RL Law and Governance

07/10/2022

Virtual Verse, Same as the First

By Prokofy Neva, Virtualtor

This is a useful thread from VirtualVerse One to review and more systematically rebut when I have some time some day. I've copied it because they, like the Lindens, disappear content there often.

For one, it helps in making my case that the trans women community in SL, many of whose leaders are on Virtual Verse One now (the old Sluniverse) are utterly intolerant of anyone who changes their gender in any way that they haven't approved of. They are horrid exemplars of totalitarianism. If you think your condo board or your office performance committee is authoritarian, wait until you see these people.

They also curiously imagine that if someone hasn't transitioned in the way they imagine, and hasn't had surgery, let alone cross-dressed in SL, that they must have some psychiatric issue, some "dysphoria," or something wrong with them.

It's amazingly hard to change your avatar's gender in SL for this reason, in any direction. The wall of intolerance, the wall of hatred and harassment from people who themselves say they have been harassed all their lives is just astounding!

In RL, I've given birth to three children, one of whom died, and I have had a number of surgeries over the years for various conditions, some related to my rare immune disease, and I can't imagine anything worse -- for me -- than going for any kind of surgery at all. I've never gone to a surgery, and emerged better off than when I went in. It's always worse. That's just my own personal preferences. We get to have those, right? Or we don't? Even if I had no personal history of other medical surgery, I would never wish to perform that surgery, and that's fine, correct? Or are you medical totalitarians like Mengele and Sudoplatov?

If someone wants to have any and all surgeries to transition from one gender to another  to a gender they believe is inherent (and which I am happy to accept as inherent for them), that's their call. Why would this same set of people get to harass and heckle and bully other people who either didn't make this choice for themselves, or due to their traditional beliefs, can't accept it?  Eventually people with old-fashioned beliefs die out. I don't know anybody reliant on a horse and carriage now. But if you need to hasten their demise and bully them into non-existence, yes, you are totalitarian.

I'm not interested in changing my gender in RL just to have an SL avatar of the opposite gender. Listen to yourselves! Do you really think that is required? Do you really think we are not free?! Why did I choose a male avatar in SL? As I explained for Designing Worlds: because I can. That really is all the reason anyone needs or should require. We get to change our genders in SL. Have you?

But...If you criticize tech bros; if you criticize the open source cult; if you criticize big or small tech (something I had no company doing 20 years ago, but have plenty now), it means you have just lost all your rights, if you ever had them. Criticism of tech -- which has many, many features that are eminently open to criticism -- doesn't mean you are stripped of your right to change your gender or not change your gender, or PS to have privacy in RL, something that all these people feel has always been fine to deprive me of for "higher reasons," namely, my criticism of tech.

If you criticize the high priests of our little world, or the tech world at large, these harpies believe that OF COURSE you have to be hounded, harried, doxxed, and exposed as punishment. OF COURSE. You lose your rights.

Today, those immersed in the transgender movement have a term for this: "transmedicalists". See, there's a term for everything. I personally don't make any of this my cause, when there's been the war in Ukraine for the last 8 years, my more immediate and I think deserving focus. I mean, paragraphs like this have about three too many buzz terms I'd need to look up for me to play:

Maybe I’ve just become more aware of it recently, but there seems to have been a rise in the amount and vehemence of people identifying as transmedicalists/truscum online, which is an ideology stating that people have to experience dysphoria to be transgender, though the severity of the ideology varies, to the extent some people think you have to be binary and want every kind of medical intervention possible in order to “pass” to be really trans. And many of the people who believe this make it their life’s work to harass trans people who don’t fit their idea of what a “real trans person” is — for instance, Kalvin Garrah (a truscum youtuber)’s multiple lengthy videos on gothfruits (a non-binary transmasculine gender non-conforming makeup artist/youtuber) calling him a transtrender.

You would never know from the SLuniverse posse that transgender experience might not be monolithic. 

Of course these authors I'm quoting would never use the term "trans totalitarianism" as I do, but that's how I see it. I could gather enormous numbers of examples of how this has worked in SL, where I first recognized, and on social media, where we can all see it now. Some of them are in this thread.

Under this rigid totalitarian cult, if you once had a female avatar (I don't recall any avatar named "Elizabeth" at all and I don't think one ever existed), why, you are not allowed to have a male one, and you must then "shut up" if someone exposes this. Even if someone produces some screenshot with me in an avatar with the name "Elizabeth," so what? Everybody has alts. I have my name. His pronouns are he/him. You do believe in pronouns, right? Or not? Or you believe some people who don't believe as you do get their pronoun rights stripped away? Then, you are totalitarians.

TORLEY IN WATERHEAD IN 2004

In 2004, I remember going to the Waterhead telehub. I had on a pilot's outfit I believe I got from Cubey's venue. That avatar had a female appearance -- I had a variety of avatar shapes and outfits I had experimented with when I first came to SL -- one African female got enormous attention from the Herald at the time --  but then I picked the male avatars because I wished to do so. You get to do that in SL.

So at Waterhead, I ran into an old friend from TSO and she remarked that I had a female avatar, which I rarely had had in TSO, where my main and alts were male, and I said, oh, yes, that's the one today, but I don't think I'll keep it, etc. Nearby was sitting Torley Linden, at that time Torley the resident, playing Mahjong with another resident whose name I don't recall. 

Torley on her alts, or Cienna Samiam (Cienna with other last names) as an alt of Torley, or whoever that resident sitting with her at that time, would then endlessly invoke this incident as if it were some kind of "gotcha". They would never admit they were a Linden, then or now. They would never admit that they were a friend of a Linden, then or now. They would replay this incident over and over on the forums as if this was some kind of grand expose. 

Imagine doing that. Imagine Lindens being like that (they were and are). Torley is a male who had a female avatar and another RL male who had a female avatar as a partner. THAT was the root of the animosity -- the greatest chorus of haters and totalitarians I've experienced frantic to misgender me are totalitarian trans women in SL.

When she became a Linden, Robin Linden insisted that Torley remove her partnership. (If it were me, I wouldn't have become a Linden then, but people need to work and live.) Soon enough that took a toll on that relationship when she agreed to do so to become a Linden. That person, who, unlike Torley was always nice to me, later married a woman in RL. That vicious Cienna, who made eyeglasses that were about the only ones available in SL and who was immensely popular, endlessly heckled and harassed me on the forums and inworld on the mistaken belief that she had some kind of "gotcha" merely because I didn't choose to reveal my RL gender when I began SL and didn't choose to note that I remembered exactly what incident she was invoking. Later, my identity was forcibly dragged from me by both the Herald (whose editor was mad that I criticized his take on TSO in the New York Times) and by the forums, with Lindens approvingly presiding. I'm going to describe this in more detail soon, it's important.

You can change your gender in SL -- but only if you hang with the posse and obey their rigid, totalitarian rules. I choose not to.

CRITICIZE THE ELITE AND LOSE YOUR RIGHTS

It's helpful to remember why the vicious mob on the old forums, some of whom remain today, decided I "needed" to have my RL identity and gender "outed," something which I always took in stride, "making lemonade out of lemons." I'm not anonymous. You are.

It's because I criticized the privileged insider relationship that some of the scripters, designers, and other kinds of "creatives" and devs had with Linden Lab, a system I called "the Feted Inner Core" or "FIC". I criticized them for obtaining inside knowledge of discounted sims, always obtaining media interviews when the media contacted LL to the exclusion of others, obtaining endorsements for their businesses, winning contests and saying later that it was because no one else applied -- and so on. 

To their credit, later, LL cleaned up some of this obvious favouritism and graft from the early days, when 1/3 of the staff came from the user base so it was a revolving door of insider privilege and commerce circles elevated to staff powers. But back then, these people wanted to get revenge. A Linden falsely told a resident, based on reading my RL name on my account and Googling me (a gross breach of resident privacy for which that Linden should have been fired), that I was on alimony and wealthy and sitting with the box wine all day dabbling on SL. I've never been on alimony and had only modest child support from my partner with whom I have raised our children over the years and I've never bought a box wine in my life.

Other Google witch hunters, or that one, decided I was a journalist who had been fired from a newspaper for plagiarism and announced solemnly to the forums that I was "indicted for RL crime". Of course, plagiarism in academic and journalism isn't exactly a "crime," but it is actionable. But...I have never been accused of, or have been found guilty, of plagiarism.  The problem is that I have a very common name. The people with my exact same name, even including the middle initial, even with the same age and location, have done all kinds of things -- worked for the State Department, worked for other government agencies, worked for Greenpeace or worked in journalism or worked or had very public messy divorces. None of them are me.

EXCEPTIONS FOR THE RULERS

Most of all, I criticized and exposed these people for never getting disciplined on the forums. Ulrika Zugzwang, among the founders of "socialism on one sim" in SL, copied my forum avatar and turned it into a bloody exploded head, and made that into her own forums avatar. Nothing could be done about it. It was "creativity" or "parody". But when I said Aimee Weber's name was "like" a cheerleader's name, one of those people who put little hearts as the dots above their "is," I was permabanned. These children, some of them directly related to the Lindens, were terribly thin-skinned! And still are. The nearly 20 years they've had to grow up hasn't helped one bit.

Today, when friends of the Lindens get to have their virtual wedding in a new community center in Fantasseria, when the BBB gets a 4096 and double prims for their RP game in Bellisseria, when certain businesses are touted in front page videos and blogs and others ignored, causing forums drama, I don't have to explain about the favouritism system at all. If only if were just a favouritism system! If only it didn't also involve selective Governance inaction, and even the enabling of griefing of dissidents who won't worship at the altar of the selected ones, and call out their grift. I think some of you have no idea what it's like to live in a world where you see the Lindens hanging out and partying with people who have constantly griefed you and crashed your sim. 

The other point is that I have never worked for the US government or any government as any kind of "agent" or staff person or analyst. I was a freelance translator and news writer as a contractor for RFE/RL, which is a US Congressionally-funded set of radio stations and web sites broadcasting abroad. It properly has "state media" as a label on Twitter. It was and is a tremendously valued resource. That it was funded by the CIA at its origins in the 1950s, and was closed in the 1970s when I was in junior high school as part of a general whistleblowing on CIA support of various US organizations, is irrelevant to my career today or even 30 years ago. When you work for these kinds of agencies, or Russian state TV as a translator, which I did for a time at a NYC TV station, it doesn't mean you are a government agent. And most of my jobs have been for non-profit organizations, and this is all a matter of public record. I'm not suffering from some kind of angst or nostalgia from "my days as a Soviet analyst" because a) this isn't the kind of job I had -- journalism isn't government analysis -- and because I've always had jobs up to the present related to the post-Soviet space, which of course, has many features that grew out of the Soviet Union.

I wish more of these kids would study the history of the Comintern to understand the origins and methods of their beloved Anti-Fa movement as well.

Weatherwax, who is evidently a failed creator who left SL for a time and now has re-spawned as a live musician, falsely denounced the makers of gatchas as greedy grifters. He got static not only from me, who will be the elephant who never forgets on this one, and partially beat a retreat, and remains a non-entity.

 

THREAD ON VIRTUALVERSE ONE

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Da5id Weatherwax

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I'd escaped for so many years.. but the gacha discussion on the official forums finally got Prok to target me.

Epic meltdown when I laughed at her instead of rising to the bait, earned her a 5-day ban.

Now the dumbass is seeking out places where I've played music in the past and ranting at the venue owners on twitter and other platforms.

I guess my ridicule struck a little snowflake-nerve?

le sigh....
 
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bubblesort

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Prok? Now there's a name I haven't heard in a long time.

I think trolling Prok into a meltdown is a rite of passage in SL. Most of the time you never hear of Prok, but when you do run into her, even if you aren't naturally a troll, it's just too hard to resist messing with her a bit. She just brings out the inner troll in regular people.

Don't worry about the clubs, David. Nobody will take her seriously at those venues. Every time I've seen you, you've put on a great show. No club owner who knows what they're doing will ditch a performer like you over Prok's weird drama. If they do, just tell the FIC about it, that'll show em! LOL

 
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CronoCloud Creeggan

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Da5id Weatherwax said:
I'd escaped for so many years.. but the gacha discussion on the official forums finally got Prok to target me.

Epic meltdown when I laughed at her instead of rising to the bait, earned her a 5-day ban.


I've been using Grumpy Cat "Good" quite often lately.

Gear said:
It astounds me that someone can still be around after all these years, and still be just as insufferable.
Prok is Prok, If I was running LL I'd have banned her from the forum AND the grid years ago....like 2006.
GoblinCampFollower said:
sounds like I'm blessed to not know who the hell this person is...
Prokofy Neva, Salome calls her the Crazy Cat Lady of SL. Hates anyone more successful or popular than her, calls them FIC. Also hates Linux users and MTF transfolk. Don't call her she, he uses a male avatar. I suspect Prok is a self-hating FTM. Prok is one of the few SL users I've WANTED to troll when I see her. Basically I'd call her Comrade and wave around a kitschy Soviet flag that plays the soviet anthem on Kazoo. Not that I've actually done it, I've just wanted to do it.
 
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Romana

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I only know about him indirectly, from forum stuff, but that's enough.
When I was land shopping once I noticed the plot next to the one I was looking at ease one of his.
I noped out of there.
 
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GoblinCampFollower

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CronoCloud Creeggan said:
...Also hates Linux users and MTF transfolk. Don't call her she, he uses a male avatar. I suspect Prok is a self-hating FTM.
ewwwwwwwwww, nothing I can't stand more than people in oppressed groups who think they should be a special exception to their own bigotry... Kind of like gay men who hate lesbians and feminists or immigrants who want to shut the door behind them.
 
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Romana

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GoblinCampFollower said:
ewwwwwwwwww, nothing I can't stand more than people in oppressed groups who think they should be a special exception to their own bigotry... Kind of like gay men who hate lesbians and feminists or immigrants who want to shut the door behind them.
Noted and edited. He may be a jerk, but I'm not OK with misgendering.
Da5id, what did you say that set him off? I couldn't find it. Was it one of the ones that Kristen Linden removed?
 
Sid

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Prok's posts cost an extra mouse wheel a year, only by scrolling by, when not on ignore.
Some of his posts do make sense.
 
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Spirits Rising

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Romana said:
Noted and edited. He may be a jerk, but I'm not OK with misgendering.
Da5id, what did you say that set him off? I couldn't find it. Was it one of the ones that Kristen Linden removed?
Until that one (Prok) directly states that they are - indeed - Trans, you are not misgendering whatsoever.
 
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Abigail Longmeadow

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I am amazed. I thought Prokofy left a long time ago. Maybe he just stopped posting on the forums. I see he is still a land-lord, running Ravenglass Rentals. It is not that easy to run a mainland rental, because you don't have the privacy and control of a private Second Life island.
 
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Katheryne Helendale

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What's his Twitter handle? I feel like having some fun! :shiftyeyes:
 
Katheryne Helendale

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He's not unique to SL. He got his start in the TSO community, pretty much alienating everyone even then.
 
Robert Jung

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The only time I've ever interacted with Prok, was on a walk around Mainland, led by Cubie. Prok didn't say much but was quite civil and quietly participated in the walk.

I didn't understand what was happening then , and I certainly have no more clue today, but it's always been one of my strongest memories , reminding me we can't always predict what will happen in SL.
 
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Noodles

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All my interest in with Prok was related to hanging around Woodbury before they got banned. I think Ingot mentioned on her blog once for some reason.
 
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Beebo Brink

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Essence Lumin said:
He was banned from SLU. I don't know about VVO.
He was banned from SLU, and because of that, Cris asked that we not discuss Prok in our forums since any discussion was one-sided. Aside from the occasional oblique reference, we pretty much held to that line.
 
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Sid

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Must all have taken place just before I joined SLU.
I only know him from the SL forums since a few months.
 

Posted at 10:42 AM in FIC, SIC, SOC, and Inside Dopes, Griefers, Scammers, Criminals, RL Law and Governance, Transgender | | Comments (0)

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

By Prokofy Neva, Virtualtor

Sorry_001

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 [email protected]#[email protected]#[email protected] 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".

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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.

 

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.

 

Posted at 05:48 AM in Griefers, Scammers, Criminals, Intellectual Property, RL Law and Governance | | Comments (2)

Who Rules

Prokofy Neva, Virtualtor

This was written in 2010 after some conferences on the Metaverse but not published for some reason.

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Obama doesn't rule America, or senators or Supreme Court judges or your assemblyman or Dad. No, there are three types of people who rule America, and you would never know it -- if you didn't think about it a little.

One is exemplified by a kid with a name like Matt or Jeff -- I'll find it in a minute -- with an elaborate floral tatoo on his forearm, tall, with a shock of black hair and a friendly demeanor, who appears as a dinosaur-type creature, working as a mod in Webosaurus from the company Metaverse Mod Squad. Another is a cheerful, heavyset woman in glasses with intelligent brown eyes who is from Sony Online Entertainment, her name is Laralyn McWilliams, the Creative Director of Free Realms. And of course there's the lanky geek guy in the glasses with the boyish cowlick, owlish eyes, slightly receding chin, and and deadpan grin -- Will Wright, inventor of the Sims.

These are the types of people who really rule America, because they shape the hours an hours and HOURS of time online that your sons and daughters -- and YOU -- spend in their games or worlds. They are the game inventor or dev, the game manager or creative director, and the mod -- the person moderating the behaviour of the users. These three kinds of people have a powerful influence over the education of your offspring -- and your mindset, too! -- and they have way, way, WAY more influence over your thinking and your children's thinking and patterns of behaviour than family, school, or certainly church or club. It is their practices of governance -- best or worse, as we'll see - that determine how people see themselves as individuals and in groups, and see themselves as part of larger systems or civilizations, such as they are.

These three types of people -- and you've seen them all and known them all by various names -- really shape our real and our simulated lives, no question. They decide whether you can gank newbs with impunity because it will be allowed as "fun" (the practice known as "ganking" means to deliberately kill newbs or harass newbs in large numbers -- just because you can), or whether you will be punished for it. Whether you can swear or not swear. Whether you are processed along this incentivizing channel or that one. Whether you get one time-out or a three day ban for whatever is perceived as bad behaviour. Whether you are encouraged to report on your neighbour surreptitiously about what you think he is doing bad -- or not. Whether you have fun, or are miserable, but addicted. Every facet of your game or world experience is controlled by these people's notions of governance, and yet they have little training, awareness or conceptualization of real-life governance (they aren't politicians or political scientists or business managers). They are rulers online in the virtual worlds, and they rule with an iron hand, usually assisted by code-as-law, but also a playbook of what they feel are "best practices" outlining how game publishers should treat their players, and what kind of beings those players must become to fit into the worlds they make.

Will Wright doesn't think, like your church or your Dad, whether it's a good thing or a bad thing if a mafia forms to bully others, or whether a marriage breaks up online over the Sim capacity for stepping out on your real mate. It's not really his problem. It's emergent gameplay, and while he might personally feel a bit rueful about it, it's not something he *works at* changing *as a game function*. If he did -- he'd be the first to tell you! -- the game wouldn't be fun. Platforms, pixels, code, mechanics, blowing stuff up -- that's all just a lot more interesting to him than morality, which isn't necessarily a reproach, just a report.

Laralyn McWilliams, who gave the most absolute best workshop I have ever heard in my life on governance (and that includes a lot of UN and OSCE workshops lol) -- every single game god should take her hour-long course -- likely doesn't think terribly deeply whether her system is sufficiently liberal and democratic. She can't; she has a world to run -- it has horrible exigencies that few of us mortals truly appreciate. And the Webosaurus guy, as he interacts with kids 10 years his junior, trying to round them up to pursue more positive activities than just huddling and gossiping and possibly sexting, which obviously isn't allowed, doesn't ponder heavily whether he is part of a collectivizing experiment that might have a down side. Moderating is just what you *do* in worlds. You *need* mods. Everyone *expects* mods. Mods are inherent. You could have a world without mods. Mods need to mod. Otherwise, you'd get Lord of the Flies. Right?

Continue reading "Who Rules" »

Posted at 04:54 AM in Current Affairs, Games, Worlds, Metaverse, RL Law and Governance, Virtual Governance, Virtual History | | Comments (0)

07/09/2022

The Guild in Second Life

Prokofy Neva, Virtualtor

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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.

 

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!

 

 

 

 

 

Posted at 03:17 AM in FIC, SIC, SOC, and Inside Dopes, Intellectual Property, RL Law and Governance | | Comments (0)

07/08/2022

Anti-Anti-Anti-Rez

By Prokofy Neva, Virtualtor

Jan 22_046

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.

Posted at 10:52 PM in Intellectual Property, RL Law and Governance, Virtual Business, Virtual Estate, Economy, Land, Virtual Governance | | Comments (0)

03/30/2012

The Avatar Arrives at the State Department

I've been blogging about the story of our US ambassador to Russia, Michael McFaul, who got into a confrontation with the state-controlled NTV who has been dogging him like the KGB. McFaul is very active on Twitter (see @mcfaul) -- I've sparred with him there as many others have.

And there was a funny interchange at the State Department noon press briefing today that lets us know the avatar has arrived (even if the word is expelled) -- and is so very Second Life:

MR. TONER: Well, we’ve raised our concerns. There’s been a number of incidents since his arrival there that have caused us to have some concerns about his security and safety. So as we would in any – following normal protocol, we’ve raised that with the Government of Russia.

QUESTION: Do you have any concerns at all about just – I mean in general about the tweets that he’s been sending out?

MR. TONER: No. I think I said yesterday that we have full confidence in our chiefs of mission to use Twitter as a way to communicate to a number of followers, whether they be in Russia – in Mike McFaul’s case, but – or outside. And I did note, having looked at his Twitter account – we had an exchange yesterday – but there’s quite a few of his followers who respond in Cyrillic, so he does have some measure. I don’t have any way to measure that, but you questioned --

QUESTION: One of his followers appears to be someone with the name the – at least the Twitter handle Prostitutkamila. Do you have any – (laughter) – whose avitar is crossed legs. Do you have any – I mean, he is going back and forth with Prostitutkamila about this situation yesterday. Do you have any concerns or problems with that? Is that appropriate for – I mean, God knows who this person actually is, but --

MR. TONER: Right. Exactly, Matt. You well know, as I do, even though we’re not of the – this generation that uses Twitter – well, maybe you do, maybe you are, I don’t mean to age you – but that avitars come in all shapes and forms.

QUESTION: Well, I know, but, I mean, here he’s having a discussion saying that he was accosted by Cossacks at this event where these journalists – there were not just journalists there, there were men in military uniform, and I just – do you think that ambassadors should be routinely engaged in Twitter conversations with people who identify themselves as prostitutes?

MR. TONER: Again, he’s engaged with his followers. I’m not going to get – regulate or talk about from this podium who within his followers he should be talking to. Twitter – his tweets go out to a broad audience.

QUESTION: Did your concerns with – over his security and safety predate his Twitter activities yesterday?

MR. TONER: Yeah. I mean, I would say that. There’s been a number of incidents. I’m not going to go into them in detail but – because they do pertain to his security, but we’ve raised this.

More here.

 

Posted at 11:56 PM in RL Law and Governance | | Comments (0) | TrackBack (0)

01/15/2012

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

 

Posted at 10:18 PM in Intellectual Property, RL Law and Governance | | Comments (39) | TrackBack (0)

02/25/2011

The War on the Second Life Economy

It's important to understand that there has always been a war on the SL economy by communists in the opensource movement who hate the economy as such, and hate that people buy and sell in it, and hate that people keep copyright coupled to commerce in order to do that, using the tools of Second Life itself put into it by its framers.

I noted in my report on Ina Centaur's latest "liberation front attack" that if I had world enough and time, I'd sell her freebies to undo her communist sabotage. I think it's the sort of partisan war one should definitely take part in to combat communism -- if you have the stamina.

I do this first and foremost with Linden objects made some time ago that they put on all perms because they are part of that goofy Creative Communism culture. I modify them (sometimes they cry out for modification as they are so crappy) or I keep them as is (some of them are really good) and I re-sell them in my shops. Usually I charge $1 or $2 because they *are* freebies and you *can* get them elsewhere -- they aren't in the library, but they are here and there at various depots. I get to do this, and should even charge more

I first got the idea for this when I saw a Linden tent for sale for $100 on Baku flying around as a newbie. This tent was nowhere available that I had ever seen, and I loved it, it was perfect for something I was building. It was modifiable, too, so I could change its textures. I thought that the person who had gone to the trouble to find and tier and display that item deserved $100, and paid it. Yes, I was aware that it was likely out there somewhere -- but I hadn't seen it at Stillman Bazaar or anywhere else. Yes, $100 was a lot to pay. But it was what I needed just in time -- and paying that "just in time" price is something SL will let you do, and let sellers do.

What is an economy? An old friend of mine who is a wealthy retailer once explained it to me very simply:

"It's the place where a willing buyer meets a willing seller."

He explained various features of how this formula can go wrong. If prices are too high, the buyer won't sell his stuff. And if you have an economy where the seller won't make good stuff and charge more for it, and makes a lot of crappy stuff and charges less, he essentially has an unwilling seller who buys but may not forever and it collapses (the Soviet Union).

The GNUsenses, copyleftists, opensource freaks, various hobos, etc. have barraged SL deliberately with freebies to try to undermine what they saw the Lindens doing. I've seldom covered their war, mainly because after about the first year, they had absolutely zero effect. Many's the time I've seen Jai Nomad's hugely insane prim-heavy Dutch table (a pretty work of art to be sure with its inlaid woods) for sale for at least $100.

I once approached Jai and asked her if for God's sake, she could put some of her pretty items on mod. They were just so frigging prim-heavy. I was making a newbies' community, wanted to use her houses to inspire people to build cool space-age kinda stuff (this was back when I was a naive noobie landlord) but I only had so many prims. Could she please consider giving me a special set of them on mod?  She had them on copy/transfer but not mod. She was reluctant to do this, I think like others she may have believed that if only she didn't put stuff on mod, she could realize her communal dreams of spreading free content throughout the world to "help da newbz" but also undermine the Man's copyright economy -- it was kind of a deterrent.

Well, here was I, a landlord, willing to give people free houses, willing to charge them only one dollar a prim, the barest of rent that would barely break even on the tier (and not really), but she was asking to help by enabling prim reduction (also, enabling taking some of the "glow" light-box stuff off -- at that time, the light was blinding and spread across the sim). Finally she relented and I got a set of the stuff that I was able to get defatted and put it out. It was put on no-transfer, though : )

The GNU store, ironically supported by certain famous FIC types who were happy to copy anims available on the Internet and resell them in SL for a fortune (LOL), was something the Lindens promoted, and all the newbies were told to go there. It actually didn't have much of a selection. Some of the stuff was odd. Some of it was hugely annoying. Like one widely-distributed orange coloured A-frame house that the maker put on "lock" -- which was another thing that oldbies did to stop further copying and defeat of the "first sale" doctrine while still styling themselves as Lady Bountiful with free stuff. You wanted to get rid of that ugly orange or at least be able to resize the thing -- but you had to figure out the "unlock" at first and that took time -- some newbies never figured it out.

The heavy-prim Jai houses were there; but some other ugly skins were just an infliction on the grid. And don't get me started about that widely-flushed turd called "the Beach House" by Siggy Romulus.

For a time, Hamlet ne Linden Au and even the actual Lawrence Lessig, given an account with his custom name, appeared in SL and tried to flog Creative Commons. They put it on Democracy Island (Beth Noveck's short-lived and failed project) as a kind of "machine" that dispensed the "license" -- but I once checked how many items it had dispensed after it had been out for months: the number was at 30. It had zero appeal. It had almost no use. Just like CC itself, which you NEVER see in SL. And for good reason: it harms commerce and undermines copyright, and we all know that it does that, and SL is an ideal laboratory to prove that point in spades -- which is why Lessig stopped liking SL, and why even its founder Mitch Kapor stop liking SL as much as they liked it at the beginning when they imagined that people would step into the regime easily, producing copies that they would release for free with the California Business Model and then...and then...um...get paid somehow.

Fortunately, the Lindens put the "pay" function right into the viewer on the object, and people quickly figured out it was better to get paid *something* than nothing; in fact, it was better to get paid a lot, than a little. And hence the economy was born -- without the Lindens. It was accidental. The convertibility of the Lindens' communist currency (they were willing to accept it for payment of tier only at a terrible rate, an option very few people used at that time) was also something that happened completely without them, but ultimately with their consent, and that was via Gaming Open Market, later forced closed (a long and important chapter of SL history I'd have to find the links to, because it served as the source of the term "GOM" -- which is a term to describe what the Lab has done, and means "to coopt a resident's creation then use it yourself without their involvement" (something the TOS enables them to do, ultimately).

Here's a response to my email from the lovely Ina. My note in italics. Note that unlike Masami Kuramoto, who claims that "it would be copyright infringement' if you sell freebies (it's not), Ina doesn't make that false claim.

1. I'm not aware that there's any serious constituency in Second Life -- if there ever was one -- that believes that release of freebies on all perms constitutes a revolutionary act "undermining the economy". Such acts disappear without a ripple. It's such a huge and diverse place now spanning many real-life countries with an enormous amount of commerce on it of all forms -- for-profit commercial, non-profit, donation, etc. -- that it would be hard to conceive of the actions of any one agent or even a concerted group of agents releasing freebies as "undermining the economy". Indeed, when Linden Lab itself threatened to remove all freebies from the SL Marketplace (they certained harmed *its* economy of commissions on sales!), the community of merchants put up such vigorous defense in support of their loss-leaders that Linden Lab was forced to step back with the plan.

I concede that the macroeconomic overview may have little apparent effect with respect to such financial numerics, but the effect on both individuals and taxonomies of creators may be quite nontrivial. By citing only the SLX case, you seem to neglect the actual creation other side of this creative ecosystem. In my opinion, the proper examples to cite would be that of Arcadia Asylum's MetroCity and related full-perms freebies and Eloh Eliot's “Another Skin”. Unlike promotional freebies released per promo, these two freebie collections are released 1) in a truly opensourced fashion, 2) not as a promotional swag for a particular merchant.

The caveat rests in the fact that these items were opensourced in a way that anyone can modify, or steal and resell, repackage, and even take over, with their own “rebranded” name as creator. They were not merely full-permission items, but textures and other source material were provided. As a result, you see a profusion of these freebies repackaged being sold to unsuspecting users. Since Eloh Eliot released her .psd and .ai opensourced skin, the skin market has become supersaturated with Another Skin's. With actual value put in by the intermediary creator, said creator reselling the content seems perfectly all right. However, when the intermediary creator simply repackages the same content with no-added value, then tacks on an “industry-standard” premium of L$3000/skin, that she or he obtained for no cost, the fellowship of the potential creative meritocracy that SL could have been, becomes abjectly violated.

My goal is to try to keep this fellowship of creative meritocracy.

I hope this clarifies the issue at stake.

2. The notion that a *if* such an act is actually (or could be construed as) damaging to the economy, that it is mitigated if it is mediocre quality is a novel one as well. It implies that copyright permissions are only legitimate to keep coupled to commerce and commercial activity if they are on *good* content or even really high-quality content. It implies that those who *might* worry about an economy-sabotage should stop worrying, and simply *make better content* -- work harder and better! But in fact, the persons most undermined by freebies of mediocre avatars are the makers of *other* mediocre avatars that they can still sell -- and that's ok. Having a huge diversity of content in the world from amateur to professional is all a good thing.

Eloh Eliot's skins were released at a useable, professional quality, but with plenty of room for improvement. They are considered by the more elite creators and patrons of SL to be of “medium quality,” but are considered by more plebeian users to be “good enough” or “wow, waaaay better than my n00b skin.” As a result, masses were resold with absolutely no improvement or variation from the original released set, purely because the customers were not aware that they were buying repackaged free content. This is blatantly unfair to creators who actually create, c.f. fellowship of a creative meritocracy.

I believe that the only way to responsibly release quality content in this world of ephemeral and highly portable virtual goods is to notify the potential customers, and in this case, being geared for OpenSim, I would hope that the many educational and nonprofit institutions making use of OpenSim and SL would not be scammed into paying for content that was originally provided for free.

3. To be sure, constantly decoupling copyright and commerce with a conscious desire to hammer a wedge between it to undermine copyright (as Creative Commons does) is indeed a political act and you imply it as such. But it's a political act that the overwhelming majority of merchants in SL ignore. The overwhelming majority have no interest in Creative Commons as it doesn't serve them and doesn't help them make any livlihood.

Because this content is released under the most liberal Creative Commons license, the intermediate creator is not forbidden to resell them – this makes sense, as there is really no way to track what happens to all this. However, as I mentioned above, I would really like the potential consumer benefactors to not be scammed into paying for them, when they are freely available.

4. If you are worried about people selling your perm-free items, you have to click the box "no-transfer". Trying to use social injunctions against the selling of freebies doesn't work anymore in this very wide and diverse world. And you really can't ask people anymore to tier the display of your loss-leaders for free anymore. It's the attention economy -- they want a penny at least.

When your content is released open-source (i.e. with textures, sculpties, mesh, etc. freely available for anyone to download and modify), it becomes a nontrivial matter that these limited SL permissions cannot solve. Anyone can just upload your source, plaster it on their own prim and call it their own. No SL permission box can help you in this case. Getting the word out and making sure that your endpoints are aware of what's available is the only way to avoid this from becoming epidemic.

How's your Whack-a-Mole score these days?

Thank you for your time and concern.

***

The fellowship of creative meritocracy -- what a term! -- is best kept by charging a lot for your stuff so that it is valued.

The communists always hide their altruism -- which is in fact a sabotage act designed to "expropriate from the expropriates" and I out it as such here -- in this caveat that they "just don't want people to be scammed".

If you REALLY don't want them to be scammed, then don't put your junk on transfer? Hello!!!

But if you are engaged in communist liberation acts, you don't do that, do you, because then you don't get as much eyeball space and inventory share for your cause.

It's good Ina outed herself -- and her clan -- with the actual intentions she has here. It focuses my mind better on what these people are really up to, which I hadn't quite put all together in one way before.

The opensource professors who whine about costs and whine that their students need free stuff seemingly out of concern for the poor and seemingly out of creative altruism, and who believe there is a "stampede" to Open Sim (there isn't) are actually footsoldiers in a war. It's a war led by John Perry Barlow, Lawrence Lessig, Cory Doctorow and others, and is indeed a war. It's a war on copyright, and that means *it's a war on your livlihood* if you make a living in SL, or even if you just get costs met.

These people have always tried to use the social injunction against selling freebies.

For awhile, there was one of those Ayn Randians who called herself the Queen of Second Life, Jamie Bergman, who used to deliberately collect all the oldbie freebies, especially the weapons, and deliberately sell them in a popular store. The job of aggregating and displaying is one the market appreciates. They don't feel "scammed". They pay $100 for a good weapon -- or more. Too bad for you, communists.

They tried to bully and harass her endlessly on the forums, but she was playing war with these commies and refused to be budged. She kept on selling freebies happily for ages, but then got bored with SL I guess, she's gone now.

There is absolutely nothing in the TOS the Lindens can invoke to punish the sale of freebies.

I once saw a group of zealous Lindens land like a ton of bricks on a neighbour with a yard sale who wa GASP reselling Yadni Monde's freebies *he* sells for $1 *for a $1 too* which he "forbids". This was in the days when Lindens were wilder than they are now.

They deleted the content and warned this guy he couldn't do that. They were thugs. They were pals of Yadni, a beloved early adapter, and they used this vigilante method of destroying property and intimidating a relatively new resident into stopping the resale of freebies.

But then they couldn't scale that. Thousands of people came and resold freebies. The Lindens had to let it go. You don't sell server space and get commissions on goods if you stop the resale of freebies. Either you play economy, or you don't.

I suspect that the website Copycense is right, that this war is going to heat up, and more and more there will be a challenge to copyright but also to copyleftist thugs like Lessig and Creative Commons. While once Lessig tried to invoke the legion of online digital artists in his army against RIAA or big media corporations trying to maintain copyright and preventing resale or remixing and modification of resale of content, and it all seemed like a glorious struggle of the People.

Of course the People that Lessig had in his army weren't *the* people -- the were the affluent hippies and coders that he had gathered around him in the EFF and related networks who themselves were either rich kids like John Perry Barlow to start with, or had become rich through...the sale of software (imagine that!) like Mitch Kapor, who now presides over Firefox (and Second Life and other projects with open source freebies), or various other people working in big IT firms or simply living in Mom's basement.

But now there's a different army. Now there's an army of people like Stroker Serpentine, a plumber in real life, who starts an online business and wants to get paid for his creations. Now you have thousands of people who aren't rich, who aren't connected, who aren't working for big IT, who aren't in the Silicon Valley magic circle, and they make content online, and not only in SL but on all kinds of other websites, and they want to get paid. And they want copyright coupled to commerce, and they want to have the system work to keep their livlihoods intact. *Livlihoods* are important for people to eat and have a home -- people are not SL avatars

One of the biggest indictments against Creative Communism is Flickr. In various jobs I have, I often have to go to Flickr to research photos available and also in a sense follow news, because some news events are followed by what people post there. And I sometimes have to search out a CC photo because I work at sites that want pictures, may not have budgets for photos, and also support the CC stuff (I don't, but I don't have a choice as a mere worker in these situations). So I look at Flickr a lot -- and I also look at the various SL groups on it and SL related content -- plus -- and here's another whole group of people -- my children's work, their friends' work, their school photography class projects, etc. etc.

And here's what I see on Flickr: the default is NOT CC. (There was probably a war over that; it was lost very early on). The default is ALL RIGHTS RESERVED. And the OVERWHELMING MAJORITY of people keep that default, either because they haven't thought about it, but in many, many more cases, because they have. Some people put CONTACT GETTY PHOTO or some other agency if you want to buy the rights to their photos. Sometimes in a few cases you do find CC licenses.

But the OVERWHELMING MAJORITY of the content IS NOT ON CC AND NOT ON COPY PERMISSIONS. And that's a good thing. It'd not like I can't contact the creator if he has "all rights reserved" and no info about any agency like Getty, and not write to him to seek permissions and arrange payment if relevant.

The artificial "problem" that CC induces by saying that people "don't have an easy way to share" otherwise is bullshit, as the default is share without credit on the Internet due to the technological and ideological regime set up by Tim Berners Lee and co, and the same Internet that makes that possible also makes it eminently easy to put a notice on your freely viewed Internet page: write me for permissions or contact my agent.

 

Posted at 12:14 PM in RL Law and Governance | | Comments (4) | TrackBack (0)

10/10/2009

"A Real Ear"

Back at the Dam again after missing a few weeks due to being busy in RL or not being able to even log on and teleport, SL was so messed up last week.

If you wade into the depths of this thread on the Community Partnership program, you would have to say in fairness the Lindens are trying -- and look what they have to work with. The usual group of sychophants and malcontents that don't put any peas in their pot.

Why?

A resident suggests what he wants out of the Lindens is "a real ear".

But the Lindens must be suffering from Meniere's Disease because they have sliced off their ears and handed them to the residents over and over and -- look what it has gotten them.

Still, I'm never that sorry. As I have to keep saying, we have been on the Mainland all these years in fact adding value and improving the view and doing all the things that the Lindens have only just began. Rather than trying to railroad us into their fake communities they should really fly around a lot more and listen. They aren't really doing this for "the community," however but are doing it "for the product". It's marketing. It's not personal.

However, once again, it's not going to work.

Continue reading ""A Real Ear"" »

Posted at 12:21 AM in RL Law and Governance | | Comments (1) | TrackBack (0)

11/08/2008

Prok's Parliament

College_003 The dashing blogger-intellectual and virtual world gadfly Prokofy Neva has declared himself interrim speaker of a parliament of his own making, and announced he is "in charge" of at least 65 sims in Second Life.

You know, it's really time to be doing this, and I'm sure you'll agree : )

It's that time of the year when my landlord in RL has finally turned on the heat in our building, and now we're free to turn it off again to save off that whopping heat bill, ouch. So I thought I'd repair to my Winter Palace in Second Life. Well, I don't actually have a Winter Palace in Second Life, but I have the Voting Lodge in Duck which has that prefab Bali lodge thing by Barnesworth, a nice fireplace, FDR Adirondack chairs, and I'll be sure to put some treacly Xmas Muzak on the URL. Hot cocoa served.

See, I've gotten one too many "Parliament" invitations lately, the last one from somebody named "Princess" something who sounds like she should set up a "Palace" instead of a "Parliament" lol. Her group had the usual badly-misspelled jumble of concepts. So I thought, "Hey, I can do this, too!"

I really am sick of the sorry-assed shape of resident governance in Second Life. This last revolution (if you could call a half-assed rebellion studded with suck-ups and turn-coats a "rebellion") was so pathetic, ineffective, and cooptable that it made me nauseous. The Lindens handy evisceration and eradication of it was nauseating, too. Their certain victory in getting the mass-addicted to their "product price point changes" is inevitable unless people take action.

To get started, I think it would be most expedient if I simply declared myself "in charge" on the 65 or 70 sims where I own land (inventory coming soon). I suggest you do that, too, if you own land! This has an immediate advantage -- I can declare myself as owner of "the largest public space in the Metaverse," and thus beat out Rezzable's WrongAsWrath Rimbaud who claims Rezzable has that status lol (at least my actual public lands don't have "buy pass" on them lol). Declaring myself "in charge" of these 65-odd sims enables me to: a) return prims from my land and b) bitch to the Lindens in Concierge tickets about the behaviour of my hapless neighbours with trees waving into my land. That's pretty heady stuff, but I think I'm accountable and responsible and can manage it.

So I'm going to make Prokofy's Parliament, and any large or small landowner is welcome to join it, on their main account. You know, I'd make a group for the purpose, but hey, I'm out of groups just now, so just hold that thought.

Do you think I will encounter any resistance in declaring myself to be "in charge" of 65 or 70 -- or maybe it may be a few more than that -- sims? (You may get lucky and I may have forgotten that I own land on YOUR sim because my land group won't load the total land list anymore!) Well, given that most of those sims are mainland, with a number having no-show neighbours and abandoned land, I don't think I will find that much of a challenge. There are also people who don't speak English or any of the foreign languages I speak, or live on other time zones, so "they don't count," and they can easily overlap with their own government thingies as they wish, we won't get in each other's way.

Then there are people around me in various RP things like "Gor" or "Star Trek" and what-not -- I don't care about these people. We're not really in the same game, and if they need to go on having "kings" and "paladins" and "Captain Kirk" -- that's fine, I will just tip-toe around them.

Prok's Parliament will be a temporary expediency which, like all temporary expediencies, will last about two or three times as long as anyone thinks it should, until it will finally be overthrown, but peacefully, to ensure that European Commission grants and American college lecture circuit fees remain available to me for years to come in a comfortable retirement.

Prok's Parliament will not admit any landless whiners who hate land barons and insist on "parity" and "equality" and "fraternity" and all that other silly jazz. History shows that short work has to be made of such people. They are welcome to make their own syndicates, cells, unions, rabble, mobs, and other ineffectual bodies that may or may not get a mandate and some seats in the eventual parliament to come, depending on how they comport themselves.

What is the purpose of Prok's Parliament?

Continue reading "Prok's Parliament" »

Posted at 03:33 PM in RL Law and Governance | | Comments (22) | TrackBack (0)

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