there is delegation of executive power to a loyalist group, without first a separation of powers and a sharing of powers so that there are independent bodies of the governing power such as to have checks and balances.

[Prokofy Neva]

Jauani, it's not interesting to keep having the same debate, you say it's not a country, which which you really try to tell me that you "have a life" and "it's a game" and I should "get a life" and I say no, it is a country, sure walks like a country, talks like a country, and my having or not having a life doesn't affect that.

Castronova said that in a few years time, the seminar won't have the prefix "cyberworld stock exchanges" or whatever it had, but just "stock exchanges" because they'll all be virtual. And he also spoke very earnesly about how everyone would find it normal to be online and do things online a good deal of time in the future.

I agree that a country can't just keep springing from a company like out of Zeus' head -- it has to spawn off at some point. But I do believe in living in now *as if* it were a country because it will be some day. I don't want these Electric Sheep herding me.

[jauani]

first of all prokofy, i am not saying you don't have a life for calling SL a country. i take my sl business ventures just as seriously as you do. i see my ventures as selling cotton candy at an amusement park. just because the park owners sell tokens for people to spend at my stall, doesn't make it a country.

castranova didn't say anything that didn't already exist. people already find it normal to be online and do a good deal of things online. SL is a subset of this. people chat, email, surf for info, shop all online. virtual worlds are just a small segment of the internet world. they aren't something entirely new or revolutionary.

SL will never be a country. it might become a protocol.

[Prokofy Neva]

Jauani, the thrust of all your comments to me, inworld and outworld, on blogs on in persons, has always been "You're a hobbyist." So I know exactly what your agenda is. And it's pathetic. Get a life yourself.

What Castranova said that was interesting was not that people are online all the time -- they are online all day at work for 8 hours, and come home and spend another 4 hours at least in email, games, shopping. That's not the revolutionary news. His point was that major life institutions -- stock markets, banks, worlds, stores -- would be moving online into the Metaverse, the 3-D world. That's quite a staggering concept.

I'm as eager as you are to debunk all the hype around the Metaverse, especially when it comes from electrified sheeps and goats. But it is revolutionary and will have a sweeping effect, and not to recognize that is just to be contrary and petulant.

[jauani]

prokofy, i don't know why you are insisting that i should tell you to get a life. of, fine... get a life! satisfied?

it's not revolutionary at all. the migration he's talking about is non-existant. stock exchanges, banks, and stores are all accessible on the internet already. using a new format for their internet portal is not a social or economic revolution. it's a minor revolution in interface. definitely more intuitive than a flat html. it's like going from rotary phones to touch tone. or something like that.

[Prokofy Neva]

Stock-exchanges, banks, and stores have Internet pages with words and jpegs on them. But they aren't online as institutions you can walk in, and deal with avatars in, Jauani, geez, you are so literalist.

It's a much bigger deal that rotary to touch tone. I think it's more like going from those big cumbersome camberas with the big flashes and the powder and having to sit stock-still, with only one guy in the town serving as the photographer, to having Kodaks that anybody could use but still being dependent on developers to having Polaroids you could develop on your own. It's more like that.

[Jake Reitveld]

Interesting post, and, at its core, very telling. One of the problems I ran into with helping people with take down notices in SL, is that LL were pretty non-responsive. In short, they would not necessarily abide by the takedown notice, and it is not really worth it for people to litigate in federal court to get LL to respond and then have the expense of proving the underlying action. My impression is that when the takedown notice came from a corporation (i.e., potential corporate sponsor, the notice was rapidly abided by. In contrast, when it came from a resident, it was ignored.

Fundamentally, on the internet, the rule of law is the rule of law in the country where any transcation occurred, or in the country where you agree to be bound by those laws. So if, say, Amazon.com takes my money and fails to deliver my books, I have recourse-I sue them in RL court.

In SL we have a problem: its not real life. We don't know the names of the other residents, nor will they be provided by LL due to privacy considerations, so we are utterly without access to justice, except for that which LL chooses to enforce, for they are the sovereign, despite the fact that they do not want to be.

The trouble with this is that, ultimately, SL is not just another corporate owned media vehicle. SL proudly sells itself on users owning the rights to the content. They creat an expecation of a property interest in thier consumers, and then, by way of their refusal to enforce the property interests of the users, render them effectively meaningless.

So what we have is an effective denial of justice and denial of any rule of law. LL won't enforce inworld, and residents are effectively prohibited from seeking RL justice.

It is my thought, that LL truly expects some sort of residential collective society, with a government by consensus to grow from the SL residents. Like we should have our own constitution as residents. Whether this is some social expereiment on LL's part, or whether this is just LL's excuse for not wanting to invest in administration is unclear.
What is clear is that LL creats an expecation of protection of property interests, and then consistently fails to protect that expectation by taking the position that LL is in the business of innovation, not administration.

The only business I can see LL as truly being committed to is the PR business. And thus we are left with anarchy, where only the naive or rich have any recourse. And the only law is LL's arbitrary responses to whatever pressure is put on it by the media's cause of the day.

[Ashcroft Burnham]

Jake: have you heard of the Metaverse Republic? It's a growing organisation dedicated to precisely that: a ground-up system of governance and justice for SecondLife (and other virtual worlds, eventually), with emphasis on a strict separation of powers and the rule of law.

If you are interested in joining, or would like more information, please IM me in-world, or see our website, http://www.metaverserepublic.org .

[Prokofy Neva]

I view LL as very much like one of these corporativist governments like Russia or China, with as big aspirations, ultimately, for their revolutionary zeal, and that's why I bother. They do things through connections, favour-banking, etc. So that's why FlipperPA and his lawyer can get the Lindens to turn over a John Doe name, and others are ignored. I think if all the cases you had taken up, Jake, involved FIC types, publicity, the news angle of a sex bed, etc. etc. you'd be that more favourably positioned. But of course that isn't the rule of law; it's the rule of tribes, it's the jungle.

The rash of cases that have gotten so much attention (ageplay, Bragg, Stroker) have led to this rising tide of expectations that RL law will now be able to save the day everywhere, and we are seeing it cannot, and perhaps should not, but this alternative, where we're supposed to build this glorious new revolutionary Creative Commons type of legal regime is also fake and manipulated constantly.

Yes, Jake, I know you've always made this point, that they haev this concept of "we give you guys the tools". But trust me -- if "we guys" and "our tools" were really to create this self-governed society and pose any challenge to them, they'd be very swift in breaking it up -- and they might do this almost unconsciously or with some prevarication that some of their lower ranks believe.

It's like the way they've replied to Forseti's SLOG letter about IP and how the Lindens are competing with their own residents, grabbing content, using it to show off LL, and never even

I saw this in full-blown regalia at VW07. There was a giant poster board of a mermaid, the epitome of virtual world experience. I immediately saw that she was a skin and attachments made by EmeraldEmerald Kline, who is one of my tenants. And I was surprised that at the corner of this giant picture, there were no credits -- nothing.

So I went up on stage after Joe Linden gave his very upbeat talk about open sourcing and blah blah blah, and I said, Joe, let me tell you what it's about, it's about this giant poster you have behind your PowerPoint talk which is content by a resident that you don't credit or barely seem aware of.

And he was so confused, and looking around and like, huh, wha?? Because he's fairly new there, and it's just not his job to worry about the "your world/your imagination" mantra given to the customers, who is somebody else's job -- Jeska's -- to placate.

Being inworld, we tend to buy some of this propaganda ourselves to some extent, unconsciously. I remember this marketing Linden who I don't think is there any more getting put out that the houses people made inworld just weren't attractive enough to help her sell the "look" she needed to hustle the first land in that special offer they did for awhile with zoned sims and houses offered on land. I just rolled my eyes at this. I saw the depths of how fake they are, even in their own internal corporate culture, about really making this our world. It's not. The TOS lets us know that.

Of course this claim of "self-governance" is grandly passing the buck of a federal responsibility, and turning it over to warring Balkan warlords and not framing the debate propertly even. And the results are predictable. And if the results were anything different -- and they can't be, while sectarians ilke Ashcroft dominate the discussion with crazy stuff like the Metaverse Republic -- then the Lindens can rest assured that nothing will ever come of it.

This is so true:

"What is clear is that LL creats an expecation of protection of property interests, and then consistently fails to protect that expectation by taking the position that LL is in the business of innovation, not administration."

The expectation, however, is built on an emulation and a simulation. And we know its flaws and their shortcomings. The extremist of what you're saying, however, is instantly belied by all the hundreds of people who do design content and sell it for real money. That's always what they can point to. Those that get burned doing that aren't the majority -- there hasn't yet been a Copybot-type total undermining of the system -- but there will be, likely when they open source.

I don't think the solution is to build a toy government and be patted on the head. I think a few very simple single-interest type of demands need to be placed on the Lindens by movements that don't fuss a lot about structuring a government on servers they can't own, with powers that won't cede their power or separate them, but influence them and mitigate their damage as you would with any corporation whose behaviour you seek to change.