MarcusD Braveheart

There are quite a few people saying that the context of the new TOS (which hasn't dropped down yet as something we've had to sign to log on) says that publication of chat logs relates to SL and the SL forums and inworld only.

I'm going to take the literalism at its word, even though I know the Lindens have deliberately made this ambigious so they can both themselves tacitly bully people who publish chatlogs, and also enable legions of their online fanboyz to bully with it as well.

I have on my profile a disclaimer: "I'm in one-party consent New York State. Your abusive IM to me constitutes your consent to publish any chatlog."

So...This just in:

-- Instant message logging enabled --
[9:11]  MarcusD Braveheart: (Saved Tue Mar 01 08:59:42 2011) I am truly disappointed Mr. Neva. Only one who is well and truly paranoid would jump to the conclusion you have without a single shred tangible evidence. No matter, you may enjoy your little blog. You have done nothing more than to drive away a person with an opinion which you yourself do not hold. I would suggest that you hold off on such actions in the future until such time as you can act without looking like a fool. Your response to this message is not needed nor required, the instant it is sent you will be placed on mute as I have no wish to hear back from the likes of those who must make excuses to silence others. You do not have my permission to reprint this message anywhere, in any form.

Well, sorry, but when little bullying thugs in SL send me messages like that, the first thing I do is *rush* to publish them.

Why? Am I just "trolling" or "obdurate"? No, I simply have no recourse, and no other means of defense against people like this.

He was banned from this blog for the simple reason that he appeared to be speaking *exactly*, with the same words, and style, and tone and obsessiveness, as another person.

Rather than "no shred of evidence," I had plenty to suspect that MarcusD is Solar Legion: use of the word "kindly" as an admonition that was anything but kind; obsession with me and fighting me in comments; obsession on this topic; density about grasping the finer points of the discussion; evasiveness about saying "no, I'm not him" but saying nothing.

Is he an alt of Sean Williams? Who knows? He doesn't have the same IP address, but those dynamically change, as Sean Williams kept telling us -- um, except when they don't.

Perhaps he isn't, and is being unfairly charged. How can we know? We are in the awful position of never knowing. And it doesn't matter. Unless, of course, he's used an alt to evade a ban -- a ban that was instituted on him in the first place not because of "his opinion" or of his often savage critique of me -- that doesn't matter.

It's because of his sly methods of trying to evade my rules, and evade my main point for them: reputational accountability in world.

Sean began to post as "Sean Williams" and always denying that he was Solar Legion, even tho the IP addresses matched and he himself linked them. I wouldn't have any reason ever to match IPs and out people, if it weren't for my demand for compliance with the rule. I pointed out that "Sean Williams" is a basketball player and any one of a zillion people on the Internet. So as a real-life name, it's not a very good accountability inducer. WHICH Sean William was this Sean Williams? If he's on FB, then indicate it. Or if he has some other validation, indicate it. He refused. I then pointed out that he was Solar Legion. Why not use that name to post, as that was indeed what he was attached to, and was more recognizable in this community than "Sean Williams"? He refused. He wanted to keep that inworld RP avatar free of connection to his nasty and stupid and vile comments here.

And no one of any intelligence denies they were nasty and stupid and vile. They were allowed anyway because I have a high threshold of tolerance. But I do demand that you link up your nasty and stupid and vile comments with a valid and recognizable identity. He refused. Out he went.

I have a hunch MarcusD is his new gambit to try to bend the rules -- but maybe not.

There's a simple solution. MarcusD can come and say "I'm not an alt". But hasn't. [Now he has, published below -- well, sorta.] To be sure, he's banned and his messages end up in the spam bin. But I don't see one saying that. [A message did appear, included below.]

Let's remember how this fight started. I criticized Ina Centaur for a cynical and deliberate act of economic sabotage, as she herself described it, releasing freebies into the world to undercut the market and those making their living making skins.

I called it out for what it was. I especially admonished her for trying to put bullying and threatening social injunctions on lists and blogs in the course of releasing these skins, urging readers to take part in a secret police informants' exercise, which is to report and rat out anyone caught selling these skins.

Remember, the issue isn't copying the work and selling it as your own. The issue is that these skins are on all perms. The issue is selling what is able to be sold which is not on "no transfer" and could be.

I indicated that if someone has freebies and doesn't want them to be sold and would prefer to just give them away, he has a solution: don't put them on transfer, put them in your store for free. Don't expect the entire world to go on playing Lady Bountiful for you. See, THAT is the destructive part of these assholes. It's not REALLY that they are releasing something for free as a kindness or even as a loss-leader. They are releasing them AND trying to bind everybody else in their collectivism.

They are releasing them for free as a political act, and demand that they be spread beyond their immediate scope, and that everyone who gets a freebie and puts it out also spread it and never sell it, never even take $1 or $5.

And that's just plain wrong. I refuse to participate in such coerciveness. Such coercion has no place in a free economy.

It especially has no place in SL where there are other remedies.

MarcusD, who isn't terribly bright (another marker he could be Sean Williams) insists that we "must' obey these CC licenses in SL if tucked into the prim. Why? CC has no legal backing. It has no body of court cases upholding it. The one court case that *might* have established this (the Virgin Mobile one) was withdrawn by CC itself. In that case, the photographer released his photograph on all perms, the most permissive regimen within CC, *allowing for commercial use*. He then regretted it later and wanted to claw back the "license" (another reason NEVER TO USE CC!!!). Virgin Mobile used the photo in an ad campaign. He decided to sue.

And Lawrence Lessig shrewdly decided not to allow his coercive collectivism to have to face a day in court. It might not have won. Either way, in fact, it would lose. If the judge said that CC licenses mean nothing, and copyright is inherent, and regardless of CC "licenses", the author gets to demand compensation from companies *anyway* (which I would concede certainly), then CC would be revealed as the hollow shell it is. Everyone would cease beliefing in the magic fairy dust.

If the judge went the other way, and said CC licenses have to be taken seriously, and if somebody literally put the all-perms license out that said you *could* gain commecial advantage, and Virgin took it at its word, then the guy has no case.

And that would reveal the coerciveness and obstructiveness of the CC license. Virgin could certainly afford to pay the kid a fee. And if he were in a world where CC had a license that says "pay me a fee if you use this copy" (or even variations -- pay me if you use this once, pay me if you use this for an audience of X in an ad, etc. etc. -- in fact there are websites that have those kinds of lists of options like OpenDemocracy.net)

Lessig immediately realized that exposing his magic virtual reality to the cold day of reality would kill it and make it useless (so it's too bad the case didn't go forward!)

As I've said repeatedly, there's another case with a GNU license and a guy who used open source software for something he sold and the court did uphold the open source freak's share-bear stuff -- I have to find it. The setting was different. It wasn't CC.

You can't just endlessly cite the literalism of law and the literalism of the Creative Commons regime and expect that mere hortatory exhortation will carry the day. It can't. *It has to be applied, it has to be tested in court, and a judge has to rule*. That's what "separation of powers" and "checks and balances" and "the rule of law" actually means. It doesn't mean that a literalist law gets to be enforced with ruthless malice by an all-powerful executive branch (even one where your friends take over the FCC and FTC *cough*). It means that the law has to be applied by a judge, who looks at past jurisprudence and precedent.

And there isn't one.

Nobody has ever uphold the notion that just because a CC license is tacked on to something that we have to abide by it; in this case what's more hilarious is that like the kid in the Virgin case, Ina has put on the most permed option, which means you CAN use it for commercial gain. And yet she's trying to undo that by browbeating in a social media matter to "enforce" in bullying what she can't in the license itself -- which is coercive anyway at the end of the day when it winds up not expressing the author's will (which can change).

As for MarcusD, he keeps claiming falsely you *can* keep coercing with CC in this way AND banging on the idea that if CDs have code to prevent you from copying, then the SL situation is just like that.

And I explained that was stupid. Because it's not. The CD can be copied for your own use and easily copied for others and resold, and that's why cracking and copying it is a crime and should be prosecuted.

But in SL, cracking the CD, so to speak, is much harder. And the average person and even the script kiddie doesn't always try. And most people abide by c/m/t.

A maker of an mp3 song or a video or a CD has a lot harder time trying to control recopying and resale than an SL dressmaker who can set c/m/t. The complaint that copyleftists always very disingenuosly and dishonestly make is that they "only need it for personal use". Only to copy at home to various gadgets. Not to resell.

The SL DRM calls them on that claim. Then if that's REALLY the case, that's what they get in SL. They can copy something on copy as much as they need to. They just can't transfer and put a price on it and resell it if the "t" is not clicked off.

So that's why it's different, and that's why MarcusD is thoroughly an ass.

I have loads of respect for copyright and preserving attribution and paying people for their work and not copying their work.

I have zero respect for Creative Communism, as I call it, and zero respect for its foot soldiers in SL deliberately trying to police resale of freebies even as they make the world tier their vanity projects.

I don't believe these thugs should get to coerce their views on the economy, not when we have remedies in the tools that they can avail themselves of.

As Ina has started this act of war (and we know all about her character from the Whack-a-Mole story, of course) and as MarcusD has decided to back her in a partisan like manner, I'm going to object.

He immediately appeared to accuse me of "violating copyright law". Well, no. Don't put your stuff on all perms CC AND all perms SL DRM if you don't want resale. Especially don't expect anyone to abide by CC when in the SL context you have a perfectly good DRM that works most of the time.

He persisted in accusing me of "violating law" and somehow undermining copyright.

Well, no. I'm undermining the right of bullies to coerce the economy with their communist partisan raids. That's different.

And now he's imagining that he can demand that I not publish a chatlog where he bullies me, and somehow threaten me into silence. Sorry, I don't let bullies get away with bullying. I think sunlight is the best disinfectant.

Comments

[MarcusD Braveheart]

Do try and get your story straight Mr. Neva. I have indeed stated I am not anyone's alt. Please refrain from outright lies.

This entire entry, breaching consent laws and assuming your little disclaimer, buried in your web blog actually covers you is little more than further proof that you are not the sort of person which is at all interested in any real debate.

Have a pleasent life Mr. Neva. I truly do hope you one day get over whatever instilled this sort of fear and irrationality in you. Perhaps then you'll be worthy of real debate.

[Prokofy Neva]

Hmm, "I am not anyone's alt". Well, I guess that's as good as we will get from this freak.

As for this notion that I have "breached consent laws", um, I haven't. Not at all. I live in a one-party consent state. California is also one-party consent. So any case you have immediately evaporates.

Furthermore, my disclaimer isn't buried on a "weblog," it's right on my profile. And was annonced here.

Um, sure, I'm interested in real debate. But that's not what you bring. You bring thuggish oppressiveness and demands to make the economy coercive and bending to the will of the likes of you.

You get to invade the economy with freebies; if anyone sets them to sale to a $1, you pursue them with vicious vengeance. You spread injunctions against them doing that to suborn them into your destructive campaign. That's wrong.

As you continue to talk EXACTLY like Sean Williams, I'm going to keep you banned, as I think you're lying.

Perhaps you are *not* Sean Williams, but then, you both went to the same BDSM weekend-whippers school about how to talk tought RP lol

[The Sheenster.]

"even tho the IP addresses... " Heh. Typo.

I honestly cannot believe people take the business of Second Life so seriously. It truly is fascinating.

[Darien Caldwell]

Prok doesn't even legally have to have the disclamer in her profile. She's well within her right to publish chat logs outside of SL. The TOS does not extend outside of the jurisdiction of LL's servers.

However, I know Prok, and some others, feel that is in doubt. At least nobody can say they weren't warned.

The Silly Profile disclaimers which I really hate are the ones that try to alter the TOS, and make it legal to distribute chat logs in-world. *That* you can not do, in any way, shape, or form, and no disclamer in your profile, or anywhere else, will change that.

[Prokofy Neva]

Oh, totally, I don't need that disclaimer WHATSOEVER.

The TOS does not have that extension, and frankly, even if it did claim it, I think I could successfully challenge it in court if they used that as a reason to ban me and seize my online property.

Since the TOS has become more ambigious, I thought it would be useful to put it up precisely because I get threatened with lawsuits, libel suits, harassment, reports to the Lindens, etc. frequently.

And definitely not because I'm abusive; I get this merely because somebody's furniture returns on autoreturn because they haven't read one of four ways I've tried to deliver the message to them that they need to join an open group and activate the tag to set prims.

I get this if somebody doesn't pay their rent and I return their furniture even after an entire week of reminders.

I get this merely because I refuse to help some abusive boyfriend further abuse his ex girlfriend by unbanning him.

I get this if I boot people from putting 3000 prims in a sandbox and setting up a squatter hut and shooting people from it or selling weapons in it.

And so forth and so on. So while I don't expect it to curb abuse, it will take the wind out of the sails of those trying to keep threatening me.

I certainly am not going to put a disclaimer, like many merchants and landlords do because of constant abuse and disputes, that "all conversations are logged".

For one, I don't have the time or effort or inclination to actually log all those convos. While chats automatically save, viewer 2 wipes them out on each installation due to a bug, so you have to go manually save them all the time -- who has the time or the concern about chat to THAT extent?

Furthermore, it implies that I'm going to adopt a sort of litigious attitude toward every transaction. I'd rather default to trust and decency, which occurs in 95 percent of cases, and for the rest, there's refund and eject.

[Amanda Dallin]

He certainly has Sean's ego and arrogance.

I haven't had V2 wipe my chat logs but I did lose about a weeks worth when I tried to use Phoenix. The logs continued again when I switched back to V2 and I did have it set to log chat.