Prokofy Neva, Virtualtor
The Governors of the Guild of St. Luke, Haarlem, 1675 Painting by Jan de Bray
Meanwhile, there is an entire drama off stage from Walton's small but stratospheric world. And that is the anguish of people selling full perm models who increasingly find that their customers sell their packs "as is," or use them as gifts or hunt prizes, and barely change them, violating their TOS. That sort of TOS held better when the world was smaller and made up more of conscientious designers respecting each other's IP -- and customers in a loyal fan base in groups who helped police their beloved creator's TOS. That era is long gone, really, as much as some people try to keep it alive with endless browbeating in groups. People have left and are still leaving -- Gatchapocalypse forced them out, a problem Walton Wainright doesn't feel as he is selling his fatpacks for $5000 now and they were never his bread and butter. I never recall Walton commenting at all on the vicious debates about gatchas -- I'm sure he feels he is above the fray. Then the sales tax, which Europeans can only shrug at, as they suffered it 10 years ago, welcome to the club -- and the cash-out fees, and -- can you imagine? During SLB19? During Shop 'n Hop? When people buy Linden dollars? $222 million Lindens parked at 241 and not budging for days -- weeks -- on end.
I hope Wally doesn't think the creators who made many amazing gatcha items for years in SL were somehow charlatans and incompetents who couldn't make a living without ripping off the public, but he might well think that (although he would likely not speak of it in public; I'm beginning to see how his sub-tweets work). I think if he, living in the rich West, went and looked in the eyes those people in Eastern Europe, Russia, Asia, and Latin America who made a living this way, he couldn't possibly say that to them -- and their work spoke for itself. The world of gatchas isn't entirely gone, but there are two other areas of the economy that have more attention now, art works (about which I will write later) and full perm models. Where once they were invisible in the events -- no need to call attention to something more people might steal, better to stay within the guild! -- now they have multiple fairs just for full perm models and textures.
FULL PERM MESH MODEL CREATORS ISSUE MORE RESTRICTIVE TOS
At least two top sellers of full perm models recently changed their TOS to a more restrictive one in the last few months due to rampant misuse -- I know because I'm in their groups and I frequently buy from them. Others I see on the MP have followed suit.
They changed the TOS to compel makers to only sell their items for a specific price or higher, and never give them away, or only use them on a limited basis in hunts, and only if they significantly changed the item or incorporated it into a more complex creation.
Obviously, it's very, very hard to police people on what amounts to the honour system of abiding by a TOS. LL does not get involved in resident-to-resident disputes. This set of creators and more pointedly their customers, most of them far from Walton's world, where the events won't allow creators who use models (the customers of these merchants), are really hurting these days. Their business is down, the demands of their customers have increased as more and more people become desperate to try to find a way to make and sell things to cover SL expenses, now that gatchas are nearly depleted as a resource (NextUp and so on simply can't fill the gap).
Some of the FP merchants have more and more turned to selling no-transfer items themselves at large shopping events so that they can compete with the big dogs who scorn this sector even if they might acknowledge the skill of those who make mesh models. A few of the big dogs use the models themselves, imagine, but through building and starring in the posse, they gain respect that others will never obtain -- they are locked out of events that demand participants only sell original mesh.
So in the world of model makers and their customers, creators don't worry about Copybot so much, which is kind of an abstraction -- and Copybotters are not going to waste time ripping a 30L Saturday flowerpot they can't re-sell for hardly anything. Rippers want to get the top clothes, vehicles, gatcha rares, because you can sell them for the most money. Did you ever hear of somebody ripping a lawn chair or a skybox?
You wouldn't have to take the risk to deploy Copybot in the world; you'd only have to befriend a customer of an FP store.
NOT COPYBOT, BUT THE CUSTOMER IS THE ENEMY
FP makers worry about their own customers who steal from them by giving all their full perm items away to their friends and alts, or who merely retexture something to re-sell it and thus essentially take away the business of those full perm model makers. Maybe such model makers are doomed to have to go out of business in the Metaverse, I'm not sure. But of course they are the only way that the untalented and amateurs like me have a way to become creative. Of course, what the top class of merchants want us to do is be gawkers and buyers and shut up.
Over and over again, Philip Linden promised "a watermark" to protect copyright. This evidently wasn't practical or doable but more to the point, the Lindens weren't motivated to care about it. There are the top creators that sell the most and are the most popular. Those people can arrange DMCA takedowns if they want. Why bother with the rest -- the rest who used to be called "the long tail" in a positive way -- a term you never hear anymore?
THE GUILD AND THE RENFAIRE
I think this will end with a guild system, where the Lindens, fed up with drama and protests against them and rampant ripping and Copybot all over town, will say to creators: register with us, give us a driver's license or passport and a form of payment, fill out a form here in triplicate, and wait 21 business days...or 45...or never, as it is at our discretion...and you, too, can sell on the MP where the search works, and don't bother with inworld, where the search doesn't work. Other worlds worked like this -- such as There and IMVU. It's not the norm to have user content scattered throughout the world-- game devs and world platform providers hate it. It means ugliness in the world, and endless trouble. Gamerz endlessly rant on the SL forums about how this engine or that engine is better and SL is on life support. But World of Warcraft doesn't have user content in it. Roblox has ways to make separate games or mods or something, but it's not a world where you can make and sell user content. You can't even get married in Roblox. Sure, a world can look good when the content is all absolutely uniform. Been to Bellisseria lately?
The beauty of SL is that it never had this oppressive and exclusive guild system, that it enables people like my tenants to take a kitty they bred and put it to sale; to take a box they turned into a table and put it to sale; to re-sell a gatcha; to even make clothes that at least their friends in their circle will buy.
There is a cohort of creators in SL nobody has heard of. They are never in the top Seraphim events. They aren't even at Mieville fairs and hunts, which is far more tolerant of the amateur and the mesh-model user. They live in the hinterlands and have breedable auctions far from anyone's event list. They have little stores with funny or cute or innovative items. They aren't the new designers that Walton picks out of the line-up and takes under his wing. He will never see them.
I'm amazed when I find a store with someone making things out of mesh out in the boondocks, and no one has heard of them -- they can't break into the posses of the top 200, the Shop 'n Hop cartel, the ones the Lindens feature in all their videos on the blog. That doesn't bother me or them as long as they are free to thrive and aren't broken by heavy tier, taxation, and theft. It was always my assumption that if you could make a beautiful and realistic-looking mesh item, that you would have the talent to get noticed and be accepted into the merchants' events. Not so.
THE EVENTS RACKET
As the critics of this secretive and exploitative system point out that it's not an open system. It's not a matter of merely paying the steep fees - they start at 2500 but I hear they can be double or triple that amount. I've only seen one event, probably because the organizers were getting desperate, where rental boxes were put in the booths so anyone could pay them and put in their wares. Most events have an exclusive list of designers they cull themselves and the creation of strict rules to filter out the incompetent or unqualified.
One of the mysteries of SL is when a totally unknown person, with a new profile or maybe one only a year or two old, springs full-blown into a top event. How do they get in? Are they alts? Do they just apply? Do they work the networks and go to the right parties? Some of these people appear and disappear astoundingly fast, like comets. They have stores sparsely filled, after selling a lot of expensive fancy furniture. Then they go dark. I guess some people like to experiment with other names and looks? Or perhaps they genuinely are new people, but they can't take the heat and get out of the kitchen.
OPEN MARKETS
I could point out that the way Anshe Chung broke the back of the oldbie Guild -- the Feted Inner Core or FIC as I called them -- that seized hold of SL in the early days -- early adapters, Charter members with free 4096s, strung together on alts into entire sims, designers and scripters with stores in the boondocks where they sometimes let a newbie with seeming talent have a little corner table in their store -- was by creating malls with rental boxes anyone could pay. The prices were high, but if you paid them, you could put out your wares and get more eyeballs and more traffic than those boutiques in the boondocks on the early colour sims. This made them furious, and sparked their campaign to get rid of telehubs, where Anshe and others clustered their malls.
CLOSED STALLS
So I've been in four merchant events, two of which were featured on Seraphim -- which is a massively popular and high-trafficked site whose editors select only designers and events they think fit. Each of these events involves event managers endlessly nagging the designers and trying to get them to show up on time, put out their stuff, and not violate rules meant to tame lag. There is always drama about bloggers taking free packs and not blogging. There is always someone who has a fight about some placement of their booth which they think is disadvantageous.
It is so unpleasant being in these groups listening to this haranguing in the group all day, when you have already followed the rules and done what they asked. The wrangling, not to mention the steep fees, was enough to make me leave one event; another event folded because they got tired of chasing all these divas to accomplish the goal of helping them sell their wares. I have great respect for the people of Mieville, who keep cheerfully putting on events, with great hardship since their Mayor is out on sick leave, and herding the cats that make up that delightful place.
They can't get on Seraphim's feed, however -- the portals to virtual prosperity are jealously guarded. You don't pay to be on the feed; but you have to be accepted by the Guild. They do get on the Lindens' Destinations, however, which helps.
MAKE A VIP GROUP?
My proposal to the Full Perm creators is that they create a category of VIP customer who pays more to be an exclusive group where the members are allowed to use the models in creations that are given away for free at hunts or as group gifts. The problem is that creators who put in their TOS a demand to sell items using their models only for X price (usually more than what the model cost) are merely reducing their customer list needlessly. I personally back away from such creators now unless they have something that seems "must have" for some little egg I'm making.
If they had a VIP group that I paid $500 or $750 to join that would then allow me to use the items in quests, that would bring me back. When I had to gather up 3 gifts for SLB19, I realized that the freebie requirement would kick in with some of these makers, so I culled out anything from any of them from my items, replacing them with others, and if that wasn't possible, discarding that item from consideration.
Some model makers say they only mean they don't want you to give their pack "as is" as the freebie, even if on no-transfer. But most make it very explicit that you must not use their item in creations given away even with no-transfer, and that they must be sold for X price. This is because of the flood of abuses. I myself have seen how even top creators casually send me a full-perm item they've used in their creation, thinking it doesn't matter if they've paid sometimes a high price for that thing.
THE GUILD RULES?
I don't see how LL can possibly be involved in this sector of the creator economy, but I do wonder if they reach the point of The Guild system, whether they will NOT accept full perm model makers, because it is too hard for them to police IP on the honour method. That is, they actually have the technical capacity to do so! They can scour the servers and find where the FP items are sold by people who didn't buy the kits. They can see where they are given away for $0 or in a giver. They have server logs. We don't. Will they use that power when they get creators to make the tradeoff to be in their Guild -- a privilege that might involve not just presentation of RL ID and possibly even credentials but possibly a higher percentage of taxation than what they pay now (10% on the MP).
The Lindens removed from the MP system an extremely valuable device that consumers could use to keep unscrupulous sellers in check: the ability to comment on positive or negative reviews substantively. (Now you can only indicate whether a review was useful or not). Where once you did not have to buy the item in order to post a comment, on others' comments -- sometimes in self-defense, some times to rebut misinformation -- now that is removed. Thin-skinned divas who don't want any reviews but from their adoring friends didn't mind the comments being nerfed. I imagine we won't have to wait too long til the Linden enable the merchant to remove negative comments.
When the Copybot and for that matter full perm copying problems grow severe enough, the Lindens will be able to herd creators into the Guild in exchange for help with IP protection -- investigations with their server logs and willingness not must to remove content after a DMCA content, but content their servers prove is stolen -- when a non-IP holder is found selling a cloned item.
Do you know that Google has an automated system that removes hundreds of thousands of videos every day, based on agreements with top copyright holders and simply pro-active automatic searches for obvious key words of the day. This was explained to me personally by a staff person, at an OSCE conference. Google doesn't wait for DMCA takedown notices to limit its liability for litigation, even with Section 230 to hide behind -- not when they face the big guys simply pulling all their content and attempting huge lawsuits (as they have done). We all know the California Ideology led to this situation with Napster and all the rest, but it didn't last. Google takes down the Beyonce copies that aren't from Beyonce's company. There is no reason why LL can't do that on the MP and inworld -- at its little level -- as well with the most obvious cases. Didn't a Linden delete a Coke machine on my property once because Coke was now in SL? Please.
The Lindens could at least on a selective basis (which is how they do Governance now ANYWAY), chase down some thieves and remove the stolen property and assist more in the DMCA process (I don't see that it could be automated). They may already do that quietly anyway, we don't know.
THE POSSE AND THE CASPER BLOCK
But the Copybot problem isn't severe enough -- yet. The big dogs manage their DMCAs; the little cats have the vitriol and the posses to go chasing into every store of every customer and seeing if they are in violation, in person. Then they can block their purchases on Casper -- this is one of Casper's pernicious features. There is no due process here, of course, and we can't be sure they are right every time they make these blocks.
The biggest difference between the Lindens of yesterday up through Ebbe and the Lindens NOW is that they have a Harvard-trained lawyer among their investors, not merely their staff, and a lawyer who has shown us he is not in adversarial mode regarding the outside world of state prosecutors or regulators, but the unruly user base -- us. Before, it was all geeks like Philip and Mitch Kapor and Pierre Omidyaar, the E-bay guy.
At one time the Lindens had Ginsu Linden (Gene Yoon in RL) who was a nice, quiet man whom Philip once tapped during a RL meet-up in NYC to assure me that Linden Lab would never never never take away my virtual property. (That the Lindens tied forums bans with land confiscation at the time belied this claim was somehow tabled). Ginsu is now running for office in his area in California -- he has a great program and if you live there, vote for him! But that kind of lawyer is long gone. He did the basic work that corporate lawyers do to protect their company, their copyrights, their trademarks, and their ass, in the media, when various types came for them, including some residents like Mark Bragg who sued them for confiscation of land, although he had used an exploit to pay a low fee on the auction.
NOW we have a different kind of lawyer, Raj Date, a politician, a US official and protogee of Elizabeth Warren who served in the US Trade Office. THIS lawyer is ideological and crusading against the user base, which makes it harder to sell this boat in their view, and in a bid to keep the company always ready for inspection -- and sale. It's like when you want to sell a house. You can't leave the kids' toys lying around. From THIS lawyer, we got the ban of gatchas; the end of non-buyer comments on the MP (most likely, though that can't be proven); the sales tax (which they went 18 years without paying) and I suspect, the sudden demand to remove resident logos from SLB18 exhibitions because they appeared next to LL logos -- but not from Shop 'n Hop, obviously. And there's probably more, I don't know about.
THE GUILD IS THE SOLUTION TO COPYBOT
From THIS lawyer, I think it's reasonable to expect that at some time, his eye will fall on the Copybot and full perm sellers community and their wrangles, and decide that there has to be a registered guild, so that LL knows whom they are protecting, and then protection of that Guild, which is the money maker. (LL always wanted to move away from the land model -- so heavy! All those servers!)
Of course, I have no way of knowing what is really happening, nor do you. Linden Lab's chief counsel is David Kim, a seasoned lawyer with a past resume on bitcoin -- which SL never had and is not likely to get in the near future -- unless his resume means something?
OBSOLETE GROUP BUILDS AND INWORLD CREATOR TOOLS
Recently, when Philip spoke of his "laws for the metaverse," he seem to idealize the group build of yesteryear that never really caught on in SL even in the early days and today is nearly non-existent. He seemed unaware that most creators now work outside the viewers, in Blender and such. They are not pushing prims inworld because they're past all that now, and working with mesh. Philip left before mesh was imposed and took off and I think he just doesn't think about the large divide introduced into SL -- all those who can work in sophisticated programs for designers, and the rest of us who slap a texture on a prim. And what on earth is this screenshot? Is this SL with a lot of debris in the air, or a badly rezzing sim? The ground looks like SL but maybe it's Roblox.
There are minimal requirements for virtual worlds to be useful places for value creation, here are some: https://t.co/b02DnbcBs4
— Philip Rosedale (@philiprosedale) July 8, 2022
How long before we don't even have prims any more? I mean, there's nothing to say that they have to be kept, when no top designers work with them anymore. How many prim constructions did you see at Shop 'n Hop?
I feel sometimes that I am the only one making something inworld, out on the lawn in front of my house or in the commons area of my rentals, and all the annoyances that go with this -- the edit window always opening OVER the object you are trying to edit (pushing it to the side works, sure, but you have to KEEP doing that); the flashing lights we now have in the background in edit mode, etc. etc.
I'm in a small niche of people making things with prims, sculpties, and mesh, who aren't the mass of users -- who barely can place a house these days and never learn to rez a prim (and why should they?) -- and not the mesh creators of the top and secondary tiers
No one feels any pressure to accommodate us and I'm acutely aware of that.
THE GUILD IS ONLY A PREMIUM PLUS CONCIERGE SERVICE!
When the Guild is created, at first it will only be described as a kind of Premium Plus, a registration process that might even cost money (likely it would have to, given the work involved), and Lindens will tell angry complainers that it is not a "Good-Housekeeping Seal of Approval" at all, oh noes. It will be described as merely a bonus to facilitate copyright issues, let's say, and perhaps provide technical support, like a souped-up Concierge service. In a way, it will be a sop to creators because LL is not likely -- yet -- to have the will to rein in Firestorm (I'll have a separate post on them.)
Gradually, you will be seen as incompetent if you aren't in the Guild. But you won't be able to get in unless you spent years cultivating Lindens and Moles or unless you know a guy who knows a guy.
"The Guild," Linden execs will tell us wearily, at first in a poorly-attended inworld office hour, and then later in a sanitized blog post, "is not perhaps to everyone's liking, but it's the only way we can be in the Metaverse."
"Oh?" we will ask. "What on earth do you mean?"
"Well, you know how you asked if we had joined that Interoperability Group with big tech, and we weren't exactly invited, and then we sort of schnorred our way in...."
"Oh?" we say, arching an eyebrow.
"Well, it turns out, if we want to be interoperable with these other big platforms -- and of course we do, because it means more creativity and commerce for everybody -- we're going to have to make some changes around here. We have to ensure that all user content is not in violation of copyright. We also have to protect creators' intellectual property as there are more people walking from verse to verse."
At this point we'll wonder privately to ourselves why they never did that before, when so much ripping was going on, but ok.
"....And the only way to do that is to have a registry and a Guild...of sorts. We won't be able to keep the building tools in the viewer -- we're finding they didn't get much use, anyway. User statistics are god, you know! So, we think this represents the best solution to preserve what's so special about SL, and..."
By this time, your eyes may be glazing over, or your ears will stop listening or you will be facedesked. But onward to the Great and Glorious Future!
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