I can see I'll practically have to go on SL television (waves to Paisley Beebe!), something I generally avoid because I don't like legitimizing the freaks I'm usually asked to debate, just to undo some of this character assassination of me that Gwyn, as her bitter revolution eats her children, is engaging in.
Gwyn is trying to make out here that I'm for suppressing free speech, going against my years of First Amendment activism in SL, and giving comfort to the evil new Linden TOS. She's trying to make a dramatic slam on me as going against my principles, chuckling knowingly all the while as if she could "see this Hyprokisy coming" -- even though she's gotten it all mixed up and isn't making clear whether she as an EU citizen values privacy in virtual worlds or not.
She's doing this because apparently my confrontations of her to stop being so coy about her tacit endorsement of the extremist opensource movement in SL and the extremist transhumanism movement in SL, and own up to the consequences of endorsing such claptrap, is now hitting close to home.
I guess a post denouncing the new TOS as muddled and confusing and clawing back rights it seemed to give wasn't strong enough for her.
I guess she's also hopelessly confused about the difference between public and private and the First Amendment and how to apply it.
I think she also has some bitter need to take some big nasty swipe at me because I've confronted her with the consequences of the tacit ideological support she's given to the opensource and transhumanism movements all this time, while always being able to pretend that she's apart from them. And that her infantile obsession about the negative BBB reports and need to petulantly try to mount an attack on LL over this silly BBB stuff isn't a legitimate form of criticism of LL.
Anyway, here's what it boils down to if a long polemics is not on your diet today:
1. I oppose any TOS or policy that makes people have to seek written permission from every avatar on a sim, and written permission from every landlord, for screenshots or machinima IN PUBLIC PLACES. FULL STOP.
2. I understand public places not as coded public places open to the public to enter, which is the coded meaning put in the TOS. I understand public places as meaning those places that are public as RL equivalents -- streets, squares, commons, malls, shops, theaters, welcome areas, infohubs, gathering places, clubs, concerts, farms, attractions, RL city simulations and everything that fits into a category people don't have trouble understanding in real life as PUBLIC. Public is not my bedroom. Public isn't my back yard, either.
3. I condemn the TOS definition of public spaces as only those spaces that are physically coded as "open" because they aren't closed. That's code as law, and doesn't work. I shouldn't have to close my store sim or my homestead that I generally want open to the public to see my nice build, just to keep out scraper bots.
4. I affirm privacy as the bedrock of the individual's rights that are in fact a core part of the concept of freedom of expression.
5. I condemn the TOS muddle and contradiction and general incompetence in defining public and privacy and the right of the individual to both privacy and freedom of expression.
It currently is not clear whether you can deploy intrusive scraper bots without opt-in consent, and it currently is not clear whether you can film machinima in normal public places like concerts or welcome areas or stores without gaining permission from all visible avatars and the land owners. That muddle and that seeming cavalier attitude both to my privacy on my residential land, and that cavalier attitude to my and others' freedom of expression for machinima filming in public places is UNACCEPTABLE.
Those getting on the victimization bandwagon here and waving the "censorship" flag on all this need themselves to make their own minds up about whether they are willing to trample on PRIVACY which is the bedrock of freedom of expression.
Apparently Gwyn is now leading the charge to have the Machinima policy dropped, to keep the TOS endorsement of "public means any place not coded as closed" - and sorry, but that's an unacceptable intrusion on my privacy, and it is not required to gain even full-fledged First Amendment rights in SL.
Now, some blow-by-blow comments to Gwyn's blog, which doesn't have room for my wrong response.
Your claim that Linden Lab as an American company doing business in California needs an "F" on the BBB is absurd, tendentious, biased and full of a bitter personal agenda.
They don't deserve anything of the sort. But MMORPGs, as has been pointed out, can be unfairly singled out by disgruntled patrons who have all the time in the world to play forums junkyard dog in real life, too.
I guess I probed a nerve, because I can see you are completely flustered by my response. And I also see curiously that while I posted a blog titled "The New TOS is a Mess and Contradicts Itself" I'm being accused of endorsing bad TOS policies.
>I definitely think you're also part of the group that is out of touch with reality, Prokofy ;) It's amazing what deep levels of conspiracy theories you read between the lines when I wrote... absolutely nothing of what you're saying!
I think I'm as in touch as anybody can be with the reality of LL these days, but not in touch as most who go to office hours. I don't do office hours. I have my dignity. Do you? And I don't know where you're getting this conspiracy stuff when I haven't claimed one. I *have* pointed out that you seem to have lost your Lab hook-up and also are howling at the end of opensource madness -- and that's the truth.
<And it was the first time I see you defend LL's putting an end to freedom of expression. You see, according to the new ToS, that picture I posted on the top of the article is forbidden and a bannable offence, because I don't have LL's written permission to take pictures in their public in-world building. That's the kind of things that I'm pointing at.
Snorts. Oh, stop it Gwyn, you shouldn't sink to such *low* tactics. I've done nothing of the kind. And you haven't read the TOS. You can take screenshots (as distinct from machinima) without permission. Go and re-read it. But I'm the first to say it is confusing and seemingly contradictory and it is. But read it like you'd read an EU law about the percentage of milkfat in cheese, and then you'll get it.
>I might have felt offended if I were an extremist, a singularist, or an opensourcist :) Since I'm neither, I hardly see the logic of your statement. I never said that Linden Lab deserved an F because they don't agree with me. I didn't get them the rating! I didn't even file any complaints! And from the list of complaints received in the last 36 months, I have not seen any that showed that the "F" rating was given for ideological or philosophical reasons. No, they were given because of this, or, in a summarised version:
I think you need to stop hiding out on your alt Extropia, or, if she isn't an alt, stop pretending the MILES of air time you provide her with your blog are just damn weird. She could have long ago had her own blog by now. It's a big Internet. Your ceding the Thinker's leadership to her is also creepy. I'm one of the people who doesn't believe Extropia is an alt. So I'm going to chalk up this indignant rant here as more evidence that Extropia is NOT an alt. You're also an opensource booster. You bitch every time LL hasn't done every thing they could in this area, and your rant now amounts to this. Just because you aren't a nutter on OS Dev doesn't mean you aren't in that camp.
Your coyly claiming now that you aren't saying LL deserved an F is REAAAAALLLY lame. You've done a headline that has put this meme all over the blogosphere. All those people like Hamlet who respect you and amplify your voice 100 fold will pick up and run with this meme. So shame on you for that. You even picking this as a meme you need to run with is very cunning and very deliberate. That's why you are so annoying, Gwyn. You do hit-and-run drive-by blogging like this. Setting a meme out, getting all its mileage, and then running away from accountability by spending hours saying "I didn't say it" when you just did a blog ensuring that *it would be said*. That's called "outsourcing the hate".
>- 72 complaints filed against business
- Failure to respond to 2 complaints filed against business.
- Length of time business has taken to resolve complaint(s).
72 complaints is nothing for a company this size on the BBB. I think you don't grasp what the BBB is and what it does. In any event, if you view this as some kind of public shaming board that you can set up others to use while you pretend you didn't mean that, it won't work. Neither Linden Lab or anybody of any influence cares what this says, as they realize that disgruntled loons leave stuff on there, that it isn't enough of a number of reports, that bad press by cynical geeks who hate VWs probably does a lot more damage.
So if you wanted to hurt LL today, Gwyn, instead of fooling around with BBB, call up the Los Angeles times and dish on how crappy everything is now, they haven't banged on SL in a while and are due on the rotation cycle.
>Sorry to disagree with your biased, non-expert opinion. Since it's merely an opinion, you're welcome to express it. As a matter of fact, it happens to be the same opinion that Linden Lab is expressing. However, not even in the sunny state of California a company can try to push the liability of writing bad code to third parties by merely writing an agreement that says so. That's what's wrong with it. They would have done a far better job if they simply stated "Third Party Viewers are forbidden", end of story, without fuss. No one can forbid LL to limit access to their products and services, and that simple statement would be far less messy, quite clear, and have no legal problems whatsoever.
Oh, blah, Gwyn. This is so much up and down extremist blather. You and Morgaine! (Is she your alt, too? You/Extropia/Morgaine all sound so much alike these days). The downstream liability that these freaks thinks is pinned on them is not in the language of the TPV but in their fevered extremist minds. They are pushing this line and behaving like tragic victims and tragically misunderstood artists. It's all a huge act. Joe Miller's rather bland persistence (good for him!) that it doesn't say this is right on the mark. It says when you hook up to LL's servers, here's the drill, here's how you have to behave. It does not overreach to when you don't latch on to LL's servers.
If you have a burning desire to use their code to make a viewer that will copy content, steal passwords, track user activities, crash sims, I think you'll find that you have indemnity doing that in opensim and no one will be suing you for it on LL's side.
What's wrong with the OS rigidity, freakishness, mindless infantalism so on display here is this pouting -- "Unless we can hear this the way we want with more of a blank check, we won't play. We'll call it "No TPV policy at all" or "no devs wanted at all" boo hoo". Manipulative victim behaviour at its most obvious. There isn't messy. What *would* be messy is to say some total piece of legal nonsense like "No one can forbid LL to limit access to their products and services". That's the sort of thing that I guess the bureaucratic mind produces. It is very much like the statement "anything that is not allowed is forbidden" which so permeates law in magisterial systems, instead of "anything that is not forbidden is allowed" which is the way common law prefers to do this. And here, it *is* allowed to take your buggy, crappy, ripping, griefing, crashing viewer, and go all over the Internet with it, without worrying about a lawsuit from LL or its users. Of course, even Adam Zaius may not appreciate the losses and damages that occur with someone logging on to deliberately crash his servers, and he may have some notion of how he'd deal with that scenario that might wind up looking like...gasp...a TPV policy.
>I'm not saying that, where did you read that? They left LL before the new policies were in place. I didn't interview anyone. Some of them were only quoted as disagreeing with LL's policies. I've assumed that meant the policies of not listening to customers (since some of those ex-Lindens were very fond of close contact with residents), but I have absolutely no idea if that was the reason or not.
More drive-by blogging and coyness. You are the first blogger to tell us *they quit*. You do this in the same blog in which you lament the TPV and let people do the math. Disagreeing with WHAT policies?! I cannot believe that six Lindens quit all at once suddenly, after years, like Phoenix Linden, because suddenly they've all gotten squishy soft about "LL not listening to users". These are self-interested people, not Girl Scouts. They were more likely to have been fired than to have quit, given so many of them all got whacked at once, and if they did quit, it's much more likely to be over a traditional highly ideological Linden issue in which *Lindens* had stake, like the opensource program and TPVs, then some mushy crap like "Ohhhh they don't listen to residents".
<In any case, at least I hope that you agree that the way a company listens to their customers is far more important than discussing third-party viewer licenses :) (But after reading the rest of your comment, I'm not so sure any longer).
Again, so much tendentious blather from you again. I didn't say that, of course, but you're in tendentious/manipulation mode, so you can't be stopped. I said that *as a reason for LINDENS to quit* it wasn't likely. And still say that. And it isn't. And my thinking listening to residents, whatever vague mush that's supposed to mean, is more important doesn't matter. Lindens are self-interested. Lindens are not our advocates. I don't know where some residents got this idea that "My favourite Linden Pathfinder or Which Linden has been victimized and fired because he was in my corner stumping for residents". Baloney. These Lindens were fired, or quit over something MUUUUCH more self-interested.
<Ah, so you believe that Linden Lab's secret agenda is to allow people to mount attacks sovereignty, the individual, property, identity, and so forth? :) Interesting thought. It would explain why freedom of expression is now part of the list, too. And getting customers angry is definitely a good way to get the ball rolling...
You are writing yourself into a pretzel here. Here's what I think the secret agenda is of *some Lindens* that *other Lindens* either don't know about, don't care about, or aren't ready to control yet: letting the interoperability work continue, letting the IETF work continue, in the belief that LL will prevail somehow has a company and that's all a good thing, or else that LL won't lose anything from it, because it will take forever and go nowhere, and that way LL can look like it "cares" about "open standards", the bedrock of the opensource theology. "Open standards" of course are the standards of whatever big company is big enough to push whatever standards help them sell more widgets. (Actually a good reason why governments or an intergovernmental body, rather than a body made up by big companies and freaks working for them for free shouldn't decide standards).
I haven't had time to study the whole IETF thing carefully, but having following it as an amateur, I know it's up to no good. The extremists in it who have no value whatsoever for property, IP, copyright, etc. are ensuring those values are jettisoned. The presence of the maker and seller of the first copybot, John Hurliman of Intel, in this group, as one of its most vocal proponents, let's us know the level of morality and science in this project.
>Perhaps I'm too naive and still believe that this was an accident and not malicious intent, since it's so easy to make it right, and it doesn't even require a viewer change. If I'm proved wrong, I'll give you all the credit. In any case, my point is that LL doesn't care enough about what residents need and want, and yours is exactly one excellent example of what I mean...
I don't know what this means, it's not clear. If you mean that the viewer is easy to fix and therefore nothing is deliberate and everything is not set in stone, think again. The messing up of Search was VERY deliberate and very much part of an agenda as I've written. While they may mildly tweak this to get rid of the wackier broken pieces of it, like the refinement of your search results with a "traffic" or "name" search taking you out of your search results and back to the general dbase again, more likely nothing will change. The Linden in charge of this is a big fan of Lessis, Free Culture, blah blah, and has happily Googlized away the internal economy of SL, and she's been able to do this because other parties of Lindens in their warring camp found this useful for steering to at least a few big constituents the Lindens want to milk, like big classifieds merchants, etc. That's all.
>Please explain how that ultimately leads to a more profitable company. Not even Apple does that, and Steve Jobs is known to be the most egomaniac CEO of Silicon Valley...
Actually, Apple does JUST that very thing. Look at the i-pad. Legions of geeks like yourself are screaming, snorting, ridiculing, wailing about the i-pad. Normal people and ordinary people are thrilled. They will sell a lot of them. The Lindens have a very big FB group already, as many as the concurrency. It's a group that they don't moderate and yet it has almost all happy fluffy positive things on it. Given a chance to bypass all the oldbies with a death grip on SL's culture and layout such as yourself, and able to just fly in, buy a dress, dance a bit and socialize and then go to a humper bunker, most people will be supremely happy. I don't know if you've ever noticed how many thousands of people in SL are wildly happy and finding their absolutely perfect soul mate. Most ordinary people have a fantastic time in SL, and they don't even have to cyber, they can just casually socialize and shop and hang out. So LL will concentrate on those people, and business on the other end, and those interested in drilling deeper into the potentials of economic models and governance models will be ignored or even discouraged.
>LOL! Prokofy, you're smoking weird things. I think it's time I really do have to write an article about the pitfalls of Transhumanism and Extropianism, like I promised on another comment...
You could just shut off your Extropian alt, put her on another blog, and be done with it. That might help.
>I'm much less an "extropian nutter" than you are a "liberal moderate" unless your dictionary has different words than mine :) I remain a liberal capitalist, thank you very much, and I have no idea really of what you are, but "moderate" is definitely not going to feature in the label...
>a liberal capitalist such as myself has absolutely no problem with the new TPV. You are not a liberal capitalist if you have a problem with the TPV. You are a leftist, a socialist, an opensource proponent with an extremist bent. There's the Occam's Razor for you.
>And, honestly, for the sake of the argument, an endless socialist paradise looks to me as boring as a paradise where people play harps sitting on clouds and singing "Holy, Holy, Holy is God, Father in Heaven" for all eternity... ;) I don't subscribe to either!
Do you realize the Lindens have an Easter egg in the viewer (or should we call it, in keeping with their Burner culture, "A Hunk a Burnin' Junk"), whereby groups of residents, if they go in a group inworld and sing together, they can get the viewer to force them into various happy gesters. Creepy, eh?
>Well, you might be right. After all, Linden Lab has exactly the same opinion as you do. It's interesting, though, how those disgruntled freaks are not attacking Microsoft, Apple... or even ComCast. Why do you think they're all just complaining about Linden Lab? What makes LL so special to get the monopoly on disgruntled freaks making complaints?
I'll give you the short answer, Gwyn: People do not have sex inside Microsoft Word. They do not run a business literally off their Apple i-hone unless they are little API nerd engineers. They do not shop and hear live music by their relationship to Comcast. Does that help? People are far more emotionally invested in this product because of what it does.
>You don't know that. We only know that there were 19 complaints regarding billing or collection issues, including, but not limited, to improper collection practices, unauthorized bank debits, or unauthorized credit card charges just in the past 36 months. The amounts are not specified. It could have been as little as US$1 or far more than that. So the answer is, at best, "probably not" and not such an assertive "no" like you presume.
I have a billing complaint right this minute. Who doesn't? The Lindens still have this problem whereby some accounts bill with a header on them saying "UK VIDEO ARCADE". Can you imagine what my bank does when they see an overseas billing code coming at the debit card with a label like "UK VIDEO ARCADE"? They call in alarm. LL has double billed me a number of times and taken forever to undo this. ON that account, PayPal looks askance at LL and doesn't pass it through. I get a call from Paypal too saying OMG UK VIDEO ARCADE. Yes, it's a problem. But I view it as so minor a problem in the scheme of things that I don't even follow up. It will get fixed, as it has before.
As for "you don't even know," well, gosh, I plead guilty. I don't know. I challenge those who claim there's mounds of CS complaints to produce the actualities. P.S. I got my chickens back without Lindens. But I think the problem is that you are simply seeing the *nature* of this business differently than me. You view it as a software company. I don't. It's product isn't software. It's product is a world, an experience.
Second Life is a big theme park. It's like Six Flags. How many billions of people come through a place like Six Flags? Every other year there is a death in the pool or every third year there's a fateful fall off the roller coaster. Do these cause complaints on the BBB? Probably not. BBB complaints aren't about grave tragedies like that, but whether or not the hot dogs caused food poisoning or the cashier gave you the wrong change.
That's how to understand Linden Lab. It is an amusement park with 16 million casual visitors of whom 1.5 actually stayed for the day and came back again. Out of these 1.5 million, some 72 filed complaints about the hotdogs, and perhaps one fell off the roller coaster and died.
>The rest of us have a different experience. 25 residents filed complains regarding Customer Service issues. Where did you get the "97%" figure from? I'm afraid I'm just unlucky because me, my partners, and my clients are all on the remaining 3%? It could be the case. We all dread talking to customer support and use that only when we're desperate. It's like going to the dentist: you know it's good for you at the end, but you're not going to enjoy the experience.
I'm on the mainland so I have to ask Lindens at least once a day to reset a sim, move a tree on their land in the way, solve massive griefing. Island owners with big estates have transfers, renames, moves, lag, etc. I dunno, I am a heavy user of CS. They are always good.
>On the policy side of things, it's not getting better, and I fail to understand how you are so happy about more and more restrictions to what you can do and not do in SL, some of them curbing your freedom of expression. I remember reading your very old blog posts yelling at the way LL restricted your freedom of expression by repeatedly banning you from blogs, forums, and kicking you out of town halls and office hours and the like. I used to be worried about LL's attitude because you were the living example of what LL really thinks deep down, which is that residents should hush up, pay, and not complain. But, well, those were mostly isolated cases, so I never thought these would become the mainstream of thought at the 'Lab. Now that these policies start popping up on the agreements you sign with LL when you log in, you all of a sudden switch sides, and proudly proclaim that this is how things should be! Why the sudden 180º turn, Prokofy? I can't understand your motives behind that. Sure, you're allowed to switch opinions (as someone who changes her opinion frequently, I definitely entitle you to do the same :) ), but I used to see you as an example of someone aggressively fighting Linden Lab's attitude of silencing dissenting opinions. Now that they're incorporated in the rules regulating the relationship between the 'Lab and their customers, what made you change your opinion?
This seems to be the heart of your tendentious and cranky response to me, so let me go over it again.
1. Approval of Linden Lab *codifying* and *moving toward the rule of law* is not approval of those essentially unlawful notions in their TOS/policies. Maybe this is over your head. But taking policies off blogs and office hour chat logs, and putting them in a formal way linked to actual sections of the TOS is a HUGE milestone. It may seem trivial
Think of it as like Hammarabi's code. Or the idea of "an eye for an eye". Many find that barbaric. But it wasn't in the era of the barbarians, who were happy now had a legal code that said "Poke out an eye when your eye is poked out, if you must, but don't cut off a hand". That's progress.
LL has not restricted my right to take and post a screenshot on the mainland. At least, I've read it that way. They now require priori consent for machinima and I've criticized that. I've pointed out how they contradict themselves. I've also pointed out the problem of devising a policy that a) gets rid of Papparazi Artful's ability to intrude anywhere and b)
I don't want Papparazi Artful, a scheming bot that merely scrapes data for one third-party geeky company's advantage, to scrape my land without my consent just because I didn't close off my land. I don't like that concept that takes us away from RL, where we can't film in a person's home or in their backyard as strangers without seeking consent as a moral issue.
I do want machinimists to go everywhere and take movies like concerts or interesting builds without getting a signature. On the one hand, it sounds like the Lindens *in the TOS* opened the door to let Papparazi Artful go on scraping us unless we lock down our land;on the other hand it makes it sound like the Lindens are requiring their beloved Draxtor to collect 100 signatures each time he makes a generally pro-LL video. I'm quite sure the Lindens want to square this circle. They want Paparazzi Artful to roam around filming everything the way he never could in RL
It's like you're saying that in RL, anyone should be able to walk into my house unannounced, or into my back yard, and film me without my consent. Not just a building on a street, but me and my house and my back yard. And if I object, you're saying I'm thrwarting "freedom of expression".
These things are tested daily in the U.S. (they aren't in your country). So should a nutty religious group that hates gays that has a particularly weird view that our combat deaths in Iraq are caused by letting gays in the army, and in general, in public life, get to demonstrate their strange and nasty views right on the sidewalk outside a fallen soldier's funeral, humiliating and angering his grieving family members?
Answer provided by local officials interpreting First Amendment law, and courts reviewing the soldier's father's complaints: yes they can.
I marvel at how nobody could get a good "restrictions as to time place and manner" going on this, to say that this crazy group at least has to go 200 meters across the street, or to say that funerals are not what you get to picket and demonstrate.
OK, so now you have a group that's against the war in Iraq. They want to demonstrate at every soldier's funeral so that the president, the public, everybody gets it that this war is crazy and killing too many people and not worth it. But they can't because of the new town regulation put into effect to get rid of those religious nutters. So you see how it works. Not easy. And in the machinima case, I think the rule has to be: don't make code law, make law law, and if you are going to make code, make code that is lawful.
So that's why I'm for adding a flag to a parcel that keeps it open, but also marks it public or private, so that anything that physically can'still be entered is NOT available for scraping by bots filming if the "private" flag is ticked. The "group only" closing function is just not granulated enough to reflect the acutality of human organic will: I want my parcel open and not closed as a welcoming place, but I don't want it scraped by bots.
But that won't happen. The Lindens hate making not code as law but law as law. They do it under great duress and get it jumbled (hence the contradiction between TOS and policies on machinima). On machinima, I think there has to be policy, not code, and that the policy has to be based on ACTUAL public spaces not CODED public spaces. CODED public spaces are "any space not put on group-only or locked down out of sight". That's wrong. That's too blunt a weapon. It's a good reason why code shouldn't be law. The Lindens *should have* put in their policy a real-life-like policy that says "use common sense when filming, public spaces such as malls and clubs and welcome areas, and even people's showcase homes they want to show off in SL are things you can film. But be mindful of people's privacy and don't invade their homes and yards. Ask for permission if you will be filming residential areas."
Again, making a lifelike concept of "resident" and "business" and "public" and "private" isn't in the Linden's menu though they have nearly that sort of categorization on their little-used labels for land now. So I can only say: everyone should keep pointing out their muddle and contradictions and get them to re-do the machinima policy so that it is clear that it is not meant to discourage filming in PUBLIC places and force permission gathering from every avatar on a sim, but that it is not meant to provide cover for Papparazi Artful as a scripted, intrusive, non-opt-in device, to film all of SL and use it for that company's private business or political agenda.
>Well, again, you seem to be defending the opposite of what you did just 6 months ago :) If that means that you're happy with the measures that LL has taken to stop content theft, I have to agree that they're doing a good job. But yes, you're right. They are dealing with content theft far more aggressively. And it's nice to see that you also admit that this will never be 100% enforceable — since you yelled at me, not so long ago, when I claimed the same thing :) I'm glad that we can agree on this point, too :)
Your religious belief in opensource -- which is your driving agenda here in this beef with LL, though you cannot admit it -- doesn't let you admit that the chief reason there is copybotting in SL is because Cory Linden colluded with the makers and sellers of copybot, libsecondlife, and did not stop them. Cory and other Lindens colluded or did not stop the copybot from being made and from being sold until they had a near riot on their hands. They did this for deep, deep ideological reasons which drove their opensourcing of the viewer -- an act *hastened along by* the copying of the viewer illegally as reverse engineering by libsecondlife. This is all documented history of SL which you cannot deny as you saw it, too, though you may have celebrated it instead of condemning it. My banning from the Linden blog and my ejection from the Linden town hall with Cory was directly related to my objection of the *Linden* endorsement of the copybotting and griefing group libsecondlife.
So bottom line, I don't artificially divorce the Cory Linden problem, the extremist ideology of other Lindens, the libsecondlife problem, the early copybot problems, from copyright theft which has been rampantly and malicious aided and abetted *precisely due to that criminal williness of the Lindens back in 2006 to permit the reverse engineering of their code without action*. THAT is where it is rooted, Gwyn. THAT is what you have to see as a red thread following every incident of copying in SL.
To see copyright theft as merely a thousand isolated incidents of greedy kids plagiarizing dresses and making a buck is to overlook the grownups who laid the moral and technical space for these incidents to occur *with impunity*. Please look at this deeper than you are looking at this now.
Copyright theft will be deprived of its animus, its deep springs of being, its permeation in every aspect of life, when the Lindens confront where the root of it lies: in their hearts, and their belief in technocommunism. If they can root that out, they can do a better job of fixing it at the other end of the pipeline. When they stop creating an enabling environment for technocommunism, they can help plug at least the structure reason for the leaks.
>I don't think so. The number of reports is too small for that. If they had been Googlebombed, they had hundreds or thousands of reports, not just 72.
you're not getting my point here. It is like Googlebombing, in that it destroys a reputation, not actual literal Googlebombing. And hey, who needs a Googlebomb when you can file a mere 72 reports, get Gwyn to fume about it, set up Hamlet to thumb-suck about it, and you have a Meme sprung loose all over the blogosphere?
>Well, narrow for you, perhaps, because you are happy with the level of customer service you get from LL... I'm happy for you too! Sadly, the rest of the (virtual) world happens to disagree.
You aren't convincing, and you aren't documenting this very well. I would think with a blog post like this making much out of a BBB entry that is distorted, you should your (lost) money where your mouth is and file a public BBB complaint listing your actual consumer complaints. Otherwise I will view you as a provocateur and a poseur.
>So that's perhaps the reason why they're now restricting freedom of expression... ;)
Once again dear, let's go over it:
o seeking permission to send a scraper filming bot on my private residential lawn isn't a restriction of freedom of expression
o machinima is in fact seemingly given that right anyway
o the seeking of permission seems to be confusingly
Your problem is that you are trolling and fisking, and trying to get *my concern with privacy on my lawn, which is like EU privacy law* to translate into a Hyprokisy of saying "we shouldn't have freedom to film in SL". But, you can't get me to do that. Both privacy and freedom of expression are values. I don't even say like a European "but they need to be balanced" because I don't play balancing acts with rights. I say "but they need to be defined carefully so they don't encroach on each other".
>Tch. The pitfalls of democracy: giving people the right to say what they think, and do what they want. What do we have as a result? Crime, hatred, and communism (it's fun to see "communism" in the same label as "crime" and "hatred", but, of course, that's just a result of... hating them ;) ).
Er, no, Gwyn. Trolling again and just generally showing off your endless ability to be manipulative and duplicitious. What, you don't have a good EU citizen's care about PRIVACY? You're going to translate the EU policy about PRIVACY into a suppression of free speech for communism? Neat trick, that! So the EU PRIVACY law is all about repelling communism? Wow, who knew! It's about time, eh!
BTW, another legal nonsense I forgot to mention and will is that the Lindens promote freedom of machinima and publication in theory at least but don't do the same for chat logs.
<So, seriously, are you suggesting that Second Life ought to be a haven for Politically-Correct Speech only? I'm sorry to say that I couldn't disagree more. But then again, you were the one that wrote an article to encourage people to forbid Islamism to be discussed publicly in SL :)
Well you've really completely convinced yourself that I've called for the banning of free expression in SL, which of course I haven't done, and neatly transferred from the actual subject of my blog post and comments about *machinima* to written speech-- but hey, who's counting.
Again, I don't think that scripted agents should enter my land without me being able to opt out in a way that does not involve me shutting off my land completely. Hello! It's about freedom of expression having enough of a granulated toggle that I don't have to shut off freedom of expression completely by blocking my land (!) just to have PRIVACY.
For me, it's not even about privacy, as I don't seek it, but I do seek it for my tenants. It's also about the refusal to let scripted devices benefiting only one company from taking over the public space. It's actually a perfectly good social democratic concern that you socialists and democrats in the EU should love. That you don't let's me know there's a problem with your socialist democracy.
>The only thing I cannot understand is how you defended freedom of expression so thoroughly (and here and there you still do it) but now are jumping over to the other side — the side that wants to control what people say and think and discuss. You're serious about thinking of yourself as a liberal moderate, Prokofy? In my book, people that wish to control what gets discussed and are happy about rules curbing freedom of expression are far from being "liberal" or "moderates"...
Er, I guess it's because...I didn't? Let me go over it a 10th time?
1. I denounced the TOS as contradictory and a muddle, I didn't endorse it.
2. I advocated privacy from intrusive bots on my residential land. Advocating privacy is ultimately a right of the individual to freedom of expression, and not enabling the collective -- scripted bots -- from taking that away from me.
3. I didn't endorse the seeking of permission from individuals when taking machinima. I have never done that, never will do that, and do not practice it myself. In fact, on my land, I have a sign saying ON THE AIR that warns people there that they cannot claim sanctuary of any notion of privacy or opting out of a chat log or a screenshot because they are on a PUBLIC SPACE. That's my "covenant".
4. People who don't want other people to control THEM and decide FOR THEM what "gets discussed and publicized" -- i.e. scripted bots of companies scraping data -- are stopping freedom, not me. They've taken mine away. I haven't taken anything from them, because they have no demonstrable need or right to be filming *in my private space*. They don't in RL; they shouldn't in SL under colour of "freedom of speech for machinima". They can have this freedom without having to intrude unasked into a home. Even the news media chasing victims of notorious crimes or shamed politicians know that when it comes to the porch or the doorway and the hand held up -- they don't go further. Good Lord, Gwyn, you're being literalist and retarded about this.
That you can't grasp the debate here about PRIVACY and have converted it to some wierd notion that I'm applauding the lab for their machinima policy let's me know you're becoming unhinged.
The other issues I will address another time, but I think it's important to get what's going on here:
1. You -- if you are endorsing the side of all opensourceniks and Free Culture nuts and whatnot and lovers of all bots -- are not getting your permissive scraper-bot regime that you had hoped you would get because it appears that the TOS that allows you to have a Paparazzi Artful then claws that back (as um...I explained. So why I'm getting a wall o-text claiming I've lost my free speech values is insane).
2. Machinimists -- if they thought they'd have the regime enabled for Paparazzi Artful in the TOS would give them right of way everywhere -- are now facing something that looks like they have to get permission from every avatar visibly shown in their movies, and every landowner where they film.
3. Me -- who wants machinimists NOT to do that and NOT have to seek permission from anybody to do anything ON PUBLIC LANDS AND TO FILM FREELY ON PUBLIC LANDS WITHOUT HINDRANCE but who also wants TO BE FREE OF INTRUSION FROM BOTS and have PRIVACY -- has neither in this TOS. Neither.
Do you get that?
Wayfinder is being an ass -- I don't "troll," which is a word I don't accept generally as a concept even, as it inherently mitigates against free speech. I also don't "bait" in some insincere, cynical way. I write my judgements as things as I see them, and am utterly unconcerned about "political correctness". I don't look over my shoulder to see if I might be seen as "hypocritical" because I frankly believe in my own sincerity, even if you don't. I believe you have to be fair and accurate in criticizing Linden Lab, and criticize the hell out of them -- not something YOU have been doing, as you've been sucking up to them for years! -- and when they do something right, praise them, and when they are unfairly attacked, defend them on the merits.
Your claim that Linden Lab as an American company doing business in California needs an "F" on the BBB is absurd, tendentious, biased and full of a bitter personal agenda.
They don't deserve anything of the sort. But MMORPGs, as has been pointed out, can be unfairly singled out by disgruntled patrons who have all the time in the world to play forums junkyard dog in real life, too.
I guess I probed a nerve, because I can see you are completely flustered by my response. And I also see curiously that while I posted a blog titled "The New TOS is a Mess and Contradicts Itself" I'm being accused of endorsing bad TOS policies.
>I definitely think you're also part of the group that is out of touch with reality, Prokofy ;) It's amazing what deep levels of conspiracy theories you read between the lines when I wrote... absolutely nothing of what you're saying!
I think I'm as in touch as anybody can be with the reality of LL these days, but not in touch as most who go to office hours. I don't do office hours. I have my dignity. Do you? And I don't know where you're getting this conspiracy stuff when I haven't claimed one. I *have* pointed out that you seem to have lost your Lab hook-up and also are howling at the end of opensource madness -- and that's the truth.
<And it was the first time I see you defend LL's putting an end to freedom of expression. You see, according to the new ToS, that picture I posted on the top of the article is forbidden and a bannable offence, because I don't have LL's written permission to take pictures in their public in-world building. That's the kind of things that I'm pointing at.
Snorts. Oh, stop it Gwyn, you shouldn't sink to such *low* tactics. I've done nothing of the kind. And you haven't read the TOS. You can take screenshots (as distinct from machinima) without permission. Go and re-read it. But I'm the first to say it is confusing and seemingly contradictory and it is. But read it like you'd read an EU law about the percentage of milkfat in cheese, and then you'll get it.
>I might have felt offended if I were an extremist, a singularist, or an opensourcist :) Since I'm neither, I hardly see the logic of your statement. I never said that Linden Lab deserved an F because they don't agree with me. I didn't get them the rating! I didn't even file any complaints! And from the list of complaints received in the last 36 months, I have not seen any that showed that the "F" rating was given for ideological or philosophical reasons. No, they were given because of this, or, in a summarised version:
I think you need to stop hiding out on your alt Extropia, or, if she isn't an alt, stop pretending the MILES of air time you provide her with your blog are just damn weird. She could have long ago had her own blog by now. It's a big Internet. Your ceding the Thinker's leadership to her is also creepy. I'm one of the people who doesn't believe Extropia is an alt. So I'm going to chalk up this indignant rant here as more evidence that Extropia is NOT an alt. You're also an opensource booster. You bitch every time LL hasn't done every thing they could in this area, and your rant now amounts to this. Just because you aren't a nutter on OS Dev doesn't mean you aren't in that camp.
Your coyly claiming now that you aren't saying LL deserved an F is REAAAAALLLY lame. You've done a headline that has put this meme all over the blogosphere. All those people like Hamlet who respect you and amplify your voice 100 fold will pick up and run with this meme. So shame on you for that. You even picking this as a meme you need to run with is very cunning and very deliberate. That's why you are so annoying, Gwyn. You do hit-and-run drive-by blogging like this. Setting a meme out, getting all its mileage, and then running away from accountability by spending hours saying "I didn't say it" when you just did a blog ensuring that *it would be said*. That's called "outsourcing the hate".
>- 72 complaints filed against business
- Failure to respond to 2 complaints filed against business.
- Length of time business has taken to resolve complaint(s).
72 complaints is nothing for a company this size on the BBB. I think you don't grasp what the BBB is and what it does. In any event, if you view this as some kind of public shaming board that you can set up others to use while you pretend you didn't mean that, it won't work. Neither Linden Lab or anybody of any influence cares what this says, as they realize that disgruntled loons leave stuff on there, that it isn't enough of a number of reports, that bad press by cynical geeks who hate VWs probably does a lot more damage.
So if you wanted to hurt LL today, Gwyn, instead of fooling around with BBB, call up the Los Angeles times and dish on how crappy everything is now, they haven't banged on SL in a while and are due on the rotation cycle.
>Sorry to disagree with your biased, non-expert opinion. Since it's merely an opinion, you're welcome to express it. As a matter of fact, it happens to be the same opinion that Linden Lab is expressing. However, not even in the sunny state of California a company can try to push the liability of writing bad code to third parties by merely writing an agreement that says so. That's what's wrong with it. They would have done a far better job if they simply stated "Third Party Viewers are forbidden", end of story, without fuss. No one can forbid LL to limit access to their products and services, and that simple statement would be far less messy, quite clear, and have no legal problems whatsoever.
Oh, blah, Gwyn. This is so much up and down extremist blather. You and Morgaine! (Is she your alt, too? You/Extropia/Morgaine all sound so much alike these days). The downstream liability that these freaks thinks is pinned on them is not in the language of the TPV but in their fevered extremist minds. They are pushing this line and behaving like tragic victims and tragically misunderstood artists. It's all a huge act. Joe Miller's rather bland persistence (good for him!) that it doesn't say this is right on the mark. It says when you hook up to LL's servers, here's the drill, here's how you have to behave. It does not overreach to when you don't latch on to LL's servers.
If you have a burning desire to use their code to make a viewer that will copy content, steal passwords, track user activities, crash sims, I think you'll find that you have indemnity doing that in opensim and no one will be suing you for it on LL's side.
What's wrong with the OS rigidity, freakishness, mindless infantalism so on display here is this pouting -- "Unless we can hear this the way we want with more of a blank check, we won't play. We'll call it "No TPV policy at all" or "no devs wanted at all" boo hoo". Manipulative victim behaviour at its most obvious. There isn't messy. What *would* be messy is to say some total piece of legal nonsense like "No one can forbid LL to limit access to their products and services". That's the sort of thing that I guess the bureaucratic mind produces. It is very much like the statement "anything that is not allowed is forbidden" which so permeates law in magisterial systems, instead of "anything that is not forbidden is allowed" which is the way common law prefers to do this. And here, it *is* allowed to take your buggy, crappy, ripping, griefing, crashing viewer, and go all over the Internet with it, without worrying about a lawsuit from LL or its users. Of course, even Adam Zaius may not appreciate the losses and damages that occur with someone logging on to deliberately crash his servers, and he may have some notion of how he'd deal with that scenario that might wind up looking like...gasp...a TPV policy.
>I'm not saying that, where did you read that? They left LL before the new policies were in place. I didn't interview anyone. Some of them were only quoted as disagreeing with LL's policies. I've assumed that meant the policies of not listening to customers (since some of those ex-Lindens were very fond of close contact with residents), but I have absolutely no idea if that was the reason or not.
More drive-by blogging and coyness. You are the first blogger to tell us *they quit*. You do this in the same blog in which you lament the TPV and let people do the math. Disagreeing with WHAT policies?! I cannot believe that six Lindens quit all at once suddenly, after years, like Phoenix Linden, because suddenly they've all gotten squishy soft about "LL not listening to users". These are self-interested people, not Girl Scouts. They were more likely to have been fired than to have quit, given so many of them all got whacked at once, and if they did quit, it's much more likely to be over a traditional highly ideological Linden issue in which *Lindens* had stake, like the opensource program and TPVs, then some mushy crap like "Ohhhh they don't listen to residents".
<In any case, at least I hope that you agree that the way a company listens to their customers is far more important than discussing third-party viewer licenses :) (But after reading the rest of your comment, I'm not so sure any longer).
Again, so much tendentious blather from you again. I didn't say that, of course, but you're in tendentious/manipulation mode, so you can't be stopped. I said that *as a reason for LINDENS to quit* it wasn't likely. And still say that. And it isn't. And my thinking listening to residents, whatever vague mush that's supposed to mean, is more important doesn't matter. Lindens are self-interested. Lindens are not our advocates. I don't know where some residents got this idea that "My favourite Linden Pathfinder or Which Linden has been victimized and fired because he was in my corner stumping for residents". Baloney. These Lindens were fired, or quit over something MUUUUCH more self-interested.
<Ah, so you believe that Linden Lab's secret agenda is to allow people to mount attacks sovereignty, the individual, property, identity, and so forth? :) Interesting thought. It would explain why freedom of expression is now part of the list, too. And getting customers angry is definitely a good way to get the ball rolling...
You are writing yourself into a pretzel here. Here's what I think the secret agenda is of *some Lindens* that *other Lindens* either don't know about, don't care about, or aren't ready to control yet: letting the interoperability work continue, letting the IETF work continue, in the belief that LL will prevail somehow has a company and that's all a good thing, or else that LL won't lose anything from it, because it will take forever and go nowhere, and that way LL can look like it "cares" about "open standards", the bedrock of the opensource theology. "Open standards" of course are the standards of whatever big company is big enough to push whatever standards help them sell more widgets. (Actually a good reason why governments or an intergovernmental body, rather than a body made up by big companies and freaks working for them for free shouldn't decide standards).
I haven't had time to study the whole IETF thing carefully, but having following it as an amateur, I know it's up to no good. The extremists in it who have no value whatsoever for property, IP, copyright, etc. are ensuring those values are jettisoned. The presence of the maker and seller of the first copybot, John Hurliman of Intel, in this group, as one of its most vocal proponents, let's us know the level of morality and science in this project.
>Perhaps I'm too naive and still believe that this was an accident and not malicious intent, since it's so easy to make it right, and it doesn't even require a viewer change. If I'm proved wrong, I'll give you all the credit. In any case, my point is that LL doesn't care enough about what residents need and want, and yours is exactly one excellent example of what I mean...
I don't know what this means, it's not clear. If you mean that the viewer is easy to fix and therefore nothing is deliberate and everything is not set in stone, think again. The messing up of Search was VERY deliberate and very much part of an agenda as I've written. While they may mildly tweak this to get rid of the wackier broken pieces of it, like the refinement of your search results with a "traffic" or "name" search taking you out of your search results and back to the general dbase again, more likely nothing will change. The Linden in charge of this is a big fan of Lessis, Free Culture, blah blah, and has happily Googlized away the internal economy of SL, and she's been able to do this because other parties of Lindens in their warring camp found this useful for steering to at least a few big constituents the Lindens want to milk, like big classifieds merchants, etc. That's all.
>Please explain how that ultimately leads to a more profitable company. Not even Apple does that, and Steve Jobs is known to be the most egomaniac CEO of Silicon Valley...
Actually, Apple does JUST that very thing. Look at the i-pad. Legions of geeks like yourself are screaming, snorting, ridiculing, wailing about the i-pad. Normal people and ordinary people are thrilled. They will sell a lot of them. The Lindens have a very big FB group already, as many as the concurrency. It's a group that they don't moderate and yet it has almost all happy fluffy positive things on it. Given a chance to bypass all the oldbies with a death grip on SL's culture and layout such as yourself, and able to just fly in, buy a dress, dance a bit and socialize and then go to a humper bunker, most people will be supremely happy. I don't know if you've ever noticed how many thousands of people in SL are wildly happy and finding their absolutely perfect soul mate. Most ordinary people have a fantastic time in SL, and they don't even have to cyber, they can just casually socialize and shop and hang out. So LL will concentrate on those people, and business on the other end, and those interested in drilling deeper into the potentials of economic models and governance models will be ignored or even discouraged.
>LOL! Prokofy, you're smoking weird things. I think it's time I really do have to write an article about the pitfalls of Transhumanism and Extropianism, like I promised on another comment...
You could just shut off your Extropian alt, put her on another blog, and be done with it. That might help.
>I'm much less an "extropian nutter" than you are a "liberal moderate" unless your dictionary has different words than mine :) I remain a liberal capitalist, thank you very much, and I have no idea really of what you are, but "moderate" is definitely not going to feature in the label...
>a liberal capitalist such as myself has absolutely no problem with the new TPV. You are not a liberal capitalist if you have a problem with the TPV. You are a leftist, a socialist, an opensource proponent with an extremist bent. There's the Occam's Razor for you.
>And, honestly, for the sake of the argument, an endless socialist paradise looks to me as boring as a paradise where people play harps sitting on clouds and singing "Holy, Holy, Holy is God, Father in Heaven" for all eternity... ;) I don't subscribe to either!
Do you realize the Lindens have an Easter egg in the viewer (or should we call it, in keeping with their Burner culture, "A Hunk a Burnin' Junk"), whereby groups of residents, if they go in a group inworld and sing together, they can get the viewer to force them into various happy gesters. Creepy, eh?
>Well, you might be right. After all, Linden Lab has exactly the same opinion as you do. It's interesting, though, how those disgruntled freaks are not attacking Microsoft, Apple... or even ComCast. Why do you think they're all just complaining about Linden Lab? What makes LL so special to get the monopoly on disgruntled freaks making complaints?
I'll give you the short answer, Gwyn: People do not have sex inside Microsoft Word. They do not run a business literally off their Apple i-hone unless they are little API nerd engineers. They do not shop and hear live music by their relationship to Comcast. Does that help? People are far more emotionally invested in this product because of what it does.
>You don't know that. We only know that there were 19 complaints regarding billing or collection issues, including, but not limited, to improper collection practices, unauthorized bank debits, or unauthorized credit card charges just in the past 36 months. The amounts are not specified. It could have been as little as US$1 or far more than that. So the answer is, at best, "probably not" and not such an assertive "no" like you presume.
I have a billing complaint right this minute. Who doesn't? The Lindens still have this problem whereby some accounts bill with a header on them saying "UK VIDEO ARCADE". Can you imagine what my bank does when they see an overseas billing code coming at the debit card with a label like "UK VIDEO ARCADE"? They call in alarm. LL has double billed me a number of times and taken forever to undo this. ON that account, PayPal looks askance at LL and doesn't pass it through. I get a call from Paypal too saying OMG UK VIDEO ARCADE. Yes, it's a problem. But I view it as so minor a problem in the scheme of things that I don't even follow up. It will get fixed, as it has before.
As for "you don't even know," well, gosh, I plead guilty. I don't know. I challenge those who claim there's mounds of CS complaints to produce the actualities. P.S. I got my chickens back without Lindens. But I think the problem is that you are simply seeing the *nature* of this business differently than me. You view it as a software company. I don't. It's product isn't software. It's product is a world, an experience.
Second Life is a big theme park. It's like Six Flags. How many billions of people come through a place like Six Flags? Every other year there is a death in the pool or every third year there's a fateful fall off the roller coaster. Do these cause complaints on the BBB? Probably not. BBB complaints aren't about grave tragedies like that, but whether or not the hot dogs caused food poisoning or the cashier gave you the wrong change.
That's how to understand Linden Lab. It is an amusement park with 16 million casual visitors of whom 1.5 actually stayed for the day and came back again. Out of these 1.5 million, some 72 filed complaints about the hotdogs, and perhaps one fell off the roller coaster and died.
>The rest of us have a different experience. 25 residents filed complains regarding Customer Service issues. Where did you get the "97%" figure from? I'm afraid I'm just unlucky because me, my partners, and my clients are all on the remaining 3%? It could be the case. We all dread talking to customer support and use that only when we're desperate. It's like going to the dentist: you know it's good for you at the end, but you're not going to enjoy the experience.
I'm on the mainland so I have to ask Lindens at least once a day to reset a sim, move a tree on their land in the way, solve massive griefing. Island owners with big estates have transfers, renames, moves, lag, etc. I dunno, I am a heavy user of CS. They are always good.
>On the policy side of things, it's not getting better, and I fail to understand how you are so happy about more and more restrictions to what you can do and not do in SL, some of them curbing your freedom of expression. I remember reading your very old blog posts yelling at the way LL restricted your freedom of expression by repeatedly banning you from blogs, forums, and kicking you out of town halls and office hours and the like. I used to be worried about LL's attitude because you were the living example of what LL really thinks deep down, which is that residents should hush up, pay, and not complain. But, well, those were mostly isolated cases, so I never thought these would become the mainstream of thought at the 'Lab. Now that these policies start popping up on the agreements you sign with LL when you log in, you all of a sudden switch sides, and proudly proclaim that this is how things should be! Why the sudden 180º turn, Prokofy? I can't understand your motives behind that. Sure, you're allowed to switch opinions (as someone who changes her opinion frequently, I definitely entitle you to do the same :) ), but I used to see you as an example of someone aggressively fighting Linden Lab's attitude of silencing dissenting opinions. Now that they're incorporated in the rules regulating the relationship between the 'Lab and their customers, what made you change your opinion?
This seems to be the heart of your tendentious and cranky response to me, so let me go over it again.
1. Approval of Linden Lab *codifying* and *moving toward the rule of law* is not approval of those essentially unlawful notions in their TOS/policies. Maybe this is over your head. But taking policies off blogs and office hour chat logs, and putting them in a formal way linked to actual sections of the TOS is a HUGE milestone. It may seem trivial
Think of it as like Hammarabi's code. Or the idea of "an eye for an eye". Many find that barbaric. But it wasn't in the era of the barbarians, who were happy now had a legal code that said "Poke out an eye when your eye is poked out, if you must, but don't cut off a hand". That's progress.
LL has not restricted my right to take and post a screenshot on the mainland. At least, I've read it that way. They now require priori consent for machinima and I've criticized that. I've pointed out how they contradict themselves. I've also pointed out the problem of devising a policy that a) gets rid of Papparazi Artful's ability to intrude anywhere and b)
I don't want Papparazi Artful, a scheming bot that merely scrapes data for one third-party geeky company's advantage, to scrape my land without my consent just because I didn't close off my land. I don't like that concept that takes us away from RL, where we can't film in a person's home or in their backyard as strangers without seeking consent as a moral issue.
I do want machinimists to go everywhere and take movies like concerts or interesting builds without getting a signature. On the one hand, it sounds like the Lindens *in the TOS* opened the door to let Papparazi Artful go on scraping us unless we lock down our land;on the other hand it makes it sound like the Lindens are requiring their beloved Draxtor to collect 100 signatures each time he makes a generally pro-LL video. I'm quite sure the Lindens want to square this circle. They want Paparazzi Artful to roam around filming everything the way he never could in RL
It's like you're saying that in RL, anyone should be able to walk into my house unannounced, or into my back yard, and film me without my consent. Not just a building on a street, but me and my house and my back yard. And if I object, you're saying I'm thrwarting "freedom of expression".
These things are tested daily in the U.S. (they aren't in your country). So should a nutty religious group that hates gays that has a particularly weird view that our combat deaths in Iraq are caused by letting gays in the army, and in general, in public life, get to demonstrate their strange and nasty views right on the sidewalk outside a fallen soldier's funeral, humiliating and angering his grieving family members?
Answer provided by local officials interpreting First Amendment law, and courts reviewing the soldier's father's complaints: yes they can.
I marvel at how nobody could get a good "restrictions as to time place and manner" going on this, to say that this crazy group at least has to go 200 meters across the street, or to say that funerals are not what you get to picket and demonstrate.
OK, so now you have a group that's against the war in Iraq. They want to demonstrate at every soldier's funeral so that the president, the public, everybody gets it that this war is crazy and killing too many people and not worth it. But they can't because of the new town regulation put into effect to get rid of those religious nutters. So you see how it works. Not easy. And in the machinima case, I think the rule has to be: don't make code law, make law law, and if you are going to make code, make code that is lawful.
So that's why I'm for adding a flag to a parcel that keeps it open, but also marks it public or private, so that anything that physically can'still be entered is NOT available for scraping by bots filming if the "private" flag is ticked. The "group only" closing function is just not granulated enough to reflect the acutality of human organic will: I want my parcel open and not closed as a welcoming place, but I don't want it scraped by bots.
But that won't happen. The Lindens hate making not code as law but law as law. They do it under great duress and get it jumbled (hence the contradiction between TOS and policies on machinima). On machinima, I think there has to be policy, not code, and that the policy has to be based on ACTUAL public spaces not CODED public spaces. CODED public spaces are "any space not put on group-only or locked down out of sight". That's wrong. That's too blunt a weapon. It's a good reason why code shouldn't be law. The Lindens *should have* put in their policy a real-life-like policy that says "use common sense when filming, public spaces such as malls and clubs and welcome areas, and even people's showcase homes they want to show off in SL are things you can film. But be mindful of people's privacy and don't invade their homes and yards. Ask for permission if you will be filming residential areas."
Again, making a lifelike concept of "resident" and "business" and "public" and "private" isn't in the Linden's menu though they have nearly that sort of categorization on their little-used labels for land now. So I can only say: everyone should keep pointing out their muddle and contradictions and get them to re-do the machinima policy so that it is clear that it is not meant to discourage filming in PUBLIC places and force permission gathering from every avatar on a sim, but that it is not meant to provide cover for Papparazi Artful as a scripted, intrusive, non-opt-in device, to film all of SL and use it for that company's private business or political agenda.
>Well, again, you seem to be defending the opposite of what you did just 6 months ago :) If that means that you're happy with the measures that LL has taken to stop content theft, I have to agree that they're doing a good job. But yes, you're right. They are dealing with content theft far more aggressively. And it's nice to see that you also admit that this will never be 100% enforceable — since you yelled at me, not so long ago, when I claimed the same thing :) I'm glad that we can agree on this point, too :)
Your religious belief in opensource -- which is your driving agenda here in this beef with LL, though you cannot admit it -- doesn't let you admit that the chief reason there is copybotting in SL is because Cory Linden colluded with the makers and sellers of copybot, libsecondlife, and did not stop them. Cory and other Lindens colluded or did not stop the copybot from being made and from being sold until they had a near riot on their hands. They did this for deep, deep ideological reasons which drove their opensourcing of the viewer -- an act *hastened along by* the copying of the viewer illegally as reverse engineering by libsecondlife. This is all documented history of SL which you cannot deny as you saw it, too, though you may have celebrated it instead of condemning it. My banning from the Linden blog and my ejection from the Linden town hall with Cory was directly related to my objection of the *Linden* endorsement of the copybotting and griefing group libsecondlife.
So bottom line, I don't artificially divorce the Cory Linden problem, the extremist ideology of other Lindens, the libsecondlife problem, the early copybot problems, from copyright theft which has been rampantly and malicious aided and abetted *precisely due to that criminal williness of the Lindens back in 2006 to permit the reverse engineering of their code without action*. THAT is where it is rooted, Gwyn. THAT is what you have to see as a red thread following every incident of copying in SL.
To see copyright theft as merely a thousand isolated incidents of greedy kids plagiarizing dresses and making a buck is to overlook the grownups who laid the moral and technical space for these incidents to occur *with impunity*. Please look at this deeper than you are looking at this now.
Copyright theft will be deprived of its animus, its deep springs of being, its permeation in every aspect of life, when the Lindens confront where the root of it lies: in their hearts, and their belief in technocommunism. If they can root that out, they can do a better job of fixing it at the other end of the pipeline. When they stop creating an enabling environment for technocommunism, they can help plug at least the structure reason for the leaks.
>I don't think so. The number of reports is too small for that. If they had been Googlebombed, they had hundreds or thousands of reports, not just 72.
you're not getting my point here. It is like Googlebombing, in that it destroys a reputation, not actual literal Googlebombing. And hey, who needs a Googlebomb when you can file a mere 72 reports, get Gwyn to fume about it, set up Hamlet to thumb-suck about it, and you have a Meme sprung loose all over the blogosphere?
>Well, narrow for you, perhaps, because you are happy with the level of customer service you get from LL... I'm happy for you too! Sadly, the rest of the (virtual) world happens to disagree.
You aren't convincing, and you aren't documenting this very well. I would think with a blog post like this making much out of a BBB entry that is distorted, you should your (lost) money where your mouth is and file a public BBB complaint listing your actual consumer complaints. Otherwise I will view you as a provocateur and a poseur.
>So that's perhaps the reason why they're now restricting freedom of expression... ;)
Once again dear, let's go over it:
o seeking permission to send a scraper filming bot on my private residential lawn isn't a restriction of freedom of expression
o machinima is in fact seemingly given that right anyway
o the seeking of permission seems to be confusingly
Your problem is that you are trolling and fisking, and trying to get *my concern with privacy on my lawn, which is like EU privacy law* to translate into a Hyprokisy of saying "we shouldn't have freedom to film in SL". But, you can't get me to do that. Both privacy and freedom of expression are values. I don't even say like a European "but they need to be balanced" because I don't play balancing acts with rights. I say "but they need to be defined carefully so they don't encroach on each other".
>Tch. The pitfalls of democracy: giving people the right to say what they think, and do what they want. What do we have as a result? Crime, hatred, and communism (it's fun to see "communism" in the same label as "crime" and "hatred", but, of course, that's just a result of... hating them ;) ).
Er, no, Gwyn. Trolling again and just generally showing off your endless ability to be manipulative and duplicitious. What, you don't have a good EU citizen's care about PRIVACY? You're going to translate the EU policy about PRIVACY into a suppression of free speech for communism? Neat trick, that! So the EU PRIVACY law is all about repelling communism? Wow, who knew! It's about time, eh!
BTW, another legal nonsense I forgot to mention and will is that the Lindens promote freedom of machinima and publication in theory at least but don't do the same for chat logs.
<So, seriously, are you suggesting that Second Life ought to be a haven for Politically-Correct Speech only? I'm sorry to say that I couldn't disagree more. But then again, you were the one that wrote an article to encourage people to forbid Islamism to be discussed publicly in SL :)
Well you've really completely convinced yourself that I've called for the banning of free expression in SL, which of course I haven't done, and neatly transferred from the actual subject of my blog post and comments about *machinima* to written speech-- but hey, who's counting.
Again, I don't think that scripted agents should enter my land without me being able to opt out in a way that does not involve me shutting off my land completely. Hello! It's about freedom of expression having enough of a granulated toggle that I don't have to shut off freedom of expression completely by blocking my land (!) just to have PRIVACY.
For me, it's not even about privacy, as I don't seek it, but I do seek it for my tenants. It's also about the refusal to let scripted devices benefiting only one company from taking over the public space. It's actually a perfectly good social democratic concern that you socialists and democrats in the EU should love. That you don't let's me know there's a problem with your socialist democracy.
>The only thing I cannot understand is how you defended freedom of expression so thoroughly (and here and there you still do it) but now are jumping over to the other side — the side that wants to control what people say and think and discuss. You're serious about thinking of yourself as a liberal moderate, Prokofy? In my book, people that wish to control what gets discussed and are happy about rules curbing freedom of expression are far from being "liberal" or "moderates"...
Er, I guess it's because...I didn't? Let me go over it a 10th time?
1. I denounced the TOS as contradictory and a muddle, I didn't endorse it.
2. I advocated privacy from intrusive bots on my residential land. Advocating privacy is ultimately a right of the individual to freedom of expression, and not enabling the collective -- scripted bots -- from taking that away from me.
3. I didn't endorse the seeking of permission from individuals when taking machinima. I have never done that, never will do that, and do not practice it myself. In fact, on my land, I have a sign saying ON THE AIR that warns people there that they cannot claim sanctuary of any notion of privacy or opting out of a chat log or a screenshot because they are on a PUBLIC SPACE. That's my "covenant".
4. People who don't want other people to control THEM and decide FOR THEM what "gets discussed and publicized" -- i.e. scripted bots of companies scraping data -- are stopping freedom, not me. They've taken mine away. I haven't taken anything from them, because they have no demonstrable need or right to be filming *in my private space*. They don't in RL; they shouldn't in SL under colour of "freedom of speech for machinima". They can have this freedom without having to intrude unasked into a home. Even the news media chasing victims of notorious crimes or shamed politicians know that when it comes to the porch or the doorway and the hand held up -- they don't go further. Good Lord, Gwyn, you're being literalist and retarded about this.
That you can't grasp the debate here about PRIVACY and have converted it to some wierd notion that I'm applauding the lab for their machinima policy let's me know you're becoming unhinged.
The other issues I will address another time, but I think it's important to get what's going on here:
1. You -- if you are endorsing the side of all opensourceniks and Free Culture nuts and whatnot and lovers of all bots -- are not getting your permissive scraper-bot regime that you had hoped you would get because it appears that the TOS that allows you to have a Paparazzi Artful then claws that back (as um...I explained. So why I'm getting a wall o-text claiming I've lost my free speech values is insane).
2. Machinimists -- if they thought they'd have the regime enabled for Paparazzi Artful in the TOS would give them right of way everywhere -- are now facing something that looks like they have to get permission from every avatar visibly shown in their movies, and every landowner where they film.
3. Me -- who wants machinimists NOT to do that and NOT have to seek permission from anybody to do anything ON PUBLIC LANDS AND TO FILM FREELY ON PUBLIC LANDS WITHOUT HINDRANCE but who also wants TO BE FREE OF INTRUSION FROM BOTS and have PRIVACY -- has neither in this TOS. Neither.
Do you get that?
I don't have to love or hate LL's policies to know that if I don't agree to them I am not authorized to connect to their network.
I fully expect all those who are upset and angry over the new policies to cease their existence in SL on April 30, 2010.
I.e.; GTFO or STFU.
The irony that sentence can now be said by those whom that sentence has always been said to.
Posted by: AnnOtooleInSL | April 02, 2010 at 05:41 AM
Prok:
RE: Gwyn - While I disagree with labeling her rebuttal of you as "character assassination", (You went to her blog and lambasted her first on this.) I don't know what's up with Gwyn about the third party viewer policies.
This is one of those times where a VERY vocal, VERY minority group is complaining. Are they developers and deserved to be heard? Yes. Does that mean people can generalize and say "Linden Lab isn't listening to their customers"? No. In fact, they should be saying, "Linden Lab isn't listening to its business partners and developers", if anything. But that's still only part of the story, because I think a ton of content creators are happy with the new policy.
And it's not a new policy. Linden Lab has technically never "allowed" third party viewers to wholesale copy, but now it's moved to the ToS. I really don't see the hoopla being raised as warranted.
Do I still think Linden Lab needs solutions to back-up? Yes. At the same time, structuring the third-party-viewer policy ought to motivate third-party-viewer creators to make viewers that can do that and still respect IP; at the same time, it should motivate people to have better building and scripting practices.
RE: Machinima and Snapshots:
I read the ToS about this closely. It also specifically refers to the SL wiki entry about Machinima and Snapshot policy, which both references Fair Use policy as well as, essentially, "Check the estate's covenant before taking pictures / machinima". And "get a signed permission from any avatar". To me, this reads that Linden Lab actually has a fairly good understanding of the legal needs (make sure it isn't sued by people complaining that snapshots are taken) and at the time establishing a proper framework for protecting IP.
Posted by: Hiro Pendragon | April 02, 2010 at 09:23 AM
Am I being deleted now, or did Typepad swallow my last post?
Posted by: Hiro Pendragon | April 02, 2010 at 09:32 AM
Personally, I think the rules as they stand could be tweaked a little, but aren't horrible.
I agree having to ask LL for permission is rather lame. In Real Life you don't have to go ask the government for permission every time you take picture on a public street, it's 'granted by default" as the coders would say. However, you probably would have to ask permission inside a courthouse, even though it's a public area as well. But there are good reasons for that. I don't see any overwhelming good reason you need permission to take a picture of a Ahern for example. I guess it just lets LL control and mitigate anything which they may feel is negative about their image and company.
The Machinima policy is a different animal. In some ways it does seem very restrictive, however, the moving picture is much more powerful and evocative than a still picture, so I can see the argument for getting tacit permission from anyone who is easily recognized in such a video.
As for the scraper bot, It seems they skirt the rules, since they take snapshots, and then convert those still images *into* a 3D video. But the pictures they take are hardly the item of most concern, it's the other personally identifiable information they can gather (personal to the Avatar).
Posted by: Darien Caldwell | April 02, 2010 at 11:56 AM
My Koinup update. They told me that they can't delete the account along with the content in it. If they did, the content in the account would still be there. So their customer service answer to me was to just leave it all up and orphan it since they did not give me (a customer) an easy option to delete pics on it. So confident they were that no one would want to leave they didn't even think to create an option for mass deletion of pics. Anyone reading this should seriously rethink uploading anything into Koinup.
The problem with Machinima and Screenshots is that creators have been thinking of SL as private galleries and the public have been thinking of open spaces as public. I don't know how to address that truthfully. In NY, museums allow photos except in private shows. The new TOS policy tries to address it but it is muddled. I have just decided to stop taking pics because I don't want to be involved in over zealous problems on any account.
My own little plot is and will always be open. I hate ban lines. So that means I won't mind pics being taken of my garden or machinima made of it. Inside of my VR house is a different matter. However, everyone does have to worry whether or not each and every plant creator, clothing creator etc has given permission to have screenshot-machima recreations made of them. That leads back to the private gallery vs public space problem again.
Posted by: melponeme_k | April 02, 2010 at 01:01 PM
so koinup WONT let you delete an account? PUBLI - SIZE IT!
make noise. maybe ill kill my account too.
this is about commercial value. the value of OTHERS work/ time/ and property.
next time youre in a commercial art gallery, try setting up a tripod to photograph the displayed artists photographs.:) for free- for you to resale -under the free license of the galleries owner- in "your gallery " without the artists permission. see how long that gallery has patrons or artists showing there.
or try to film a "kids show tv pilot" at "SIX FLAGS PARK" without permissions.
were not talking abiut "personal usage family movies".. were talking about a broad non restrictive license to reuse for any purpose that LL has ASSUMED they now can GIVE to anyone.
really selfish, really only for the interest of SL..not like any "realife" gallery or co -creative- rl event- or even ISP- ive heard of.
they NOW claim what AOL got "all hell for" for by the aol arts communities in 1992.
Adobes failed "flickr stype app- had the same tos issue- rebuked in a day after it was CAUGHT by creators online.
really all crap indeed,:)
surprized prok dont get it... still mixing up commercial with civic activities...? oh well. played too many sim city game god games i guess;)
its so simple- both WOW and BLIZZARD get it. they protect the IP commercial value within their product- services, even if they created it or not.
the machinima screenshot tos IS technocommunism... it takes all IP and gives its usage for any purpose to all for "free".- just log in to SL-- its one big IP freebiemart..unless its a Linden trademark or about their concurenny of user base.
Posted by: cube inada | April 02, 2010 at 01:50 PM
It seems *you* don't get it. You keeps saying SL is a freebie mart. Freebie mart of what? pictures of someone's skirt? Picture of a 3 day old newb avatar? Picture of someone's store?
None of these have any value at all. They can't be sold, and likely not even given away. It's like you imagine there is some market for pictures of builds and avatars, and there's not.
There is absolutely no way to make 1 thin cent from a screenshot taken in SL. None. Zero. Nada.
If it's a freebie mart of anything it's 100% worthless screenshots. Worthless in monetary value, valuable only in the sentimental nature and joy they may bring the viewer of said screenshot.
Your argument reminds me of the people who think taking your photo means the person took your soul. Just as unreasonable and just as based in fear, ignorance, and superstition.
If I take a picture of your build, I don't somehow siphon off it's value, leaving your build suddenly 'soulless'. People want to buy the build, not the picture of the build, trust me.
And the more that know about the build, the more that will buy it.
Posted by: Darien Caldwell | April 02, 2010 at 03:36 PM
In regards to private galleries, I was thinking along the lines that they prohibit photography. Just as special showcases in museums prohibit photos as well.
SL has decided that they will be as close to a public commons as they can allow. Which is why their TOS changed. Then they put the onus on the customers to allow or prohibit whatever they want on the land they rent. But it isn't their responsibility in the long run.
What creators want is what Blizzard etc have. However, creators will then have to create that platform for themselves separate from SL, OSgrid, BM etc. On that platform they can control the no photography option. I would suppose they could group together and create something under the banner of a major museum. But museums are hurting for cash now and not many of them are jumping into VR. Even if it could be done, there would be a question of people visiting it.
On SL that will not be the case. Unless someone wants to test out being the first court case. I'm going to sit it out until it's settled.
Posted by: melponeme_k | April 02, 2010 at 05:16 PM
jesus, you guys are so brainwashed.
darian. -
.-- go google Flickr or youtube or HBO. not a cent made by them -right;)
mel.- try flash, unity3d , 3dxplorer, and any old ISP.. etc or any licensed software TOOL or even some other SERVICE not so arroagant,almost anyone can make a 3d mu gallery. and NOT be required to offer a third party ANY RIGHTS by using thes otehr options and a REAL ISP-.
facebook, AOl, and Adobe all had to "apologise" for this type of clawing at others IP.. and they also retracted these type of TOS terms.
LL should do the aame.
Koinup will most likely be bought by LL within the year, this is most likely the reason they are grabbing so broad to monetize via TOS on such assets.
totally limited thinking, and why every other user gen vr/online world/ gallery service has died from non usage of content of any value, or has been part of the huge transfer of work for free to a few giant server renters that brainwashed a generation to believing they will make a living by giving work away for free.
Posted by: cube inada | April 02, 2010 at 06:55 PM
BTW - mel
i have had dozens of vr museums, even the Charles Shulz Museum, online and in MU 3d for years. NONE fo them had to deal with the TOS issue as to the reuse/loss of IP license rights of works presented.
I tried to make all this clear 4 years ago to you all... Only after the last vr worlds/service companies built on others content for "free" are dead, and enough have had value taken from, will those not turned to "creative borg", get it:)
Posted by: cube inada | April 02, 2010 at 07:03 PM
The artists inside SL should have stayed inside their own 3d museums. Because it is always been clear that SL wasn't the place to be. The new TOS is wrong and should not scrape rights of the people using the platform. In turn LL is also trying to create a more Blizzard like deal for themselves and take back a platform that has been molded by disparate parties. Not always the good sort either.
The "Free Content" model is going to die hard because many companies make a living off of it.
I've stopped taking screenshots. I'll be deleting everything SL in the next few weeks. I suggest creators get together and issue mass takedown notices to all screenshot makers. It won't be popular but it will give notice to the issues on hand.
Posted by: melponeme_k | April 02, 2010 at 07:57 PM
hm.
its very sick that the content creators would need to do that to "get notice for the issue" and appear as the "bad guys" playing right into the spoiled "free content child" companies hands.
id rather see a commecial attack.-- GREENIES PORNO-- would serve RAR right, and make the point. Or maybe- use those Linden Teddie bear "3d assets" in an "objectionble-embarrasing way"
its gotta be sold commercially and upset the content owners closest to LL.:) and not be able to be considered fair use;)
so sad and sick.
betterverse...lol my ass
Posted by: cube inada | April 02, 2010 at 08:31 PM
ah....this is it:)
http://www.metaversejournal.com/2010/03/24/linden-lab-ceos-art-show-in-second-life-uwa-scores-again/
FREE IMAGES!!-- lots of 2d doodle art assets... come and get em.
i suggest "some derivative" video and still works made.. and a website with loads of google ad words to sell them as t-shirts and dvds.:)
Posted by: cube inada | April 02, 2010 at 08:57 PM
This can't be done with everyone looking saintly and squeaky clean. Its going to be a hard and dirty fight.
To look good or trying for a better deal means the Pinkertons come shooting, leaving the concerned parties expiring in the snow ala Beatty in McCabe and Mrs. Miller. Meanwhile the rest are all here celebrating Presbyterian Church.
History is circles, always has been.
Posted by: melponeme_k | April 02, 2010 at 08:58 PM
well i just walked around the public galleries and took some screen shots.. arty stuff..lol
M'art is what i be callin it.
Ive re-packaged and re-producted it all up for a few bucks for my fellow residents...
drop by Minchau at 969m...;)
maybe a wider sales compaign later:)
all set to go on SLX.:)
ethics? i look, i see, i read land cov, i snap, i upload, then i re-value!
makin bank in the metaverse.;)
Posted by: cube inada | April 02, 2010 at 10:39 PM
"well i just walked around the public galleries and took some screen shots.. arty stuff..lol"
Nobody wants it. :) Yawn.
Posted by: Darien Caldwell | April 03, 2010 at 12:05 PM
Are you sure? Genius. works of genius they are. Open to all to enjoy the creativity of me. oh. and someother guy in the new tos of SL.
Posted by: cube inada | April 03, 2010 at 12:45 PM
>She could have long ago had her own blog by now. It's a big Internet<
Yes it is, and that is the problem. I could have a blog of my own but it would be lost in utter obscurity. But if I get published on a blog with an established audience, there is more of a chance that people will read what I have to say.
Am I piggybacking on Gwyn's reputation? Yes, of course. This is nothing new. Think of those so-called co-authored papers in which one author is a scientist of great repute. Said scientist merely agrees to be credited as co-author without actively contributing to the piece itself. Their name guarantees a far wider audience than would otherwise be the case. In a somewhat similar fashion, Gwyn agrees to publish my essays and I benefit from the readership her hard work as earned her.
As for Thinkers, you seem confused with regards to how things are done. Anybody who is a member (or even if they are not, as far as I am concerned) are free to hold and chair discussions. There is no rule stating 'only Extropia DaSilva may host Thinkers discussions'. That the vast majority have been chaired by me, is due to the fact that I seem to be the only person who can be arsed to think up topics for discussion in the first place.
Posted by: Extropia DaSilva | April 08, 2010 at 07:08 AM