Second Thoughts

The Tragedy of the Commons: A History of Protest in Second Life in Five Acts

By Prokofy Neva, Virtualtor

Come to my SL20B Exhibit! There are more than a dozen freebies, many of them historic artifacts!

Among the rules for exhibitors at the SL birthdays -- which have grown more strict in recent years -- aside from the ban on commerce, tip jars, your company logo (!), etc., there is this:

*10. You may not use or display hate-oriented content at your SL20B build. Political affiliations, statements or content of any kind are not appropriate for the Birthday. The Second Life Birthday event is a place to celebrate the anniversary of Second Life and display creative endeavors by Residents. If you are not sure if something falls into these categories, contact a Mole Coordinator. You may not display content that expresses a political opinion or would defame, ridicule or disparage other residents or groups or Second Life. Any content that is deemed offensive, harassing, insulting or bullying will be removed, and the owner will be removed from the event. This will be determined by the staff of SL20B at their discretion. Their decisions are final.

As we know from the SL forums, the notion of "hate-oriented content" or content that "would defame, ridicule or disparage other residents or groups" are tremendously overbroad concepts and certainly don't pass muster for US First Amendent jurisprudence, and for that matter, even Art. 19 of the UN's Universal Declaration of Human Rights. As a private corporation, Linden Lab is not required to supply First-Amendment level free speech, so and here we all are.

I view this as merely an interesting, challenging writing assignment to see if you can apply "the View from Nowhere" -- so hated in particular by leftist media critics like Jay Rosen. I feel such a "nowhere view" is actually a good thing when it consists of layered perspectives so that the reader can form their own judgement. In the old days, the New York Times would typically have a "nut graph" or a graph early in the story providing, say, five perspectives of an event. There would be the perpetrators, the victims, the bystanders, the experts, the government officials and so on. Reporters have given up investigating these perspectives; worse, they delegitimize many of them. 

I don't pretend to any full history of SL or even full (or especially unbiased) account of the events of protest in SL. But I was a witness of many of them and I think I can bring more information to the table. 

Why do I write such long posts? Because I think out loud and write as I go. You're not required to read them and can skim. This essay is broken up into 18 vignettes in world -- several cover one event or topic in two notecards, so the "vignettes" are not so distinct. Due to health issues, I hardly had any time to do this build and notecards and nearly dropped out. But I did want to be present for the historic SL20B and get this topic passed and validated. If you go to Tapestry of Time, or read the official 20th anniversary commemoration booklet, you realize the Lindens tend to reify certain events in their own corporate history (the "Prim Tax Revolt" is always worshipped as much as the "Boston Tea Party" in RL American history and simulates it, right down to crates of tea thrown into the ocean). They also tend to focus not on social developments that drive their software revisions, but technical issues -- now we have sculpties; now we have mesh; oh, there's a shiny, PBR, oh now we can finally link prims 64 meters apart from each other (which means you can put walls on a sky platform that size and link them finally).

Protests about how software affects organic people manifesting as avatars? Not so much.

That is one "use case"; there is another "edge case"; there is a "bug" or a "feature". The software-driven life, not based on any kinds of laws of nature or natural law or organic values,  which we have all lived thoroughly for 20 years has now invaded all of modern life in developed countries and will only become all-pervasive.

The recent fumblings by Meta (Facebook) and others with what purported to be "the dawn of the Metaverse" (which we know dawned in 2003 and had conferences and white papers by 2006!) and the reiteration of the wheel lets us know that we still don't have the necessary attention we deserve!

THE TRAGEDY OF THE COMMONS: A HISTORY OF PROTEST IN SECOND LIFE IN FIVE ACTS

Welcome

Welcome to my exhibit for SL20B! I'm still a newbie at almost 19 years in SL now, but over the last two decades, I have done a lot of thinking about this glorious virtual Experiment in International Living which we have on these fair servers, and the lessons we can pass on to the new legless and blind Metaverse Engineers: leave in everything below the waist, keep the TVs off your nose and the boxes off your head, and zone, zone, zone.

Much of the stress and strife of virtual worlds and the cost in staff time and trouble in customer tickets can be boiled down to the Tragedy of the Commons. Read up on this concept if you haven't heard of it, but if you have been in SL for even 30 days, you've already lived it in the round.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Tragedy_of_the_commons

The Second Life grid represented as the paddocked green pastures of the islands and homesteads; the gated communities of Bellisseria; and the wild mainland where large eyesore builds, grid-wide transportation games, enormous RP castles, etc. contest for the view, amid clumps of wildflowers and manicured lawns.

Few remember now how the Electric Sheep company, one of the "Big Six" resident developers or "solutions providers" for outside RL companies in SL, managed to tag every single item in SL and then organize a global search around it, which led to an uproar as people's casual sale items left to $0 for their friends or their adult furniture was suddenly thrust into the public eye. Eventually, this led to an object menu section where you can check off "show in search," an item that is generally irrelevant now (does Firestorm's Area Search even require it?)

Many of the protests that developed in SL over the years related to the ruination of the virtual experience of the many by the few, and the effort by the platform providers to provide the maximum freedom of creativity to grow the world, but not yield to forces bent on destroying it to fulfill the whims of the few.

Within a few years of its founding, Second Life was forced to abandon the dream of harmonious civic life on a contiguous mainland and offer private islands for people to get away from each other, represented by the sheep paddock here, and give in to strenuous customer demand for planned communities with more rules and predictable content, which began with Brown and Boardman and continued to Bellisseria and similar Linden Home communities.

As in RL, citizen protest emerges against rules and against other citizens' groups with the dominant theme that Second Life is "not a country" (although founder Philip Rosedale said he was making one -- and did, whether recognized or not). It doesn't have the features of real-life liberal democracies or for that matter rigid authoritarian regimes but is a private company with a Terms of Service. We already live in the Customer Service State predicted by games theory thinker Edward Castronova (Escape to the Virtual World - 2008).

Yet there can never be enough staff time to address all the complaints accruing in a place where hell is other people - in 3D, streaming, and where even the most attentive and dedicated customer servants could please everybody. And so the "game" that has emerged throughout the years is to get enough attention to one's recipe for happiness and have the TOS amended in this or that direction. Some redactions occurred internally; others were a result of external pressure, whether by small groups or fare more rarely, by mass movements (which are almost impossible to form in SL for lots of reasons).

I have made 18 vignettes somewhat arbitrarily that illustrates this process; some deal with specific events in time, and others deal with chronic themes over the years.

History is written by the victors. And Mainland rentals agents are not the victors in this game. So this is understandably a dissident history, and features moments you may never have heard of, such as this: did you know that in 2004, you could be voted off your group land which you purchased on the auction and paid tier on regularly, by tenants who paid no tier? Did you know one resident company asked for an obtained a box on objects "show in search" to be able to search the entire grid and harvest the search results for their use? This feature remains today on object menus, largely unused or not understood. Did you know there was once a volunteers' group with 8000 residents in it who met in an enormous Greco-Roman palace?

Naturally some events have been left out and if you think of any that you believe should be included, ,leave a notecard in the Complaint Rockets to the right in the Better Living Through Land Impact room.

Be sure to pick up all the interesting historical freebies or art works, vote early and often on all your alts, and leave your actual signed notecard in the mailbox to bring back the Pony in the Welcome Area -- or any other feature request!

We find the drinks we offer from Kittykat Ninetail's "THIS IS MINE" dragon are perfect for reflecting on everything related to the cry of many a resident down through the years: "I get to do WTF I want on my land" -- and the consequences for us all. And you should sample beverages offered at further stations to bolster your stamina in considering SL's rich history, only a slice of which I am able to give here. If you remember these events differently -- write your own history!

I am grateful to my dear friend Alazarin Mondrian/Alazarin Mobius for helping me with the build and providing signage and props. Also special recognition of Bump Squeegee and Silas Merlin for their art works displayed here.

Happy SL20B!

Prokofy Neva, Curator

Content and Discontent, Richness and Sadness

Prelude
Content/Discontent

The entire history of massive online role-play games, virtual worlds, social media, virtual reality, and artificial intelligence could be summed up in this phrase:

Content/Discontent

Game gods, virtual world devs, social media entrepreneurs, VR devs and our newflangled "prompt engineers" all face the same dilemma:

They make a thing.
Some people like it; some don't, they vote with their feet.
They let people make a thing; some people don't like it, they leave (and you can't have their stuff)
They make a thing -- some people "take it to real," as the kids say, in RL courtrooms.
They don't make a thing -- people complain.
They make a thing -- people burn through it and want more.
They make a thing -- users break it.

You get the idea.

Lindens make a gorgeous virtual, contiguous world with a sun that rises and sets, a moon, trees, grass, flowers, and like God on the 6th day, they made fugly but serviceable avatars, and then doubled back later and put in fish.

The didn't have to make animals because Sion Zaius entered our world and created the sion chicken, whose food inworld is now literally running out because Sion had to go back to college. Content/Discontent.

The content which the Lindens enabled with their inworld building tools and permission for outworld uploads of textures, sounds, and later mesh, is rich, ornate, as intricate as Maru Kado's Kasamawashi animesh cat here.

But people have poor graphic cards; they experience lag; stuff breaks; *they* break it -- and, as Wallace Stevens says in "Gubbinal":

"The world is ugly and the people are sad."

They sit in the Sad Chair, they talk to their Sad Little Friend the Cloud, they do Sad Things that make more sadness.

Their loudest complaint is:

"This isn't like RL."

Linden Lab refuses to get involved in inter-resident disputes and prohibits the naming of names on the forums.

But if anyone, Linden or resident, makes rules for compatible living, someone is sure to feel too constrained and bark:

"This is TOO MUCH like RL."

Linden Lab has rules based on RL jurisdictions, prohibiting the crimes of gambling, fraud, child pornography etc -- none of which is sanitized by being virtualized.

Everyone finds their way across the thin line between Content and Discontent, or they don't find the thin line between Sanity or Insanity.

***

Act 1, Scene 1
Prim Hoarders

Every virtual schoolchild knows the glorious history of the Prim Tax Revolt, spoken of in reverent tones and told and retold to a high polish.

The reality is, some of the instigators were Linden alts, so it was one set of Lindens against another set of Lindens on a policy issue, with some residents getting involved.

Yes, wasn't it terrible, like some horrid oligarchic Scrooge, to charge people by the prim??? Gosh, that sounds like some rental agents we know!

But before there was the Prim Tax and the Prim Tax Revolt, there was another thing that is instructive to know about in terms of our Tragedy of the Commons, and that is: Prim Hoarding.

So in the old days, people would get a parcel of land, and because the prims could be accessed like a vast well on that sim for all (as they can in grouped land on Mainland rentals! Imagine!), some people would build huge, complex, and not necessarily beautiful builds. Although there are some fabulous old builds like the Cathedral in Mocha not to mention the wondrous Linden builds like the Moth Temple.

And some people who weren't particularly talented but thought that some day, they might want to build something or hire a builder, would stash hoards of prims under the ground to use them up -- a kind of prim-soaker. Of the type we had to keep in some sims (the Estonian Embassy in SL's cornflower crown was good for this purpose) to that *griefers* wouldn't fill the sim with griefcubes which used to make people's prims return to their inventories.

So people just rezzed out a bunch of cubes or some high-prim item -- and in those days, there was no "Convex," no no no.

So quite reasonably to deter that behaviour, which good will and good neighbourliness couldn't stop, the Lindens decided to charge by the prim. Then people, especially prim hoarders, rebelled.

Then they charged by the *meter* and made the number of prims per meter standard.

Progress.

So while there were many Lessons Learned and imposed, such as "be clear on your protest goals" or "use humour" or "be willing to compromise," there was another darker, force at work, which we already explained was Content/Discontent, and that is the Law of Virtuality -- somebody is always making a thing, and somebody else doesn't like that thing, or wants to hog resources to themselves, and prevent others from having them.

In RL, there is "tort law" and laws about "attractive nuisances" and "zoning" but in SL, we have meters and standard number of prims -- or land impact as they are now known (virtually the same).

Be grateful.

***

Act 1, Scene 2
Magic Wand vs. Griefcube

After the Lindens rested on the 7th day, their residents got to work building out the world, in some ways worse -- much worse -- and some ways better, but that was the plan, and we all know that God loves us and has a plan for us, don't we?

So somewhere along here in the early days there was a wondrous magician named Starax who made an amazing wand. This wand, when clicked, could produce all kinds of things from detailed, anatomically correct Vertu Cows to goldfish and lions and horses (and we don't really know because we're newbies, and missed that early chapter but someone will catch us up.)

So these items would come out of the wand at a clip and replicate across a sim. They were on temp rez, so it didn't seem like such a big deal.

Meanwhile, less creative sorts who read the Something Awful forums, and later 4chan, thought it would be fun to go around and find items that people had rezzed out from the Linden Library, such as Philip's Party hat, which the Lindens had thoughtfully left on all perms to help people "share" and "create". (Now they've gone in the opposite direction and put things on no transfer which is a shame, but you'll see why in a minute.)

So not before long, sims would be regularly deluged with self-replicating cubes, often with horrendously ugly, vulgar, and illegal images on them, and typically with some nonsense being spouted and sometimes numbered prims announcing their births rapidly in chat. Often, this would crash a sim, if some other sim crashing device wasn't used.

And the beauty part? As they had originated from an individual resident's library, and then been seized because they were pre-checked on "share" and all perms, they could now look as if they were grief objects made by that prim creator, who was then vilified and AR'd as a griefer, instead of the victim of a griefer. That's why you always need to look at the prim *owner* or deployer in a grief attack.

These mass attacks would occur particularly during public events, like the goodbye party for Robin Linden, an early VP. Or during a town hall. Philip got so mad once he threatened to call the FBI. The entire grid would be shut down sometimes for days at a time -- essentially, this was a DDoS attack, with zero-day exploits.

Lindens scampered around trying to patch exploits and built what they called a "grey goo fence" which stopped self-replicating prims at least from crossing borders, or replicating as fast...or something -- get Andrew Linden to tell you if you can find him (he is no longer on staff).

But that nerfed Starax's Wand and a great outcry went up on the forums and in the land. Now, the forums are typically read in any game or world by less than 5% of the user population, but still, it Had an Effect, which is always the goal. It seemd Starax's Wand could still work, in a way, but by then, Starax had stomped out of the world. Of course, he was later to appear on an alt and work for one of the big RL developers but not everyone remembers that part. There was even a little Starax museum in Patagonia which we helped to keep free of weeds and Starax himself apparently came to it.

We can't represent all the forms of griefing here which are myriad and diverse and wondrous, even more than Starax's wand, or the Mysti-Tool, or Alazarin's 600-prim castles or anc's friedberry gatchas, my personal favourite. Because if we represented them, we'd be banned here. So take it on faith -- griefers wrecked havoc for at least 5 solid years before the worst of them either were finally banned or grew up in RL and got jobs at Intel and other virtual world competitors-- which maybe this was what it was all about all along.

Some people weren't affected by griefing and never thought it was a big deal; others experienced it daily and filed ARs that went nowhere for years on end. There was a strange drama of "allowing creativity" and "complying with TOS 2(c)" -- a now removed section of the TOS which we personally found useful which went something like this "interfering with the enjoyment of Second Life by other residents."

There is much that is overbroad in the TOS and some found that particular clause overbroad, but it fits. The Golden Rule still works pretty well as an organic norm often hard to enforce in code.

Griefing -- more than high cost, lag, curbs on lifestyles, etc. -- has likely caused more protest than any other thing in SL, but only the Lindens know how the ARs are trending as they no longer publish their partial Police Blotter which was helpful.

Enhancement of the land tools -- which we couldn't fit in to this exhibit -- helped control the experience more and more for residents -- they could turn off fly to prevent griefer swarms, although this also prevents much of the thrill of SL as the avian creatures we are. They can turn off scripts for "everyone" and only enable "group" to run them, which can be closed. And so on.

If working the land controls isn't enough, a newer sort of Linden now with names like Governance4 Linden tell you to file ARs accurately and in detail and they will have an effect.

Everyone knows ARs seldom work, but the workarounds that evolved to fill this gap -- various resident vigilante groups -- can be worse -- and again, space and time did not allow us to enlarge on that topic which in SL terms, is actually an interesting prequel to the Edward Snowden story.

Remember: if you are ever cage-bombed, the trick is just to sit on anything or be animated by any object.

***

Act 1, Scene 3
Griefer U

The visible or physical destruction of griefers is one topic, but there are myriad forms of other types of griefing -- ranging from briefly amusing chat to repetitive spam to annoying catcalls to actionable hate speech and more.

And there are all kinds of tricks and fakes and maneuvers especially making extensive use of the affordances of alts and the ability to fly (which is why "fly" is turned off in so many places.)

One might say that while SL is a place of enormous creativity where many have found friends and even soul mates for life, it is also a place offering incredible opportunities to inflict pain on other human beings.

There are certain extremist scholars who view offenses against RL social norms and corporate terms of service as merely "transgressive" or "ludic" or "neuro-atypical" and fascinating subjects of study to be encouraged and kept free of condemnation. But the people who live in virtual worlds tend to realize at some level that if there is something you are doing that you wouldn't do in your grandmother's living room, maybe you shouldn't be doing it, or at least not in public.

Is griefing a legitimate form of protest or merely another form of crime? We're going to go with Door No. 2. If you want to oppose The Man and knock over the twin towers as "satire," do it on your own sim at least. But you don't have a sim, do you? Or even a micro-parcel. So that's why you're griefing in a sandbox, eh?

Sometimes these behaviours are blessed as "emergent" by the platform providers who, after all, never forget that they are a Lab and we are all in an experiment.

Other times, they are allowed for a while -- sometimes years -- and then disallowed suddenly, and we don't always know why.

Extraordinary feats of kindness and self-sacrifice have been made on this grid along with extraordinary feats of cruelty -- but if you gave your log-on to someone else, that's on you. Protest as you will, LL doesn't get involved. And so on. The line is drawn clearly there.

Elsewhere, as a one-time VP at LL asked pointedly about the activity possible on a 16 m microparcel: "What are you doing on there, your knitting?"

Make a parade of alts to spy on or harass a lover who rejected you -- likely you'll be able to get away with it although in theory, this can be grounds for action. There isn't any limit on the number of basic or premium accounts any more "as long as they are not used for ill" as a top Linden explained -- but this has to be tested through the AR process by others.

One thing is certain, this Road to Hell is paved with the good intention of Encouraging Creativity.

The RL effigies of myself allowed to proliferate on my virtual lawns for years on end and the packs of Soviet palaces and Stalinist regalia were creative, I suppose -- prim sculpture really is a wonder and a lost art, at that, nowadays! But if the sacred pledge of virtual world makers to their denizens -- that if it is not on the profile inworld, it is not fair game -- is to retain its glory, then it has to stick for everybody, not just people you like.

Then on a separate but related topic, I personally wonder if art requiring virtual platforms and artificial intelligence can rightfully be called "art" in the full sense and I prefer to call it "artifacturing" when it comes to MidJourney although I concede that the creations of SL are far more like RL creations.

Trust me, I am unable to keep my hand and eye straight long enough to paint anything remotely like this Blue Owl on Porcelain Cup and I even manged to flunk art class in High School.

And I'm not so sure of the meaning of this Blue Owl which I personally didn't make at all but merely "prompted" to be scraped from the chaos of images on the Internet like the bits of chainsawed books in "Rainbow's End" by Vernor Vinges in a strange future library which were glued back together virtually!

In fact, somebody who can actually make a nice little Blue Owl like Dalriada Delwood of MOoH! is much the greater artist.

But even she may have gone on the Internet to get ideas because haven't we all?

Still, it's hard to imagine why even the mundane creativity of norms living in little houses on the hillside with picket fences and decorating with the top Coastal Grandma decorators of Happy Weekends had to die for Plastic Duck. You know?

Yet all of us had to have a little bit of them die in order that Plastic Duck live -- although have you noticed he hasn't been around for ages?

At a certain point when the drive to allow creativity out of some socialist ideological fervour or technolibertarian fever dream crashes on the reality of user attrition and less sales of regions and more abandoned land, the Lindens do act. Protest works.

It just takes a long time.

And I think in the long, run, we'd all rather have our legs. PS our eyes free to look at RL along with SL at the same time.

***

Act 1, Scene 4
Ad Farmers

As long as there has been land enabled for sale in SL, there have been extortionists finding ways to get people to "buy back the view" -- or even buy passage out of their own property without ban lines.

Ad farmers buy up cheap parcels and cut them into small pieces and then put an outrageous price on it to encourage people near the land -- which may sprout spinning cubes, laggy cubes, large billboards that encroach elsewhere, etc. -- to "buy back the view."

Few remember how these micro-parcels first appeared, unless they were born during the early years when "First Land" was available -- and they clicked the wrong button on the land menu.

: (

If you clicked "abandon" by intention or mistake, your land would fall into 16 m2 parcels -- that means 32 individual 16m parcels which rapidly fell prey to swift or bot-deploying land barons who bought them for $16 meter before you could scarcely gather your wits. Well, you'll be sure not to do THAT again -- except you might, again, by mistake, on another account, or comfort a friend who fell prey to the same insanity. That is why among the reforms to the land tools were "scare screens" with "Do you really want to abandon your land?" -- and then this fall-into-pieces system was retired and the full lot would abandon intact.

The theory of the insta-chop-up was that your neighbours, all being people of good will, would only take what they needed for extra prims -- why there might be several cheerful souls right on your sim who would take the few prims each, leaving it for others to take as needed, like a pumpkin pie at Thanksgiving, right?

Except like a lot of things in SL, it didn't work that way until many years later, bots were banned for use in land purchases -- although the amazing speed at which certain barons show up at your elbow if you mistakingly click "anyone" when attempting to put land to sale to yourself or another person.

But to back up a bit, we spent many years -- from about 2004-2008 or four long years -- protesting the land extortion racket to the Lindens and trying to get them to adopt a policy about it.

This wasn't easy, because there were many legitimate uses of microparcels -- some people made maps, or surveyed the grid, or monitored which sims were sharing which server (contiguous land is not necessarily on the same server) or provided freebies for new residents or created various types of stations for RP games. The Lindens couldn't investigate every 16 m2 parcel and ARs were not always made in good faith as the AR system itself was always wielded in various internecine resident group wars.

Even so, it was pretty clear if you followed the money and followed the alts, which tended to have to be in the same groups and tended to win the same auctions -- which in the old days, helpfully showed the name of the avatar who won the auction.

Several groups sprang up to try to rescue abandoned land in tiny amounts and put trees or seating on it like mini-parks, or AR'd ad cutters and urged people not to buy the microplots and feed the madness.

Eventually after many meetings with Lindens, various townhalls, blogs, petitions and even a "Zoo of Ad Farmers" with the hope that "name and shame" might work (it seldom does in anonymous virtual worlds), the Lindens devised a policy where ad parcels had to be limited to one per sim, and the signs put on them could not be obtrusive or encroaching.

The problem is that some land barons bought up microparcels and re-rented or re-sold them and didn't always police their tenants; there are always those bold enough to park a giant billboard like the one shown here and root it on a 16 m2 to make it sit over Linden road shoulder. So it's an endless maintenance chore.

The ad farm situation is better than it used to be 10 or 15 years ago, but it is still a major maintenance and AR chore for both Lindens and land owners. There are ALWAYS edge-casers. There are even some who deploy the famous "Good Neighbour" kiosk with rules to live by many agree on to keep sims looking nice -- and use them to force people away from their land.

Island dealers could only gleefully follow the sufferings of Mainland dealers and deploy their own billboards, "Want to Get Away from Mainland Blight? Come to the Islands!" which only added to the problem.

Our own view is that only preventing land under 128 m2 from selling to anyone but its owner to change its group (or not at all) along with a managed, networked, tasteful Linden-owned ad system on roadsides and in infohubs and welcome areas (as there used to be) will fix this problem by replacing what drives it: the demand for advertising that can reach eyeballs, in a world where there always is too much bad advertising and not enough good advertising reaching people who can make use of it. Lindens shy away from billboard blight, but their own Mole billboards used as teleporter boards or other signage let us know they can make fun or even beautiful billboards and sell the ad space on them to residents.

Along the way might come a total ban on all resident roadside advertising, because Lindens prefer to use code-as-law rather than organic policy to solve problems because they can't eat up staff time. It really is a dilemma for the most well-intentioned.

Lindens also devised a policy some years ago that land under 96 m2 cannot show up in search. This prevented the use of microparcels to game traffic, by creating dozens of them at a venue and skewing search results.

Residents trying to maintain their properties are also vexed by giant air towers, spires, spinning orbs, and all kinds of junk deployed even on land not for sale -- for reasons that often escape passers-by. Lindens will sometimes act if there is a cluster of these nuisance towers, but given that their policy is about *advertising* or *sale* of land, just putting up a giant nuisance tower worthy of St. Simeon Stylites is not enough to get Governance Lindens to act.

Suffice it to say, the struggle over micro-parcel sales and ads, while abated some over the years with a series of Linden policies in response to resident protest, will continue until some greater intervention is devised.

See if you can guess why there is a box of donuts in the middle of these microparcels for sale, and those with correct answers will win a free prize.

***

Act 2, Scene 1
The Pizza Guy

Protests against prim taxes or Mainland griefing or Copybot are often the best known form of protests and viewed as the most successful in SL.

But in my view, the protest against the voting function in the original version of groups in SL, and removal of the feature of "officer recall" was among the greatest achievements in SL.

On January 14, 2006, I posted a blog titled
"Imagine if the Pizza Guy Stole LL"

The fanciful premise of this essay was to compare what the group tools enable/impose on SL businesses and non-profit groups with their equivalents in real life.

What if, in order merely to enable the pizza guy to make and then deliver a pizza and set it down in your office, you had to also enable the delivery man to take your office from you and be cut into all your profits?

Cory Linden (Cory Ondrejka) saw the post and discussed it with Philip Linden and they could see the point that I and other land owners had been making for many months to no avail. The original group tools were intended for collaborative projects of various types, whether communities of affinity or discussion groups, but not originally envisioned with land, which developed over time as a product available as "First Land" inworld to newbies or from auctions arranged by LL (mainly of entire sims when the world was growing by leaps and bounds).

Faced with the problem of how to have tenants join a group to set their vendors and wares out for sale, ,yet not be able to cause any damage or return any builds, Anshe Chung and other land barons used to switch out their entire malls to other groups every night manually, to make prims not set to the tenant's group disappear or to manage other aspects of a mall such as parceling, then put it back into the tenant's group again.

In SL, I found that I could create a land group and group my land as the system encouraged to get 10% more tier to apply for extra prims. The Lindens invented group land to facilitate communal activity -- which they idealized -- particularly group building -- an activity which has featured over the years more as a distant ideal than a typical reality.

Most builds are done by either a landowner herself, solo, or she hires someone else to build for her, or groups cooperating on builds do them either in serial fashion or with separate assignments -- a simultaneous group build with some people casually able to return the prims of others they don't like using the "share" feature is not the norm -- in fact, like blowing up land to terraform it, we could describe it as "declining" and not "emergent" behaviour.

But if I decided, for the convenient of my tenants, to have an open group anyone could join on the honour system to set prims on the parcel they were renting -- a behaviour seemingly consistent with the hippie-style commune nature of early group tools -- then any member of the group could trigger "officer recall" and vote me out of the group, and off land that I had purchased and paid the tier for.

In the early version of groups, all payments to the group, such as from a deeded vendor or a land sale, distributed exactly equally to all the group members -- there wasn't even a way (as there is now) to distribute according to the Soviet reformist maxim: "from each according to his ability; to each according to his work". And all group fees or "dwell" -- a form of incentive based on land traffic in the early days -- also distributed equally.

"Officer Recall" was clearly invented with the ideal of having civilian control over leaders manifested within the virtual world, as a way to prevent tyranny. But like other well-intentioned world-construction decisions made by the platform providers, it was not used by people of good will but used by bad actors, or sometimes triggered by mistake. The tyranny became the few over the many.

While the vote played out over 3 days, the officer with the group powers could not use them - he was prevented from thereby selling the group land to another group or expelling those who triggered the disruptive recall and continued to grief in other ways.

This in turn caused many businesses to fill their groups with multiple officer alts who, in the event of the recall of one officer by bad actors, they could keep their land and control their groups.

Then LL decided to crack down on the proliferation of premium accounts, which people would buy for their then-512 m,2 tier allocation and ability to buy "First Land" for $512, and misuse the function intended for a one-time help to make up an entire sim of $1/m land at a time when entire sims sold for thousands of US dollars on the auction. Residents were ordered to cut the number of their accounts to five, and cancel the rest.

When I cancelled my accounts, I wrote the reason for making the alt in the first instance -- to prevent the destructiveness of "officer recall". Philip then caught up with me at a RL meet-up -- the first SLCC in October 2005 in conjunction with the "State of Play" conference at NY Law School and asked me why I had done that.

Yes, people held conferences about the Metaverse in *2003*, although some think the Metaverse was invented by Meta in October 2023, 20 years later!

I sat down at a computer terminal and showed Philip how group land worked and the problem with "officer recall" -- it wasn't the first or the last time that an interesting discussion with him revealed that he was not familiar with every aspect of his creation and their ramifications!

I once complained to Philip that a book device released by a resident for the occasion of Cory Doctorow's appearance in SL and his giving away of his work "Someone Comes to Town, Someone Leaves Town" was not on "mod," and couldn't really be hailed as the "first printing press" as so many were saying.

(You can find a free copy at this station by clicking around.)

Of course, freedom of the press belongs to him who owns one, as the old saying goes, but Philip's response was one I never forgot:

"Someone will make everything."

He was absolutely confident that anything that was needed in the virtual world would be made; if one product or tool or script wasn't optimal, someone would make another and it would get better.

This has happened slowly and unevenly, and "someone comes to town" is overbalanced by "someone leaves town" constantly in SL.

***

I'm not doing so well in this poll, as it seems 430 people want to permaban me, but I also discovered this old script doesn't work any more to stop more than one vote on one avatar. So somebody may have had the patience to click this 430 times, who knows.

Act 2, Scene 2
Group Tools Reform

The reform of the Group Tools in 2005-2006 is one of the most fascinating -- and overlooked -- chapters of Second Life history.

It's hard to remember now, but long before Twitter, long before Facebook, even Second Life groups had real-time chat with numerous people, and the ability to hold talks in world with the ability to save transcripts. The first person to make an RT on Twitter was actually a Second Life resident -- because they were already familiar with that gesture from a very good early form of social media inside this virtual world: group chat.

The flaws of the current iteration of Groups tends to overshadow how truly clunky the tools were in the early years and fails to recognize that the cure for the key beef nowadays about Groups -- chat lags or doesn't work at all -- is simple:

Discord.

And really most games and worlds have always cultivated outworld solutions for inworld communications that either were too clunky or too heavily moderated: TeamSpeak, Gchat, Skype, Twitter, etc. There are actually SLers still on Plurk, which you never heard of. So we can't take the knock on Group chat seriously when there is such an easy workaround -- Discord, used by numerous merchants and affinity groups.

Next. We saw how in "The Pizza Guy," there were terrible flaws in the group originally created by that unique amalgam of technolibertarianism and technocommunism that makes up the ideology of our beloved Lab. Never change, LL!

But Lindens could see the problem themselves in their own groups they needed to accomplish inworld tasks from land management and customer service to staff meetings.

So they launched on a total reform of the groups and began by convening a series of inworld workshops with interested residents. Up until that time, the top Lindens would hold town halls on four-sim corners to maximize the number of participants "in person," then make available relays (they looked like old-fashioned radios) for any resident to hold a listening party on their own sim. They also began holding office hours and in the early years, they would even do walkabouts on the telehubs and welcome areas and talk to residents.

But to my recollection, the Group Tools conferences were the first of their type where people were in smaller working groups with Lindens, asking questions and proposing alternatives and getting feedback. It's one thing to protest, including with your feet, but it's another thing to try to work out alternatives and solutions.

The different-sized Laminak tables here with mismatched chairs represent the results -- more granulated tools, more flexibility, more possibilities for everyone, but not a perfect fit. Along the way, the Lindens faced demands such as a desire to have all owners to join simultaneously so that no one owner would be controlling the admission of another, but that was not technically possible.

Some Lindens kept failing to understand that "officer recall" might be a boon in a hippie commune where everyone put in 512, but one person was hogging the prims on group land that was collectivized, but in a rentals operation, where prims had to be managed fairly and apportioned, it was a bane. When I explained how "officer recall" could be used perniciously, a Linden told me that I would just have to lobby the other group members and prove to them that I was a good manager.

Except...I had paid for the land, and continued to pay the tier every month, and collect the rent to pay that tier. If someone felt that arrangement was tyrannical, they should refund or not rent in the first place -- the premise is different.

So land could be stolen by one rogue officer, taken away from the owners who paid for it and worked it, under the guise of "democracy".

When they finally grasped this, the Lindens went overboard and removed voting completely from the group tools. I remember one of the last (the last?) votes in a group of 8,000 people called "Concierge" at the time (which has now been revised as "MonCierge") and a proposition was mounted to protest changes to the TOS regarding copyright and LL's use of resident content, which many were unhappy with.

It may have been that the lag induced by having to check group membership and handle poll questions was too great, but like other early democratic features of SL, it was deprecated for the greater good.

While there was a certain amount of Sturm und Drang in the group tools process, and the Lindens never returned to quite this "workshop" format (the select "focus groups" with special friends was not as open and democratic and under NDA) -- it did bring about one of the greatest achievements of Second Life: tools to enable the kind of differentiated roles and granulation of function needed for every kind of group on group land or private land, whether a small group of friends, an RP sim, a store, a rentals agency, a university, NASA, or really anything you could think of with more than one person -- and some people took a group of alts to group their land and gain the tier bonus and ease of management.

The beauty of the group tools comes in the Roles, which can be calibrated or granulated to give people greater or lesser amounts of control of land, suited to their role -- as a partner in an RP community, as a romantic partner, as a tenant in a rental, as a shopper in a store, as an employee in a non-profit. So once the roles were set up properly there were the issues of cash and property -- deciding whether people could remove group-set prims, or equally receive all proceeds from a land or objects sale -- now there was no forced collectivization.

There are still some annoyances with groups -- search does not work with a pasted in name but only the first few letters can be typed to find it manually; after about 350 members, the land groups don't load so well; at 500 members the Lindens decided to make a bug a feature -- the group members cannot see the others in the group. This is not an option to select, so that say, shoppers are not "outed" to each other, but evidently a default. The groups can be hidden from one's profile.

The groups can still be griefed, especially if open -- people still invade them begging for cash, or spamming ads for their store, or spouting trash about other residents, sometimes pretending to be "bots," and we find all too often, group members believe an anonymous day-old alt ranting in their group, instead of someone in business for years in SL. But these problems are fixable by moderators with the ability first to select who can speak and second, who must be kicked from the group to maintain decorum. After all, if anyone is unhappy with a group's rules and management style, they can form their own group for 100L.

The fact that a key feature of the new Premium Plus account is 140 groups lets us know just how important groups are to Second Life. We never thought we'd use them all up, but we did and have to constantly leave some to make room for others.

***

Act 2, Scene 3
Mentors

There's a lot I could say about the Mentor.

Or maybe just a little, because this new version of them coming up may not last, like past iterations.

Mentors are older residents deployed to welcome areas, infohubs, etc. to help new members of SL.

They exist both as the result of protest about lack of care of newbies and retention -- which is bad in general for business and socializing. And themselves become the subject of protest when they inevitably fail to produce results that fit everyone's ideal society.

Remember your high school government? OK, everyone wants an ideal society, but no one wants to put in the work and those that do become martyrs or villains.

So people protest the various forms that Mentors have taken over the years as examples of favouritism or ineffective onboarding; but people also protest the lack of any kind of systematic efforts to retain new people when business begins to lag and concurrency falters. Periodically a forums or blog post or a RL news story refreshes the sense of futility and despair.

So let us just contemplate in general the Bonfire of Bad Ideas, which included things in the long-ago past when group tools were being reformed, such as "let's have islands where the residents can only file an AR with the island owner". This would be great for certain types of RP, said a Linden no longer on staff. This will be great for Retention because people will be Free.

We felt that if, for example, subs in highly authoritarian forms of RP were forced to give their passwords to abusive doms under threat of ban or worse, or forced to do things against the TOS, they should have the right to make a private AR to the Lab, where the name would not be publicized, and some person in authority could in theory respond to the situation if it was not a mere resident-to-resident dispute. Fortunately, that's more or less the regimen we have today, with no "home rule" for islands as much as it might be desirable in some aspects.

Another really hard-and-fast rule has been that only Lindens can ban from Linden land. This always seemed like a really, really good idea to us for any Mentors or related volunteer program, even though as we run a resident infohub on Governor Linden land (an old program following the demise of the Telehubs and the collapse of the first rendition of the Infohubs -- there are 10 of them) -- we have often wished we could ban the people who specifically came to grief us, and put out large pictures of our RL selves on the land using rogue viewers.

In our view, only paid, full-time, benefited staff can help entry and retention in RL as in SL. But it's a luxury for the Customer Service State so there is always the temptation to reach for Ladies' Auxilaries or druzhenniki (auxilary police).

The interesting feature of the newest rendition of Mentors is that prospective Helpful Hals and Helpful Hannahs must agree to work two-hour shifts for free, and promote the SL viewer unless asked about alternatives. Inevitably the cry went up to provide some perks or gifts for such shift-working Mentors. (Hey, I know, let's have them put their stores right at the first landing, as was done in the past.) Having worked far longer shifts for less than minimum wage in RL and SL, I think I'll pass.

Still, I'd invite you to look into the face of this sad and tired boy in Silas Merlin's sculpture. His feet are blistered from running as a First Person Shooter without even a voice, as in Zelda, and he has run many, many a mile across games and worlds and now arrived in SL. He stares listlessly into the distance, idly wondering whether SL is a game, or what the heck it is. A kind bird, but a bird spouting incoherent nonsense nonetheless, tells him that F1 is in the Viewer now.

He doesn't know what F1 is, or what a Viewer is, but ok....

Can't anyone HELP??!

I could go on, but I can only say Sic Transit, Gloria Mundi.

I have one name for you -- "Lucy Linden".

And I have one region for you -- "Tenera".

Look it up.

***

Quick, said the bird, find them, find them,
Round the corner. Through the first gate,
Into our first world, shall we follow
The deception of the thrush? Into our first world.

***

Act 3, Scene 1
Telehubs>>p2p

The Lindens always said they felt guilty as game gods with god modes that we mortals did not have, so they were keen to add point-to-point teleportation (p2p) as quickly as possible.

The anti-telehub lobby on the forums was strong, in part for justified reasons as some telehubs had become avatar traps and lag monsters when surrounded by heavily trafficked malls -- which were there because the way people used to get around in SL was by first going to a central telehub in a region, then flying on their own steam (or taking a jetpack or plane or boat) to their final destination.

I remember Waterhead Telehub, which I used to call "Headbangers' Ball," because each time you landed there, you banged your avatar's head on the ceiling inside the building -- the landing wasn't put outside for the longest time.

Then I would have to fly 1,000 solid meters, often in strong headwinds with tough sim crossings, to my first auction-won sim of Ravenglass. It hadn't occured to me when I got it that getting to it would be such a problem (and I actually won an auction once in Portage where I quite simply could not get to the sim due to the lack of void sims at the time and difficult sim crossings).

Unless I stayed put on that sim and never went anywhere -- and that's actually how a lot of early pioneers lived, not usually traveling that much because it was a chore.

And those with businesses now located 1000 or 2000 or more meters or many sims away from a centralized telehub sprouting a giant mall felt shafted, and left behind by "Progress".

THAT drove a lot of animosity to the telehubs, which Philip Linden had invented under the influence of the theories of urban planner Jane Jacobs.

Jacobs envisioned hubs in New York City which often came into being, where a subway stop or a stop below the El would engender stores, services, large apartment buildings, parks where people would congregate when they came home from work -- or conversely, in the areas where they went to work.

Philip reasoned that the virtual world could operate the same way -- and he was right. The problem is that not every one shared his embrace of commerce and some people thought virtual worlds would be better off without malls.

Or at least...there could be the highly specialized boutiques of some early designers, where new designers could sometimes get a corner if they essentially elected to serve as apprentices or unpaid clerical and PR staff. But these were located far from telehubs, and wasn't it terrible that now these newbies competed with them!

Anshe Chung may have commandeered most of the telehub-adjacent land through market capture, but she was democratic about her rental tenants -- anyone who was willing to pay the somewhat higher rent -- even another land agent -- could get a space. That's how I got my first office at a mall in Clunn -- that has remained abandoned land now for many years.

I once asked Philip Linden which sims had the most sales on them and he said quite frankly, "The telehubs." Telehub land would command double and triple and more the average land price -- and new ones continued to be rolled out despite some residents' and Lindens' protests -- and often in bucolic surroundings with plenty of space around their squat, concrete Chicago urban style to make them less "avatar traps" with the inevitable malls that appeared around them. The Moth Temple in Iris didn't start as a hub -- but ended as one with the most beautiful build of all of them.

Then Anshe Chung and a few others noticed something that wasn't readily apparent to non-tech types -- the Lindens were tinkering with the world map. They were preparing it for the day when anyone could click on one point on the map -- and directly travel to it from any other point, hopefully not landing in deep water or the side of a wall (which oddly didn't work for telehub sims where the landing was forcibly set -- and never changed, which is why you land in the water in Ross, for example.)

Suddenly, Anshe stopped renting out the telehub land she won at auction -- she used to keep the stores of her regular clients and put them out herself for their convenience to set up right away. Instead, she put the land to sale.

A new generation of would-be land barons snapped them up, and were thrilled at the opportunity. One built a Wild West sort of mall around Midge. Lindens publicly expressed their skepticism about the usefulness of telehubs, and one day I took Robin Linden on a tour of telehubs, so that she could see with her eyes that they were not all like Fuji -- the notorious avatar trap that was the reason for so much animosity. By that time Brownlee had been deployed -- although not yet with the Mole's juice bar. As we stopped at each telehub, we would see friends or various people who recognized her and we would chat and look into some stores. The telehubs functioned in fact as envisioned and weren't the lag mess claimed.

But the Lindens were determined to go ahead with their plan to abolish the telehubs as forced landings, install p2p, and convert the old telehubs merely to company inifohubs with their own kiosks with information about orientation and buying Lindens, etc.

Your faithful servant snapped the last picture of a telehub, carrying a poster "Save Our Hubs!" before Lindens gleefully deleted it, which at that time was posted on the Snapzilla-run device for anyone to put pictures on the Linden front page (that didn't last for long, obviously).

Then there was ANOTHER kind of telehub protest -- one that wasn't covered by the media or the forums in particular, but was also one of the most important protests of SL history:

http://alphavilleherald.com/2005/12/extra_extra_bar.html

The newbie land barons, seeing now the writing on the wall, felt they'd been sold a pig in a poke. Even Anshe began to realize the full extent of the damage -- the new infohubs would not be a draw and the malls around them would get overgrown with grass -- much like the malls of RL America with the appearance of the Internet, then later COVID. The Lindens tried to desperately drum up interest in the infohubs by sponsoring a hippo contest -- anyone could take a basic hippo model (the Lindens had adopted the hippo as their mascot due to some arcane coding term) and embellish it into a character. You can see ours in a tree at Memory Bazaar in Ross.

But before p2p was installed, another stage in this drama unfurled, which was the launching of the Heterocera continent withhout any telehubs at all. Everyone had to fly over rough seas to get there -- and a few enterprising souls started ferries and planes to haul people to the new paradise.

Forums regs rhapsodized about land unspoiled by urban and commercial blight -- the Lindens also staged a short-lived experiment in leaving Linden trees and grass on parcels, rooted elsewhere, so that they could not be removed. This forced pastoral idyll didn't go over well with people who bought land on the auctions -- unlike those on the forums who lived back at the ranch on the Colour Sims of the first days of SL.

Somewhere along this road I learned from Xenon Linden, the builder of the Moth Temple, that a telehub didn't have to be a squat, ugly, bug -- like the ones you see here (take a free one home, they're sort of cute when shrunk!) -- but could be anything, with an invisible telehub landing disc inside the build (as in Iris).

As it became clear that telehubs were going away for good, there were now dozens of very angry customers, who began to mutter legal phrases like "bait and switch," and demanded a meeting with Philip and other Lindens.

They threatened to "cash out" and stop buying on the auction unless their now worthless telehub land was bought back. Philip made an offer to buy back telehub land at the rate of $7.5/meter (not the $10 or $20 or $30 once enjoyed), and many took him up on his offer. The Lindens said that if anyone opted to keep their telehub and not take a buy-back, they could submit a proposal in a competition to have their group run an infohub on Governor Linden's old land, set to their group.

After they shelled out a fortune in buy-backs, which they had once taken in on the auction, the Lindens still prevailed. They rolled out some beautiful new sandy and pine-tree covered sims that looked like private islands, with new textures, but which were actually still mainland -- the sims are named for artists and scientists. In order to keep their market share, Anshe and others had to buy those new sims -- using their telehub buyback funds and more.

This was one of the turning points for some land barons in departing the Mainland forever and working exclusively with islands and homesteads.

***

Act 3, Scene 2
Copybot

The story of the pernicious script known as "Copybot" unleashed in Second Life is well known and covered in all major studies and articles about SL, Google is your friend.

But I'd like to recount some aspects of the story not covered as much as the main outlines of the crisis, which involved hundreds of angry and frightened virtual merchants -- some fearful of their RL livelihoods -- shuttering their stores, blocking their vendors or asking mall agents like me to put up ban lines -- and refusing to sell until the Lindens "did something".

Cynics ridiculed their scandal as "little dressmakers' holocaust" but perhaps didn't realize the scale and numbers of "little dressmakers" who at least offset the considerable costs of SL (especially for second- and third-world nations) or actually covered RL bills with their virtual wares.

Many on the Internet and most in Second Life are aware of an essential truism known technically as "the analog hole" -- if you can see something on your screen, if it has been streamed or displayed to you through your browser, you can copy it in a variety of ways, even if some deterrents are deployed.

The greatest wonder of Second Life is the permissions systems enabling a choice among modify/copy/transfer because it enables manufacturing and shopping -- "a willing buyer meets a willing seller over a price" -- the most prevalent activity of SL, dwarfing even socializing, sex, games, or music. And the miracle is that these permissions hold, and not as mere markers for a social norm easily overridden. While rogue viewers and techniques have abounded, generally their deployers are caught and barred from SL, with notable exceptions especially in gacha rares.

The cynics said that everyone should simply "Get Real" and live with the fact that everything online is copyable and they should just allow copying and distribute freebies and make their living on, oh, volumes of sales, or custom work, or -- like the authors who claim they sell books by giving away books, make money on the Ted Talk circuit, if they can break into it.

But people who had benefitted from the genius of C/M/T and the regime that seemed to hold, felt Something Should be Done. They didn't feel they should be driven into the chore of RL DMCA takedown notices, or registering their mark, or engaging in any RL business necessities if the whole point of a virtual world was to make more possibility and enable more people to benefit from the Internet instead of seeing it destroy their livelihoods.

I personally was summoned to a sim and had a gleefully malicious griefer boy copy my avatar and array out a dozen of him as he roared with laughter. Not being much of a clothes horse, I didn't immediately see the disaster involved in this prank, which I thought would just lead to a lot of mistaken identity and griefing episodes. Years later, I went to a Metaverse conference in 2007 (yes we had those! Before 2023! Let Grandpa put in his teeth and tell you the story!). A group of us went to a bar and I fell into a long and interesting conversation with Raph Koster, the famous game designer (Star Wars Galaxy etc). He had invented at that time a prototype open sourced open-ended sandbox sort of world-not-game which he used to flesh out ideas for how to make these worlds work, and which some of us had joined. As he spoke and I asked a lot of probing questions (about copyright issues, for one), I noticed a very young boy, too young to be served in the bar and whose mother may not have liked that he was out this late), edging closer and closer to the conversation, but not speaking out of shyness.

Finally, people began to head off to bed and just the boy remained. I asked him what his name was in SL -- and it turned out he was a notorious griefer, and the copybot deployer. He said he lived in his mom's basement -- "But I pay her some rent," he added defensively. "Where's Dad" is a question I had long learned not to ask any more.

"Why????" I finally asked in despair. Why the griefing, the ban evasions, the theft.

"Because the Internet poisoned my soul," he said in all seriousness.

The story of Copybot actually begins much earlier, when a group which I'll dub "Perverse Engineers" reverse-engineered the viewer -- an action that was in violation of the TOS of that era. These fellows set about god-moding and stalking and harassing and griefing people around the grid and of course contrived to copy especially textures, which anyone could do with a series of steps right within even the legal viewer at the time. Some of us AR'd what we felt was an obvious TOS violation but apparently they had some encouragement from some Lindens -- because the Lindens were about to open-source their viewer *anyways*.

When the time came to ask questions on the forums for the Town Hall -- as we still do today -- I asked pointedly why this group was allowed to reverse engineer the viewer and grief people. For this I was banned from the forums, but still remained to attend the town hall. Somehow the question had still reached Cory Linden, and he read it aloud and began to answer it. Just then an avatar of a few days with a name created to look like mine began swooping around and heckling people -- and to no one's surprise, *I* was soon looking at the ominous "administrative time-out" screen and cooling my heels back in RL. When I emerged an hour later, I found a bunch of the particularly tough looking Perverse Engineers flanked around Philip as if holding him in protective custody.

Just as I could not prove I was not a camel, I could not prove I had not done any swooping, although server records would show it. Or maybe not.

The viewer was open sourced, and Cory Linden then left the Lab, some said over a dispute with Philip over whether the server code should be open sourced as well.

It so happened that I was in touch with some of the Peverse Engineers who came to the old Sutherland Dam discussions on Friday nights which I hosted, one of whom sadly died in a car accident in RL at a very young age. I was tipped off that one of the big developer firms working with RL companies had ordered "Copybot" to be coded (or a version of it) to make instances for live music concerts -- shards, as in a game, where the band would be mirrored many times over to enable thousands of people to see those avatars. This seemed like a super-structure in search of a base, if not an accident going somewhere to happen -- and sure enough it did.

Copybot had a thousands midwives and no paternity, however and while I had sources for this story they needed to hold on to their jobs and their sponsorships so we had to issue a retraction at the SL Herald, the notorious muck-raking tabloid of the early years of SL edited by Urizenus Sklar and Pixeleen Mistral.

While not everyone wants to connect up the dots, the Copybot scandal led to Linden policies about Third-Party viewers, and various showdowns and knockdowns and revisions along these lines -- and lots of dead sion chickens kicked offworld, let us just put it that way for now.

We now live under a regime where "Copybot can't be stopped" because "you can't stop Copybot" and inworld groups devoted to copybotting and a Github page with the Copybot script persist "because it can," but Lindens still insisting that certain groups have their leaders step down to spend more time with their families and revise their inworld activities.

While once "unlawful copying" was an offense contained in the Abuse Report template that could be submitted and sometimes get action even without an additional DMCA, today, that category is gone from the AR form.

Copybot compelled the Lindens to change wording in their TOS and attempt to remedy the complaints of masses of merchants -- and this wording was to be redacting and changed and dropped over time leading to more protests and walk-outs.

Merchants then tried their own remedies, which included the completely ineffectual script you see here that would supposedly spam a copybotting viewer or script and get it to stop.

Today, the mechanism for copybotting is different than those used in earlier days and some people feel it is "less of a problem" while others weep constantly on social media about how they've been targeted. The breedables industry has been particularly hit with mutual recriminations and even RL lawsuits.

There's one category of creator who ostensibly never has to worry about Copybot, as their creations execute server side and not client side: the scripter. The one recorded instance of the copybotting of closed scripts is disputed.

It is no surprise that those whose work is most protected against copyright are more cynical about the complaints about those who are most vulnerable to theft -- even to denouncing certain anti-rez scripts that work well enough, if not perfectly, particularly for those compelled to comply with full-perm mesh makers' TOS.

Merchants have responded to the challenge either by giving away more freebies; building up loyal client lists and doing custom work; putting their items in bags or HUDs or other types of packages that ostensibly deter theft; banning people and their alts with illegal IP detection systems; not putting their products on "mod" -- although this has zero deterrence value.

Surprisingly, in the food sector, some major creators simply put the takeaway food on all perms -- because when you get down to it, who is going to bother to re-sell a fork with a bit of chicken on it at an odd angle, or a tilted wine glass? It doesn't matter.

And some full perm creators have in fact specified in their TOS that for props such as food givers, they suspend their usual mandate to bar "transfer" -- but then they specify that "no mod" must be used. Well, at least a script is safe that way, although of course the whole lot can be bundled into a separate box. Of course, most people -- again -- buy platters of food for their beauty on the table, not in the hand, and the market for plywood boxes with famous creator's food bits in it is strangely....empty.

As with a lot of situations in Second Life, the hysterical hypothetical need not apply, and the edge case need not drive policy.

Even so, for many sectors of the virtual market -- bodies, beasts, buildings -- copying remains a serious threat and causes people to give up, to go to other third-party model sites and reduce their contribution to SL. And who can blame them, those "little dressmakers" in war-torn Ukraine or refugee overflowing and earthquake stricken Turkey or crisis-ridden Brazil? Or even a COVID-ravaged city in affluent America.

The dream of anonymously marketing your virtual wares on the strength of your talent and your constructed persona, free of taxation of bricks-and-mortar costs or real-world authorities with their hands out, dies hard, but the hill it dies first on is Copybot.

***

Act 3, Scene 3
Welcome Areas

If you TP into the original welcome areas of Violet or Ahern or Ambat these days, chances are you will find they are pretty quiet. There might be a newbie or two struggling, spread-eagled, with appearance or standing in bewilderment or AFK. A lone, sad older resident might also be AFK with a sign over her head: RENT ME.

One reason is a curious recent development: the Lindens have removed the term "infohub" from map search. While the infohub symbol remains on the map, and browsing the map can turn up such spaces, they are no longer in search at all.

Instead, we have a brand new set of Welcome Hubs with shopping, ersatz gambling, a sandbox, and tutorials, and new mentors. *Some* old infohubs still retain the ability to set home (this function has been removed from many of them despite the confusing message that you can set home on Mainland hubs).

As the great baseball legend Yogi Berra might have put it, The Welcome Areas (infohubs, orientation islands, hangouts and other Linden-owned areas) are so crowded nobody goes there anymore.

But if you know to hunt for "Social Island" and some of the newer entry points (Firestorm Island, Belli Hub) you might find 40 avatars filling the sim, or at least 6, with much the same mixture of useful help and trash talk as the old days. Yet no pickets

At one time, every ongoing protest in SL would play out in the Welcome Areas, whether against VAT tax, or ad farming, or putting Voice into SL (denounced as a ruiner of magic and outer of genders by quite a few, and today -- as I can attest from looking at many, many parcels -- Voice is often turned OFF or sometimes fails to work in public events).

Early throngs of hardy residents would go to Governor Linden's mansion in Clementina to protest, but that was before they learned she was never, ever, there. Yes, she. We have seen her twice in our 19 years!

There are still public spaces where newbies are heckled as I can attest from rolling a new alt the other day but generally, this type of behaviour was thoroughly discouraged. Even so, there are patches of "wall sitters" as they were dubbed -- groups of bored, restless youth (or senior delinquents who should know better) who voiced inappropriately for the rating and confused or ridiculed the new arrivals. Other bands of residents would fight them -- and then the welcome areas as such would become the theme of protest.

I suppose the earlier renditions of them could be called sort of Hyde Parks, especially when the famous Jeska Linden would tell people sparring on the forums to "take it inworld," in the theory that if you could see your antagonizer in person, you might be nicer to them. We're here to tell you that doesn't work, just like a demand for RL names, age, location, occupation don't help social media to become more tolerant, either.

Recently I came across a resident who had returned after many years, and wrote this in her profile:

"In 2006, Second Life was wild and unpredictable and amazing. Mass user protests, mafia gangs, and land barons. Ready, Player One! Snowcrash coming!

Second Life is prettier now, but something is missing. It seems reserved, careful, and a bit cold. The unpredictability is gone. Maybe everyone just grew up. The unknown is known. Limits set. Expectations in place."

Experiments in what might be called "managed democracy" haven't exactly proliferated in SL but there have been some:

o the original Linden walkabouts -- it's hard to believe now that Jack Linden, a computer professional with considerable RL experience, who began as a modest liaison in SL and worked his way up to VP, would actually stand in the WAs for hours on end, and hold office hours frequently to wrestle all the most urgent questions of the day, such as ad farm destruction of the Mainland.

o town halls (which were more interactive with spontaneous questions rather than lists submitted and curated by talk show hosts)

o workshops on specific issues such as reform of the Group Tools

o focus groups (yes, LL used to select some of their special friends to come all expense paid to California and give feedback, all placed under NDA)

o RL meetups -- a series of SL community conferences under various auspices with varying degrees of disaster were held over the years 2004 to 2012 before they broke down and devolved into inworld Open Sim conferences or select groups such as Educators, to which Lindens were invited to speak

o the Features Voting Tool -- this was actually a really great page in which anyone could submit a proposal and collect votes for it. It should simply have been left alone. It wasn't. A "helpful" resident who actually seemed bent on destroying it offered to help "clean it up" and went to the Lindens first with a list of duplicates, in his view, then with a list of "undoables" or "poorly worded" proposals -- and busy Lindens were grateful for his input. As the FVT, which had grown thick and dense vines around a weak trunk, began to be pruned, authors of proposals began to howl, since they didn't think they were "undoable" -- and the Lindens should decide this, rather than residents with agendas. One day we woked up and the FVT had been deleted entirely by a Linden.

o the old JIRA voting system -- at one time, it was possible to make a JIRA proposal specifically about bugs but also about features, more broadly understood, which would then also be about policies, and also collect votes. Today, since the reconfiguration of the JIRA under Oz Linden, the system is very different.

At one time, your faithful correspondent introduced a proposal that was revolutionary -- that anyone could continue to collect votes for a bug report/feature request and JIRAs could only be closed by Lindens who made a judgement of "can't do". The volunteer helpers who pruned the JIRA and similar systems would not be allowed to close anyone else's JIRA. This essentially opened up a way to create a "no" vote to the hall monitors who inevitably appear to clean up in any group, sometimes with the tacit approval of the company. Amazingly, this proposal was passed, and implemented -- but then removed some years later.

We could note the chief flaw of these voting systems is that you couldn't vote "no". Voting "no" is vital to any democracy and a part of any robust proposition system on local ballots. But in the ideologies of Silicon Valley, voting "no" is viewed as "negative," or an anomaly in the system. Some people think it is "not possible" to vote "no" on the JIRA as configured for use by Linden Lab.

But I caught up with the makers of JIRA at TechCrunch one year and quizzed them on this. They confirmed that any client of the JIRA could configure it to vote "no," but also had trouble understanding why it is necessary. There is a tendency to think that "upvoting" or "getting to yes" or "taking a straw poll" or "direct voting" is going to "fix" democracy. It never has.

The "no" vote -- especially with the added functionality of undisclosed vote -- is absolutely essential and would rid both Lindens and residents of a lot of their illusions if incorporated, and redistribute the balance of power. Even if the "no" vote became only symbolic, it would have a cumulative effect.

We felt so strongly about this that at one point, we created a "JIRA Mirror" where people could collect mirror votes on JIRAs they had posted, and of course the results were fascinating. There is more on this subject in other venues, but one thing Governor Linden might consider doing in honour of the 20th Birthday is to pardon those banned from the JIRA.

Today, certain factions hijack the forums occasionally with impunity; Moles, who were once associated only with creative endeavours are now diverted to loathsome moderation duties; and various groups associated with large continents or large stores or RP groups tend to hold sway.

There isn't any form of democracy today within Second Life across the grid, and the efforts to create the institutions of democracy outside of it (such as the Herald online tabloid or various professor and game developer blogs) have all fallen into disrepair. If the Customer Service State gives people more or less what they want -- if there is a product and they themselves aren't made the product -- they are content and don't see the need for dissent.

For a brief moment in time, relatively, on the old forums, we had the Features Voting System and even large group voting tools even in Concierge; we had live interactive townhalls and a far more free-wheeling forums -- go and look:

Don't be afraid of scary warnings -- the Lindens didn't update their certificate but it's a perfectly safe site. Try it on Edge if Chrome doesn't work.

If there is "socialism in one sim," it doesn't count, because such RP expeditions don't influence policy for the grid; it is Solzhenitsyn's idea of democracy but not Sakharov's.

People who regularly talk to their Mole and Linden friends, who bid in charity auctions to have sims named after them, who have their weddings in new community centers, they don't see what the problem is here!

"Lindens are a scarce resource," a Linden once commented in an office hour with many residents clamouring for this or that change. And indeed they are, and that's why virtual world construction can't rely on them.

Lindens have put up with so many protests about lag over the years (even Linden Lags parody t-shirts) that they have now put a button right in the viewer under WORLD called IMPROVE GRAPHICS SPEED.

Our advice is to never touch that button.

[Linden Lags Tshirt]

***

Act 3, Scene 4
FIX SEARCH

There's a lot I could tell you about this subject -- I've written reams and reams.

One way to sum it up is this: In the beginning of our world, the button on the viewer to get your virtual world started was titled:

FIND

And you did.

Now it's called SEARCH. So you keep SEARCHING.

In 2012, the Lindens decided to move from Viewer 1.23 to Viewer 2.0 by decision of then-CTO Oz Linden, immortalized here with the "mirrors" he promised would come some day (and so they have in PBR, we're told).

The Search in 2.0 had a terrible interface, the Lindens used Google Search Appliance instead of the interface and code they had before, and it simply stopped working. There were many layers to this decline but the Lindens then -- as now -- insisted they were working out the bugs and improving it.

Meanwhile, Firestorm "forked" so to speak, and KEPT the version of search from 1.23 which the Lindens then RETIRED.

We have Cinders Roxley to thank for this decision and this effort, which is why we have a statue in her honour at the Lost Gardens of Slosser.

The decision to keep a normal search that returns clean lines on an exact word search of a person or business or venue meant -- was, among other reasons, but in my view the KEY reason -- that Firestorm began to be used by likely 80% or more of the user population, by the Lindens' own admission. They say they can't give precise numbers because the same people use different viewers but we have our sampling of tenants which have convinced us there are only four of us: -- me, another oldbie like me with failing eyesight, a newbie who just landed and hasn't gotten the memo, and some guy testing his furry avatars on different viewers. The end.

What has kept our world thriving all this time is the ability of people to SHOP, and GO TO THE PLACES, and BUY and then FIND A HOME and live happily ever after. You know?

All you have to do is search for a business or location -- "Linden Lab" is one good one to test -- on both viewers, and I won't have to keep explaining this. I use Alchemy personally to see my own Search/Places ads.

I've learned this will never change; this is cast in stone; this is a religion. So I step away quietly and go on Alchemy as needed and muddle along.

What keeps me occasionally returning to this topic is I remember a night in...2018? Before the pandemic, anyway. When I saw search was broken and not returning as it did -- which at that juncture wasn't great, but still had some use. And various Lindens hurried to fix it, and within 48 hours, it was back to status quo ante. Then on another night in 2019? (before the pandemic) it broke again.

And stayed that way. And got worse. And some obvious problems were fixed but basically, the interface today -- well go look.

The Lindens need to fiix search. Then they'll have a growing world. They don't want to, possibly because they actually need to throttle growth given insufficient resources, so they don't.

***

Act 4, Scene 1
Price Drop/Fee/Tax Hike

Surely after years -- decades -- of protests, SL's protesters would be ready to retire?

After all, they now have Linden Assisted Living -- Bellisseria, Fantasseria, Sakurasseria and the soon-to-come Ponderosaserria with enormous 2048 m2 ranch spreads.

These zoned and better-managed regions with new mesh customizable houses are an answer to the chronic protest of people on the Mainland facing blight, or lonely islanders in silos left with no-show landlords. Bellisseria is the best product that Linden ever made, although the bien pensant falsely believe it to be "like" the Stepford Wives.

It's actually more like Trumansville, if you pay attention.

Bellisseria only bred the desire for more and better and different and more prims and more meters -- remember the Prelude, Content/Discontent?

You can never be too rich, too thin, or have enough prims -- but we'll let you in on a secret: most tenants do not use all their prims, far from it. And another secret: mesh items aren't necessarily a lot less land impact.

So now that the wolf at the door is merely a lawn ornament; Honey West whom you were too little to watch is a hipster collage and you even have a plaster elephant -- 10 prims! -- on your lawn, just like the neighbour's! ----

Why are you still protesting? You got homesteads without having to first buy an island. They're unattached and proliferating now and filling up with big ugly black boxes just like the Mainland -- but now there will be 2028 ranchettes!

WHY ARE YOU COMPLAINING?

If you have a comment, you can rocket right out of here!

LOL

Although first, leave a notecard.

But we'll tell you what people still find to protest:

o the fee increases for purchase of Lindens and cashouts which came soon enough after the lowering of the cost of tier and the increase of prims per square meter;

o application of US state taxes -- ouch, ouch, ouch (unless you're in like Montana);

o more fee hikes for conversion of Lindens to dollars and process of credits;

o lack of void sims laid out in a row from their Mainland properties with money-making venues and the newest Bellissseria content;

o the strangulation of the Mainland in various ways;

The Russians have an idiom: "frenzied from fat".

One thing we've noticed: if you complain about lack of managed land in SL, you will get what you wished. So be careful what you wish for.

***

Act 4, Scene 2
GachaPWND

The ban in August 2021 on gachas, a form of commerce involving selling sets of items via random pulls, sparked massive protests on the forums and social media on both sides of the issue. I believe it was the biggest blow to the virtual economy in 20 years, and we are still feeling the dead cat bounce two years later.

As usual, those backing the company policy (especially those who benefited) were eager to leverage their loyal positions to harass and silence opponents. Threads were closed, forums bans were handed out, and some lawyers got bully pulpits that others didn't, but there was no recourse: the ban hammer went down, merchants had 30 days to get rid of the machines or face disciplinary actions.

The word "gacha" comes from the Japanese term "gachapon" the term for machines containing small prizes for a few coins -- they were originally modeled after the American gumball machines found outside supermarkets.

The SL edition also began at a low price of 25L for a few decor items and evolved into mechanisms to sell sets of fancy hair for 100L. While there was also a vocal chorus preaching against the Las Vegas/Lost Wages aspect of the gacha, they were massively popular. If you asked the critics claiming they were "shocked that gambling was permitted in the house" and told them to turn out their inventories, you might find a croupier would appear and say, as to Capt. Renault, "Your winnings, sir."

While the opponents of gachas tended to focus on the random nature and the enormous amounts people would pour into them to get the "rares," they key feature of the gacha phenomenon, which ran for more than a decade, was that it was a way for people to enter the economy if they had no skills in design or coding and insufficient capital to start a land-related business. People hoping to offset the cost of SL, which can be considerable even just to buy a socially acceptable outfit and body) are able to buy low and sell high or sell in high volume, as they can with breedables.

Gacha machines have also been a way for creators to make sales at themed mass shopping events in an environment where they are increasingly competing for attention in search among a proliferation of weekend and weekday sales.

While many people have the impression that some law was passed in the States or some prosecutor overseas sent a warning from another country such as Germany or Japan, in fact there is no such law or warning, at least known to the public.

There is a US law on online gambling such as poker which prompted Linden Lab to ban slot machines, poker, roulette etc years ago. But recent court cases have found in fact that judges sided with the big platforms Google and Apple regarding lootboxes -- which strictly speaking, is a different animal than a gacha as gachas in SL are not required to advance gameplay as it is not a game as such. And in theory, minors under the age of 18 should not be on the plaform (although 16-18 years are permitted in G areas). The main driver of the lootbox lawsuits were parents angered at children running up credit card bills to play an online game.

The US is a country of common law where judicial interpretation and legal precedents establish the law of the land and where international law or law from other countries is not self-executing. Again, there was no judicial ruling to prompt this policy.

But since Linden Lab is a private company it can make any policy it deems necessary, and in this case took preemptive action to limit liability for litigation, a standard business case.

The irony is that while the old form of gachas were banned, a new form emerged called Miepon or other names that still involved machines with sets of desirable decor or outfits, but you could see which one you would be purchasing in a chute -- removing the mystery of the blind pull. To be sure, you can't be sure when the coveted rare will come which means the aftermarket and the Lost Wages are still relevant,

Even so, there is no question that the overall level of gacha frenzy is considerably reduced. The shock to the economy was considerable and some merchants ended up out of business. The critics who sneered at them that they couldn't drive traffic to their stores are forgetting that this is an attention economy -- search functions poorly, there is both too little advertising of the right kind and too much spam, and mass events by large companies (viewed by some as cartels) heavily influence the market against "a nation of shop-keepers".

The inimitable Daveosaurus of Crocodoggle, beloved in SL as both a developer and DJ, created a parody item called "GachaPWND" with a play on the term "gachapon" and the kids' term of art for being beaten in a game -- "pawned". Merchants who had drained the pockets of their fans in search of "rares" now got their comeuppance. But since clever designers and scripters ultimately succeeded in keeping the broad outlines of the gacha experience and some of the re-sale economy intact, who was really PWND?

The constant proliferation of new weekend or weekday or really 24/7/ sales which were weakening the economy for creators before the ban has not compensated for the role played by gachas in the economy -- hence even more appearing every week. Every inventory is bursting and every home is flooded, and no one could possibly wear all the outfits they have purchased even if they changed their clothes 10 times a day. This is a feature of virtuality that hasn't been sufficiently studied -- with the ability to replicate without expending RL materials (except server space) and when goods don't wear out, economies seem magical.

But when inventories are so large they can't even be searched anymore, and every weekend sale living room set looks like the other one, have we discovered why virtual economies always tend toward entropy and failure? Or maybe not?

Now we've also deployed Daveosaurus broken gacha machine to symbolize a "gated community" of sorts -- Linden Homes, the answer to the Second Life Tragedy of the Commons for tens of thousands of people who now don't have to wake up and find anything unpredictable in their view.

Critics of Linden Homes have likened them to the movie Stepford Wives, but it wasn't the homes that looked the same in that movie, but the wives who began behaving like identical ideal subserviant drones after their husbands turned them into robot replicas. Perhaps the song popularized by Pete Seeger, "Little Boxes on the Hillside" is a good descriptor?

But there are a wide variety of Linden homes and they are customizable up to a point. Perhaps Trumansville is the better trope with the same scenery repeating and the controlled life, but the Moles may have a lot of repetitive tasks, they aren't actors, but contractors meeting customer requirements, a feature of proprietary software companies often absent from open source experiments.

With the Commons expertly managed by Lindens and Moles, there is relief to the eyes as to texture, land impact, and covenants specifying the removal of Christmas trees after holidays, a limit on cats, and even prohibition on the ban systems that hark back to MMORPGs in the way they return you home, to your spawn point.

To be sure, people run through 351 prims, even if the house doesn't count, pretty fast -- which is why we are about to get 2048 ranchettes! Can Bellisseria homesteads be far behind?

Freed of the stresses of the Commons Tragedy that pits neighbours against each other (remember the neighbours' gigantic submarine that brought all other scripts to a standstill or the club on 4096 of land that filled all available avatar slots for that region every night, so no one could go home not to mention infestations of glowing towers?), the Linden Homes areas are said to create better communities with richer and more rewarding events, including DJ parties, the stamp finding game, and art shows.

Yet no lot can be put in search, no commerce is allowed, even a yard sale or charity flea market, and all social life is driven to groups -- groups inevitably heavily controlled by their founders, often spawning anti-groups.

We didn't find Juneteenth on the calendar or anything like the elaborate sculptures and installations of ArtKorner's weekly HUD, but there's the Legacy Mainland for that, right? After you're done with a round of the GTFO transportation game.

For how long?

***

Act 4, Scene 3
Privacy for Me/
Bounce for Thee

This vignette doesn't need much explication.

The yellow ban lines, blocking your view.

The inadequate ban lists that are numerically limited, or overcome by some rogue viewers, or which don't work above a certain height.

The candles and crystals and wishful thinking -- door locks? Sit hack anyone?

We did have quite an ominous looking animesh bouncer guy out here but he was 17 li so we took him down.

Both the desire for privacy -- and not always for the reasons you think -- and the desire for travel and exploration are always in conflict and always spawn protest.

It's hard to believe there was a time when Philip actually said for a moment in time that he would deprecate the "teleport home" or "bounce" scripts that so aggravated life on the Mainland. Then a caucus of Lindens and old residents squawked that the 3 1/2 elevators then operating in SL very slowly and clunkily would no longer work, so the script had to stay.

Certain merchants and influencers got their way on this, especially those who sold security orbs.

The Lindens had a brainstorm a few years ago -- truly genius. They added the function "Avatars Can See Me" to the land menu which can be switched "on" or "off".

Nothing like being totally invisible from outside the lot for privacy!

Of course, by definition in a virtual world, you are in public and it is hard to take yourself out of the public eye but of course it is constantly done with a huge variety of skyboxes, security systems, and then the continent Zindra, which isn't so much the "adult content" continent as it is "the zone where your enemies can't AR you" for swearing (as they can in PG) or classical paintings with partial nudes (as they can in G) or flying around with your bits outside (as they can in M) -- which they do merely as a form of retaliation usually over other beefs.

That's all that's about.

"Privacy" encompasses not just the view of any activity or furniture or scantily clad persons, but the right to be free of encroaching trees or builds, other people's prims on your land, rooted on theirs, and even an ugly view.

So the Lindens responded to the constant flood of complaints about how ruined the view got from signs, ad farms, tall buildings, and just plain fugly beach houses and spinning neon signs by allowing the third-party viewer Firestorm to put "derender" into the viewer.

The Lindens themselves have always steadfastly held to a Shared Vision of a Shared Vision and I'm with them there -- I think you should have rules people abide by -- soft norms or hard code laws -- to make views and lives tolerable and not rely on making the world a fractured fairy tale where no one sees the same thing.

I don't know how long that notion will last with the Lindens but they've had it for 20 years, and enabled a wide variety of options to ensure users the level of privacy or interaction they wish, by choice.

Every student of the Internet's history knows the story of "A Rape in Cyberspace" -- and everyone knows that when Meta began to claim the first Metaverse, they failed to learn not only from The Well but Second Life, which made a lot of progress on enabling freedom from the company but freedom from other users, as well. Soon the headlines were filling up with the rediscovered invention of the wheel.

A movie was once made for TV, a detective thriller taking place in Second Life, in which a character shouts "Log off! Log off!" to another character to get them away from an evil influence.

Until AI has a map of your house in its mind's eye and you in it, unless you're in a place like Iran or Russia, you're safe from prying eyes in RL for now. And in SL, you have many options to protect your privacy -- so many, that the frequent lament of newbies and returnees -- it's impossible to find a friend and things to do -- may have been the result. The privacy the individual seeks soon attaches to groups of like-minded with clubs whose main purpose is to keep others out.

***

Act 5, Scene 1
The Future is NOW

Dr. Harry "Happy" Cox, who you may remember from Firesign Theater, says "EVERYTHING YOU KNOW IS WRONG'. And as we know from a Firesign skit, "The future is HERE, the future is NOW".

The future isn't turning out like we thought and here we all are now soaking in it.

What will YOUR future be like in SL? If you like, go to our ancient Magic Compass at the geographic and magnetic center of SL in Ross (yes, really!) and take a reading (click on the fortune cards for the LM).

Harry has a question for the big Linden town hall for the 20th birthday:

"Will chatGPT take YOUR jobs?" Some of the work of Moles and Lindens may be further automated.

And more importantly, this:

"Is all of SL a giant LLM for you to use to train AI on? Are you sitting on a gold mine?"

As I noted before, unlike the giants who inhabit Silicon Valley, LL hasn't slurped up customer data to pitch ads to customers or sell to outside ad agencies.

But could it use the petabytes of chat and content and signage and labelling as an LLM to train robots?

Would it want to? If so, what constraints would be put on it?

I predict that the next iteration of the Tao of Linden (click on the rations to get it) will have to say something about artificial versus organic intelligence and comment whether it uses customer data for anything, whether pitching ads or for "world experience" or "improving the platform" or however it may be phrases. The role of bots will have to be better defined not just in the TOS but will have to start in the mission/values statement of the Tao.

We all have a big advantage because we've all been living up in the future for 20 years and other people are just going to come and know it.

We know what it means to be banned globally from the main outposts of society. Could that pan out in RL? We know what it means when merchants ban us from their vendors on the MP and inworld for all kinds of reasons, good or bad -- maybe they believe we have Copybot; maybe they don't like our blog. What about a future when you can't buy bread because you criticized the president?

We know what it is to have houses that are networked and public and visible and cammable by everyone. Will RL get that way?

Will the best parts of SL prevail in a RL all-encompassing Metaverse, like "getting to know someone from the inside out," as a figure in one of Draxtor Dupres' videos about romance in SL so beautifully described it?

All kinds of people from all kinds of places and stations in life and perspectives sometimes come together to cooperate in SL on all kinds of things, from live music to art to breeding smart cats and keeping the view nice and sailing into the sunset. Is that extendable to RL?

The "weak ties" once celebrated as a boon of social media are never discussed any more because they too often turn so vicious. Do virtual world "weak ties" work better to create viable communities?

I find it shocking that some tech on Twitter says the Metaverse started in 2022 and points to some industry working group -- and says if some company isn't in it, they must not be relevant. They have a very cramped notion of "Metaverse" that largely revolves around interoperability for a few big platforms.

Of course there is a lot more that goes into world-making, from security, privacy, regulating commerce, ensuring creators' rights to enable a viable market, and deterring crime effectively.

Linden Lab was convening Metaverse conferences in 2003. I went to the first one in 2004 ("State of Play" conference at NYU Law School, followed by the first SLCC meet-up).

I'm old enough to remember the first white paper on the Metaverse in 2007 with Jerry Paffendorf (SnoopyBrown Zamboni in SL)

Wire magazine has an article on the Metaverse this week acknowledging the role of Second Life in shaping Roblox and VRChat. Philip Rosedale is chided for anticipating SL becoming far bigger than it has, but if it influenced other worlds -- it has indeed grown bigger. Who had adult content in Roblox on their bingo card?

Wired speaks lamely of the need to organize easy AR reports as in SL -- but we know that's not enough, not without external blogs, social media, internal forums, and resident community groups where you can discuss issues and where you can address grievances and bring about meaningful change.

As the old END anti-nuclear slogan said:

PROTEST AND SURVIVE!

If the world are to live and be places where we move and have our being, we have to care enough to protest, offer alternatives, and being willing to compromise, just as in real life.

I always have.

END

Creator Arrogance in SL

This thread could be headed for demolition down the memory hole, so I'm saving it.

Gilliana Parx

• Resident
• •  8

 

Posted 22 hours ago (edited)

I know, a bit of a rude title, but i did not know how else to put it. 

In the recent... one or two years in SL of the 14 I am apparently in here, i noticed that an absurd high number of creators not only sell their items No Modify (which i in itself find absolutely stupid) but - which i find far worse - refuse to list the permissions of the items they sell anywhere on the package. And while im sitting here since half an hour, trying to find out if a certain item is modify, i am also at the same time wondering...

Why the heck are we okay with this?

I already realized that there is a MASSIVE spike in self-importance with many creators, even tho their creative energy begins and ends with what was in a fashion magazine six months ago, but isn't it just a matter of basic decency to let your customer know what exactly they are buying? I don't agree to no mod and you might see that differently. Okay, fine! But can i at least be informed about the specifics of the stuff i put money in for, thank you very much?

I don't see any kind of movement against this, even tho everyone should be angry at that. In fact, it should be against the rules. In reality thats what we would call "buying a pig in a poke". And by now it seems to be a vast majority of clothing and accessoires related items for those big bodies that just don't tell you.

I want to mod my stuff. Either making my own texture for something, turning a piece invisible or just to link it, if some complex Roleplay-Outfit that also needs me to equip two huds and stuff makes me hit the attachment limit in day and age of extra heads, ears, hair, jewelry, eyes, piercings, a body, hands, feet and then some... I don't get whats so difficult in writing NM/C/NT or something similar on your product page. It can't be too much to ask...

What is your view on this? am i the only one seeing it this way?

Edited 22 hours ago by Gilliana Parx

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Stephanie Lovely

• 
• Resident
• Tasmanian
• •  940

 

Posted 22 hours ago

Yeah, I just assume things are no modify unless they are actually listed as mod on the advertisement. You are right, there is a definite move away from modifiable items and to more customer hostile things like anti rez scripts too.

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Charalyne Blackwood

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Posted 22 hours ago

Your use of "pig in a poke" is completely wrong. It goes along with "the cat is out of the bag". Both refer to purchasing something under completely false pretenses, and "no mod" is pretty up front.  Don't buy anything without trying the demo first, that way you have a much better idea what you're purchasing or even if you want it at all. 

     Cell phones are a very "no mod" item, are they breaking some nonexistent rule by being so? "no mod" in SL prevents counterfeiting and protects the creator's ownership of the design. Not all creator's set it up and that's their right to do so. 

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Posted 21 hours ago (edited)

  22 hours ago, Charalyne Blackwood said:

Your use of "pig in a poke" is completely wrong. It goes along with "the cat is out of the bag". Both refer to purchasing something under completely false pretenses, and "no mod" is pretty up front.  Don't buy anything without trying the demo first, that way you have a much better idea what you're purchasing or even if you want it at all. 

     Cell phones are a very "no mod" item, are they breaking some nonexistent rule by being so? "no mod" in SL prevents counterfeiting and protects the creator's ownership of the design. Not all creator's set it up and that's their right to do so. 

Expand  

You did not read my post, did you? "No mod" is upfront. But the issue im talking about is not the no mod-issue but that its not even LISTED on the Product itself IF IT IS no modify. As i wrote, you can have a different opinion on no-modify but thats a different topic. However, Im pretty sure its in everyones best interest to know WHAT THE PERMISSIONS ARE before a purchase and that should be the bare minimum.

The Demo of the Product in question shows me exactly that, if it WAS modify, i could turn the part of the item that bothers me invisible. So, if it was, i would buy it immidiately. If it is NO MOD however, that piece is in the way of the outfit i want it for and will not work with the theme. So, its Schroedingers Item. Its either modify and fits perfectly or its no modify and i have no use for it. The problem is; I can't know!

And yes, i wrote the creator and i hope an answer comes... eventually... but i shouldn't have to write a notecard everytime i want to know what permissions the stuff i want to buy has.

Edited 21 hours ago by Gilliana Parx

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Posted 21 hours ago (edited)

If they don't tell you the permissions when they sell it to you, which they really should, I mean, there's checkboxes for all of it, sometimes you can look under the Contents tab and see if what's in the folder they're selling shows the permissions. If it's in a box or a depacker though, this won't be relevant. Usually you can tell if it's boxed, though.

And if they don't make it possible to find out, and they won't tell you, and you buy it and don't like it, leave a review saying so. Warn other potential buyers that what they're getting isn't Mod and isn't marked. Me, I'd just not buy it if they don't bother telling me. Why support someone who doesn't care if I'm happy as a customer?

Some vendors are total jerks and don't even display any but the good reviews, but you can always still boycott them and refuse to buy from them again, and I'm pretty sure letting friends and acquaintances know to avoid that seller might at least give them an incentive to change their ways, and at least not be so lazy as to refuse to tick a couple of checkboxes when listing an item.

Not sure about reporting, or how it'd work or turn out, but if there's any MP rule about it, you could probably report them, Iunno.

I hate no-mod stuff myself, but I sell some. But I try to make sure whatever isn't mod is that way for a reason, like a script I wrote and don't want changed. I don't understand why so many people wouldn't even allow a person to tint the mesh of an item, but a lot of vendors are indeed that stingy with their perms. Like if they only sell one shirt, and it's in one color, like white, at least let people tint the derned thing!  The other side of this of course, is if they sell multiple versions of say, a shirt, and allowing people to mod the texture would be cutting their own thingy off. In that case, they'd be pretty dumb if they left it mod.

Anyway yeah, they could at least mark the permissions on it in their listing. Lazy vendors can't expect to get paid like hard-working and attentive vendors, and ignorance of this fact probably costs them a lot more than they realize. A lot of people are just like me, and won't buy anything if they don't know exactly what they're getting. It's almost as bad as misspelling all of their keyword spam, and never having their listing be seen by anyone who searches for it.

Edited 21 hours ago by PheebyKatz

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Posted 21 hours ago (edited)

  22 hours ago, Charalyne Blackwood said:

Your use of "pig in a poke" is completely wrong. It goes along with "the cat is out of the bag". Both refer to purchasing something under completely false pretenses

No - "pig in a poke" refers to buying something with unknown properties, and "cat is out of the bag" is utterly different - a concealed thing suddenly becomes apparent.

 "no mod" in SL prevents counterfeiting

How?

Expand  

Edited 21 hours ago by Theresa Tennyson

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Posted 21 hours ago (edited)

  21 hours ago, PheebyKatz said:

If they don't tell you the permissions when they sell it to you, which they really should, I mean, there's checkboxes for all of it, sometimes you can look under the Contents tab and see if what's in the folder they're selling shows the permissions. If it's in a box or a depacker though, this won't be relevant. Usually you can tell if it's boxed, though.

And if they don't make it possible to find out, and they won't tell you, and you buy it and don't like it, leave a review saying so. Warn other potential buyers that what they're getting isn't Mod and isn't marked. Me, I'd just not buy it if they don't bother telling me. Why support someone who doesn't care if I'm happy as a customer?

Some vendors are total jerks and don't even display any but the good reviews, but you can always still boycott them and refuse to buy from them again, and I'm pretty sure letting friends and acquaintances know to avoid that seller might at least give them an incentive to change their ways, and at least not be so lazy as to refuse to tick a couple of checkboxes when listing an item.

Not sure about reporting, or how it'd work or turn out, but if there's any MP rule about it, you could probably report them, Iunno.

I hate no-mod stuff myself, but I sell some. But I try to make sure whatever isn't mod is that way for a reason, like a script I wrote and don't want changed. I don't understand why so many people wouldn't even allow a person to tint the mesh of an item, but a lot of vendors are indeed that stingy with their perms. Like if they only sell one shirt, and it's in one color, like white, at least let people tint the derned thing!

Expand  

Marketplace is usually listed correctly-ish. I think if its wrong here, its in 9 of 10 cases a honest mistake. I mostly refer to creators with almost 90% of their stuff being in world only or on event sales. 

And i do boycott that, if its not listed. But that kind of thing does not really do much in SL. There also is no real... counter movement against this i know of. There even is one against no modify, which i again agree is something you can disagree with me on (and i 100% agree there are cases in which something should and can be no modify, no questions asked, its a case to case thing to me), but not for this, which i actually think should be seen as a violation of sorts. |D

In world, i did not yet find an option to tell what permission an item has. Even if you buy from a box that you can inspect to see its content, all contents are usually listed as no copy, no mod, no trans, no matter what they will be when i purchased it. If im wrong and just do not see an option that exist i would be thankful to know! It would make second life a lot easier!

Edited 21 hours ago by Gilliana Parx

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Posted 21 hours ago

  21 hours ago, Theresa Tennyson said:

 

https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Pig_in_a_poke

https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Letting_the_cat_out_of_the_bag

Both phrases have references to purchase without knowing the details, whether they're simply hidden by chance or deliberately. 

" no mod" prevents counterfeiting by not letting unscrupulous persons take an original item apart and using aspects of it to make their own product. It works quite well when paired with "no transfer" and even better with "no copy". I make houses for fun and anytime someone wants one they get it with copy and mod open because it allows them to add textures at will and to have an untouched copy on hand if they do something irreparable. One cannot counterfeit without having full edit ability over the item in question. It supports "do your own work, don't use mine without permission"

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Posted 21 hours ago

  21 hours ago, Gilliana Parx said:

You did not read my post, did you? "No mod" is upfront. But the issue im talking about is not the no mod-issue but that its not even LISTED on the Product itself IF IT IS no modify. As i wrote, you can have a different opinion on no-modify but thats a different topic. However, Im pretty sure its in everyones best interest to know WHAT THE PERMISSIONS ARE before a purchase and that should be the bare minimum.

The Demo of the Product in question shows me exactly that, if it WAS modify, i could turn the part of the item that bothers me invisible. So, if it was, i would buy it immidiately. If it is NO MOD however, that piece is in the way of the outfit i want it for and will not work with the theme. So, its Schroedingers Item. Its either modify and fits perfectly or its no modify and i have no use for it. The problem is; I can't know!

And yes, i wrote the creator and i hope an answer comes... eventually... but i shouldn't have to write a notecard everytime i want to know what permissions the stuff i want to buy has.

Expand  

Yes i read your whole post.  Seeing if a purchased item is no mod or not isn't at all difficult. Get the demo.  Wear it (or rez it, whichever is the intended method of deployment). Right click.  Select "edit". You're welcome.  Looks like you're going to have a lousy SL experience by assuming all the creators are evil and out to get you. Why so eager to alter others works? If it bothers you that much, get Blender and Avastar and make your own stuff, just make sure it's all open perms so nobody thinks you're arrogant with the "no mod"

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Posted 21 hours ago (edited)

Yeah, if an inworld vendor doesn't have the C-M-T thingy showing the perms in the ad image on the vendor, I'd be skeptical of the contents.

And yeah, anyone listing items on the MP after a long night of making stuff can probably be forgiven forgetting to tick some things in the listing editor. Vendors with a conscience usually go OMG SORRY and fix it if you point it out to them politely.

And yeah, many creators really do not like people taking their stuff apart and making things out of it. Others are okay with it, which is why we have loads of full-perms stuff on the MP as well. It just usually costs a lot more than premade-for-the-consumer stuff, because well, people make stuff out of it and make money off of it. Anyone who makes anything has every right to govern their creations as they see fit. I give full perms on a lot of what I sell, just so people can make other things with it if they like, but even I have a few items I really don't want to see anyone sticking an invisible box on (so their name shows as creator) and claiming is their own creation.

Still sucks when you get something cool and pay a lot for it, and then realize you can't use it or make it work for you, though.

Edited 21 hours ago by PheebyKatz

 
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Posted 21 hours ago

Copy, mod, no transfer is the preferred way to sell anything...IMO.

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Posted 21 hours ago

  21 hours ago, Charalyne Blackwood said:

" no mod" prevents counterfeiting by not letting unscrupulous persons take an original item apart and using aspects of it to make their own product. It works quite well when paired with "no transfer" and even better with "no copy".

Theresa Tennyson nods and smiles.

https://wiki.casperdns.com/index.php/CopyBot

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Posted 21 hours ago

  21 hours ago, Charalyne Blackwood said:

Yes i read your whole post.  Seeing if a purchased item is no mod or not isn't at all difficult. Get the demo.  Wear it (or rez it, whichever is the intended method of deployment). Right click.  Select "edit". You're welcome.  Looks like you're going to have a lousy SL experience by assuming all the creators are evil and out to get you. Why so eager to alter others works? If it bothers you that much, get Blender and Avastar and make your own stuff, just make sure it's all open perms so nobody thinks you're arrogant with the "no mod"

Most demos are No mod on.purpose and tells you nothing about the original in that respect.

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Posted 21 hours ago

  21 hours ago, Charalyne Blackwood said:

Yes i read your whole post.  Seeing if a purchased item is no mod or not isn't at all difficult. Get the demo.  Wear it (or rez it, whichever is the intended method of deployment). Right click.  Select "edit".

So, demos have the same permissions as the purchased item? My, that would be a recipe for chaos, wouldn't it?

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Posted 21 hours ago

  21 hours ago, Rowan Amore said:

Most demos are No mod on.purpose and tells you nothing about the original in that respect.

Perhaps best to always assume No Mod. It doesn't bother me in the slightest of the creators want to lock down perms or not.

 
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Posted 21 hours ago (edited)

  21 hours ago, Theresa Tennyson said:

Theresa Tennyson nods and smiles.

https://wiki.casperdns.com/index.php/CopyBot

So? Copybots are a great way to lose your account. Do you have something of value to say or are you just so painfully itchy to attempt to one up me on something so insignificant?

Edited 21 hours ago by Charalyne Blackwood

 
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Posted 21 hours ago

  22 hours ago, Charalyne Blackwood said:

"no mod" in SL prevents counterfeiting

Nope.  While creators would like to think so, anyone truly determined to rip off someone's creation can find a way -- and No Mod will not prevent it.  

I most definitely will not give specifics on that.

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Posted 21 hours ago

  21 hours ago, LittleMe Jewell said:

Nope.  While creators would like to think so, anyone truly determined to rip off someone's creation can find a way -- and No Mod will not prevent it.  

I most definitely will not give specifics on that.

Someone already did. Again, it's a fast track to account loss.

 
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Posted 21 hours ago (edited)

  22 hours ago, Gilliana Parx said:

I know, a bit of a rude title, but i did not know how else to put it. 

In the recent... one or two years in SL of the 14 I am apparently in here, i noticed that an absurd high number of creators not only sell their items No Modify (which i in itself find absolutely stupid) but - which i find far worse - refuse to list the permissions of the items they sell anywhere on the package. And while im sitting here since half an hour, trying to find out if a certain item is modify, i am also at the same time wondering...

Why the heck are we okay with this?

I already realized that there is a MASSIVE spike in self-importance with many creators, even tho their creative energy begins and ends with what was in a fashion magazine six months ago, but isn't it just a matter of basic decency to let your customer know what exactly they are buying? I don't agree to no mod and you might see that differently. Okay, fine! But can i at least be informed about the specifics of the stuff i put money in for, thank you very much?

I don't see any kind of movement against this, even tho everyone should be angry at that. In fact, it should be against the rules. In reality thats what we would call "buying a pig in a poke". And by now it seems to be a vast majority of clothing and accessoires related items for those big bodies that just don't tell you.

I want to mod my stuff. Either making my own texture for something, turning a piece invisible or just to link it, if some complex Roleplay-Outfit that also needs me to equip two huds and stuff makes me hit the attachment limit in day and age of extra heads, ears, hair, jewelry, eyes, piercings, a body, hands, feet and then some... I don't get whats so difficult in writing NM/C/NT or something similar on your product page. It can't be too much to ask...

What is your view on this? am i the only one seeing it this way?

Expand  

For me, it depends on what the item is.  I insist on No Mod for all of my household and landscaping items.  I don't usually care when it comes to clothing as I'm seldom ever interested in making changes to those items.  I prefer No Mod for hair, but I will accept it as long as I get a demo that shows it fits well and as long as there is a supplied color/tint that works for me.

As for specifying the perms on the vendor package, I think it should be - or at least most of the time.  I think these days that it is so commonly accepted that clothing will be No Mod, that one only needs to publish the perms if it IS MOD.

Edited 21 hours ago by LittleMe Jewell

 
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Posted 21 hours ago (edited)

  21 hours ago, Charalyne Blackwood said:

Yes i read your whole post.  Seeing if a purchased item is no mod or not isn't at all difficult. Get the demo.  Wear it (or rez it, whichever is the intended method of deployment). Right click.  Select "edit". You're welcome.  Looks like you're going to have a lousy SL experience by assuming all the creators are evil and out to get you. Why so eager to alter others works? If it bothers you that much, get Blender and Avastar and make your own stuff, just make sure it's all open perms so nobody thinks you're arrogant with the "no mod"

Im sorry, what are you talking about? Demos don't show if something is mod, copy or anything. They show the permissions... of the demo. And naturally a demo is no mod, no copy, no trans because its something you didn't buy yet.

Again, my point is not the modify thing. Its not telling people the permissions upfront.

And to your criticism of me; 10/20/2008 (5130) This is my accountage. Im not new to this. Im also part of Process of Elemination. You are free to look that up on the Marketplace. Further im a Sim-builder and if you get the Second Life Weekly Newsletter or follow SL's Twitter; My work was on the cover on August 16 of this year. I am very much also creating content. So please don't talk like im some kind of Jerk who just wants to insult creators.

Edited 21 hours ago by Gilliana Parx

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Posted 21 hours ago

  21 hours ago, Charalyne Blackwood said:

Someone already did. Again, it's a fast track to account loss.

Most definitely, but only if the person gets caught.  The very determined will not be deterred by the possibility of account loss.  Usually a No Mod setting is simply giving a creator a false sense of security on that front.

Now, I understand that some creators also do No Mod so that their "vision/design" is not messed with.  For some things, I can totally understand that, but not for all things.

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Posted 21 hours ago (edited)

I don't care for no-mod myself and ya, some have either gotten laxed with putting it on there, or came in seeing it as something normal to do, because they came in after we were already eased into no mod becoming a normal thing..

it's like that old saying, what you don't know won't hurt you.. New customers that joined after it became the norm, see the current as the norm..Older residents see it as a change and it's gonna bother some and not others..

Myself , it bothers me and does have an impact on things I might or might not buy.. 

The best way to treat at a creator or a full permi painter, that sets up a business in SL is, like a business.. Then decide if you want to do business with them or not.. Decide if what they are wanting you to buy, lines up with who you would do business with and who you wouldn't.. Then just stick to the rules you apply for yourself..

I always ask myself, do I reaaaally need this or do I reaaally just want it.. Does it line up with my rules.. If not, it's a good chance I'll find something similar somewhere else, because honestly, there aren't too many separating themselves from the pack and someone does have something similar  elsewhere..

Find the ones that fit your rules and make a list of those places and do business with them..

Events and sales really are just the old big malls we used to have in SL, that had a bunch of follower stores, setting up in places to get side traffic from, the really good creators that were the cream of the crop main attractions..

Events and sales are pretty much turning into those malls, but over time many of the big name have reduced more and more over time.

Remember when fifty linden Friday used to have a lot of really big names in them? Ya not as much anymore..

Just look at your money as how hard you worked for it, then see how much of your own rules you are ready to break and why, to get this item..

I started looking at things in that light and really cut down on a lot of the clutter I was buying.. hehehe

Edited 21 hours ago by Ceka Cianci

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Posted 21 hours ago (edited)

On the copybotting subject: There are entire communities online that promote copybotting, and a ridiculous number of the people in them don't even seem to know what SL is, and/or haven't even been inworld more than once or twice. It's a confederacy of dunces for the most part, at least from what I can tell.

On the subject of selling stolen/fraudlent creations, a vendor in the anime community in SL was outed for selling things that they got for free on 3D asset sharing sites and not telling anyone that's what they were selling. The mall had a big sign up declaring the vendor a thief and that they had been ousted from the mall and were to be shunned. They also gave people the link to where the user got the free meshes and told people they could just go there and get the stuff themselves and upload it, because it was free for personal use, and NOT commercial use.

They soiled their own reputation for a while, and had to start making all of their own stuff to get any respect from the community. Last I saw it seemed they had learned their lesson and all of their goods were their own creations. I know people with throwaway accounts wouldn't care, but at least in this one case the vendor had enough emotional investment in their SL to try and make good on their mistakes. Probably for the best, because a lot of anime fans can be quite difficult to deal with if you take their L$ when they could have gotten the thing for free, or for the cost of uploading it themselves.

I'd be pretty upset too. Especially when they have the gall to make it no-mod, and make a big fuss on their listing page about what they'll do to you if you if you don't follow every jot and tittle of how they expect you to honor their rights as the "creator" of their ganked game assets that weren't even made with SL in mind. Protip: Uploading it doesn't make you the creator. It just makes it say you are. Few are fooled by this if they've seen more of the internet than Second Life.

Edited 20 hours ago by PheebyKatz

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Posted 21 hours ago

  21 hours ago, LittleMe Jewell said:

For me, it depends on what the item is.  I insist on No Mod for all of my household and landscaping items.  I don't usually care when it comes to clothing as I'm seldom ever interested in making changes to those items.  I prefer No Mod for hair, but I will accept it as long as I get a demo that shows it fits well and as long as there is a supplied color/tint that works for me.

I actually don't mind it with hair either. Often enough its just rigged anyhow, so there is no real point? And even if its mod it often is one big piece so even try-error texturing to delete bangs and all is not... really vaiable but thats fine. I noticed that many hair creators oddly enough do MORE modify recently or have, like... the bangs on the front be seperated items.

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Posted 21 hours ago

  21 hours ago, PheebyKatz said:

There are entire communities online that promote copybotting, and a ridiculous number of the people in them don't even seem to know what SL is, and/or haven't even been inworld more than once or twice. It's a confederacy of dunces for the most part, at least from what I can tell.

On the subject of stolen creations, a vendor in the anime community in SL was outed for selling things that they got for free on 3D asset sharing sites and not telling anyone that's what they were selling. The mall had a big sign up declaring the vendor a gthief and that they had been ousted from the mall and were to be shunned. They also gave people the link to where the user got the free meshes and told people they could just go there and get the stuff themselves and upload it, because it was free for personal use.

They soiled their own reputation for a while, and had to start making all of their own stuff to get any respect from the community. Last I saw it seemed they had learned their lesson and all of their goods were their own creations. I know people with throwaway accounts wouldn't care, but at least in this one case the vendor had enough emotional investment in their SL to try and make good on their mistakes.

Expand  

Would it be fair to ask who the creator was? Not to shun them, im mostly interested if its a redemption arc...

Yea, copybotting is just all types of wrong. It is basically theft... which is absurdly petty when a lot of items are like... the equivalent of a dollar or euro already.

 
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Posted 21 hours ago (edited)

Even ignoring that there are ways of copying mesh/prim objects that are undetectable, inspecting a modifiable mesh object will not tell anyone anything about that object that they can use to replicate or "counterfeit" it.  Scripts are different and nobody puts in modifiable scripts on a commercial product.  However most people just want the object to be modifiable so that they can adjust materials, re-texture, tint, etc. and in these discussions are not expecting scripts to be modifiable as well.

If any creator believes that no-mod protects anything, then they are likely to be taken in by all kinds of SL scams too.
 

Edited 19 hours ago by Gabriele Graves

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Posted 21 hours ago (edited)

  21 hours ago, Gilliana Parx said:

Would it be fair to ask who the creator was? Not to shun them, im mostly interested if its a redemption arc...

No, it wouldn't. I value my account and my own rep, what there is of it. Sorry. It's against the rules to do that, as far as I can tell.

I don't even mention someone's name if they tick me off on the forum, I just let people figure out who it is from context. Naming people out loud in connection with anything bad is a sure-fire way to get your post edited by a mod/Mole, or get a warning, at the very least.

I'm sure you could find out on your own, if you felt like it. I just can't name-drop in here. Wouldn't be right.

I mean, if we could, the forums would be full of people assassinating each other's characters for ticking them off inworld, etc., as people try to do on occasion. The forum staff really don't need that much drama bulldooky, they have enough to deal with as it is.

Edited 20 hours ago by PheebyKatz

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Ceka Cianci

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Posted 21 hours ago

!quit

It's the union label.. hehehe

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LittleMe Jewell

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Posted 20 hours ago

  21 hours ago, Ceka Cianci said:

!quit

It's the union label.. hehehe

Ahhh, those were the days

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Posted 20 hours ago

  20 hours ago, LittleMe Jewell said:

Ahhh, those were the days

When I first would see those popping up, I was like  who is quitting what and do I need to be quitting something? What the hell am I missing out on!! \o/

 hehehe

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Ceka Cianci

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Posted 20 hours ago (edited)

  21 hours ago, Gabriele Graves said:

Even ignoring that there are ways of copying mesh/prim objects that are undetectable, inspecting a modifiable mesh object will not tell anyone anything about that object that they can use to replicate or "counterfeit" it.  Scripts are different and nobody puts in modifiable scripts on a commercial product.  However most people just want the object to be modifiable so that they can adjust materials, re-texture, tint, etc. or in these discussions are not expecting scripts to be modifiable as well.

If any creator believes that no-mod protects anything, then they are likely to be taken in by all kinds of SL scams too.
 

Expand  

There were and probably more today, so many that never took the time to really even understand how it works.. They were easy to spot out back then because of the protection  they had in their stores..

I don't even think they had to be in the same sim, just in cam range to steal a whole sim's contents. It's been awhile, but I remember, they could stand right next to you and change right into an exact copy of your avatar or copy everything in the sim no matter what protections things had on it.

Edited 20 hours ago by Ceka Cianci

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Charlotte Bartlett

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Posted 18 hours ago

  22 hours ago, Charalyne Blackwood said:

"no mod" in SL prevents counterfeiting and protects the creator's ownership of the design. 

No it doesn't in reality, your statement could mislead people.   New or uninformed creators end up missing out on many sales as they think no mod is some sort of ownership protection.   They should be fully aware of copyright laws and how to protect their designs external to Second Life, so they can enforce if needed.  No mod does nothing in relationship to "ownership".  

The only user case when they is actually true are elements like scripts where they are server side (if you mean to stop copying contents). 

To OP

Home & Decor people will always be mod if they want volume of sales.  
Some scripts in Home & Decor may not be mod e.g. for Huds purely as they are third party items. 
It is always worth asking the creator if they will do a mod version and a polite discussion.   It may be an old item, a new creator or somebody not understanding the commercial benefits of providing mod items to their customers.

Fashion people (generally) will go no mod (I don't agree with it) if there are fatpacks etc - the rationale from some I have heard directly from is they don't want people tinting a white item (huge generalisation here) to lose out on sales. 

Honestly you can normally find things very similar in Second Life if one creator isn't meeting your direct needs that will have the perms you would like.

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Posted 16 hours ago

  22 hours ago, Gilliana Parx said:

I already realized that there is a MASSIVE spike in self-importance with many creators, even tho their creative energy begins and ends with what was in a fashion magazine six months ago, but isn't it just a matter of basic decency to let your customer know what exactly they are buying?

Creators should list permissions and I prefer mod stuff, but I'm never going to agree that all creators produce worthless uncreative junk that anyone could make. If it was that quick and easy, you'd make everything you need and never need to buy anything. Taking out your upset on all creators, including the ones doing exactly what you wanted, is not going to improve anything.

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Jules Catlyn

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Posted 16 hours ago

Just as OP states that she deems certain actions by a business owner as 'creator arrogance", i can flip the scales and say that projecting your way of thinking on a creator in an effort to making then conform to your satisfaction, is "consumer arrogance"

A creator has no obligation to conform to anyone. If a consumer does not like the way a creator conducts their business, they can respond by not buying from them. But the constant complaining about the "Mod/No Mod" issue and now the way a creator states or does not state permissions on a product is just whining. 

Don't like a creator? Move on with your day and don't buy from them.

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Arielle Popstar

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Posted 14 hours ago

  16 hours ago, Jules Catlyn said:

A creator has no obligation to conform to anyone. If a consumer does not like the way a creator conducts their business, they can respond by not buying from them. But the constant complaining about the "Mod/No Mod" issue and now the way a creator states or does not state permissions on a product is just whining. 

Don't like a creator? Move on with your day and don't buy from them.

I think it is good to call out the sort of shady business practices that some creators indulge in to dupe their customers, as it will hopefully send a message to newer people that not all that glitters is gold and that caveat emptor is more relevant in S/L than in the real world. In the real world at least those businesses that play the line too close get called out for it whereas in S/L they are a protected class that at the end of the day hurts old and new customers alike as well as the legitimate creators and developers who do their best for their customers. 

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Posted 13 hours ago

Yes people have the right to run their businesses however they please even if they decide to engage in shady practices and/or be indifferent or outright hostile to their customers.  They shouldn't be surprised though if their reputation and sales plummet as people discuss what they don't like about such businesses.

  16 hours ago, Jules Catlyn said:

But the constant complaining about the "Mod/No Mod" issue and now the way a creator states or does not state permissions on a product is just whining.

No, it isn't whining for people to discuss what they don't like about the way a business conducts itself.  Thank you for revealing how you think of customers in general.

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Posted 11 hours ago

  22 hours ago, Gilliana Parx said:

What is your view on this? am i the only one seeing it this way?

I haven't had any problems. If the item listing is unclear about whether it is mod, and mod is a dealbreaker for me, then I don't buy it. Or I look up the maker and ask them.

Creators don't owe us anything here...they make stuff and decide to share it or not as they choose. As a consumer, I'm grateful people take time to make cool stuff for my entertainment. 

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Posted 8 hours ago

  13 hours ago, Gabriele Graves said:

Thank you for revealing how you think of customers in general.

Those who genuinely know me and the way i conduct business, know how i "think about my customers". I have a well established business and will go the extra mile for my customers. I also work for other people in-world and provide service and support for their businesses. Just because my opinion differs from yours and others and i am not afraid to voice it, does not mean my own business practices fall under the category of "shady".  I do listen to my customers and always will. I am just getting tired of people always ganging up on creators and their decisions like we are the evil ones. We are people, we make mistakes, we learn every day. But the way some people think they need to call us out is ridiculous. Yes, there are shady business people in SL. There always have been and always will be. I am just done with the constant creator bashing. 

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Maitimo

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Posted 7 hours ago

  22 hours ago, Gilliana Parx said:

I know, a bit of a rude title, but i did not know how else to put it. 

In the recent... one or two years in SL of the 14 I am apparently in here, i noticed that an absurd high number of creators not only sell their items No Modify (which i in itself find absolutely stupid) but - which i find far worse - refuse to list the permissions of the items they sell anywhere on the package. And while im sitting here since half an hour, trying to find out if a certain item is modify, i am also at the same time wondering...

Why the heck are we okay with this?

I already realized that there is a MASSIVE spike in self-importance with many creators, even tho their creative energy begins and ends with what was in a fashion magazine six months ago, but isn't it just a matter of basic decency to let your customer know what exactly they are buying? I don't agree to no mod and you might see that differently. Okay, fine! But can i at least be informed about the specifics of the stuff i put money in for, thank you very much?

I don't see any kind of movement against this, even tho everyone should be angry at that. In fact, it should be against the rules. In reality thats what we would call "buying a pig in a poke". And by now it seems to be a vast majority of clothing and accessoires related items for those big bodies that just don't tell you.

I want to mod my stuff. Either making my own texture for something, turning a piece invisible or just to link it, if some complex Roleplay-Outfit that also needs me to equip two huds and stuff makes me hit the attachment limit in day and age of extra heads, ears, hair, jewelry, eyes, piercings, a body, hands, feet and then some... I don't get whats so difficult in writing NM/C/NT or something similar on your product page. It can't be too much to ask...

What is your view on this? am i the only one seeing it this way?

Expand  

If you read this forum often enough, you'll see that a LOT of people (including myself) already do see it this way and the subject comes up here quite often.  I used to refuse to buy no-mod stuff but then I stopped because it eventually became impossible, I wasn't able to buy anything because it was ALL no-mod.  You can bet that 100% of all clothing that has no perms listed is Copy/No-mod/No-transfer.  You don't need the perms listed on the vendor. That's 100% what they will be, guaranteed.

I don't think it's necessarily arrogance though, I think it's partly a cash-grab (pay for the fatpack, not just the white one) and partly a fear that users will discover that the seller is using full perm templates and never actualy made the thing in the first place.

Thats why Demo-Demo-Demo is so important. If the thing isn't 100% perfect for you straight out the box, if you can't wear it exactly as-is without changing a texture or making a piece invisible or linking it to something else, don't buy it at all. You will NOT be able to modify it in any way whatsoever.

This is the reason why I am far more likely to buy full-perm kits these days. I don't sell them, I don't have a store, but buying a L$500 or even a L$1500 fullperm kit with infinite colour/texture/modification possibilities is waaay cheaper than buying a L$2500 no-mod fatpack of 10/20/30 options. My only exception is sellers who do use templates but texture them well and market them sensibly - a fatpack priced at say L$200 to L$400 with a big hud and good range of colours.  Hilly Haalan being my favourite - she is one of the few sellers I will buy at "full price" from, even knowing it's all no-mod.

I do think the trend is very slowly begining to reverse.  Mesh body sellers are already getting the message; some of the newest bodies (Kalhene Erika, Ebody Reborn and Belleza Gen-X) are now mod.  KC Shoes (which are already really well-priced) switched to mod for all their new releases about a year ago. I buy from a couple of niche sellers which not only make their stuff mod, they even include UV maps and sample textures so you can make your own.

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PheebyKatz

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Posted 6 hours ago (edited)

I, for one, often buy full-perms stuff for my own outifts, just because I can use whatever fabric pattern I feel like wearing that day. I'd gladly pay double the price of any fatpack just to be able to put my own textures on what I wear inworld. I can make and rig my own mesh clothes, heck, I even uploaded my own custom mesh body once, and it looked awesome, but it's a lot of work to make things and rig them, and I have no qualms about paying someone else for their time if I think they made something beautiful and I want to wear it.

And a lot of our resident content creators do far nicer design and execution of fashions than I have the patience or skill to do myself. I have loads of respect for that kind of artistry and hard work.

I realize it's a thread about creators not marking things properly to avoid customer disappointment, and has veered off into venting a bit about not being able to mod things in general, but I had to blurt that out, just because I forgot to mention it earlier.

If I buy FP meshes, it does tempt me to sell my modded versions of them (within the limits of the user license agreement, of course), but mostly it's just for my own sense of control over how various parts of my outfit match each other. I'll happily buy non-transferable, moddable versions of things and pay handsomely for them. It does take work to make and rig mesh clothing, and that work should be worth something, and even more so if they're kind  enough to give customization options to those who aren't fortunate enough to have the skills and/or tools and/or time necessary to make the base meshes for their outfits themselves.

Even when I decide to make things for myself, I still buy other creator's takes on them so as to support the creative community while finding inspiration for my own personal take on something. I've been known to buy every version of a thing before deciding I want to make my own. I feel it's at least fair to everyone else that way. Plus, my wardrobe is THE BOMB DIGGITY as a result.

Anyway, just my other two cents.

Edited 6 hours ago by PheebyKatz

 
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Qie Niangao

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Posted 4 hours ago

  11 hours ago, Akane Nacht said:

Creators don't owe us anything here...they make stuff and decide to share it or not as they choose.

If they give it away for free, then they don't owe us anything. If they accept L$s for their work, they get customers, not acolytes.

I had a bad weekend with SL merchants so I'm not feeling especially generous to "creators" right now. Multiple incidents, but the one that really got me wasn't about no-mod (other were, see below). The winner of "Arrogant Creator of the Week" was when an alt discovered that a new product's HUD did nothing at all, so he tried to contact the creator, whose profile said "please use the proper channels" and listed a couple customer service representatives. So that's who was sent a report, then more detail and a workaround, then finally a pinpointed bug and the fix the script needed (this despite the script being no-mod, hence invisible). The win? Here's the CSR's response: 

  Quote

I am the incorrect person and you don't have to be so ignorant but ok, seems to be the global climate at the present moment. so guess we must deal with it I will pass on your comments. Next time I would suggest "This doesnt seem to be working correctly can you please have a look at it." would probably suffice. Thanks. have a wonderful day.

What a peach! 🙄

An unrelated incident that did involve no-mod was a complete mislabeling of a product as Copy+Mod. Turns out there was another product on offer that was modifiable, although the ad was for both products and made no distinction. There was a demo, but I figured the reason it was no-mod was because it was a demo. The product, though, was rigged for just one body (not mentioned on the ad board, and not a body I use), whereas I thought it was unrigged mesh I could modify. (It doesn't flex with joint motion or anything.) Had I tried there'd be no way to move the attached demo, so that would have revealed it was rigged, but I had no reason to test that. Anyway, once I understood all that, I didn't make a fuss; it wasn't all that much money anyway, and a relatively new brand. At least there was a demo; it was misleading, but unintentionally, I think.

There were other examples of "Creators Behaving Badly" too, but on a positive note, a few more who have overcome the "counterfeit" superstition hysteria and offer modifiable clothing:

• Caboodle
• FACS
• Hotdog
• lock&tuft
• Malediction
• Matova
• Noche (fatpacks)
• Semller (fatpacks)
• Sintiklia
• Thirst (fatpacks)

Some have been modifiable all along and some recently came over to the good side so may have back-catalog items that lack Mod perms, so as always check to be sure. Also I'm not sure I've flagged all the fatpack-only cases, or even which creators offer non-fatpack products at all.

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Posted 2 hours ago

  4 hours ago, Qie Niangao said:

If they give it away for free, then they don't owe us anything. If they accept L$s for their work, they get customers, not acolytes.

Free or paid, both are customers. In neither case does the maker owe me anything besides what they sold me. If I read the description wrongly, or didn't bother to demo or check with them first before buying, that's on me. If I couldn't reach the creator (and there are shops out there where the creator is long gone) and I bought it anyway, again, that's on me.

That said, if something is clearly broken, it's reasonable to ask for it to be fixed. I bought an item with a broken HUD once, and I politely informed the maker the HUD wasn't working. She fixed it for me within minutes, though I didn't hurry her. We don't have to be "acolytes" but being courteous sure doesn't hurt. 

 
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Theresa Tennyson

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Posted 2 hours ago

  2 hours ago, Akane Nacht said:

That said, if something is clearly broken, it's reasonable to ask for it to be fixed.

My, that's generous of you toward the whiny nuisance of a customer...

 
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Sid Nagy

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Posted 2 hours ago (edited)

  13 hours ago, Gabriele Graves said:

No, it isn't whining for people to discuss what they don't like about the way a business conducts itself.  Thank you for revealing how you think of customers in general.

Discussing isn't whining, that is totally true. But the OP tossed in a few extras that were totally not needed for such a discussion, IMHO.
Like the title of this thread for instance.

Edited 2 hours ago by Sid Nagy

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Posted 2 hours ago

  2 hours ago, Theresa Tennyson said:

My, that's generous of you toward the whiny nuisance of a customer...

hmm? I was the customer with the broken thing. 

 
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Cinos Field

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Posted 2 hours ago

  4 hours ago, Qie Niangao said:

There were other examples of "Creators Behaving Badly" too, but on a positive note, a few more who have overcome the "counterfeit" superstition hysteria and offer modifiable clothing:

• Caboodle
• FACS
• Hotdog
• lock&tuft
• Malediction
• Matova
• Noche (fatpacks)
• Semller (fatpacks)
• Sintiklia
• Thirst (fatpacks)

Some have been modifiable all along and some recently came over to the good side so may have back-catalog items that lack Mod perms, so as always check to be sure. Also I'm not sure I've flagged all the fatpack-only cases, or even which creators offer non-fatpack products at all.

Expand  

To add to that list just to give creators who leave the mod-box checked some much-needed love:

• Kaithleen's
• Neve
• Meva
• Justice (fatpacks)
• Asteroidbox (fatpacks, I think)

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Posted 1 hour ago (edited)

@Qie Niangao Thank you for that list - also @Cinos Field. They'll get more of my and my wife's custom. That's what we need... lists of the sensible sellers.

We would both buy a lot more if things were modifyable. We've stopped buying a certain hair brand since they stopped having mod perms some time ago. Shame - it's really good hair. We used to buy a lot and we've often tinted it a little manually, or made other adjustments (materials etc) to get the most out of our purchases. No longer.

Edited 1 hour ago by Rick Daylight

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Arielle Popstar

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Posted 1 hour ago

  2 hours ago, Cinos Field said:

To add to that list just to give creators who leave the mod-box checked some much-needed love:

• Kaithleen's
• Neve
• Meva
• Justice (fatpacks)
• Asteroidbox (fatpacks, I think)

To add more still, there is this thread specifically geared to modifiable clothing:

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Theresa Tennyson

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Posted 9 minutes ago

  2 hours ago, Akane Nacht said:

hmm? I was the customer with the broken thing. 

I was responding to how your post seemed to say that the "maker owes you nothing", but that if the thing you purchased was literally sold broken, you'd just be "reasonable to ask" for it to be fixed.

Yes, you should be polite about things, and yes, sometimes things are broken by accident or unforseen changes, but if someone's selling something I'd be inclined to say that they should fix it. Or at least allow you to fix it yourself.

 
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Anna Salyx

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Posted 4 minutes ago (edited)

  22 hours ago, Stephanie Lovely said:

 You are right, there is a definite move away from modifiable items and to more customer hostile things like anti rez scripts too.

I really do despise the anti-rez scripts. They serve absolutely no purpose other than give the creator a false sense of security. They are trivially easy to bypass and out of decorum I'll not mention the standard land/security feature (no tricks, no hacks, no exploits) that makes this a reality.  So, all an anti-rez script does is needlessly add to my script count and load on the system. We tend to be script heavy as it is anymore and i don't see the need to add to that bucket with a useless script. Now all that said, I don't go around making a habit of trying to bypass a so called security feature a particular designer decides to use; I can respect their implicit wish, after all my desire to rez a wearable is very narrowly situational (more below), and if I know a particular creator uses this type of script, I just don't buy from them.

  21 hours ago, LittleMe Jewell said:

For me, it depends on what the item is.  I insist on No Mod for all of my household and landscaping items.  I don't usually care when it comes to clothing as I'm seldom ever interested in making changes to those items.  I prefer No Mod for hair, but I will accept it as long as I get a demo that shows it fits well and as long as there is a supplied color/tint that works for me.

See, I prefer for decor/landscape items to be Yes Mod.  I like linking things together.  Sometimes it can lower the overall LI a group of items by making them a linkset.  It helps me adjust and move things around, when I pack things up, I can put them all back in one step.  Also, once set if the landscape/decore things have scripts and they don't self delete the scripts, I can pull those on out too.

  21 hours ago, Gilliana Parx said:

I actually don't mind it with hair either. Often enough its just rigged anyhow, so there is no real point? And even if its mod it often is one big piece so even try-error texturing to delete bangs and all is not... really vaiable but thats fine. I noticed that many hair creators oddly enough do MORE modify recently or have, like... the bangs on the front be seperated items.

On clothing, not so much just hair, but if multiple items are rigged, and I'm always going to wear them as a set, I can link the various parts and then instead of 2, 3, 5 attachment slots taken up, it's just one.  Everything goes to where it needs be.  I don't often hit the attach limit but sometimes, there are days and special outfits where I get very close, especially if I have to have a few HUDS on.   But to be fair, those are special case scenarios and don't come up often, but I like having the option. I go out of my way to get Yes Mod clothes, but don't fgo out of my way to overtly shun No Mod, but if i have a choice between two similar items (clothing or decor), the mod status will be a deciding factor.

and a final thought, even no-non rigged things, like earrings, I can link and with a little patience and editing instead of them taking up two slots, I have a pair that take up just one.  it makes life a bit better.  I mentioned above that I'm not in a habit of regularly rezzing wearables, but the exception is to link things together, to pull out scripts, to maybe add/change a script (autohide). 

Edited 3 minutes ago by Anna Salyx
typo fix

 
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Prokofy Neva

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Posted 3 minutes ago (edited)

I think in this day and age, some 13 years after the original Copybot scare in SL, creators who actually make and sell their wears commercially aren't burdened with the misconception that putting an item on "no mod" means it is "less" vulnerable to Copybot. While the mechanism of copybotting has changed since 2005, it doesn't matter what permissions are set. 

I think there are three other reasons:

1. Fear of increased customer service from people who don't copy the original, mod it, and then complain when it turns ugly. Sure, they could re-deliver it, but maybe not, not everyone has a redelivery terminal; sometimes they are strangely hard to find. In any event -- anything to reduce CS.

2. Yes, indeed, creator arrogance, which is based in creator insecurity as we all know. What if someone modded a creation, *and made it better*?! The horror! Or what if they mod it, make a mess, and go around then ruining the rep of the original creator? That seems like a compelling reason -- except many people, including myself, simply won't buy things that aren't on mod, the end. If I really, really want it for some reason, I will then take a star off the review just for that no-mod factor.

3. Copybotting isn't the only problem a creator faces. When something is on mod, you can examine it better. When it doesn't have an anti-rez script in it, you can take it out and look at it, not on you, but inworld. Sure, you can take off scripts on the land to defeat any anti-rez script. But it's that examination "in the round" off yourself that I think is also a factor. It's not just brute copying -- it's "inspiration" -- in a highly competitive and repetitive world where someone *will* make a better mousetrap than you, always.

That's what it seems like to me, but I never hear anyone mention it. Maybe it's because they  use pose stands and think that's the same as taking it off and examining it. I don't feel it is. I may be in the minority. But I don't think that anti-rez scripts are used because people still cling to the idea this "defeats" Copybot -- I think that again, they don't want people rezzing things out that they should wear, especially if high-prim, and they don't want that Consumer Gaze.

I will say that anti-rez scripts of the type that prevent food and other deliverables from being casually stolen do have a place, and do in fact work "well enough", despite the completely vicious and unjustifiable beat-down I took on this subject from a certain fabulous scripter. I need to blog about this again.

I really don't think Copybot drives people any more.

I think insecurity does.

And it's not just about copying, it's about being modded and looking better, and the "inspiration" that comes from the ability to mod that then constitutes competition.

We live in a terribly restrictive and horribly oppressive Ren Faire in SL, which a horribly feted guild class. I think many understand this isn't a "conspiracy" theory any more, but a report.

Edited just now by Prokofy Neva

 

 
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Posted 1 minute ago

  22 hours ago, Gilliana Parx said:

I know, a bit of a rude title, but i did not know how else to put it. 

In the recent... one or two years in SL of the 14 I am apparently in here, i noticed that an absurd high number of creators not only sell their items No Modify (which i in itself find absolutely stupid) but - which i find far worse - refuse to list the permissions of the items they sell anywhere on the package. And while im sitting here since half an hour, trying to find out if a certain item is modify, i am also at the same time wondering...

Why the heck are we okay with this?

I already realized that there is a MASSIVE spike in self-importance with many creators, even tho their creative energy begins and ends with what was in a fashion magazine six months ago, but isn't it just a matter of basic decency to let your customer know what exactly they are buying? I don't agree to no mod and you might see that differently. Okay, fine! But can i at least be informed about the specifics of the stuff i put money in for, thank you very much?

I don't see any kind of movement against this, even tho everyone should be angry at that. In fact, it should be against the rules. In reality thats what we would call "buying a pig in a poke". And by now it seems to be a vast majority of clothing and accessoires related items for those big bodies that just don't tell you.

I want to mod my stuff. Either making my own texture for something, turning a piece invisible or just to link it, if some complex Roleplay-Outfit that also needs me to equip two huds and stuff makes me hit the attachment limit in day and age of extra heads, ears, hair, jewelry, eyes, piercings, a body, hands, feet and then some... I don't get whats so difficult in writing NM/C/NT or something similar on your product page. It can't be too much to ask...

What is your view on this? am i the only one seeing it this way?

Expand  

You should just buy full perm items. Most of the items "creators" (esp clothing ) sell is full perm items anyway. They do not want you mucking around finding that out in their product. (maybe) Also, you do not need to link worn items..  

Most textures are created with a UV map, not some texture you got online so applying your own texture kind of makes the object look bad, and clicking on it people see who the creator is and think oh man they suck... so to play devils advocate.. 

Usually permissions on items are displayed, if there is no indication then move on... there are thousands and thousands of creators creating the same thing..  IF you find a unique item then "ask" the creator for a mod, usually you won't get a "copy" version then.... so if you muck it up your mucked. 

It is their product, they an sell it anyway they want. 

How to Combat Copybot -- And It's Not What You Think

By Prokofy Neva, Virtualtor

Yes, you can combat Copybot, although not in the ways you imagine, and the knowier-than-though geeksplainer -- Contraption's scripter -- on this subject actually don't have it all right, either. Particularly outrageous is the idea that his notion of "best practices" that he's pulled out of his posse's trading-post culture will work. I'll light a prayer candle to St. Jude, thank you, Patron Saint of Lost Causes. PS The notion that you could combat Copybot in 2006 because the viewer was closed leaves out the part about how it was crowbarred open by libsl reverse-engineering it, leading to Copybot in the first place.

If you find it hard to read anything longer than a tweet or a short thread or anything bigger than your hand, it's unlikely that this text will help you to understand the all-important SOCIAL history of Copybot and how it was fought, but then, it was always beyond your ken, anyway.

The Copybot of 2006 copied prims and sculpties; mesh didn't exist yet. The mechanism for this function wasn't the same as the function of today's Copybot which copies mesh. It doesn't matter. The nature of the mechanism is not the issue.

Top content kings like the people of Contraption can't really imagine what it is like living in the lower depths of the SL economy and the "long tail," as much as Walton styles himself as a helper of the little guy, and his arrogant scripter -- who thinks he can substitute his imagined best practice as law when code-as-law fails him (!) -- likely can't imagine what it is like trying to make a living in SL as one of the "people with no talent," either. I can, and I can only watch as my tenants and others do this; I never quit that day job. I'd advise them not to do so, either.

When the Copybot of 2006 happened, there was first an interesting series of events that the biased account from Glyn Moody, himself a copyleftist and extremist on these issues (although compelled to be more measured when filing copy for certain more mainstream tech magazines) only partially reports the story of the wielders of Copybot.

libsl was a group in SL of reverse engineers, or as those of us trying to run small businesses or live our little second lives called them, perverse engineers. They reverse-engineered the viewer not because they altruistically wanted to find bugs and help their beloved Lindens as fanboyz, although there was some of that, but because they wanted to terrorize anyone who didn't want to use Second Life -- or the Internet in general -- as they believed it should be used in their radically fanatic software cult. They particularly hated people who wanted to use SL for commerce, in virtuality or reality; to use it for religious meetings or self-help meetings or education; to use it even for a critical discussion group on the nature of SL itself. They griefed and harassed and destroyed all these activities mercilessly in the way Something Awful, WHat, 4chan, Voter5, etc. do in the Internet at large, often accompanied by outrageous racist, sexist, homophobic, antisemitic, obscene, and grotesque textures spewed as particle spam across sims. I doubt Walton Wainright ever had to spend days on end getting !@#!@#$!$@ textures rapidly spewed into his inbox so he couldn't even log on by the same people who created the Phoenix, then Emerald, then Firefox viewers. (Yes, I'm aware that history is erased, and the current devs think all these projects are separate).

So first, in a staged operation, knowing that my blog was among the most popular at the time with high traffic (hardly the case today, 16 years later), they sent a script kitty to tell me lurid tales of a new invention that could completely and instantly copy avatars, their clothing, and attachments -- and proceeded to do so before my eyes. I think even Walton, with his identically-dressed adoring fans arrayed around him in one of his tableaux, might be shocked to suddenly see 100 identical versions of himself overpopulating and then crashing a sim. I was deliberately told this was a project of a then-popular consulting agency, one of the "Big Six" of the day (none of which exist anymore), the Electric Sheep, and that they needed to copy avatars in full for a RL client who with a clothing store. Later, this was corrected to say only one of their number had a client who wanted to put on a rock show on shards, with identical band players and dancers on every shard (sim); still later this was amended to merely some staff who crossed over to membership in libsl as well prototyping and bug-testing.  As a journalist, I got at least three sources; at least two were in libsl; another was a known griefer with relevant information; two I met in RL; a fourth had to be discounted once he told me he had been deliberately paid to misinform me. Sadly, completely separately, one died in a car accident in RL.

A lot of money was at stake in those days when the likes of IBM, CBS, Coca-Cola, Sears, etc. all came into SL, all bought sims, all hired the top designers -- something I complained about to the NYT in that era because the world was dealt a severe blow from which it never recovered. SL became not a world, but a platform; the talented people who bootstrapped themselves to livelihoods and made money for themselves and the Lindens were stepped on, hard. Only a select few of them -- and as in RL, not necessarily the most talented, but the most connected -- were hired by the RL companies, who sucked them away from the world, leaving it the worse. And it wasn't an accident that this happened because a consultant for big-name clients was cynical about the world and -- as the expression generated at the time had it -- indifferent to the suffering of "little dressmakers".

It's hard to convey to cynical and literalist programmers or designers with their nose in blender and convos in Discord who rarely touch the earth of the Mainland what a shock and horror this was at the time. Most life still occurred on the Mainland, where everything from griefing to grey goo to rumours to fashions rippled quickly across the contiguous simulators unchecked.

When griefers deliberately came in and started copying entire people's avatars and outfits inworld, it spread panic and fear and hatred -- but in fact, the cohort exactly like the griefers (and intermixed with them) -- graphic designers who were also technical experts and in some cases programmers and scripters -- quickly organized to combat this menace. The first thing that an organized group of merchants did was organize a strike of sorts. They locked down all their stores, refused to sell anything, and put up CLOSED DUE TO COPYBOT signs, and assembled for visible demonstrations at the telehubs and welcome areas.

At that time I didn't make anything myself, but in solidarity with all the merchants in my multiple malls, I enabled "no access" on groups (something I never do in my rentals), so that no one could enter the stores (I had more of them then because commerce took place in them in ways it doesn't know, since the advent of the MP and the large shopping events). Many creators began using what they thought was an effective antidote, a spam script that sent a string of text that ended in "quit!" -- which was supposed to force the Copybot to stop. It didn't work much of the time.

The strike grew and people began to complain vocally to the Lindens and the crisis was covered in the blogs and Alphaville Herald, the top resident online newspaper of the day. It was a smaller world, and the Lindens didn't adopt the pose they often did with certain exigencies in the world -- for example, saying they "couldn't" deprecate the bounce script used by Psy and other security merchants to teleport people home merely for flying near somebody's private home -- because they "needed it for elevators" -- of which there were about...two...in SL at the time. (In fact, remarkably, first Philip Linden conceded that the obnoxious script should be deprecated when he saw its effects; then his own staff rolled him because as I've often commented, the Lindens never met a script they didn't like (they love scripting creativity) and because the top resident forums and photo site, beloved also by Lindens of that era, were funded by the maker of the bounce script.

The Lindens, like Walton's literalist scripter sent out to make more public pronouncements today, even disagreeing with Walton's concession about some uses for these scripts, could have held town halls and workshops patiently explaining to their user base -- their beta testers and early adapters who had handed over thousands of dollars to them for sims and content, from which they took a percentage in LindEx sales by that time -- that nothing could be done. On the Internet, not only nobody knows you're a dog; dogs can copy your stuff because if you can see it, you can copy it (a phenomenon known then as "the analog hole"). Of course not only could anyone screenshot a texture and copy it; more relevantly, they could use a device like Copybot on a rogue viewer (this was the dawn of third-party viewers and they had not been accepted yet by LL which did not formally open source its viewer until January 2007) simply to copy quickly an entire avatar, and entire house, an entire vehicle - oh, except the scripts. The scripts, if they were on no-mod and no-transfer, could not be copied because they were server-side. This gave scripters a corporate advantage over other kinds of creators which continues to give them an arrogance all out of proportion to their actual social value.

PEVERSE ENGINEERS

So what did the Lindens do to combat Copybot? Obviously they had a number of urgent -- and private -- talks with libsl, which their COO, Cory Ondrejka -- had encouraged privately and even publicly at various SL and RL meet-ups, to the chagrin of some of us who felt that reverse-engineering of the viewer -- technically banned under the TOS -- shouldn't be something that a few special friends of the Lindens get to do, who -- like Eddie Haskell on Leave It to Beaver -- say "Gee, Mrs. Linden, such a lovely dress!" as they stick out a foot to trip us up and make us fall and crash our sims.

If you think griefing is just a lark, if you think you solve it by ban tools or closed groups or closing your island, I think you have no idea what it is like to be endlessly targeted by people who can circumvent those tools. I do. And when you read the comments of the word-salad chefs, you realize the chief feature about them: they lie.

Many people think that you shouldn't give trolls air time; that you shouldn't publicize griefing because it only encourages them; I don't, as a person relentlessly griefed for my outspoken criticism of the tech bro class and as a person who had changed my gender in SL, I knew that as in RL, you had to publicize abuses or they only grew worse. You had to document them, take names, file abuse reports, publicize them, and while it took awhile, justice would eventually prevail. And it did.

The Lindens decided to declare that Copybot was illegal. It wasn't just a fun sandbox tool to do "debugging"; it wasn't just something that people who took themselves too seriously should "get over"; if it didn't affect all the economy (weapons makers always do well in any season), it was still very wrong and threatened the Lindens' bottom line. They understood that, even if the hackers didn't -- and still don't.

And libsl, which included some people who either worked in RL tech jobs or who worked as consultant to big companies in SL realized that they looked bad if they seemed to be destroying the world and ruining its capacity for creativity and commerce.

So the first thing that happened, and likely at the Lindens' prompting, is that John Hurliman (eddie Stryker in SL), stepped down from the head of libsl. If you still have doubts that he was the engineer of Copybot, do some Googling, it's not a secret. Like some politicians leave to "spend time with their families," Hurliman said "all he wanted to do was code" and didn't want the "drama".

That the drama was inspired by griefers who used his took as intended and not "not as intended" wasn't admitted, although every script kiddie and WHat loser in SL grabbed it to harass people and actually steal and flip content. "Business in a box" appeared all over with hot property and the fences, if banned, merely retrieved the copies from the group notices or sandboxes where their friends hung out, some of whom were always careful to keep their hands clean to help perpetuate the gangs' activities.

"WHERE'S DAD?"

I once went to a tech conference in San Diego where one evening a group of us had an intensive and interesting conversation with famed game designer Raph Koster, in which we tried to get him to appreciate not-a-game SL, and he laid out his plan for making a better open-ended game world (which he did do and ran for awhile before it folded and he did many other things). There was a shy, overweight young man -- a teenager -- sitting on the edge of the group, never talking. Finally, as people began to drift away, he came up to me and introduced himself as the griefer who had shown me copybot. It turned out that he literally lived in his mom's basement. I didn't ask "Where's Dad." He did some sort of work and paid her part of the rent. He acknowledged his griefing escapades.

"Why?" I asked. 

"Because the Internet poisoned my soul," he said -- sincerely.

Of course, now our entire society lives with this poisoning, that still might have been stopped 20 years ago, but that's a topic for another blog post.

THE FIRST RULE OF FIGHT CLUB...

The next thing that libsl did -- again, not as a coded, mechanical activity but a social, organic activity, if you will, was to make a rule for their club. Only core devs could be in their group. If someone wasn't a core dev -- and presumably peer-reviewed in some sense or kept honest by those who wished to be decent and not steal from others -- they couldn't be in the group. 

Now, we totally get it that this hardly stopped the proliferation of the code called "Copybot," which sits on github or whatever to this day. We're not stupid. But these two actions -- changing the head of the group, and cleaning up the membership -- went a long way to restoring faith in the group (of course, not by me, who had personally and severely and repeatedly been griefed by these criminals).

When the Lindens declared Copybot "illegal," of course they couldn't catch every log-on. Whatever hashmarks or identifying features of IP addresses there were could be easily undone by anonymizing or by the Lindens' agnosticism -- if someone logged on from a cornfield in Nebraska, whom we knew to be a griefer because they wrote obscenities on our blog and their IP addressed traced to that cornfield, the Lindens would claim that maybe it was a dorm or a house in which multiple people were logging on, and you couldn't punish all of them. The Lindens refused to block anonymizer addresses, saying that freedom fighters from Iran might be logging on (they showed perhaps 2-3 people, likely foreign journalists or government officials who managed to log on at that time). Corner cases, thy name is Linden.

The Lindens and their code-cave denizens have always been impossible to deal with for us norms, although they have become somewhat more civilized over the years as their staff is recruited not from the user base or "the Internet," but from companies like Microsoft, IBM. Amazon, etc. Today, Cory Ondrejika works at Meta heading up the mobile team; Hurliman runs his own robotics company. Creative! Geeks! They rule our world! Better Living Through Codistry!

TRIANGULATION

Meanwhile, back at the ranch, the Lindens used other methods to stamp out Copybot. It wasn't rocket-science. The same people who used Copybot, with that invisible or anonymized log-on, were still in certain groups. They still had all those anime and Bronies etc fetishes. They were still in the same sandboxes or at the same Vore clubs. Even as the world got bigger, you could find them because they victory-danced, that is, they always bragged about their exploits in the IRC channel if not in group chat inworld, and someone with a conscience would eventually AR them. Or they would crash enough sims, and harass enough people even outside the group of me and my tenants, that finally the Lindens had to permaban them and seize their islands. They did this multiple times as they kept coming back on alts, with various Medicis bank-rolling their "transgressive behaviour". 

FIRESTORM IS EVERYWHERE

So fast forward to today. Yes, I live in 2022 quite solidly thank you, not in World War I in the steampunk era, actually. How could you combat Firestorm, which rules the world in more diverse and deep ways even than Casper, the Friendly Monopolist Vendor?

Look up all the groups they have in multiple languages, with multiple purposes, totally infiltrated throughout the entire user base even more than the Lindens who essentially gave up their non-English orientation work, once so robust that they even had offices in other countries.

When confronted by reporters like me, Oz Linden would claim the Lindens "couldn't know" what percentage of log-ons were from Firestorm because the same person might use both viewers. Or that dorm room in Nebraska in fact was really only one person with a bunch of alts. Why, IP addresses dynamically change. Blah blah.

Of course they really know and we all know that it is probably at least 90% or more of the population. Only newbies, critics like me, and a few animesh avatar creators who need to test on multiple viewers ever use the bog-standard SL viewer.

SAVING SEARCH AND SHOPPERS

One of the chief reasons is that Oz and company killed search back at the dawn of 2.0 in about 2012, and continued to cripple it especially in the last two years. Meanwhile, Firestorm kept it as it was in 1.23, imagine that, these "people who live in 2022" who are "not stuck back in the dark ages with Copybot I" kept an old viewer's search arrangement because it was better, and helped shoppers more, and that made our economy. If they hadn't existed, you'd have to invent them to save the world, as the Lindens acquired a religious fervour about their mangled search that we can only explain by some curious internal development like the way they ruined their auctions by buying the ebay guy's auction software instead of using the original inhouse version they had, which was better as it showed who had bid, how much, and who won, and kept a record. Now all of that is missing, and even the winning bid disappears after a week (which is why I try to save some of them at the castle in Sylvia).

The huge debacle caused by the Phoenix-Emerald-Firefox DDoS attack, for which Fractured Crstyal is blamed (but for my bird, Lonely Bluebird was always the more sinister gangster; Fractured was just a teenager) also got the Lindens to finally clean up the third-party viewer mess.

The Firefox team of today some of whom remain from that era constantly tell you that these different versions of the viewer are separate, that you can't speak of them collectively, but when Phoenix dies, and the next thing is named Firefox -- the fire from which the phoenix arises -- and that name still appears everywhere on their literature, you don't have to be Sherlock Holmes. 

Like policemen who try to solve old cases by pinning them on a newly-arrested crook, the devs try to put all the blame on Emerald and a few devs. But we've been to the sandboxes because we were griefed from them and we've watched all the victory-dances on the YouTubes where all the name tags were visible. So let's not be children here. 

Yes, that's my RL head in effigy, eating the Emerald logo on the eve of Emerald's banning. These children were obsessed with me merely because I AR'd them and publicized their antics to expose their endless lies and claims of innocent "debugging".

At any rate, the viewer was used to ensnare its unwitting users in a DDoS attack to make a point in some sandbox fight, and Pathfinder Linden (who plotted in the IRC channel to get me banned, another sensational story of the early years) scolded the boys that you just can't abuse your customers or web sites in that manner. Those directly responsible got permabanned; those who held the cloaks remained to victory dance.

WHO THREW WHOM?

Fast forward another half decade or more and there is only me to remember any of this, and all of it is utterly sanitized. The Lindens held very tense pow-wows with the Firestorm gang, and it's not clear who threw whom. Either party was capable of throwing the other and destroying the world to make a point, I suppose. Somehow they reached a deal. The Lindens insisted on a cooperation agreement, a kind of treaty. There was a list of demands the FS devs didn't want to meet.  Possibly they demanded RL names and locations that some of their griefers didn't want to yield. The Lindens muscled them and they finally knuckled as others before them. Telehub mall land barons anyone? VAT taxed?

Today, Firestorm continues to be used to Copybot. The Firestorm devs claim they can't stop it, as you can see from their routine answer to my routine question just to see if they still say the same thing.

Our software is opensource. There is nothing we can do to mitigate users modifying our code except to close source our code. And that is not possible without violating license agreements and user trust.

— The Firestorm Viewer (@PhoenixViewerSL) July 7, 2022

 

But taking a page from the 2006 book, if Copybot grew more extreme and widespread -- and I don't think it is at this time but we are always only one crisis way from the collapse of our little world -- the Lindens could, in theory, if the situation warranted:

o demand that Firestorm CEO Jessica Lyon step down, and another CEO be found who can better rein in their goons -- and goons are their best customers, and the "users modifying our code" because they can't control their crime;

o demand that the Firestorm team create a core dev group in which others are not invited and not cleared -- obviously that leaves those Self-Compilers of Firestorm and other free agents to do what they wish but at least there is some optical effort at quality control -- optics matter, as generations of Linden PR people will tell you;

o through social ostracizing, group expulsion, land bands, etc. the people who persist in developing Firestorm in non-transparent ways or using it for non-transparent and criminal purposes (Pantera says she knows the forums where they all hang out and has urged me to go tell them not to be bad anymore; to which I can only say "No, you" -- because it's YOUR viewer and YOU are responsible;

o if this doesn't work, block Firestorm from logging on to SL.

Now, would the Lindens do this?

I can only say: watch them.

The high-end creators who sneered and heckled and harassed the makers of gatchas -- some of the finest craftspeople in SL and head and shoulders above the elites simply as people in some cases -- imagine "it can never happen to them".

I'd invite you to think clearly about the Gatchapocalypse. No RL prosecutor or legal authority of any kind in the state of California -- where it matters, because the US is a republic with states' rights and the state law on gambling is what matters -- had indicated in any way, shape, or form that gatchas were in any kind of violation. The lawsuits about children and lootboxes which are a different in phenomenon in games which were launched against Google and Apple failed. They failed.

Instead of taking an adversarial or even just practical attitude toward these developments, the Lindens, under their new owners, who included a politically-connected Harvard-trained lawyer and former US Trade official, decided to pre-emptively remove gatchas to "limit liability for litigation". There was no litigation. You can't say "But Japan" in California even if you have Japanese customers.

If you think they can't do that regarding a widespread IP theft issue, especially as they bring in more and more RL companies as they did in the past, I have a bridge in Brooklyn to sell you. Or jump, the viewer will catch you!

LAW AS LAW

Then there's another factor that people in the UK and elsewhere may not fully grasp, even though their own EU is bringing big tech to its knees these days. Section 230, the safe haven for big tech against any claims regarding the content on their servers, is more than likely to be redacted or even abolished.

Again, if you think laws that have been around, oh, for even 50 years, I invite you to look at Roe v. Wade and remember that in our common law system which is NOT LIKE your civil law system in X country, the interpretation brought by Dobbs can undo a federal law completely, devolving it back to the states. And here we all are.

You don't know. The electricity could go off or a comet might hit the planet.

But more to the point, your notion that "Copybot can't be stopped because Copybot can't be stopped because Science" is not immune to organic law and organic politics.

If top creators draw their wagons around them and tell the little dressmakers to go file a DMCA, or even offer magnanimously to help them (um, that doesn't scale, you do realize, right?), maybe that buys them some time, but ultimately, if enough people get angry or simply discouraged, either they leave SL completely, as quite a few merchants have done since the gatcha ban and then the application of the US sales tax and the cashout expenses, or they get more and more desperate and angry over copying, and they fight back.

CIVIL DISOBEDIENCE

You can't know that they may fight back with inserting anti-rez scripts in their clothing just to piss you off and keep you from their RP sim, even though they know how it works.

You can't know that they might not decide to boycott Firestorm en masse. There's always Alchemy or Catnip.

Of course, the Lindens are in very, very deep with Firestorm. Listen to any of these office hours and you might be horrified. There are more Lindens than residents in these meetings -- the residents don't even feel they need to bother to come. The summaries are on Inara Pey's blog later. The Lindens nearly grovel to theSE Firestorm devs, thanking them for fixing this or that thinglet. The Lindens apologize profusely -- you would think that Firestorm was holding office hours, and Linden fanboyz were coming to symp them.

Now, why doesn't LL just buy Firestorm? That is, Firestorm isn't "for sale," being such an altruistic volunteer open source bunch.

Why doesn't LL just retire its own viewer and pronounce Firestorm as the official viewer? After all, they buy Windlight or various other services for voice, etc. Why not the viewer? Since they can't turn back from having open sourced it back in the day.

Because they can't accept the liability of Copybot and any other criminal use of the viewer.

If they insisted on packing the core dev group, perhaps they could clean it up.

And it's not like there aren't other models for doing just that out there, for whatever reason. Look at Overte. A fork of the High Fidelity software (from Philip's company) decided to go non-profit, rather than commercial. The commercial part has likely formerly Lindens/High Fidelity staff in it -- they refuse to name them, which is of course irresponsible, but then they're coders. 

What they are making, however, is a club. You have to be in the club if you want to be central to the development AND VOTE ON IT. (That touch was particularly nice; I presume they aren't going to just hum like the IEEE engineers, and unlike the JIRA, people will be able to vote "no" -- that's crucial).

Of course, when you hang a towel in the men's locker room in the gym, anyone can wipe their ass with it. And so the Overte people, like Firestorm "can't" control what happens to their open source wonder. And yet...and yet...they seem to have built an efficient hedge around it.

And yet...they are creating a cadre of responsibility around it which they have found necessary -- and we all know that it is vital for their to be TRUST in their world. Any open source world that doesn't have grown-ups and quality control in the form of at least a voluntary club of this nature ends up like Open Sim -- unpopulated. Let me suggest that they better make up their minds quick what their attitude is to IP theft. Open Sim failed there; so will they.

If you put permissions in your world, they have to be meaningful.

If the Copybot problem worsened, if Walton couldn't help all the little dressmakers, if the tide rose higher over people's heads, the Lindens might start taking actions. They might remove some of Firestorm's massive privileges, like all their access to newbies in their help islands, which of course brings them into their commerce circles.

Nothing is certain and everything is possible.

 

The Guild in Second Life

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!

 

 

 

 

 

Anti-Anti-Anti-Rez

By Prokofy Neva, Virtualtor

So that was a very long post because I think out loud and publish my reflections. I thought it would be interesting to think of all the experiences I have had with Contraption over the years, such as they are, as someone totally on the fringe of what I now see is a fiercely-tight-knit and loyalist posse. That is, there are likely hundreds -- thousands -- of Contraption customers who don't read the forums or social media or follow any of these issues, and are just busy trying to figure out now why that funny bird they bought broke when that man at the store seemed so nice. 

But on Twitter, there are all kinds of furries available to pounce, and it's hard to walk around the robots.

So I want to summarize this unfortunately wrangle because it really is important not due to the personalities involved but the issue of how you deal with IP protection in virtual worlds -- through the edicts of top creator gods and their notions of life, or tools within the viewer that may not work, or control of third-party viewers with Copybot capacity that log on with the rest of the majority of the population.

None of these topics are taboo, outdated, or not allowed to be discussed by non-technical people, because we all have a stake in the world.

Walton Wainright issued what he perceived as a "public service announcement" although it had the curt and annoyed tone of an edict. He urged people to stop using anti-rez scripts in their no-mod clothing because such scripts didn't protect against Copybot, as is rumoured, and they only add excess script time and cripple sims and RP choices.

So with this edict, he impugned that creators of clothing -- and many are women -- are stupid. They believe in a myth. They don't know any better and use totemic icons to ward off the evil spirit of IP theft. Worse, they bring down the wrath of content kings like himself because they forced him to buy a new RP outfit -- he couldn't open up the no-mod item and reduce its script usage.

Oh, possibly he meant only NEW creators who didn't know any better. He didn't say that until much later. I will be contacting every user of these scripts simply to hear what they think. I like to check stories.

I don't go to RP sims or at least very rarely but I got to live music and DJ events and art gallery openings and I get it about the need to reduce script time, which is usually done by removing attachments, as a kind of common courtesy in SL. I have no idea if Walton Wainright ever goes to live music or art gallery openings, I never see him. SL is such a small world that every time I go to a shopping event or any event at all, I will see if not a friend or acquaintance, a tenant. I can walk along the mall at Shop 'n Hop and see many people I know. And I'm not famous, and I'm nobody compared to Walton.

So when Walton, who is famous, and the top content creator of SL in my view (not necessarily MY favourite, but the recognized King), I worry when he basically tells everyone to take out IP theft protection scripts, they don't work.

I don't like that, because I know they do work -- when we are talking about certain use cases, and that means givers of food and full perm mesh, among others. 

And that's because the problem MOST creators face isn't Copybot, which isn't as ubiquitous as imagined or we wouldn't have the world we have, but theft by conscious human beings taking full perm models and violating the TOS that went with them. Or taking full perm items meant as freebies for the community, and selling them.

It took a great deal of persistence, and stamina in getting past all the goons that clustered around Walton (I'm going to credit him with not having whistled for them) to keep explaining why he was being so destructive in his pronouncements and get him to climb down.

He then conceded there were other use cases, conceded that for full perm items that were temp-rez, copyright protection scripts made sense, or for certain other uses like HUDs in a game and felt chuffed that he had repeated himself three times -- but I only repeated myself because he still wouldn't see the larger picture.

For one, I don't think he covered all the use cases -- he never acknowledged that some creators just want to make sure people are driven to "add" or "wear" and don't start rezzing things out. He didn't acknowledged that the close perusal of a rezzed-out dress doesn't need Copybot -- it can mean a person is "inspired" to make a similar item, so similar it leads to vicious catfights on the forums, inworld, and on Discord. My God, it's Hair Fair right now. Do you think there isn't a diva weeping into her pillow somewhere that her hair has been stolen?

The regrettable affair might have ended there, but then I began to see Walton in his sub-tweets, and realized I had granted him too much the benefit of the doubt.

Walton styled himself to his posse as someone patiently repeating himself, and even offered a paw of sympathy to a skunk who claimed entirely falsely that I had harassed him, based on his garbled reading of my time line, and claimed I even come into another conversation to harass him. So because I merely responded to a tweet I can see in my feed, this skunk felt his safe space was invaded. The enormous thin-skinned nature of these geeks and designers! They have this provincial belief that they talk only among themselves in their posse when online, and no one else can comment! Why don't they go on Discord and filter the door? I often find these people don't realize they are on the Internet, on Twitter, where anyone who sees a RT of them, or who looks up a topic (I seldom do that) can talk to them. They can always use the mute button. None of them do because they are endlessly primed for drama and curiosity about what you will say.

Of course, if that other convo involves the transgender topic and the debate around "pregnant people" from PaulaNYT,  and you happen to disagree about that term, even if you support transgender people and acknowledge their authenticity, i.e. opposing Macy, then you will be prima facie a TERF or a Trumpkin. So that skunk can then run whining to Walton, who is gay, that someone is mean about LGBT. All of that is utterly false and you just have to read my tweets.

Add to that the utterly insane goon who appeared with my vandalized Wikipedia -- I assure you that a) I don't think Black people put bugs in Romney's apps or that b) because a Democrat shop had a Black coder in it that they deliberately made Romney's apps fail. You can go and read my blog instead of the insanity of Wikipedia and anonymous idiots on Twitter. 

Yes, if SL weren't bad enough, with its totally screechy and unjust forums, Twitter is even worse with these personas. 

Now why did I mix in with this? And I'd do it again in a heartbeat because I don't need to be popular and loved the way these people do.

Because I don't think Walton should tell people their efforts to stop Copybot are empty and worthless -- and indeed they are -- without providing an alternative.

He hastens to tell you that the alternative is him being nice and helping designers with DMCA takedown notices. Sorry, that doesn't scale. He wants now every creator who uses anti-rez -- and there are thousands of them -- to come to his door now? Because Copybot is everywhere, right?

This haughtly dismissal of people's home remedies and admonition to go file DMCAs aren't just condescending, they're absurd -- because we live in a regime that has permissions supplied by a company that claims it provides acknowledgement and protection of user IP, unlike other tech companies. 

Once having put in those permissions, they need to be challenged FOR SURE when they are breached by third-party viewers. The end. This is not hard to understand for those who aren't immersed in the open source cult. 

If you think copyright can only be protected by DMCA notices, why have permissions? They are pointless then. Let's remove "transfer" and be done with it.

After all, Contraption has another very important weapon in the war on Copybot -- the posse. You can be sure that if someone rips Contraption's lovely frock coat with the alchemist symbols, which I wore myself for weeks, that an entire goon squad of his loyal customers and pals will descend on that ripper's head. That's always the social quotient around Copybot incidents.

There might not necessarily be any finding of facts as in a court of law. But if the fake coat isn't removed from the thief's store, then LL might step in, especially if you have a hotline to Lindens as a top creator in their Shop 'n Hop, doing their builds. I would think not 24 hours would pass before a DMCA notice, an alert to LL, before that creep is pulverized and removed from SL, with only red mist where he once stood.

Meanwhile, someone like me will need NINE MONTHS to get grief cubes on physics tumbling up and down a nearby lot with a no-show neighbour removed by Governance.

I can discover something I bought on the MP is in fact a famous cartoon on iphones that I just didn't realize; I can try to send a protest or a complaint somewhere -- but the Lindens don't take complaints -- there is no space on the AR sheet. I can only use the posse method as well, telling people in groups not to buy it, deleting it from my inventory, posting a blog about it. 

LL would have to wait for that famous cartoonist to take an interest in Second Life and send a takedown notice to some fly-by-night operation hawking bad copies of her cartoon on the MP for 10L.

Where is this going to lead? Increasing stratification between top designers with LL's ear who have the resources -- and RL businesses -- to file DMCA takedowns to Copybot wranglers -- and the rest of us who don't. Between people with the loyal posses to fan out and bring retribution to Copybot fencers -- and those of us who don't.

But there are other solutions, about which I will post soon.

Contrary to Contraption

By Prokofy Neva, Virtualtor

Ezekiel at Bassett Town 2022

MY GREAT ADMIRATION FOR CONTRAPTION

I've always had pretty much unadulterated love for Contraption, namely Walton Wainright (faust steamer), whom I have interacted with the most over the years. I happily spent fortunes on their gatchas, I buy a lot of their products, although my name may not appear because I have an alt with artificial limbs who is their greater customer, and another alt in their group that I don't log on to much so I don't have to listen to the inane chatter from the group. I'm not a big fan of bloody metal plates that cover my avatar eyes or metal spiders that attach to my face, I'm a norm. But all the steampunk stuff with gadgets and goggles and wind-up things, especially gramophones, I'm a big fan, just like other norms.

I have spent actually many happy hours listening to the Wild West theme Contraption devised for their Fantasy Faire sim, which to me, looked like a Wild West town from Upstate, New York.  

It does sound like they took a World War I tune and Wild Westified it, but that's Contraption, I like that. I have a lot of those gramophones all over. When I say "hours," I'm not kidding. I put that latest one from Bassett Town in this complicated quest I'm making called "The Engineer's Wife," about a Japanese engineer and his Roma wife who goes missing in the late 1800s in Peru. 

Most of the crowd around Contraption are RP types into all kinds of metal, steam, goth, BDSM, whatever. Doesn't matter. I'm always for people doing their own thing on their own sim and everyone else having tolerance for that. Pluralism. And tolerance. It's the principle by which I run my rentals, where anybody of any lifestyle can rent as long as they follow my simple rules and the TOS, like not going over your prim limits.

MY RESISTANCE AGAINST EXTREMISTS WHO INVADE THE PUBLIC SQUARE

I'm not for masters clinking into the public square with their slaves on chains because I think the public square should not be taken over by ideologies that suppress other people even if they claim it is voluntary. The public square should remain a neutrality of pluralisms with tolerance but not hegemony, not an endless serial of diversities, any one of which can become hegemonic.  The presence of so many safehouses for subs tends to give the lie to that claim but I'm not here to debate BDSM today.

BDSM is the lifestyle that is barely restrained -- to make a pun -- at FF because it is G-rated, but the pagan religion and master/slave ethos is everywhere in RP and it's hard to find RP without it. Most RP or even art sims have a very strong male character with various female characters arrayed around them in slavish adulation, with very harsh practices of exclusion and very intense practices of initiation, like cults. (Their RL genders aren't important.) This is Second Life. This. This is the culture everywhere, in a store, in a game, on a shopping sim, on the forums. And I push back against it because I don't like oppression and PS I don't think "capitalism," which doesn't really exist even in the US is more oppressive than "socialism," which doesn't really exist anywhere either.

So, on the rainbow of SL styles and venues, I see Contraption on the lighter and more fun end of the spectrum -- they don't have pale neckos with deep and bleeding flesh wounds and spiked jewelry every Saturday -- maybe just like every six months. If you don't like the weather at Contraption, wait five days, it will change.

What a contrast to my accounts for work and my RL self, and my SL Twitter account. On the RL accounts, there is debate about transgender and abortion and Ukraine and guns but it is thoughtful and intellectual and there is a spectrum of opinion on the left and left-of-center where I am. On my SL account, there is hysteria, calls for violence, insanely distorted stories, disinformation, and everything from QAnon and no-vaxxers to extreme trans totalitarianism and NJ girls getting up a gang to go get Kavanaugh -- it's highly creepy. My feed looks like that on that account because it has SL avatars and tech dudes. That's why. That's how they are. Contraption isn't out at the extreme, even if their customers include some of these goons, one of whom, yes, said he was mounting a "hit" on me. Sigh.

THE TABLEAUX

Still, there's one feature of the Contraption mythic rituals (which I participate in only in a "lite" way or with "OOC" over my head) which I find faintly creepy but then, maybe I don't fully understand it. Again, I don't go to the Contraption parties or play on their affiliated RP sims, I just go to the store and buy something now and then. So my alt went to their 10th anniversary awhile ago, and each time he went to that booth to collect the present for the 10 days, buying gatchas along the way, he found people standing around, posed in their steam get-ups but not talking. Well, that's common, people go to events and go AFK all the time, the managers should just boot them if the sim fills but it hadn't filled really. Or maybe they weren't AFK in fact, but just, I don't know, "Voguing."

And standing at the center of a circle of totally decked-out steamers were Walton and Victor, magnificently dressed in their WW I era gentleman steam duds with all the bells and whistles. They just stood there, swaying slightly -- and they were AFK too. After a few times visiting and seeing them, I realized, that was how it was supposed to be. It was like a tableau -- like the living tableaus of the Soviet era, like the Mormon pageant on Hill Cummorrah (which was 30 miles from our house so we used to go to it every year).

It was -- as I said -- faintly creepy but then it was also kind of like the bot models at the entrance of Fallen Gods. Why not have the actual people's avatars instead of bots? That's fine.

At FF, was it 2 years ago, there was a city called Somniatoris Arx build by Contraption with a character at the center in a huge grave named the Somniator.  He was a large winged skeleton half visible out of his grave and a giant thurible waved back and forth over his grave, high above on a flying buttress. When I went on the sim tour with the Literary group, the tour guide barked at me that I was walking on the Somniator's grave and had to get out of the way. I immediately said that it was Grandpa, and Mom used to let us picnic on the grave all the time, what's with this. See, I can write stories, too. I wrote an elaborate one and sent it in but it was ignored, I think it was past the deadline. I noticed that the Contraption staff would array themselves just above the grave silently, clutching the rosary beads with the wedding rings, which you could change to different colours, also silently, never chatting, and likely AFK -- it was a tableau again.

I'm not good with tableaus, I like interactive plots, so I made a Somniator myself out of just models from the MP of skeletons and what-not. I bigged it up and put some "rez object on touch correctly" script in it and on the last day of the Faire, I put the grave out and I had the Somniator rise up and dance around under the arch. A few last-minute Contraption shoppers stood by and cheered and snapped some pictures. Nobody really paid attention. I did this act a few times, and also tried to ride the thurible -- the way my brother and I did when we used to picnic on Grandpa's grave -- but you couldn't right-click and sit on it. Drat. The Worthies -- the top builders -- play tricks on each other on the last day and put out giant flamingos -- there was even the long-running gag that Silas Merlin did with his chickens, and I found nearly every one. But they pay attention to each other, not to anyone else. That's fine, I might have actually been slapped with a DMCA takedown for stealing an idea, come to think of it, but I didn't sell this rigged-up Somni, I just added to the story. Now I can't find him in inventory. Oh, well. Look for the pictures on my Flickr.

BASSETT TOWN

On the last day of FF this year, many people gathered at Bassett to see it one last time -- it was truly a magnificent build, with so many subtle details despite the seemingly drab decor in this fly-blown dust-devil Western town. The cemetery in the town square in front of the main building, which is not where cemeteries usually are (they are in churchyards, usually off to the side) with the name "Walton Wainright' on all of the tombstones; the main building that looked like a saloon but was actually a church and doubled as the main store for Contraption -- well, it was all beautifully done. Of course like everyone else I spent hours there not only on the Quest, which I'm bad at, but just in general, admiring the builds. I went on the LitFest tour there, too, which was kind of a straggling affair -- it's hard to do Story when you have so many people of different levels, languages, and computer connection speeds, but still, they did, and it was grand.

So in this square by a broken-down wagon and barrels were arranged Walton Wainright's character for this event, Ezekiel Ricketts, a somewhat sad and beaten fellow, his hand in a bloody bandage  -- I would call him a "whiskey priest" in another era, the era of Diary of a Country Priest.   He was gazing into the distance, with his partner and aide-de-camp, Victor E. Eton (Irving Merritt) standing at attention nearby.  Ezekiel was playing a mournful tune on his banjo, the one you could get in the store for the gramophone. But he had his own Long Version and I swear he never repeated a note. I sat there for 45 minutes, and I swear Walton never repeated a note! That may have been an illusion, but then, that's how well the song was written (and I believe it's another person who authors the songs, I'll have to look).

So it was a very effective scene, the mournful tune never repeating a note, and Victor whose character had a poncho thrown over his bony shoulders and a skeleton for a head (and no doubt he has "walked forty-seven miles of barbed wire/got a cobra snake for a necktie" (PS IM me if you want the skel who dances to that tune which I made). I asked Victor about the meaning of a symbol on his clothing, and he explained it was a thing, related to another thing, that was a thing they were doing. OK, I need to read up on it. PS I have that statue of the guy with the owl head and I'm putting it in my quest. It's the sort of statue in a niche you might think is St. Michael the Archangel and then WHOOPS you realize Mike has an owl hand and OMG. Are these people in Bohemian Grove? Because Bohemian Grove has an owl insignia.

So...Neither of them spoke -- it was that same kind of AFK sort of tableau from the 10th anniversary and other events I've seen. Once or twice Victor popped in to say something -- he does that more than Walton. Maybe this is how two busy people make themselves available to adoring fans who can never have enough of them. It's not mine to criticize. I sort of do this myself at my little level when I stand at the Main Office of Ravenglass Rentals, slumped in an AFK, doing my work in the other window and people IM me to get a house removed.

I remained there at worship in Bassett with the rest of the townfolk, I got the freebies and the buybies and even the dueling pistol. I hate guns. I totally oppose guns in RL and SL. I'm for banishing them totally. Certainly AR-15 rifles to start. Come to my Memorial in honour of the mass shooting victims in the US in Cayuga. So I never buy them in SL. Since my purchase of the Axe of the Leviathan which I obtained as a wee newbie, I never have purchased a weapon other than a static sword to put on the wall or as a fountain. It had a lot of cool animations which I couldn't master. I realized one day when I went to an art gallery in that Bassett get up which was really cool, that while debating US gun policy with an acquaintance there, I must have looked rather hypocritical with that gun, and put it away. My RL and SL are not separate. They are seamless. I'm not anonymous.

FRACTURED FAIRY-TALE

I assure you I did not wake up in the morning and think "I must get in Walton's face today". I rarely see or interact with him as much as I appreciate him. He's not on Twitter that much. He announced he was on leave, so I didn't expect to see a road-rage tweet from him.

So this saga that ensues is not deliberate, and his posse, many of whom came late to the story and suffered from the usual Fractured Fairy-Tale of partial Twitter understanding, and who showered a hail of abuse on me, even threatening to make a "hit" on me, and ranted and raged that I was "trans-phobic," because in another thread, because while advocating for trans rights and tolerance of all forms of transgender and non-binary people, I didn't want the phrase "pregnant people" to be forced on women, merely because a tiny percentage of trans men give birth. That's all.

But with this gang in the vicious, totalitarian world of the RP extremists in SL -- over which Walton presides, like a benign tsar, unaware of what the Oprichina is up to -- you can't win. When Walton fetches up from his RL bed now haughty and self-righteous, how can you get him to read all the crazy? To listen to what the point is? To grasp that if I mention my age and experience, it's the ONLY way to try to bring equality into a discussion where your interlocutor reigns supreme? And whose reign is recognized, by me.

So what is this contretemps on Twitter really about? Read the thread and side convos if you have the patience:

CREATOR TIP:
Do NOT use anti-rez scripts in your products. It is useless and will not protect your products from anything. It just wastes extra memory for no reason.

>> The only time it's appropriate is for HUDs or something being used in a functional game.

— Walton Wainwright (@SLContraption) July 6, 2022

My first thought was that Walton got on Twitter to berate his own people in his own events he runs (The Warehouse, currently in session, and Engine Room coming in September, both excellent, premiere events).  Contraption apparently doesn't have its own Discord, although Second Life Syndicate, the events company, does, although it is probably not targeted enough, I don't know. (The topic of events companies is shrouded in mystery and worth another post).

So as I said, Walton had put a notice on his Twitter account the other day that he is on leave after some months of intensive building and creative activity at Fantasy Faire, SciFi-Con, Warehouse, SLB19 and probably other things -- all the top spring season events of SL. He's already posted to us that he is going on break to work on a very big project with new elements to his story/content creation and sales biz, which some people will follow avidly, and I will probably look in on once. So why does he come out of his vacation to get on Twitter, with his 1,353, follower, with what he calls "a PSA"?!

I take a WAG and figure it's because Warehouse is under way now, Engine Room, an even bigger deal, is coming up in September, which means creators are already making their wares for that event and staging them. And he doesn't want people with even laggier scripts than he has in his own wares -- and they have in theirs -- to slow down his shopping sims and reduce enjoyment -- and sales -- in the end. I think that's all there is to it. So he's trying to browbeat the largely female and trans women cohort of clothesmakers in SL, in his events, whom he must believe obviously to be stupid and unaware of the properties of anti-rez scripts and Copybot, into removing them. Could his hand-selected creators for his highly elite events be stupid about anti-rez scripts? Possibly.

It's that condescending male geeksplain bullshit that really got to me, but I also realized Walton inhabits a world far from the issues other more lowly creators face -- and as a far more established, high-profiled, and wealthy (in SL terms) business he has the capacity to file DMCAs, while not everyone else does.

Because I don't think he should pontificate about anti-rez scripts without also acknowledging that there have to be other remedies for Copybot then besides driving people to DMCAs.

No one says a word back to him *publicly*. As they didn't much with his last PSA in May before another episode of Warehouse and SciFi con, where he berated people for their cramped understanding of Steampunk as a genre and urged them to be more creative. This was puzzling to me given that I saw things like a Steampunk aquarium (!) at Warehouse at that moment, and I wrote that I wasn't sure if he was referring to the forums debate about SLB19 with this comment.

NATURALLY he knew nothing about the forums debate because he, like the hundreds of other very top creators of SL, aren't ON the forums. I mean, why would they waste time on those toxic cesspools? Why would they harm their image or their brand wrangling with the likes of not even Prokofy, but Coffee Pancake? So I sent him a painting that was going to be the basis for my own exhibition at SLB19, and he was delighted at an example of other colours besides brown, black, and gold.

I don't know what internal convos he had either in his groups or his discords or what, but THAT burr in his saddle wasn't entirely clear, and judging from the output at SL19 as I've written "Just Put a Gear on It!"), few people heeded  Walton, the God of Gear in SL. Oh, well.

ROAD RAGE

Then I began to wonder, given the spleen he showed over anti-rez scripts, which we can all agree are annoying, whether he just didn't have his own personal road-rage over what he saw as a bloaty outfit. I posted the script times of the anti-rez script I bought off the MP and told him examine (it's open source) and measured the script times of Contraptions own attachments, of which I have purchased plenty (or picked up at their various anniversaries and events). A couple of those goggles and backpacks and whatnot -- you have the same script time as if you had only your regular outfit and a worn box with an anti-rez script. So why not, I noted pointedly, take off some Contraption stuff, if the RP sim has a get-up you have to buy and rules you have to follow? He was torqued about having to change his character -- understood.

And as I suspected, in fact, that's what it was about, as he said in a sub-tweet a day later. And he nattered on that he can take everything out of or off his own products obviously but not from something not on mod. I presume he campaigns as hard on the no-mod issue? I do, by not buying those products or if I must, buying them and taking a star off their MP review.

So all of this was about Walton having to change his clothes on an RP sim. If they were his own clothes, he could mod them or take out scripts. But they are no-mod/no transfer clothes with anti-rez scripts in them he views as pernicious. (I bet he never gets this upset about the infestation of HUDs in general as content delivery systems and unpacker scripts which are the bane of SL -- he was happy to cede a fat exemption to any HUD for any purpose like a game. Oh, well).

SIMPLIFIED PACKAGING

I was so, so, so impressed with luc recently. He dropped ALL of the TOTAL NONSENSE in packing we have been subjected to in the last eight years or more. He put his food giver in a plain prim box, and called it a day. You drag the contents into inventory. Walla, you're done, no HUD in your face, no unpacker script firing and deleting the box while you accidentally don't receive the contents, etc. This entire nonsense of unpacking and HUDs was created by this misplaced fear that newbies or slow learners couldn't learn to drag things out of a prim into inventory -- without getting the box on their head.

So the result today is that all of us have to have creepy iron-legged little robots who chant bloody war ditties and clutch on our backs like limpets, to get a Contraption item. Well, they're kind of cute, it's ok.

NEVER CHALLENGE YOUR BETTERS

I totally realize that when these things blow by on Twitter, you should not challenge your betters. Truly I do. Because not only that superior creator but the legions of anonymous goons who fan him will start hectoring you with their perceived or actual knowledge of technical issues. This is what makes people intimidated in SL from ever objecting to anything these superiors say -- but I don't suffer from that problem.

WALTON IS KING

So first, first, the genuflections to all four compass points. I am the first to write that Walton Wainright is THE top creator of SL and I mean that even after this wrangle with him. Why?

o He has the most superior, high quality content in a niche but popular enough genre that not only reaches multiple RP genres like steam or sci-fi or goth that has some crossover to mainstream; not everyone wants a bloody metal mask blocking their face but many people want an old fashioned gramophone that plays mournful tunes;

o He has high attention to details like LOD collapse and lag and the look and feel and use of builds;

o He has high patience and ability to develop story, compelling narratives, arch and witty but sometimes sinister, which people like;

o He writes or commissions very talented and haunting musical pieces;

o He is friendly and himself sometimes comes out to a house call. Example: when I couldn't get My Bird Husband (an item made available at a tribute to Zerkalo's founder Daniel who died in RL) to big up the way I feel he should be for my scene, even if Walton did not grasp why his little bird needed to be big (so as to be like those Half-Deer Birbs I and the Deeries bigged up in Iris), he cheerfully bigged it up and sent it back to me; I also went many rounds trying to trouble shoot his experience-driven mirror. (PS I have probably burned more hours on Experience than anyone in SL except of course Fantasy Faire quest makers. You simply have to have small parcels with a dedicated landing point on them for it to work properly; otherwise non-group members won't land on the destination point. There are other problems with Experience I could discuss another day).

o He seems to be a smart and engaging person with a husband in RL who is also his SL creation partner; I think the consumer public always like to see something stable but romantic at the heart of a merchant story.  I mean, they're like Dave, the Wendy's Guy. Well, sort of. (PS the first time I saw Walton silently building at FF years ago with Victor Eton silent by his side, I thought mistakenly that Victor was his mule alt where he kept his building supplies because his own heavy inventory main account couldn't load content any more during projects -- that's what I'd be doing in a scene like that. But then I came to realize Victor is a real, separate person AND his RL partner. If this is a myth -- and we have no way of verifying it -- shoot me, but from all indications it's true).

So it's precisely because Walton is all those wonderful things that I bother resisting. Maybe these people can change. Maybe they can stop being arrogant assholes -- especially the ones who aren't really fully of that nature. Maybe they can grasp the larger issues of our fragile world, headed toward destruction.

CONDESCENSION

Walton doesn't hear or see the terrible condescension in these tweets, when he keeps telling me, in SL nearly 18 years and a creator and business owner, too, even if a far more amateur and tiny one, that I need to learn the facts of life about copybotting, and he's happy to help me. The more I try to explain to him that I truly do know these facts of virtual life and knew them before he was born, the more he accuses me of elitism. To be sure, he apologized later, which was big of him. But he really doesn't want to take the time to hear what the history MEANS.

He doesn't know that I know because I don't count in his world and never had. If I were a top designer in his events and in his friends' circle, he wouldn't dream of lecturing me about Copybot. He accepts that his peers know about Copybot. He doesn't accept his customers, especially from the low, mass culture class, know anything at all. They only deserve to be lectured.

So all of it just sounds arrogant, as I was helping my hired builders do DMCA take-downs for years before he came to SL. I recall when entire picnic tables, desert buildings, etc. were copybotted as both a griefing of me as a critic of SL, and merely as the garden variety copying that goes on in SL. In Ansheland, a copybotter casually copied all my builder's desert buildings in a scene and put them down on their own land next door (!). Anshe shrugged; it took some doing to get the Lindens to focus. We had RL names and addresses we were willing to put down; not everyone does.

If Walton is, say, 35 in RL now, the Copybot scandal happened when he was 17 and not in SL yet. He then has the temerity to tell me not to pull rank with experience -- as if any little lowly land dealer and amateur dabbler could be pulling rank on THE top creator of SL. You see what is so often the case with these geek designers -- they are actually strangely insecure, unaware of their own power and influence, unaware of the world, they lack any empathy, and can't even understand their own greatness and its responsibility.

CLASS WARFARE

He says "we're all in this together".

I wish we were.

We are not.

It is class warfare.

And I am happy to fight that class war, you will find. I don't want to live in a world where only a sanctified Guild of top creators dictate policy of technical or social kind without finding of facts especially, where we can't exist except as rubes and consumers. I don't want to live in a RenFaire. I don't want Fantasy Faire to be all day, every day, forever. I want it only to be two weeks out of the year. I want true diversity and pluralism and freedom and tolerance, and that means people who use mesh models -- are they allowed at Engine Room lol?

I don't know why all those "little dressmakers," as the people sneering at us back in the original Copybot days were called, aren't responding either to justify their use of the script or to say they take his point but don't like his attitude. But it turns out at the end he had "92 DMs" where his posse was all golf-clapping and agreeing -- and the fact that the RP sim owner with those clothes and their makers were not contacted privately, but he "took it to Twitter" is something that he and his posse will have to sort out.

I can totally grasp that my effort to defend these people I don't even know and probably wouldn't care for (I don't do RP sims) doesn't endear me to them and that's fine. 

When I linked to those stories that happened BEFORE HE WAS BORN, it was to help him try to understand the SOCIAL CONTEXT of Copybot. He, like all geeks, and increasingly all males and even all people, as binary thinking and literalist thinking induced by computers takes over the human mind, said that literally THAT Copybot of yore was copying prims and textures by another mechanism but the Copybot of today, the hipster era of the coolest kids, uses another mechanism to suck up the data sent to the server about the mesh features. All those vertices and whatnot. I don't have to know the science and math of this procedure to know THAT it works in that fashion like other things in SL -- it's like how you learn to drive a car without knowing the science of internal combustion. The ability of norms to grasp computer functioning and processes far exceeds the willingness of geeks and designers to admit our increasing abilities. Such is our world.

The SOCIAL side of Copybot -- the panic, the fear of loss of LIVELIHOOD of Black designers in Detroit and retired postal men in Columbus, Ohio -- it was awful, awful. SL was a dream, a commerce based world where you could finally sell and not just be stripped of your personal data for others to sell. This still evades Walton, even though he did, to his credit do two things -- you can see he is not theoretical at all but experience- and fact-based:

FACT-CHECKING

o First, hoping to play "gotcha" as geeks always are with norms, when I said the Mole backpack from SLB19 had the anti-rez script in it (it sure seemed to me like it did), he went and got a backpack and proved it had no such script in it. And that's fine, I don't have a problem admitting I was wrong when I was obviously wrong!

I'll bet big money that he did that not by torturously going through the Swaginator Hunt like I had to, but just IMing a Mole friend who was probably cheering him on in this Twit-fight in the background.

Why did I think the backpack did? Because when I rezzed it out to put it in a scene in a Linden home, where the floors DO NOT suffer from mesh bounce as so many SL houses do, like his own Pollux  -- they have addressed this issue -- it poofed but seemed visible for a second. Normally there are three ways for things to disappear like that in SL: a) you don't have the right group tag on your head -- you see the item for a minute, it disappears; b) anti-rez, where it appears for a second and disappears; c) mesh bounce, where you never see it at all and it disappears. You have to re-log to see it again.

Since the Moles started using -- to my enormous chagrin -- the Casper vendors, I was afraid using resident anti-rez scripts -- they do come from the user base, after all -- might be a sin now, too. So I was wrong.

o Walton went out and bought for $119 the Shuggles anti-rez script which I recommended merely because it's open source and he can see the 

SIDETRACK ON MESH BOUNCE

I'll bet you Walton has never really thought about mesh bounce and its issues because he rarely makes buildings. 

But let's take the gorgeous Pollux office which I love but which doesn't rent because it suffers badly from mesh bounce. I constantly try to educate my tenants that so many mesh houses suffer from this issue, because they were not made or uploaded properly with this problem in mind.

My sense is that someone like Walton doesn't live in SL. He doesn't have a house. He doesn't invite his pals over for drinks and snacks. He hasn't tried to decorate his living room and seen all his no-copy gatchs return due to mesh bounce. Again, if I'm wrong, shoot me, but I never heard of this particular Great and Powerful Oz having a house. SL is a hobby, a blank canvas, a chat room with peers. It's not a place to live. Or for that matter work. His work is outside in his RL home on the Internet or with various tools like Blender. That's fine. But then I'm going to firmly call out that he doesn't know what it's like to LIVE HERE.

I DO. (And yes, I "have a life" -- look me up in the book.)

Sure, he comes in and visits some RP sim. This is part of working his fan base and it's all good. But if he had a permanent home in SL especially once he made himself, he would have long ago grasped the mesh bounce problem and fixed it. 

Mesh bounce is when you try to put a mesh object out on mesh, and it just won't rez and gives you a ridiculous message  "The owner of this land does not allow it" (which I've desperately tried to get the Lindens to change to no avail) which angers my tenants because they feel like I personally am telling people who paid me money they can't do something).

There are several threads on the forums about this, and no, this page is all wrong that this is merely a "bug". Lindens refuse to change the message -- I have debated this many times. They persist in thinking it's about the server thinking you are putting your item on another sim, across a sim seam, or on land not your own, but that is definitely not it. I can be in the middle of an entire sim I own and still have this problem because it's about how the mesh was uploaded, not your placement. 

Here's a screenshot. 

Please don't tell me my business when I have to help the customers of YOUR products in YOUR PRODUCTS or OTHER CREATORS. Scarlet Creative used to have horrendous bounce problems; I had long talks with her; she fixed it. PS there are long threads on the forums (that she herself participates in, as she does on the cash-out issue) about mesh bounce. But Walton mentally is making a backdrop, a scene to a story, a sim like FF which is a shopping and philanthropy sim, not a place you live in for long. Barnesworth Anubis had this problem more severely; he began to get rid of it. The Moles making the Linden Homes in Bellisseria licked this problem. Etc. People talk about detaching floors; making them phantom; doing this, doing that, there is One Weird Trick that solves it SOMETIMES but why? Upload your mesh right, guys.

Everyone who has to either rent out or wants to live in houses gets that you have to rez out a prim board to decorate because creators can't be arsed to fix mesh bounce. I make this digression to explain the background of how creators are perceived; the social context for even top-notch, decent human being creators making PSAs they think are a genuine public service, and why no one will bother to listen to them and resent them (oh, except maybe a few eager fangirlz).

WE ARE ALL IN THIS TOGETHER

Walton at one point appeals to commonality. He doesn't really understand this beef. He is probably privately wishing to just block me and be done with it, but who needs a blogging customer mad at you? He thinks if he says "we're all in this together" -- as if he was merely "trying to help for the public good," why, who could fault him?

Well, we're not all in this together.

We're not all in the top 200 designers of SL in Shop 'n Hop

We're not even in the 85 selected SLB19 exhibitors.

And this isn't sour grapes. We can't all be "the best" and the Lindens can't pick critical bloggers especially. That's fine. But, as on forums users asked plaintively years ago:

WHAT ABOUT THE PEOPLE WITH NO TALENT?

There has to be a place for us in this society and we can't be just dumb shoppers expected to endlessly shop at your idiotic weekend sales that never end and your endlessly proliferating events.

Some of us are in the "other" category although we make the bulk of power SL users -- consumers and pro-sumers at the amateur level.

And there is a huge gulf between you and us.

If some creator doesn't like me speaking up for them and think's I'm full of shit, they're welcome to speak up themselves and correct me. But they don't.

And here's why.

They are dependent on the good will of Walton, Second Life Syndicate (what a name! sounds like a mafia), and the coterie of the ne plus ultra creator class who form opinion of what is cool and what is not, partly driven by actual technical exigencies, and partly driven by illusion and swinging dicks.

I don't feel we need to sit still for that and as is well known, I push back.

Now what is it I don't get about anti-rez scripts? Nothing. I've seen them execute many, many times! They don't seem especially necessary to me and I'm able to read their script time on a Xoph sensor as high -- but they don't seem as bad a problem as "no mod" -- also inflicted on the buying public not just for reasons of Copybot. I encounter the idiocy of "no mod" way more than I do any anti-rezzer script because "no mod" isn't just about a creator with a hysteria about Copybot which she thinks thinks she has warded off IP theft with a totemic seal.

But wait. In fact, except for the Copybot problem, which isn't as common an occurrence on a sim as imagined, no-mod is useful in preventing someone from opening up a prim, taking a script or texture or anim, and putting it into another prim. Best of all, if that item is on copy/transfer to serve as food or a temp-attach item, "no-mod" means you can't put it to sale. No-mod isn't just a fetish to ward off evil spirits; it's a function to prevent re-sale literally and to prevent use of the script and animation outside the original object. There is nothing wrong with that. LL put permissions in from the beginning. There has always been an extreme faction of copyleftists fighting it and making all kinds of special pleadings. They've ultimately all been ignored in favour of commerce based on permissions

The default of cynical asshole geeks in SL from time memorial is to tell creators they are morons, to ridicule and demean them, like Electronic Frontier Foundation did telling us that our TOS was shit and nothing could save our tiny economy built on dreams -- and Creative Commons founder Lawrence Lessig (who tried to impose Creative Commons in SL and failed miserably). They don't respect copyright and perms at all, as you can readily see from some of the comments by low-follow trolls who came into this discussion to tell you that no-transfer clothing is a "problem". Of course it isn't "a problem". Walton himself puts his clothing on "no-transfer". He doesn't make his living in SL, but he doesn't want to give his hobby creations away for free; they have to generate some income to cover costs at least of servers, etc.

IF WALTON REALLY UNDERSTOOD THE RAMIFICATIONS OF HIS STENTORIAN ADMONITION THAT ANTI-REZ SCRIPTS CAN'T SAVE YOU FROM ALL-POWERFUL COPYBOT, HE SHOULD PUT ALL HIS CREATIONS ON COPY AND TRANSFER BECAUSE REALLY, ONLY DMCA TAKEDOWN NOTICES PROTECT IP. THE END.

Yet, he doesn't, and participates in the social construct of permissions like all of us -- he just wants to optimize the script time, and he thinks shaming people about their anti-Copybot schemes will force this optimization. Well, good luck.

To him, anti-rezzing scripts, even with this follow-up acknowledgement of certain use cases for them, are an obstacle to his goal of optimal creations that are visually appealing but not laggy -- he's obsessive on these topics, likely more than is necessary given the poor computer graphics capacity that most people on SL have, such as not to even appreciate some LOD marvel or Advanced Lighting wonder. I turn all that stuff off, like a lot of people. Artists browbeat and hector us with big signs at the doors of their galleries -- we ignore them totally and enjoy the scenes anyway.

Walton is convinced that all that is necessary is to explain to ignorant women -- it's mainly women who make clothes -- that they are putting script hogs in their products out of uneducated fear, and they should stop, so his events won't be so laggy -- and in general, the experiences of his customers using his script-eating wares. His anticipation is that he will either get the back-up Greek chorus of his fellow geek dudes, or some fangirl gushing, and that will close the door on the subject on the way to the bright and beautiful future.

So this is where I put a big sneakered foot in the door and say, "No."

I say "No" because at my end of the telescope on SL, things look different and ARE different.

First, I immediately speak up on behalf of the benefits of protective scripts such as one I myself commissioned and a noted scripter devised FOR FULL PERM MODELS. I don't want him stepping on this sector out of cultural or even economic warfare and superior sneering (creators who use models are barred from most top creator events, where organizers demand only original created mesh). I don't want the catch all denunciation of "anti-rez" scripts to then capture the protection scripts such as I commissioned and others use which make rezzed objects outside their giver turn black and poof. Food givers have become much more popular, partly because I've campaigned for them, putting food to give in every beautiful creation that didn't contain it, explaining to creators they should do this themselves, and explaining how. The market began to demand this especially with the appearance of andika on the scene, who does such beautiful food delivery items, and luc of course, and it isn't about me at all.

There's no rocket science here with the FULL PERM PROTECTION (note we are NOT talking about NO TRANSFER CLOTHES); it works on the same or similar principles of other such protection scripts. We aren't so benighted as to imagine they work 100% against *Copybot* in particular; but this is like a COVID vaccine. It doesn't have to be perfect. It can work 87% or 62%. It can work not at all after awhile, and then you have to make a new kind. Etc. But it works well enough to MAKE THE WORLD.

My use case involves mainly givers of food or givers of various temp-used items like a book or a magic stick. You can accomplish this in SL by 1) having "rez wearable" whereupon the wearble jumps to the avatar but never comes in his inventory; 2) you can 'give everything but scripts" (there's something Walton should do a public service message on, the need to use GIVE EVERYTHING BUT SCRIPTS so that you don't clutter and confuse other users with excess other kinds of dispense scripts) and  then the person gets it in inventory and then uses "wear" or "add" OR 3) you can use another kind of "rez object on touch correctly" with "temp-attach" and have it work that way, for more refined animations, multiple animations in a series, etc. I bet Walton never has to think of any of these issues for the market in general. He makes his own mesh, he has teams of people doing scripting and optimization and marketing and he doesn't have to think about how he will survive in a field of rampant theft.

It's not just clothes that bounce with an anti-rez script; some teacups or magic spell books do the same thing.

So I first point out that they're used not just for clothes, which is all Walton cares about -- clothes and accessories are the creator items that cost the most and sell the most, we all get it; houses and furniture sell less than even breedables these days, especially with Linden Homes competing.

Walton curtly dismisses the other use case of food givers  with a tone that implies food consumption is low on his list of RP needs and versimilitude, although legions of people demand this and there are all kinds of sub-communities like players of XeoLife and DFS making food growing and consumption like real life.  I personally only recall one from him very recently -- the whiskey tray in Bassett (and my God, you do need a hearty shot of whiskey to get through that very dreary sim about a dying culture of the Wild West). In self-defense, he then says he does do givers, and trots out the whiskey. Sigh. 

Of course, his posse does not include the lowly plebes who eat from Prok's Trash Can Cuisine -- or for that matter luc's latest Stuffed Peppers (I'm the one that got luc to start making his products deliverable and sent him my Trash Cuisine as a model). We are a lesser breed. And we are, I get it, truly I do. Because we have to put our items on copy/transfer to make them deliverables, which means nobody needs to crank up a Firestorm performing Copybot (again, a  reason I refuse to use FS because they will not technically remove or verbally condemn this practice)

OH WOW PROK ARE YOU STOOOPID YOU DON'T GET YOU CAN COPY ANYTHING IN SL ENTIRELY IN SECONDS?

Yes, I describe this as the "analog hole" -- although that term is technically and literally not quite correct any more given the way the viewer functions now but as a generic philosophical term, it will do. This was the term computer specialists used 20 years ago when you all were watching Barney. I see it's not a term used any more, but what it means is, "if you can see it, you can copy it". To serve it to you, LL has to make a copy it puts in front of you; to see and use it, you thereby become able to copy it. This is why Raph Koster would say:

THE CLIENT IS IN THE HANDS OF THE ENEMY

The game devs always see the customer, by whom they profit, as they enemy because they burn through content and demand more; they mod and sell content in illegal ways; they steal IP and sell game currency on ebay, etc and don't behave like the docile customers of the movie and music industry did for decades.

This means some day, we may have only Meta with their high caste of devs and designers and the rest of us will be barred from creation in order to prevent IP theft.

Yes, we get it that now, no human eye is needed; now the Copybot can literally be a bot sent into a sim to have a function performed which involves slurping up the information sent to the server,

But here's the thing. Copybot has to have this virtual setting to function: someone must be waring that coveted frock coat and waist coat and monocle on a crowded event sim where they are either trying on or purchasing the item or participating in some group story around the product like an FF event sim -- and then snatch it within a blink of an eye through the wonders of science. Therefore, reasons Walton, copying happens without any rezzing; therefore no anti-rez scripts are needed.

COPYBOT IS NOT UBIQUITOUS ALTHOUGH YOU THEORIZE AS IF IT IS

But Copybot is not functioning on every sim at every minute, because the Lindens do have various ways of chasing these things. They won't close off anonymizer sites as we wish they were, imagining that freedom fighters in Iran or China are logging on with them (not!); they do scrape hash marks or whatever to track things; they can triangulate a bunch of different data points, each of which tells nothing, and put it together to spell WOODBURY -- we have watched these methods over the years and obviously they don't tell us about them. When Philip was able to kill 50 avatars from Something Awful/WHat in an afternoon (but miss some of the top miscreants who were careful not to get their hands dirty), there was enormous screeching and hollering but you know, LL has the server logs and we don't. Behaviours cluster; people who use CopyBot and sell hot ripped items also crash sims and run around with pornographic avatars in General.

ARE THE BOTS BACK IN THE BOX?

I have written repeatedly about all the other episodes around Copybot, which I witnessed myself -- indeed part of the strategy of the people griefing SL with this to "make a point" was to show it to me and get me blogging about it. The only problem was that the Herald, where I broke this story, was funded by the Electric Sheep, and the Herald's managing editor was on the Sheep's payroll. Since I was a lowly virtual journalist, but a RL journalist who understood how things work when it comes to site funders, I did what I was told and made the setrec, even knowing it to be false and misleading. Later when enough griefing of me personally was done to force me out of the Herald, I did more research. I met the person in RL who showed me the first bots. I met the Sheep staff person who deployed the code. They and others were in libsl. Libsl was busy in 2004-2005 reverse-engineering the viewer. This was disallowed under the TOS, but Cory Linden (Cory Ondrejka) encouraged it. He had a different view than Philip as we came to discover after Cory quit SL.  He wanted to liberate both the viewer and server code; Philip did not.

The Lindens backdated their tolerated TOS violation and havoc ensued as libsl didn't create but griefed, and set Copybot lose in the world. This is not a secret and not hard to find out today. Some people speculated darkly that Intel, where this individual worked soon after, in fact had sabotaged SL because they had their own virtual world in the making; there was a lot of cut-throat competition at the time with even Google making a short-lived virtual world called Lively. I'm always amazed when I stumble on Twitter users describing themselves as the thinkers at the dawn of the Metaverse, ignorant of their virtual grandfathers of 15-20 or more years ago -- they piss on SL as a cybersex dungeon with silly copyright and no interoperability and refuse to see all the very valid lessons and accomplishments of SL. Today, the Copybot coder (although he is a separate person from at least two other nefarious deployers inworld -- which is how he can keep plausible deniability) has his own robotics firm. This is life in the Metaverse.

There's enormous amount of double-talk about Copybot, and claims it was an innocent debugging project. It wasn't. I was there. I recorded what libsl did, the "perverse engineers," they used god-mode to stalk and harass me. I AR'd their obscenities and particle bombings and sim crashes; they tried to shut me up. This was a thuggish gang that constantly harassed me and tried to silence me writing on the Herald about their true nature. Emerald devs -- and yes Phoenix and Firestorm are indeed related to them -- came on my sim Belarus and kicked all the chickens offworld to kill them, this was sport. They made a giant effigy of my RL head and would hold parties with it and make films of it, which you used to be able to see on YouTube. 

Most of all they wanted to hide the fact that big business was using this, via their consultants in SL, Electric Sheep (which doesn't even exist any more), who all had nothing but a cynical attitude toward any IP protection except their own. The Lindens, when they created the Nebraska product, finally created a special closed store like the Soviets had with the Beriozka system where big RL companies could buy from a select set of merchants -- this was to ensure both that they wouldn't face copyright claims AND that they could violate it at will as work-for-hire. They copied these items with the trick of merely resetting a sim in time and reloading it.

Why does Copybot exist, Walton? Do you think it exists for script kiddies to make a buck off a ripped dress or car in a sandbox where commerce is not allowed but no one enforces this law? No. Grown-ups made Copybot to destroy copyright and liberate content so that like YouTube and the California Ideology, the Internet and then the Metaverse have free and available content to attract customers. That your IP is devalued in the process; that the newspaper, media, book, record, digital arts industries are all destroyed except for a few very highly resourced biggies like the New York Times -- who cares? 

YOU don't care BECAUSE IT DOESN'T HAPPEN TO YOU. And if it does, you can get lawyers, do DMCA takedowns, do whatever, as you have a RL business and RL contacts and RL capacity. Many creators don't. (PS that's not me, if I need to call a copyright lawyer I know just whom to call and the media to call to get the issue covered as well).

PERMISSIONS IN SL ARE NOT A FEATURE; THEY ARE A BUG

The concept of enabling creative people to make a living through sale of their content is not a feature of these platforms; it's a bug -- a bug that we all temporarily exploit, but it can't last forever. We all would like that model for the Metaverse and not the scraping and sale of personal data and the incitement of social hatred and division for clicks. But let's not pretend that those who select the former are also altruistic. They're not.

Walton conceded that the other use case for anti-rez is for those customers who haven't figured out yet that they need to use "add" or "wear" and just instinctively rez out a dress. In the old days they had a box on their head because they  were more instinctive about "add" from games or other worlds. There are always new people or returnees learning the lessons of "wear" -- and I would add that people who have already used up their attachment points, and experience a bounce, then might rez it out to see if there is something they might "do" or "edit".

CREATIONS FROM 'INSPIRATION'

And now comes the final point about all this I have saved for last. I was hoping Walton would get it. He didn't. I was hoping some diva would say something. She didn't. Because it's obviously not something to discuss.

It's Hair Fair, and you can be sure somewhere in the Metaverse, some merchant is crying herself to sleep because she thinks someone has stolen her hair -- or they have in fact. The forums, groups, Discords have endlessly wrangles about stolen hair, shapes, etc.

Is this about Copybot and your browbeat about its irrationality?

No.

Because to steal hair or a shape or something like that, sure, you can use Copybot. You may be skilled or not in doing that and may or may not get caught. Not every designer who wants to be respectable wants to reach the top through Copybotting; people will talk.

So there's another thing she will do.

She will rez the body or dress out on the sim where she can view it in the round. Walk around it. Take her time. Cam into it. Study it up close. Take some screenshots. Turn it around. This process leads to a creation "inspired by" another. It may not be technically slavishly copied, but someone who makes a shape or hair after this intense scrutiny -- thwarted only by anti-rez scripts! -- can make something that may look entirely like the original source of "inspiration".

THAT is the use case. I have no idea how common it is; I think quite common judging from the drama over the years. Someone will no doubt be along and explain that while once that was the truth with prim and sculpty and flexi hair and shapes made inside the avatar outfit creator, now, with mesh, that is less common. I don't believe that to be the case.

Sure, you don't need to rez it out! Duh! You can stand on a posing disc and turn yourself around with the camera and see just fine. Yes, we all do that. Yes, I grasp you can do that. But if you want to see all up and down and inside and out of a mesh clothing item, you can't beat rezzing it out inworld.

BTW sometimes such scrutiny isn't about "inspiration" copying but just about asking for a feature that isn't available, or for demanding "mod" when it isn't there. And sometimes customers get their way.

In any event, if I'm wrong, it doesn't matter, I don't count. What I am not seeing here is the anti-rezzer script users stepping up and explaining that no, they aren't stupid about Copybot, but they use it for: [pick a reason]. They may never show up to speak their piece. If YOU were in a Second Syndicate event run by Walton (or at least in which Walton took a leading role on content creation parameters or rules), where YOU depended on him and that event for your income would YOU speak up? Of course not! Where you were lucky to have gotten into it as not everyone is accepted? Would YOU EVER speak up and contradict the Content Creator-in-Chief? Would you?

Walton thinks that because he has "92 DMs" with approval, that the case is closed. He claims that these creators who used these scripts drove away new users. Of course just about everything in SL drives away new users, especially arrogant content creators who can't be arsed to do CS and sic their rude CS people on you who inflict more damage.

I want to hear from creators who use these scripts, and trust me, I'm going to go through my inventory to find them.

I want to hear from the maker of Bosh scripts, and I will ask him.

I want to hear from Shuggles, whose script Walton conceded wasn't so bad but...

I want to hear if Walton, in the UK, where there is less of this nonsense, thinks that "pregnant people" and "people who menstruate" are terms we must accept for the sake of being inclusive of trans men.

I think trans women are women; I accept that they have transitioned in fact to what they always felt they were; this isn't hard for me to do at all. What I do then object to -- having celebrated trans women as women -- is the need now to subsume that term into a collectivized "pregnant people". That's the big struggle this week, causing people to be fired from their jobs and cancel their subscriptions to the NYC over an article saying we should not have the far left or the far right control women's bodies, and the "pregnant people" is as bad as Dobbs in that regard. I may disagree about Dobbs for other reasons, but I sure do think "pregnant people" has to go the way of MSM, "men having sex with men," the term hospitals and foundations use. It's ok to say LGBTQ+ ; it's ok to use whatever pronouns an individual requests.

COMMON COURTESY

And then the other, related point I have: it used to be part of SL's civic culture that you removed your attachments and heavy scripts -- pre-anticipated by Cheech and Chong's admonition to "let the air out of your shoes" when exiting the Bozo Bus to the Midway of the Future. To help you be a good citizen, LL had a nag screen that tells you your avatar "cost" and it keeps nagging at you and tries to incentivize you to change by warning you that you are not visible to everyone -- the system turns you gray if you are "too expensive". I, like a lot of people, are happy to be good citizens and take off scripted things like a backpack or an animesh shoulder pet to relieve the sim. But we also turn off that nag screen on the Debug screen because it's merely a nuisance.

And here's the thing. The Lindens used to browbeat on all this way more than they used to. Maybe their way of telling us to stop wearing hair when we went out on the town was to shove it up our ass when we teleported and landed. They put in the nag screen after all and make a cursory effort to tell people to remove their attachments all the time, even while recognizing this made them special.

But if you have been in events like SLB19 or Meet the Moles lately or even just Concierge on Wednesdays, you'll notice a different refrain from the Lindens: "We now have new, fast, fresh, powerful Event Servers. Buy them! You will never feel lag again!" So instead of telling people to recycle or walk or take the bus, tp make them buy cloth bags for a dollar, they now have new electric cars that don't pollute the environment. Well, not as much.

Of course, there's this dark side of Event Regions which has to do with "the child is father of the man" as I call it  -- or you know, that child objects rendering in the distance on the cam sim. The cam sim makes things worse, they tell us. But of course, that's to get people to buy an Events Region.

Walton, buy an Events region. You can likely afford it. All these issues will go away.

Until then, I want you to think really hard about what your solution is for Copybot in general -- and don't be Mr. Helpful and tell me you will assist me in filling out a DMCA notice. No sale.

Some day, when you work for MetaSteam 30 years from now and I will long be dead, you will remember the summer night long ago when we argued about Copybot, in a world where we both could still create what we want to and sell it and keep nearly all the proceeds when we cashed out.

 

Wow, This Gatcha is Hugely Overpriced from Dessi Tyran

Conversation from today about this hugely overpriced gatcha. $2,499 is what I have seen others are charging for the entire set (gone now), not just this rare.

BTW, I'm charging $1000, but keep looking -- at this second, I see it for even less.

[12:12] Dessi Tyran: (Saved Fri Nov 16 11:59:23 2018)Hello. I would like you to look at this please - https://marketplace.secondlife.com/p/3rd-Eye-Grimm-Music-Box-7-Ravens-Rare/16007823 - I am asking you nicely not to be a "thief" take down MY PICTURE aka MY AD... and take your own or use the KEY! Thank you.
[12:14] Prokofy Neva: Um, "thief"? I always respect copyright. How am I supposed to know this is your picture and not the merchant's picture? Merchant's pictures, not only keys, are widely used. There is no way of telling. When I first looked for this item, it wasn't there! Then there was only one, which I bought. Then I won one, so I put it for sale. Climb down from your high horse. If someone notifies me that a picture is their work, not the merchant's ad, I instantly take it down.
[12:14] Dessi Tyran: it has MY LOGO ON IT...
[12:14] Dessi Tyran: That is HOW YOU KNOW.. -.-
[12:15] Dessi Tyran: I don't take you to be an idiot so don't pretend to be one. You are clearly business savvy and know what to do in SL. So let's not play the ignorant game. Just take down my picture, please.
[12:17] Prokofy Neva: I don't see any logo? By the way, dear, you have REALLY overpriced this at $2,499, which others are charging for the whole set. I'm charging $1000. Could THAT be your real issue?
[12:17] Prokofy Neva: I already said that when I am notified, I instantly take down content. There is no way to know otherwise.
[12:17] Prokofy Neva: I'm glad you're enjoying your sense of power in this tiny game LOL
[12:17] Dessi Tyran: lol....
[12:18] Dessi Tyran: Thank you for removing my picture. Have a good day.

 

I had to enlarge that picture and stare at it for awhile to see that yes, there is a logo there.  You can see it here (the red diagonals) although on the MP, I thought it was part of the merchant's design.

What I do wonder is why this re-seller is getting all exercised about copyright for, when it seems all she has done is add her logo.

Here's another version of that picture without her logo, which makes me wonder whether Ms. Tyran is defending the copyright of her logo but not the whole picture -- doesn't seem that this person photoshopped out her logo of what was ostensibly her picture.

But no, it is indeed her own artfully taken photo, as you can see by comparing the darkness and murkiness of her photo with the lightness of this one directly above.

 

[12:18] Dessi Tyran: Thank you for removing my picture. Have a good day.
[12:23] Prokofy Neva: Is this violating your copyright, too? https://marketplace.secondlife.com/p/3rd-Eye-Grimm-Music-Box-7-Ravens-Rare/15986421 Or in fact did you not make that picture?
[12:24] Prokofy Neva: I want to verify that your copyright request is about just your logo, not the whole picture
[12:25] Prokofy Neva: Hello?
[12:26] Dessi Tyran: 1. its not my picture, its her picture with HER LOGO on it and mine is clearly different with MY LOGO on it. https://marketplace.secondlife.com/p/3rd-Eye-Grimm-Music-Box-7-Ravens-Rare/15993383
[12:26] Dessi Tyran: how can you NOT see it?
[12:26] Dessi Tyran: sheesh
[12:28] Prokofy Neva: HAHAHAHAHAH
[12:28] Prokofy Neva: So once again, your copyright issue is YOUR LOGO ONLY and NOT the picture? The picture which is really the main artwork here
[12:28] Prokofy Neva: You said it was "MY PICTURE"
[12:28] Prokofy Neva: Is it?
[12:29] Prokofy Neva: I can take it down only over your tiny logo issue, but just so I know -- is that your picture?
[12:29] Dessi Tyran: Its both.
[12:29] Dessi Tyran: I spent the time unpacking the item, posing it and putting my logo on it, period.
[12:29] Dessi Tyran: You want something nice do it yourself.
[12:30] Prokofy Neva: I did. I'm selling it for less : )
[12:30] Prokofy Neva: Bye!

I should add that there's something rather trivial about warring over screenshots of what is ACTUALLY the art work -- the original gatcha! -- because anyone can take a screenshot. They can take it for better or worse. Even so, I'm happy to award copyright to this little gatcha scrapper LOL. I'd like to save my real wrath, however, for anybody who tries to knock of this artist's actual work.

I should mention that this is a bitch of a gatcha.

I generally like 3D Eye Perception's stuff unless it is BDSM or grisly.

But this gatcha had a stupid thing called "Chain Pile" that shouldn't even have been in a gatcha, it was that stupid. It was a pile, not a chain lengthener. So you got that a zillion times, you got "Hansel and Gretel" way too many times, and really had to try to get the rare.

I'm told a guy tried 60 times to get the full set. Well, I don't do that any more : )

I'm happy I got the Raven and the Juniper Tree and hopefully the sales of the extra Raven and others will pay for the dumb chain.

 

Second Lifers Should Support SOPA

Second Life creators and users should support the Stop Online Piracy Act. It's legislation that helps stop copybotting by ending the impunity for it; it's the policy on intellectual property you always wanted in Second Life instead of chasing DMCA takedown notices.

But not surprisingly, Mitch Kapor, CEO of the board of the the maker of Second Life, Linden Lab, through his Electronic Frontier Foundation and other geek networks, is fighting SOPA. Belatedly the dogs of war have been unleashed on SL, a small community compared to Reddit which is going to shut down in protest (the reverse of what the merchants did when they shut down to protest piracy).

That's been done through the usual EFF mouthpiece and geek copyleftist (who always wrote extremely unsympathetically about the copybot issues and protests), SL Hamlet ne Linden Au on his blog.

SOPA doesn't threaten Second Life in the slightest. Oh sure, piracy, supposedly to be especially likely with mesh, goes on in large quantities. But that's what we want to fight. This notion that entire sites are taken down when only some infringing content on them is absurd. Law-enforcers have to meet the test of the definitions in the law, and anticipate the defenses and remedies. That's why I've suggested, um, READING the law, which spells this out. You would have to prove that Linden Lab knowingly profited in large amounts (over $1000) for a period over more than 3 months, repeatedly and deliberately, and also failed to make its case that shutting down the site would be too technologically non-feasible or too hard (more applicable to SL servers). So even if someone somehow manages to show that the SLM pirated items sold taken as a whole on the SLM were knowingly and deliberately kept by LL there to make a profit from commissions or subscriptions or tier fees somehow, you'd have to show IP holders for $1000 worth of content and all the rest of it. It's not going to happen. OR if it should come to that, LL will remove the content. Hello! Like the do now, when a serious IP holder tells them to.

What SOPA would do would remove the endless seperate DMCA cases -- or at least many of them. Because as the law of the land, companies would have to stop looking the other way and move on their own internal complaints better.

Google said it had a whopping 5 million takedown notices in a year. 5 million! On Youtube and other properties. It took down an enormous 75 percent of them! that's how to look at it. That's millions. The 25 percent they didn't take down probably didn't have good lawyers. See how this works? 5 million items that they got to make ad money from. 5 million cases or multiple cases from IP holders like music companies, having to chase them to make them take it down. Yes, Google and others are going to have to change somewhat their criminal and negligible business model, and start licensing content and stop ignoring pleas to take it down until it comes to lawsuits.

The idea that Google was harming free speech when it took down 75 percent of 5 million items is preposterous. Free speech wasn't harmed a whit. Livelihoods were made safe and money wasn't lost for artists. Some of Google's ad revenue got dented a bit. Boo-hoo! That will teach you to stop stealing and making money off other people's content.

When Google removes millions of infringing youtubes constantly, they don't say the Internet is broken or that innovation is harmed. They comply. That's the law. This law codifies it better, instead of letting code-as-law rule.

SOPA's language specifically addresses the false claim that providers have to become "copyright police". They don't. The law says they do not have to become prior monitors. Read it! As one congressman put it acidly: they have to obey the TOS they already have. Good! Pity it takes Congress intervening on the Internet to do this, but that is what it takes. Or actually, not pity. Thank God, we have organic institutions that can control greedy geeks. It's our only hope of keeping our freedom.

Go to SOPA Opera to see where your congressmen is on this bill. And write him or her to ask him to supoprt it! Howard Berman, a champion of human rights, is thankfully supporting it. But Daryl Issa, the libertarian and Tea Party darling is putting in killer amendments -- Silicon Valley is in his district. So is Zoe Lofgren in Silicon Valley. That's why Cory Doctorow's shrill claims that technologists have no input are silly -- there are some very heavy hitters from Silicon Valley already turned on this. That's why we have to fight for it!

So many are still undecided! An easy way to write them is on their Facebook pages if they have them. Look at New York's, 4 only are supporting, 27 undecided. I've been writing them.

Oh, going to yammer on and on about how Congress is "in the 1 percent" (a stupid idea if I ever heard it) and "bought out" by lobbiests? Well, look at Zoe Loefgren. At least if that theory is true, she stays bought and true to the Silicon Valley industries of computer and Internet that paid her; the music industry just paid her a lot less.

I'm going to be watching Sen. Gillibrand in my state. She picks up a lot of the "progressive" causes. But TV/Movies interests gave her more campaign contributions than Computers/Internet, so she better support SOPA.BTW, I'm all for lobbying -- it's legal, and now you can see how transparent it is.

Ron Paul lolbertarians and Obama technocommunists are together on opposing the bill, and that's why the liberal center must hold.

One of the most deceptive aspects of all this is how geeks are screaming that this will "break" the Internet and hatrm the new DNSSEC planned security regime. Gosh, worried about security all of a sudden, i.e. their privacy, after telling us for 15 years that you can't encrypt content and DRM doesn't work. So now something new and special? And geeks block malware sites all the time; that doesn't break the Internet. Why can't they block pirate sites? And indeed, Tor will work around this, although Tor may be one of the circumvention technologies targeted if they show that they in fact have intent to allow pirating (and ideologically, of course, they do, though they dance around it.)

 

 

 

There is enough amount of hype, hypocrisy and hypotheticals around this, to quote the lobbyists of the RIAA. But long before any RIAA lobbyists said it, I said it for a different set of reasons.

I've written why Second Life resident should support SOPA and why Second Life actually shows how SOPA can work, and not harm innovation or censor speech, both chimeras that hysterical geeks have whipped up to try to scare Tumbling teens to screech about this everywhere.

My articles on this on Wired State:

 

http://3dblogger.typepad.com/wired_state/intellectual-property/

http://3dblogger.typepad.com/wired_state/2011/11/geeks-screaming-about-internet-censorship-ought-to-be-ashamed-of-themselves-and-ought-to-actually-re.html

http://3dblogger.typepad.com/wired_state/2011/12/a-strange-piece-of-hate-mail-and-an-epiphany-about-sopa.html