From: Gwyneth Llewelyn
Yes, Varian, like Pendari, I must also agree with you! LL seems to have concentrated all their efforts in the area of copyrights and intellectual property. I can understand that this is the real difference between SL and other "virtual realities" and that's the reason why LL spends more time and effort around copyrights than on "ownership".
In fairness, LL is a small company banking on a very broad mini-universe. It's their job but they still have families
We just have to keep posting and they'll keep improving
I for one would hope they spent more time on guarding our creative rights to everything before land.... I can move my intellectual property from land to land but not the other way around... One plot is similar enough to another that I can move as long as i "own" my things and can still rent ad "space" on the find places list (these quote marks are going to get out of hand before we're done here lol) Think of it as our example of changing web servers.... as long as you own your words and pictures and intent, land/server bytes is a small issue.
the only small anomoly i can think of right now is in the spatial attribute of the world i.e. closer to a telehub is worth more to a mall and less to a house and having to move might mean a loss in income. There are no SL courts yet (thankfull because we do not have enough tools yet)
From: Gwyneth Llewelyn
Still, I also think that LL will have soon to evaluate the "land ownership" question and at least define it better on ToS. The Not-To-Be-Named-Polysci-Group
of which I'm also a member and which is announcing sales of "share ownership" on private sim land had to struggle with the "concept" of land itself for the covenants to be signed amount the Not-To-Be-Named-Polysci-Group and the residents wishing to own "something". The problem here is how to define it so that everybody knows what it is (as the LL ToS does not describe it) and that does not violate ToS at the same time, by defining it wrongly, or defining it as something that it's
not.
but computing and really, mathematics, is all about metaphor. A pile of metaphors is the thin membrane that keeps this looking like a world and less like a bitmap dump. You can't pick too much at that membrane because what you will find on the other side is plain ol' electrical current running in the background. If you're uneasy about your metaphors, it's understandable but that's thought and computing... stringing metaphors together. we have to call it "land" in SL so that we all agree upon the same metaphor. Any document created in the SL world SHOULD define it as just "land" as in any other universe
It's necessary to do this so we can treat it as land, sell it as land and understand that it's space, property and an asset. LL can't maintain a virtual world and refer to everything as bytes with atribute tags...
From: Gwyneth Llewelyn
Thus, the ToS talks about "owning and selling land" but you don't know what this "land thingy" is
You just know perfectly well that all objects you create on your "land" (or on someone else's "land"
are protected by copyrights and IP laws.
As I said before, the metaphore can't be popped. There's no thingy. It's just a dirt metaphor that we use to keep things universal between countries and cultures. The TOS already talks about land as spatial pieces of sims and then describes sims as physical servers. I'm sure any court would view this as a definable, measurable portion of a server that is being rented.
From: Gwyneth Llewelyn
Whew. This is hard. As said, let the lawyers at LL figure it out. But I really hope they're on it - we definitely need a better development of land rights, as you proposed.
well, again, in fairness..... documents are written by people living in a specific universe. They are subject to the laws of that universe. Don't forget that in RL you have a "deed" to your parcel which means you hold ownership of a plot of dirt. The land has not been annexed from the country so technically it can be taken from you for any reason but you do "own" it. Your RL document is a bit hokey because of this limit we've already touched on about true ownership. But, it' a document non the less which is, if nothing else, a tool for you to use in your own defence in the court systems of your county who issued you that deed in the first place. SL is no diferent (if a reflection of RL.. we don't operate in a vacuum here) any documents published and or signed by us are going to be a document that holds ground, straddling if you will, two universes with similar quantities and qualities... We're going to have to put up with some duality if we insist on leading duel lives
~Lefty
