No resale permission

I suggest a new permission labeled No Resale. This would prevent an object from being sold in the future. In order to avoid confusing players further about permissions when they are buying something I suggest this permission can only be set when the sale price of the item by the current owner is 0. That is they are giving it away.

This will encourage people to make free items to share in Second Life. Many people have felt discouraged when they try to do good for the community by giving creations away only to find them for sale later. Let's encourage people to create and distribute gifts to each other.

An object that is TRANSFER-PERMITTED but SALE-PROHIBITED can be sold in a vending machine (which gives the item, after being given money... they don't sell) or can be hand brokered ("give me L$xxx and I'll give you this cool yyy",

There is no -- I repeat NO -- sure-fire way to make this stick that doesn't compromise other abilities in SL.

(For example, I want to make a vending machine that gives out freebies. If scripts are prohibited from llGiveInventory-ing object set NO-RESALE, then I can't do this. And if it IS allowed, I can just as easily script the vendor to require payment... Or someone else can with my free objects.)

CRAP!

alternatively, there needs to be a way to better 'deal with' object theft.

Hold on a second.

Are you sure Tiger? An object HAS to change ownership at some point, vending machine or not. Why can't they make a check against a "sellable/givable" flag toggle every time an object's owner changes?

Or am I oversimplifying it?

It does make giving gifts away harder, that's the only bad thing I can think of. Still, that's DEFINITELY a lesser evil.

You can make a test at the time of the transfer, but only based on information available to the system. It would not be capable of knowing that a separate monitary transaction between the two parties had anything to do with the current object transfer. There are just too many fine lines it would not know how to cross.


Example. Echo Omega runs a casino ("Casino Boss" IS one of her occupations) and had a friend make a special L$1 token for her. It is flagged "no resale" so there is no 3rd-party market for them. But they are transfer-okay so that players can give them to slot machines or even to a down-on-his-luck gambler as a handout. You can use real L$ to play her slots, or the tokens. The slots only give tokens when you win, but an automated teller window will convert them back to cash for you.

This seems like a VERY good use for the proposed no-resale flag, eh?

Now Ditto Omega (Echo's evil twin) bought the plot just outside Echo's casino and set up a vending machine. Ditto gets a whole slew of Echo's tokens which, at her value, are worth L$1 each. Ditto sticks them in his own vendor and it sells them for L$10. Now people coming to the casino see Ditto's vendor and unknowingly pay 10 times as much as they should.

Very underhanded (and probably could be called a TOS violation, since it's so blatant). Baaad Ditto....

So lets try to fix this... Lets say if player A (or one of his scripts) tries to GIVE player B a no-resale object, we read back through the recent money transactions looking for L$ going from B to A. If there were any in the last minute or so, deny the transaction. There. Now Ditto's vendor won't work.

But back in Echo's casino... All her slot machines have stopped paying out winnings when the player plays with L$. So she tries to script her teller window to convert L$ to tokens so people can just play with those. But the teller won't work for the same reason.

Meanwhile, Ditto has spruced up his vendor too look like a Rube Goldburg contraption. Now when people put in their money, it does a complex prim-dance (a la the fancy gumball dispensers you see in grocery stores) that takes just slightly over a minute... THEN it gives them the tokens.


Any way you try to get around the issue of vending machines with a no-resale flag in place, you end up breaking valid uses, and you can probably STILL get around it.

Resale of transfer-okay objects is here to stay.

Oh, and Ditto can get his friend Mimmeo to make a vendor that accepts money, gives the money to Ditto's vendor, which then gives the tokens with no delay.

A to C to B

It's just too easy.

No-resell is bad for the economy. It's bad for consumer rights. Read the whitepapers on the SL website for some good counter arguments to no-resell and why it's not idea for VWs.

OK, let's accept there isn't a good way to stop someone putting something with a no resale flag in a vending machine. So long as the flag is still there it will be clear that the owner of the vendor is a scummy individual and people can deal with that however they will.

Rathe,

I have read all four whitepapers on the web site and see no such discussion.

Put "NOT FOR RESALE)" in the description of the object. It will be more visible (just put the mouse over it) than a checkbox hidden away in the edit window.

And you can do it NOW!

"Defeat officially accepted"

I give up! No resale is a failure and can't be done!

I guess that's an ok option.

Essence (and anyone else interested) here is a direct cut and paste of section 3.5 from "Living on the Edge" by Cory Ondrejka which talks about fair use rights, indirectly addressing such things as a "no resale" flag.

3.5 PRESERVING CREATIVITY
An oft-missed point is that even in a digital world that fully embraces real-world copyrights, it is important to retain the historical limits on copyright, such as first sale and fair use. The current climate of strengthened copyright, exemplified by the broadcast flag (Crawford 2004) and the assault on file sharing (Lessig 2004), would be disastrous if applied to digital worlds. While creators within digital worlds should have the choice to protect their creations, traditional copyright seeks a balance between the rights of creators and the rights of consumers. Just like the real world, fair use and the right to tinker are critical components to education and knowledge dissemination within digital worlds. Giving creators the ability to block fair use reduces the world’s ability to build on past work and constantly improve subsequent creations. Even more damaging in the long run, strong copyright acts to lock early adopters in as the creative class, with knowledge and expertise hidden away. This introduces exactly the hurdles to creativity that Professor Benkler feared. Instead, digital worlds must embrace fair use while providing tools to allow rapid and economical resolution of infringement within the world. Despite the technical challenges that it entails, residents need to be on a level playing field, where everyone is allowed to exercise their rights, rather than following the real world’s approach where a subset of technical elite posses the training and knowledge to defeat digital rights management schemes.