Second Thoughts

In Defense of Land Flippers

The spam filter here at Typepad seems awfully over-active lately, putting many things in spam for no discernible reason. And I am busy working and usually can't come in more than once a day at night to pluck people out of the spam file.

I don't pre-censor any comment, and any comment goes up first before being removed. Comments can be hateful, insulting, and horrible -- and even anonymous, for one round. Then they can continue to be hateful, insulting and horrible if they like -- it's all ok -- but they just have to put a first and second valid SL name. That's rule no. 1 here. And rule no. 2 is that they can't incite damages against myself and others. And that's understood as really something severe, i.e. threatening a libel lawsuit or calling on everyone to grief somebody's land.

So go over to the picture of the land in Brown for some of the discussion that was caught, but let me reiterate it here:

I very much defend land flippers. Land flippers are legitimate and necessary in a liberal democracy with free enterprise and an open market.

We don't really have a true open market or capitalism or democracy in Second Life. So what? We have *enough of a metaphor for it* to make use of the principles. Der, we get it that Second Life is made by a company and they can "do what they want" and that may include controlling the economy with fierce socialist glee (which also may help that company's own bottom line in that *other* economy they are located in, called "real life".

We are in a kind of snow globe, of course, in our little SL economy, but the Lindens have always made much of the land market, the land model for the economy, and recognize that for both their *own* economy and the world's economy, land sales and rentals are a HUGE part.

Of course, there's a lot of socialism built into this stuff, over the years. An early example of socialism was the "first land" program that created a segregated area of land for newbies for only $1/meter, that only they could purchase -- just once -- when they made a new account.

But that got gamed, as land flippers made numerous accounts to buy first land and flip it, especially if it was near a telehub or waterfront. The Lindens eventually ended the program for that reason -- too many non-newbies were making numerous accounts and flipping land, or using bots to show up for land when the Lindens would turn it over inworld. The first-land areas of sims were total swamps, as well -- with a few exceptions, like Obscure, most sims spotted with first-land patches like postage stamp sheets ended up getting blight on their sim as new people rezzed out ugly crap, spinning junk in the sky, huge towers, giant phalluses, crashed vehicles, ugly untextured prims, blah blah.

The Lindens could have fixed this problem by making their offering good only on continguous sims that consisted only of that kind of land, so that everyone surrounding those patches wasn't harmed. But they didn't.

The flippers then emerged to help rescue those blighted sims, linking together land that was either abandoned and they picked up, or which they persuaded newbies to sell -- earning widespread hatred for paying them perhaps only twice or three times what they originally paid. But they then linked up the 512s and turned them into larger properties that then more earnest newbies who were householders and settlers rather than sandboxers tried to turn into better properties -- or else oldbies got them.

The war between sandboxers -- people who think that "the whole world is their canvas" and they should just plunk down anything they wish anywhere because it doesn't matter -- and settlers, people who take "your world, your imagination" to mean also civilized little hamlets or orderly towns and cities -- is never-ending in SL, and the Lindens have usually only taken the side of the sandboxers.

But the larger picture of land-flipping is related to the socialist hate of the real estate agent as an entrepreneur and capitalist that largely emanates from Sluniverse.com, which is, of course, largely left-leaning and even markedly Marxist, as you find from looking in the sections especially for "real life" topics.

So, not surprisingly, we get a typical anti-land-flipper screed from someone named "Whisper" in Slun the other day.

What her argument really boils down to is this: "There was land I wanted on my sim to expand my own holdings but some flipper bought it and set it to a price I can't afford and don't want to pay."

That's all. She doesn't value the land sufficiently to pay the flipper's price, she doesn't do the math and just move to another sim -- of which there are plenty! -- to get larger land holdings, perhaps even selling her existing parcel to that self-same flipper for a good price (!). Instead, she tries to universalize her particularity -- which is a non-problem, really -- into a policy that should be imposed on everyone: no land flipping. No one should ever, ever put land out at a higher price than I want to pay for it!

You never know when you see these sorts of engineered threads whether the Lab is making fake accounts and whipping up sentiment to try to ready the public for some new awful policy they are thinking of (like removing the land market).

In this case, the Whisperer shot herself in the foot by knocking some of the royals there at Sluniverse-Sharia, and got hated on. But not before dumping on land barons and getting the usual sympathy, especially from people who should know better, like Ayesha of Solace Beach. Since she's hawking island/estate land, she did the knee-jerk thing Desmond always does, and dumped on the mainland.

Let's go over again why land-flippers have to be defended.

It's not just for the abstract reason of allowing freedom in a free market -- if you can't allow everybody to buy and sell as they wish, you're not free. If you say "you can't flip land if we don't like you and don't think you should get to do that," there's no freedom. Freedom is essential for free enterprise, obviously.

Land flippers are then usually defended with the "liquidity" argument. Land flippers buy land "just any time" when you are desperate to unload it. Of course, this was more the case in past years than it is today, when the flipper is now competing against Governor Linden's vast stores of $1/m abandoned resold land. (And that's why there are less flippers.)

Even so, land flippers are still around for the better parcels to pay you more than $1/m if your land is worth that -- but not the $7.5/m you tried to set it to. They might pay you $2 or $3 or $4 even.

There's another side to all this, however, that people don't think about. It's something I realized long, long ago in Furness, where Anshe Chung had bought all the land. And that is that the big land barons enabled the development of SL. They themselves developed it. But they also, by buying with bulk-tier discounts and having volume sales -- enabled smaller land dealers like me to go slower. I could buy one 512 today, when I was ready to expand out my fledgling rentals. Then next month, another 512. They sat there all that time, waiting for me to buy them, with Anshe, not me, paying the tier on them. She didn't need to flip them at a lower price -- she could afford to keep paying tier and wait for that higher price. That was the key to much of SL development on the mainland. Land barons bought whole sims. They chopped them up. Or they bought the larger parcels put on the auction, and they held them and paid the tier on them until someone would buy them for an even higher price.

So if, say, Beetle Bailey has bought somebody's abandoned land, or low-priced land in Palomarian, where I have some other rentals, and takes this 2048 m2 and puts a price tag of $4/meter on it in PG, next to a Linden bridge and some nice views and homes, he's actually performing a public service. He's holding that land until someone values it at that slightly higher price (or four times the Governor Linden socialist price) will pay it -- and the chances are, having paid that, will keep it good-looking. The higher the land price, the more the chances are that the person who buys it won't put spinning crap and glowing purple towers and junk yards, but something better to look at. It sits there, and perhaps eventually I might justify buying it. His business may be just getting by, I don't know. He has some good land and sells it at a good price and maybe makes a fair piece of change. Good!

Because the third thing about the land business, whether rentals or sales, is that it is *the heart of the economy*. If you have something that people can come in and do readily, and can make money doing it, you have an entry level job, so to speak, that doesn't require content creation with its more intricate skills. Some of it might involve content manipulation -- making a nice landscape or selling it with a nice house (although that idea never really caught on). But basically, what the land business is, is a way for other people than programmers and digital designers to join the economy. That's priceless. Otherwise, you would have a Renaissance Faire, as Chip Midnight always lovingly spoke of it -- and wished for it to come into being.

There are some content creators -- and users -- who would love the idea that land always had to cost only $1/meter no matter where it was sold on the users' chain -- at auction, from Governor Linden, from a land baron -- that it have some built-in inability to be sold for anything but $1 (or why not $0).

Philip Linden would love that, and so might Mitch Kapor. They are devotees of the open source cult and want everything to be free that is a setting for the world -- the software itself, the browser, the land. Then only content -- "rich content" -- if you will, will cost something, and then they take a cut of the currency sales.

It's the California Business Model in the round, so to speak -- free platform, free uploads, free everything -- to make the setting where the ads (or currency) can be sold. And content is an add-on to that.

Of course, the first thing that would happen if you made all land a dollar is that you would lose what leverage you have to make the Mainland nice. But more to the point, you would completely gut out the economy. Everyone in SL in the economy in the land business would be completely knocked out and undercut. Only content creators and service providers (and these include sex workers) would thrive. That's a world some would like to hasten into existence, as they hate land as a commodity. They loathe the idea that "unskilled" people who "don't add value" (in their view) are even in the economy. They'd much rather have *only* in the economy people who make stuff and "add value" (as they see it).

But not only would you lose that entry-level job, so to speak, not requiring PhotoShop. You would lose what a lot of the largely female cohort of SL can do well -- maintain servers, rent out parcels, or sell land on estates, and keep the social flow going to make it all work. If those people couldn't make a dime on top of their expenditures, they would have less reason to go on. Even breaking even is something they require as a minimum. Few would go on losing on this game.

 

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Memorial for Vaclav Havel in Virtual Prague

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Second Life Christmas!

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Land in Brown Down to $3.9/meter? The End of SL!

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The Mechs: Will They be Good to us, or Evil?

Pooky Amsterdam (Pooky Media) has a new machinima up about the future, Time Travelers, episode 4, part of a series.

It talks about two futures, one where mechas, or robots or AI are all man's friend and under his control and serving him, and the other where the mechas are evil and take over men. "Brains, without souls". Not human! Except, if they acted enough like humans, why, Turing would tell us, as Jaron Lanier explained, that if *we* expect to be still taken as humans, we must accept them. Ugh!

The mechas in this film are all boot-stomping robotic monsters and menaces, and at one point I wondered: why would future take-over singularist type of monsters have to appear as humanoid? With swinging arms and walking feet? Is that efficient? Would little boxes on wheels or jets work better? Who says they have to look like humans? If that scary future comes, of course, it will be because humans willed it -- software is concretization of human will; so is artificial intelligence. It's just will, congealed, not special. Will mechanized! And therefore has all the flaws and holes of the human. Which is why the human could make something that would want to kill -- and kill him!

There are a lot of great special effects in the film -- mesh, is it? Lasers and stuff appearing and disappearing which is easy to do in a virtual world! The story line is awfully primitive and the dialogue pretty canned and TV-like, but as I thought about it, how could you really make it different? It has to sound like Nick at Night Jr. in order to be in a cultural space people can readily understand. It has to sound and look like Power Rangers or some cheesy anime show or it doesn't scan. The ideas are complex and couldn't be delivered in a half hour's time or less in a machinima that can fit on Youtube (10 minutes, actually?) So it has to be put into sort of idea-grams.

I'm glad to see that there's at least some attempt to make popular culture that is anti-singularist and tries to question the sinister insanity of hastening the singularity, a la Ray Kurzweil. It's funny, before I saw this machinima today, I was thinking how really stupid it is, in this modern day and age, that I often find myself doing one or two hours of housework a day. Sweeping, taking out garbage, washing dishes, emptying cat boxes, making beds, folding laundry -- why am I still spending hours on these tasks? Why isn't there a little robot thing by now, better than the Romba or whatever it's called, that can go through the house and sweep everything? Can't it just somehow magnetize everything? It might be hard to have it be a vacuum, because it might then start even slurping up plant soil or pillows. But maybe keep it set to the ground. Probably they spent years programming that Rhomba Rumba whatever, but that's expensive, and I'm not sure it would work in a small and very cluttered and chock-full apartment.

As for dishes, why haven't they invented a thing like a microwave that you just put the dish or pan in, and it just incinerates everything but the dish itself? Or...something. See, these things aren't so easy to invent after all. As for clothes, why isn't there, instead of a closet, just a chamber you walk into, and it demagnetizes all the dirt off your clothes? And like Second Life, you can change the textures and colours on your clothes via computer. But would you want to? Yes there are dishwashers -- they don't allow them in our building -- but when I've been in homes where people have them, they spend as much time rinsing the dishes to prep them for the dishwasher, then unloading them, as you would just washing the damn things and be done with it. Does it use more or less water to wash by hand? We used to have double sinks in the old days, one dishpan for washing, another with near boiling hot water for rinsing. But with a single sink, you can't do that...

It's bad enough having organic cats, having a few robots or AI devices that hover and flutter around could be annoying. I wouldn't want them to talk to me. Other people might. Siri is in fact only a target of ridicule for a lot of people. Did you see this one with Robin Williams? Hilarious!

How's Business?

A guy named garey Solo said interestingly that Second Life struck him as being like a grandfather clock that was winding down.

I said that it wasn't really that, it's just that some of the grandfathers themselves are winding down.

Skating on Thin Ice or in Fact Maybe Freemium Doesn't Work?

The other day I finally got the news that was already on sluniverse.com in March that Moopf Murray had left SL. He was famous for ice skates -- both free and more elaborate for money -- and the bubble gum machine. I got a notice that the bubble gum server was going down (I bought somebody else's replica for $50). Moopf used to have a vender system, too. I liked Moopf's stuff and put them out for people to take or buy, but he himself had that mixture of open source cultism and merchant stuffiness that always proves so unpleasant in SL -- I had several arguments with him about...whatever...he didn't like me and was part of the oldbie crowd of pioneer creators who didn't like brash newcomers like me who criticized the favouritism shown to them. I don't know what made him leave, probably boredom, tier, lack of sales, friends moving on, etc.

But of course, in his place are a 100 other people selling ice skates and making ice skating rinks of every conceivable type for every conceivable community. Life moves on.

So if Moopf Murray leaves, or various other famous oldbies, does it mean business is bad? No. Not when it's from the resident population. Even so, when first Kim Linden, VP of marketing, then FJ Linden, VP of Global Technology leave (FJ was brought in to be essentially the Atlas of the world several years ago, no?), you have to worry. People come and go, talking of Michaelangelo, of course. But two biggies leaving like that within a short period means that they argued with the management. Either Rod, or Mitch or somebody. As they are leaving, we see two things happen, maybe related, maybe not -- Creative Communism being jack-hammered into the SL Marketplace as a "license" and the "builder's boon" of blanket all-perms that creates an enabling environment for open source cultism. Did they fight about *that*? Who knows? Likely not. They probably fought about something more esoteric in their own world of marketing charts and 90-day impact statements.

Dev-within-dev

The whole Linden Realms thing strikes me as a non-starter. It's nice and all, but it seems to me that it's about Rod drifting into just doing his thing, making a platform for white-label production of games for users, something that I don't think there's a huge demand for in the world. Remember Multiverse, and Corey Bridges? That was kind of what he did already, and probably better. I don't really know what he's up to now although he was at the Entertainment Summit.

I guess I just don't think that the user base's interests, and the ability of the servers to hold up, are really the best climate for bringing in game devs to make little games. The Lindens had this idea seven years ago and gave out prizes for games -- then broke the scripts of those games in their next iterations, to the great frustration of people like Jeffrey.

If they were making this game-within-a-game really for its own sake (they're not), I might get behind it. But they're making it to test tools for resident devs to make their games -- and that's the part I'm not getting. I'm actually testing this theory myself now in the next few weeks as I gave Brownlee to be rebuilt by Jer Straaf who has lots of great games already that can work in a sim or part of sim without any special new stuff, games like "Vandalism" where you go around shooting at trash cans and such and watch them satisfyingly blow up.

My sense is that the overwhelming majority of people in SL on the 70,000 concurrency or 1 million uniques monthly don't really want to play games, other than an occasional Greedy Greedy or Whack-a-Mole or maybe a shoot-em-up on a distressed urban vampire type sim -- but not for their whole log-on sessions. Yet, people take part in hunts and Lucky Chairs and Zynga, so maybe they are willing to play *some* games if casual enough. If they can be stopped and saved at any time, so to speak.

Well, all this is interesting to theorize about -- including the return of last names (pseudonymous identity markers!) and "Your World, Your Imagination" (build a game! get more people in the door and get them to stay for us!). But, really, how's business?

Landing Spots

I cringed at first when I heard Rod suggest doing the Vikings 'R Us newbie island to land in, where other Viking RPers would rope them in. But then, as I thought about it, I realize he wasn't quite re-creating the world. His concept wasn't in fact what a lot of the Community Gateways *were*. In fact, some of them were not very exciting. Library World or InfoWorld or whatever the hell -- traffic, 100. There were the Australian and Japanese sims and they were nice and all, but sort of clubby for just the people from those countries. And there wasn't much to do on them except fish and shop.

Of course, there was Caledon, which is a rich-content sort of experience. But that's for people who know how to make their own fun, who can spend hours with pencil and paper games, if they live in the 19th century, or, in our century, can spend hours making Victorian lady tea parties and dances and dress up for them online.

So maybe, indeed, there is a place for landing spots that steer people to more mass generic fun. Like vampires, which is what the Lindens are hawking big-time -- as part of a threatening new galactic movement that even the two Star worlds are joining up to fight.

If the Lindens want to make Vampire stuff, great. I have to say that the single most taken piece of free content I offer every day is the garlic necklace that enables people to opt out of the Vampire game and not get "bite-you" messages.

Traffic and Spenders

A key factor I look at for business is the traffic at the infohubs and welcome areas. It was doing poorly. It's better now. But it's hard to tell, because there are still so many bots.

So I have to go by other factors. Are my cheap newbie rentals filled? Lately, they've filled up again. That's good. But do the people then graduate to higher paying rentals? Some of them.

It always amazes me that I get brand-new people, on that still-cumbersome new viewer, who somehow manage to find their way to my rentals within 30 days of joining SL. What hardy salmon they are, swimming upstream! But advertising...such a problem! How to find these hardy souls? I have advertised more in clubs lately or RP sims, but some of them don't have the kind of ad boards that tell you when people click them, so you can't correlate them easily to rentals or content sales.

As we know from the 3rd quarter metrics, number of people who spend $1 or more inworld is up to now 475,000, heading back up to previous heights of 488,000. Isn't that cool?

What's the Total Inworld Economy GNP?

But, hmmm...on that Linden corporate page, they are still talking about that $75 million profit they make, and putting the number for inworld content sales now by the quarter for Q42010, not the year (it was $450 million, they said, a year ago) now they're giving a figure of $165 million from exchanging currency, and I'm not sure if that's the same number.

That is, saying that in the last quarter of 2010 (nothing later, guys?), "750,000 unique users from around the globe spent more than 105 million hours experiencing Second Life while exchanging Linden dollars, Second Life’s currency, worth more than $165 million (USD) in its economy" isn't quite the same thing as saying "the world yields $450 million in content sales a year" -- they could be counting the total transactions or volume of sales and a lot of that stays inworld. I just don't know if they are talking about the same thing. I'd like to get a number that tells me a) total number of unique transactions inworld in dollars and b) the cashout. If I get $100 in a rental and then pass it to another avatar to cash out who is my business avatar, that could be counted twice.

So, to get back to the question of whether SL is winding down like a grandfather clock.

How TechDirt is Manufacturing a Pity Party for a Poster-Boy of ICE Abuse to Try to Sink SOPA

Readers may be interested to go see this thread on TechDirt, which is Copyleftist Central, with one of the most tendentious pieces I've seen in a long time on this topic -- not since Eric Rice tried to convince me that ICE was seizing somebody's blog have I seen such a fake hysteria. " "Feds Falsely Censor Popular Blog For Over A Year, Deny All Due Process, Hide All Details," shrieks the headline -- and you couldn't possibly go against it. What, you're not for due process? What, you're not for the rule of law?! How dare you, can call yourself a human rights activist!

Dajaz1.com, a blog about hip hop and jazz was taken down by ICE -- evil ICE whose name is so chilly! This is now described as if it was like being, oh, gunned down by the military on Tahrir Square in Egypt or arrested by one of Putin's goons and hustled off to the armed forces like a fellow in Syktyvkar.

What happened is that the feds impounded this site, i.e. closed it down and put up a big old Homeland Security shield on it. Then they went on to hold it for a year -- then they gave it back.

Oh, the horror. An entire year! Why, the outrage!

Yeah, we get all that. And there are plenty of people screaming about it. But I just find something fishy about these huge weeping pity parties about evil feds and terribly injured and suffered bloggers.Something doesn't add up.

Yeah, again, derr, we get that taking an entire year to adjudicate a case, gosh, that's a horrible violation of due process. And then to get your site back anyway -- gosh, that shows maybe the government didn't have a case.

Except...we don't know that. The court records aren't even shown here. And I'm not buying the story. Such a thing may have been an abusive aberration -- sure. Then...why aren't the lawyers suing for damages? That's what you do in America if you are wronged by the law. Maybe the nature of this site was so patently obvious as a pirate site that the police didn't think it necessary to make their case (although in a society under the rule of law they should anyway, of course). And maybe they gave it back not because the site wasn't guilty, but because it was too big a hassle to prosecute. And maybe those aggressive lawyers making much of this now aren't suing for damages because they are *afraid of what would come out at trial, which is the true nature of their client's site -- a pirate site.*

There's just too many things not adding up here. It really, really feels like a hustle to me -- and worst of all, a race hustle.

Because the claim is that poor black folk were uploading or sending their tunes for free to be played or shown on this site, they WANTED stuff to be copied and heard because they were trying to get noticed, and evil feds and evil record companies and evil 1 percenters on Wall Street want to stifle their innovation.

Naturally, if these people didn't make money from this site (and there isn't a claim that they did), you wonder why they didn't start another one to discuss jazz and hip hop (and they may have).

But...Don't you DARE saying anything against this site or exonerate the feds, or you will be guilty of advocating that black people not have freedom of expression, see.

So it occurred to me that the way to see what this site was all about was to plug it into the Wayback machine. So I did. Go back more than a year to the last few years and you see -- oh. It has all youtubes on it. Not of unknowns or poor black kids or emerging hip hop artists or even those artists who want their stuff given away for free, because they have some kind of 360 deal.

You see people who likely do NOT want their content copied as they are established artists. You see people even writing that they hope the youtube they are embedding for view on that site, or linking to, will not be removed. Of course, click, and you'll see by now it is IS removed. Because, der, it's infringing. And by "upload" I mean, embed code so as to display (derr, that's not hard to understand) OR link. Because the links aren't innocent either and the users even write, "I hope this isn't taken down."

Why is this so hard to admit?

Well, because they need to find a victim, and they've cunningly, deliberately, maliciuosly tried to make this site be the victim -- the posterboy. The problem is that it doesn't exemplify the case, because it isn't innocent. Oh, sure, holding it for a year is wrong. But ranting about that distracts from the obvious facts: that there evidently was very good reason to hold it in the first place, judging from views of the site we can see in the Wayback Machine.

Now, one also suspects some deal was made. Or some case was dropped for fear of race-baiting because of some kind of race hustle. And that's awful all on it's own. Just because sometimes your site sometimes puts up emerging artists or those hoping to get noticed or uses "fair use" for critical purposes in a review doesn't mean everybody gets to upload all the other copyrighted stuff on there, which looks to be more the point of the website than all those unknowns. Again, we can't know, because they are hiding the nature of the site for us, and making it seem as if the problem of lack of due process should trump their actual nature, or making it seem like the release of the site is "proof" that it is an innocent victim.

Not buying it.

Of course, all those geeky Reddit sort of freaks show up to rant and rage against property as an institution, hate on copyright as a concept and as law, urge the abolition of elected representative government, and even completely turn on its ear the concept of theft. It's all the usual suspects. I answer them all.

If anything, the abuse that appears to have occurred in this case is evidence of in fact why we need SOPA. We need the rule of law, not one-off cases like this every time -- the government had 300 of them, and obviously couldn't prosecute them all, so let some go.

We need rules, we need precedent, we need practices to emerge with a universal law like this, instead of people in different states cobbling this or that case together from this or that bunch of regulations.

SOPA would make it less likely that a case had to languish or would be mistakenly seized because the rules would be clear and the practices would instantly emerge.

Sadly, the Google and Electronic Frontier Foundation lobby against SOPA has so battered Congress that now the law is being "rewritten" and "tech people are now being consulted" -- which is abundantly fake as they were consulted already and it's not about tech.

It's sad to see that the regime of copyleftism and the open source ethics-free "liberation" of content that we fought so many years in SL (and a battle now being lost as my previous posts indicate) is now being waged and likely lost in RL, too. It will take years of people losing even more livelihoods and more outrageous destruction of various sectors of the economy to understand this.

A few more articles I have on this topic:

Copyleftist Law-Farer Opposes SOPA

First Amendment Lawyer Supports SOPA

Geeks Screaming About Internet Censors Ooght to be Ashamed of Themselves and Out to Actually Read the Bill

 

 

 

 

Oh FFS Oz Linden is Stealthily Smuggling in the Open Source Copyleftist Agenda into the Object Perms

I thought this evil thing had died some years ago -- but it's back, courtesy of Oz Linden.

JIRA 8049, the subject of great controversy and reservations even from Lindens back in 2008-2009 is baaaack -- sneakily returned by Oz Linden. Although, coupled with this "license" put in the SL Marketplace objects, it looks like a conscious, concerted policy to put Creative Commons deliberately into the fabric of Second Life -- which likely we have Mitch Kapor or another idealogue in the leadership to thank for (somehow, I don't think Rod Humble, who comes from an environment of proprietary games at EA.com, would be pushing this, and in general, I never heard him push open source the way Philip Rosedale did -- so something is "up" here.)

If you recall, *first* Catherine Pfeffer ranted on TechDirt -- run by Mike Myasnick, who is really one of the most sinister and relentless and toxicly influential copyleftist freaks on the Internet -- that she didn't have what she claimed was merely a builder's boon in SL -- the ability to permanently reset all her creations' permissions to the opensource ideal, which is copy/mod/transfer -- all perms. And Mike -- and his pals at EFF -- headlined the article by saying "EFF Agrees that Copyright in Second Life is a Mess" -- even though it isn't a mess for the reasons Myasnick and Pfeffer think -- they think it's a mess because there *is* copyright. Fred von Lohman, the EFF's lawfarer on this topic, weighs in saying copyright in SL is "worse" than in RL. Of course it's *better* because it's engineered to have very good DRM permissions that work well much of the time. That makes Mitch Kapor and company crazy, however, because they were hoping SL would be an engine to hustle their views, instead of expose them as false.

Interestingly, this Catherine Pfeffer isn't even in Second Life anymore except as a place-holder, this is what her snotty profile says:

I am most of the time on New World Grid.

I'd be happy to share a few words with you while I'm here, as long as it remains intellectually gratifying.

I wrote XGridChat, a cross-grid group IM bridge.

I am not small, you are too tall.

I think with this profile description alone, most of you will get it.

But go back to the original TechDirt piece and then read the JIRA to get it some more. She's definitely, definitely "on mission" with this one -- and it's not really about building. She used to run the Open Source Information Center (now gone, from which I was banned -- LOL), and she's a zealot.

Originally VWR-8049 was started by Seshaat Czeret, who is on the board of NCI, and of course has a position of power and influence there to push this agenda.

Catherine immediately began pushing it, and even started a petition outside of Second Life that made her agenda abundantly clear. It got 135 petitions back in 2008. She asked that the Lindens incorporate the open source ideology into the client under the fake and concocted notions that newbies didn't like to have items default to no-copy or next owner can't copy -- and that they "needed" to have this overridden so that they could realize their "intent" to opensource everything.

Read through the JIRA to get the full monte, but what's striking is just how few actual builders there are in this discussion. That's because it's not about building. Instead, it's about people with the scripting/coding/third-party viewer open source agenda (like McCabe of Imprudence) and obsessives like Lex Neva and Harleen Gretzsky who haunt the JIRA and try to run every proposal of this nature. If you read through the list, you will not see a single famous creator or even middle-tear creator/merchant on the list. Stroker Serpentine appears -- and speaks against it. Of course I appear and speak at length and philosophically against it -- and this was one of the JIRAs that led me to be perma-banned from the JIRA for "speech offenses" -- snort.

This is how Catherine tendentiously describes the code of Second Life -- it's a bit technical, but you'll get the idea:

Okay, I had a first quick glance at the code. The "Create" pie menu is handled by code in linden/indra/newview/lltoolplacer.cpp. This code builds an ObjectAdd message which syntax is explained in http://wiki.secondlife.com/wiki/ObjectAdd , and then sends this message to the region. Unfortunately, this message details all geometrical characteristics of the new object, but not its permissions.

So the bad news is : as far as I understand, when the server receives that message, it creates an object with default "egoistic" permissions.

What she means by "egotistical" permissions, of course, is that objects default to prevent theft of your inherent copyright. They are a symbolism of the notion of inherent copyright and an engineered syntax of that notion that works just great to protect people's creations -- so they can SELL THEM instead of being induced to share them for free (the Creative Commons ethos).

It's already radically outrageous to call normal default perms that reflect the law of the land as "egotistical" -- as if people who want to protect their intellectual property rights are selfish and mean (!).

But in the hothouse, oppressive world of the JIRA, it's ok to speak tendentiously like this from the copyleftist agenda, and anyone who opposes you then is abuse-reported and banned. Awful, awful stuff.

After opensource zealot Rob Linden (no longer with the Lab) weighed in -- he used to head up the open source program at LL -- another Linden came along and made an interesting critique:

Hi guys - there is an interesting permissions issue over at VWR-5082

I'm a big Creative Commons fan, but I wonder about the potential for inadvertent over-permissiveness (and thus, theft) by changing the perms at such a high level (for everything you build).

Do you think an inventory-folder level bulk permissions tool might be close enough?

Well, yeah, I do. Because it leaves this issue as an individual user's discretion with his ideology not spread through the grid, but just to his own immediate inventory.

McCabe says ohnoes, because it's just such a terrible inconvenience when people send him textures where the perms default to "no copy/no mod" (so you can't put them into the ground or whatever) -- and he claims they "all" say they wish they could have default "all perms" all the time on their textures. Oh, really? McCabe probably doesn't make or sell things (except for the nastily ideological Imprudence viewer which has always had the idea that people need to have open source "values" rammed down their throat because they "don't know what's good for them).

Erica continues explaining about how (at that time) the bulk permissions floater would be coming and that should be good enough, but the opensource ideologues persist with their edge-casing and pushing of their narrow agenda.

It's really an awfully horrible thing to watch. Catherine Pfeffer, who has moved to one of those open source grids now and isn't even really *in* Second Life anymore; McCabe who, as far as I can tell, makes a viewer, but doesn't make *stuff*; Seshat has many things she gives away for free because of her whole worldview of freebies, newbies, etc. etc. exemplified in the NCI thing, but she is also one of those people who gives away everything, then browbeats you on her profile not to violate her all perms by reselling. She helps the Virtual Guide Dog Program, so that means she is absolutely beyond criticism, see, so don't even try.

To make it more awful, in this JIRA, Coco Linden (also no longer here) comes along, openly disageres with Erica Linden's legitimate concerns and concept, and pushes the open source crap.

Coco Linden pushes it -- until she leaves. Thank God. I thought that might kill it. It didn't.

Catherine Pfeffer keeps making patches, tests them on Open Sim, where the philosophy is of course to abolish property and commerce as we know it.

CG Linden comes along -- that griefer, Coral Gaussman, remember him? -- and suggests this awful feature of putting things on all perms be built into parcels. Good Lord. Will it never end? Fortunately that's quashed.

 I come along of course, and make a number of long interventions which I think are important but of course only lead to literalist inanities like Andrew Linden claiming that the "vote" on this particular JIRA isn't running in my favour, therefore I must not be democratic and reflecting the people's will -- *snort* -- funny how *that time* a Linden pumped the idea of voting, which they then later completely removed.

I made this point to Andrew:

1. Techdirect flogs the idea that SL should never have instituted copyright protections in the light DRM that it has, with copy/mod/transfer (http://www.techdirt.com/articles/20090501/0154374713.shtml) This author is making a forthright frontal assault on copyright protections in SL and wants them completely removed as he believes they only create "troubles" – this is the usual CC/opensource shill, that copyright "restricts creativity" or "places needless burden on the user". But we know in our context it does no such thing, as "no transfer" works marvelously in a digital world in ways it can't seem to work on email, websites, or in the physical world.

2. EFF is also campaigning now against copyright in SL, invoking a fake chimera of too-burdensome copyright bids from people allegedly prepared to make claims about screenshots and machinima automatically violating copyright unless you get permissions. This is utterly fake, as there is no such call in SL, it's a lawyerly fiction, and in this case, not mounted by conservative lawyers but "progressive" lawyers to help undermine what is a growing successfuly microtransactions commerce based on DRM that in fact annoys the CC gang no end as it goes against their commerce-free, no-sale policies.

3. Into this context with several parties very obviously lobbying for removal of copyright protections in SL comes Catherine, who flogs the idea of her perms because she is already on the CC and opensource bandwagon, and says, "We must have this patch to remove the burden of overly protective copyright".

4. While the setting of individual objects is error prone, it is immediately rectified on the next object, because you start afresh with a protective default. Not so blanket settings, especially in groups. You can't change your mind. Group objects of course are already a murky area of property rights.

5. Copyrightism and CC are not at all non-sequiturs to this thread, but form the robust substrate driving the ideology of the patch; it's merely flying under the flag of convenience of "builders' convenience".

 A number of people weighed in with the idea that I need not fear, because this wouldn't change the server code's default rezzing of the cube prim at the tabula resa -- it would go on rezzing out for every newbie as no-perms until the perms were set. It would only become a blanket change when that newbie made the edit perms decision himself going forward.

Derr, I got all that. My point was that this copyleftist "boon," however, would erode the concept of perms very significantly, push the copyleftist agenda, push the group build concept of collectivist creation, and diminish the individual's rights. He would increasingly find himself brow-beaten -- which is Creative Common's aim, of course. People like Catherine Pfeffer make no secret that they believe the default cube rezzing is "selfish" of the server -- it makes people "selfish" -- and she'd like to remove it.

Some more interventions I made:

I got all that the first 50 times it was said, catherine, "If you don't change the defaults, nothing will change". Except, WHEN you change the defaults, you are then forced to have them changed forever UNTIL YOU CHANGE THEM BACK – and that's one of the flaws in this proposal.

It's not about "making Prokofy happy". It's about respecting private property and the intrinsic connection between creative, property and commerce that opensource and Creative Commons – and EFF – are constantly trying to break.

You gave away your hand when you began calling the SL server "selfish". We'll leave aside the problem of how suddenly, machines became anthropomorphic because they appeared to "thwart your will" and realize that your characterization there illustrates that you view copyright as an enemy.

The idea that servers can be "selfish" in inherently protecting copyright, and keeping the real-life concept of intrinsic copyright intact is one that doesn't bother most people, and is a demonstrable good. That Andrew would have to monkey with the server code and change its nature to accommodate this entitlement-request from a minority is profoundly disturbing – because it's ideologically driven, and not science-driven, despite it being cloaked in all kinds of pseudo-science.

Key to understanding this flawed "science" is understanding that the argumentation "There will be fewer mistakes if it is easy to control their permissions settings" is a religious belief. In fact, the more widgets you add, the more mistakes you add as we saw with the land menu. The "safety message" is wordy and jargonistic.

Where this feature will be particularly buggy, contentious, and destructive is in group tools.

Andrew, if you want to play literalist here and ignore the context, that's fine, you'll live with the consequences then. And my argumentation illustrates that there are very pernicious and far-reaching consequences to this fake "boon for builders". Perhaps you find nothing alarming about "copyright in general loses value" and "some people will lose their copyright forever on some items accidently" as more blanket and mass decisions are made at a high level, but obviously these are far, far more destructive and wide-ranging than a builder being temporarily delayed by having to check off a box again.'

I'm not the one fighting imaginary enemies, because I don't view copyright as an enemy, nor do I view the SL server, protecting copyright, as "an enemy" – it is the sect of opensource opposed to copyright on specious grounds that this creates an obstacle to creativity that is the one tilting at windmills.

The idea that "choice" is given when copyright is undermined is one of the central pieces of the OS and CC propaganda. But undermining copyright is in fact undermining choice. Once you have made blanket, top-level decisions and mass produced, especially in groups, you have taken away choice, not added to it, forcing the obstacle to come back in to undo that forced march.

"Builder convenience" is a trojan horse that is being used to invade SL copyright at a time that it is more successful than ever as an institution. The consequences will be profound.

 

When Andrew Linden then stepped in to hasten the development of the patches himself, I pointed out, "BTW, by stepping in and hastening this patch along by working on it himself, Andrew is helping to highlight the ideological nature of this patch." Indeed.

For part of this discussion, the awful nudnik Dale Innis AKA Dale Chess kept trying to play "gotcha" with me, trying to prove that I was "mistaken" in my understanding of these patches, that they would lead to default rezzing of prims or making of other items all perms, and not an option for later blanket perm setting.

And I had to point out over and over again that I was *not* misunderstanding it, but making a larger point: "If objects won't be rezzed in world permissionless, that's great (I'm not seeing definitive proof of that), but there is still a campaign to undermine permissions by trying to shift the perspective of the default."

If Catherine Pfeffer could have objects rezzed as a default with no permissions, she'd be in hog heaven, So would others in that thread. So for Dale to falsely claim that it's a wild misunderstanding with no relevance is patently absurd. Everybody can see what's going on there.

Dale persisted in thinking he had somehow still got me on a "gotcha" (he's an insufferable pig) but never admitting the larger point -- what these people were up to.

As I put it, "5. Of course it's a revolution in property rights. Anything that makes Employee No. 2 have to tamper with the inherent properties of the server code related to permissions is a revolution in property rights. He knews that; we know that."

Qarl Linden makes a copyleftist intervention acting as if there are "all these people" who "need" to have the rights to modify their friends' creations, or visa versa.

This is really all so abundantly fake. There aren't group builds in SL. It's not the norm. Most people create solo. Or they might link up some components. But they don't group build. And it's not because of permissions. Because they could set everything all perms if they want. I remember I used to get annoyed as a newbie at not being able to build with another person because if I didn't set things right I'd lose access even to my own objects if they got deeded or transfered. But there are solutions for this that you learn, you put the damn thing on all perms as you go. And frankly, the *use case* for group building and collectivism is *infintessimally small* in Second Life, and if some nerd at SLCC asks Qarl for even more collectivism than we already have, it's a quirk and an outlier, and not something the Lindens should be building into the client.

Hypatia says interestingly, toward the end, "Anyway, I think that most opensource projects are pretty benign, and there's nothing wrong with them. But there's a small set of people, and they are a small set, who use the concept of opensource to bring about social change in a very lefthanded manner."

Yes.

Ann Otoole weighed in on this discussion even advocating (an extreme) solution -- make those people who want all this copyleftist stuff have "public domain" accounts where everything in the account was set for free all the time (if I understood it correctly).

She then urged consideration of the "next owner" issue:

I think this entire discussion needs to be grid wide and involve everyone that is account verified and only those who are account verified and be removed from the pjira now and escalated to a forum policy discussion amongst all account verified residents. In fact perhaps LL needs to remove posting privileges for non account verified accounts so we can ensure only legitimate adult customers have a voice. There is much more work needed on the content intellectual property rights management aspects of Second Life as well as intergrid transport permissions. Concepts such as next owner and subsequent owner permissions need to be developed.

In January 2011, Andrew Linden withdrew from this task, unassigning himself, because he was busy with other things, simulator code, etc. He urged that it be moved to "user experience." He didn't drop because of any change in his own personal copyleftist/group build views.

Cummere Mayo, who caused such havoc on Sluniverse.com around the JLA drama, and was drummed out even of that corps, shows up saying she has been "asked to pre-triage this by Oz Linden". Sigh.

Oz then snuck in on the day before Thanksgiving, when nobody would likely notice their SL mail with notifications, and  put the patch in.

Then yesterday, he assigned himself to the job.

I don't know what is driving this. It's not inertia. It's some kind of new board policy or directive from Kapor, or somebody. Or it's a sense that the Open Sourcerers feel they can make their move now and grab this. Why?

 

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