ToS: The Perfect Body of Law

A common response in goverment threads has been something like: "we have the ToS and that's good enough for me".

Is our current Terms of Service really exactly the set of rules that you'd like to live under in SL, or would you prefer something slightly different? More restrictive? Less restrictive?

Discuss.

I would like to see PG rules relaxed a bit. Maybe not a full on M, but a little more than PG-13. We are all adults afterall. Maybe something like a PG-13, M, and X for sim ratings, but that might be over the top.

Currently, any sort of M behaviors that can be deemed offensive needs to take place indoors, out of sight, anyway. That should stay the same. I live in a PG sim and I am always aware of how my guests and I behave while on my land. But, if someone starts behaving a little above what PG allows, I dont want to have to worry about it and remind people to check themselves.

Thats about it for me. As long as the TOS and CS are enforced fairly, Im good.

And, not exactly a TOS issue, but I would like to see sim resources limited to percentage of land owned. Much the same way that your prims are restricted by plot size, physics, active scripts, light objects, etc could also be controlled via the land use functions. This would be automatic, if you tried to use more resources than available to you, your land would simply not let you. This would remove the need for enforcement of resource abuse by a real live person going door to door checking up on you.

Maybe this should be a feature suggestion, but I think its been there before. Sorry for the sidetrack.

No, because the TOS fails to take into account issues like:

-- draw on CPU resources, like lagging the sim -- there is only the vague stuff about "enjoyment of the game" or "disturbing the peace" which needs interpretatoin

-- slander of a business reputation -- you have little recourse if someone decides to hound you in this manner

-- fraud -- you have little recourse if someone deceives you, sells you an empty box, etc.
-- the Lindens are preoccupied with things like content copyright, but they don't have the tools to deal with common cat-in-a-bag type of problems

and many, many more "gray areas" like that.

TOS is perfect. That's what we all signed up for and that's what we should get.

I understand the need for more restrictive agreements to take into consideration many factors that affect our daily SL lives, such as those listed by Prokofy. However, I think those are more appropriate for small- to mid- size player run bodies and not grid wide.

One interesting thought I had the other day. It might be interesting to have 'zoned' and 'non-zoned' sims, similar to how we have 'M' and 'PG'. You want to live in a zoned sim with careful regulations you'd have plenty to choose from. If that's not really a concern, maybe a non-zoned sim is more appropriate.

Just a thought.

Another interesting post Prokofy.The TOS clearly is not enough and this is a very VERY complex subject.

I think people talk about two different things in relation to this issue and that is where it can get confusing,in my opinion what we need to talk about should really be split into two catagories.....

Community Standards

Laws

Can you have a Community Standards without a 'government'? Doubtful at best, on MOST privately owned sims you already have a goverment anyway - the owner - annoy the owner and he/she will take action so all these threads screaming 'no government' are really a waste of space.

Can you have Laws without Community Standards? The easy answer is no,you cannot.This is the world wide web and what is relavent to you may not be so to me because I live in another country - for example,I'm English and so racism is not as big an issue for me as it is for an American say.

In real life is someone opens a brothel next door to you then it IS in your power to attempt to have it closed down - in Second Life it's something you have to live with. I personally think that a couple of sims with a player run government would be a fantastic experiment and one which LL should have tried months if not years ago

There are already player governed games out there and they DO work and the reason they work is very very simple, the players running them have the best interests of their worlds at heart.

One thing IS obvious however - Second Life is now too big for The Lindens to manage so some kind of player input is,in my humble opinion, inevitable.I have in my minds eye a sim with suberbs,with malls and with their 'dark' side of the tracks too.

Can you imagine the possibilities?The player behind Billy Rampal likes his Avi to live on the edge,he comes from the wrong side of town and has no respect for the 'law'.One night he goes to his local club and in a rage he shoots a fellow reveller in front of twenty witnesses - Billy gets caught and has to pay the price.

Would'nt that make playing Billy more FUN?

And so on.......Millie Suavage loved the view from her waterfront apartment until those dam neighbours opened that strip joint next door so she sends a letter to the governor and complains,listing her reasons why the strip joint just isnt good for her neighbourhood but that dam governor rejects her appeal so Millie organises the residents and gets them to protests NO SMUT HERE!

Just to say NO to government /laws is narrow minded thinking because it COULD make this such an interesting place to be!

In another game I played I was both "Billy" and the "clubber". There was a justice system. It failed, people could kill one man and get 60 days. Others killed 30 and got one day for them all. Why favortism between players.



Ok fine tell me no and throw my palce of business out. I better get my money back then for the monthly fee LL is charging me and that I paid for that land.

Maybe you are only RENTING the land hmmm? maybe your paying L$ to do so hmmmm?

Now before you put your foot in your mouth again just go away and THINK



Because players who show 'favouritism, would be put out on their arses maybe?

I'm not following you here? Renting the land is basically what everyone in SL is doing anyway, even sim owners dont' get to take their servers home when they are finished.

What does it matter if he is paying $L for his land or not? I don't see him mentioning that at all?

I'm so confused .. please clarify.

Your clarification sir

He doesnt pay a real life money fee he rents his land for L$'s from the sim owner.

Yes but what if they are not. I doubt many are using the L$ payment system to pay for thier land that the company is providing, so in most cases you are looking at real USD. Also if you are renting then no issue easy solved and your situation might work. Otherwise it would be seen as harassment IMHO. I paid for my premium account, placed my house in a proper location (PG or mature), bought the land in L$ (either all made in game or through a USD = L$ service), and then bought or made the building to house my establishment in. You rather that people just lose thier money and property they worked for to get. Also where do stop the line at what would be a nuisance. Sure today a strip club. Tomarrow maybe your (insert sterotype) neighbor?




And besides words how would this be done? Would LL really want to take the time to look into every complaint of "abuse of power". It would raise thier work by at least 100%

These are the problems I am worried about. I have seen these happen first hand in other games where government was implemented.

The bad thing about the terms of service from my perspective is that it is primarily used as a weapon by Linden Labs and/or anybody that perceives wrong, be it legit or not. It is not empowering at all; it sounds like the guidelines for a white collar, low security prison. Sure, they may keep order and enable people to conduct themselves with reasonable expectation of decency, but the jailors are not bound by the same subset of laws...only the inmates.

I remember in the past, the police blotter specificially mentioned individuals in the forums, which is forbidden. I am curious how the exception was justified, ever, and who got warned or banned for doing it in the first place. Do they still do it? No...but that was their decision, not a punitive action taken in the name of the TOS.

Even when people say that there is clear evidence of abuse of an aspect of the world, i.e., self replicating land scanners, LL interprets in their own fashion (the info is public). Hey, so is info about my whereabouts, but if somebody leaves a device on my land to track my movements, or even whether or not I own it anymore, I would not consider that the intent of "public info". My weight is not secure info, but if somebody scanned me constantly to compile that info, I might not like it and have no doubt I could prevent it by calling the police, and a demand for how that info has been or is going to be used is clearly reasonable. The fact the player is well known by the Lindens, and obviously respected, may very well have factored into this. But aside from their word, we have no other reason to believe it. I'm fairly confident that if left up to players, self replicating scanners distributed by one player throughout the world (jeez it even READS like a computer virus) would be a thing of the past. LL decided not, so we suffer the indignity.

LL even refuses to discuss punitive actions they enact in the name of the TOS, no matter how skewed they may seem to the rest of us. This kind of enforcement inevitably leads to unrest...you simply can not discipline people with nothing more than waving a document created by you in their face, and that is exactly what it amounts to, as many players I'm sure will agree.

It is precisely this uniform applications of abitrary rules put in place by an all-overseeing entity which prevents SL from truly being "the metaverse". At best, it will never be more than "LL's Metaverse", since the only say players truly have in how the world evolves is based on what LL wishes to hear and/or who they deem worthy of taking seriously.

The ToS is a perfect minimum standard. It is not a living body of law that should be considered more than a minimum, in my opinion.

There's plenty of conjecture as to what should be added to the ToS. Most of these rules address gray-areas that are quite difficult to legislate and even more difficult to enforce.

This is, of course, why we have Community Standards - the other document which tries, with some difficulty, to address that gray area. Unfortunately, as mentioned, it's difficult without (perceived) enforcement.

I think a lot of that is due to what we don't see - the Abuse Report process. While opaque to residents, I do think that this works on some level, and the Police Blotter was also a step in the right direction. Unfortunately, it's still a long ways from perfection.

To address a lot of this, I feel that residents should be able to draft, and ratify, statutes and amendments by sim. Naturally, limits would need to be placed on the process; perhaps an upper limit on the number enforced. However, it would be one way for residents to "take control of the sims."

However, the other problem is enforcement - and the politics involved. I feel that the only recourse there would need to be official, through LL or contracted residents by LL. This would put a damper on favoritism, vote rigging, and ease pressures on the Abuse Report system.

As for LL endorsement, how about votes, by sim, for this? Passed votes would then be appealed to Linden Labs for approval, and if approved, this resident would be empowered in the sim to address problems. Similarly, if this resident abuses his/her powers, Linden Labs could also depose this ruler.

At any rate, that's my liberal $0.02. I doubt it'll happen, but it's a thought.

Well three things.....

First off I was talking about an experiment spread over a few sims owned by LL.

Secondly the italics were 'examples'

And thirdly,just as you have played a game where player gov' failed I've played three where it's worked like a dream - Ultima Online, World WarII Online & Lineage2(to a limited extent)

To dismiss this out of hand is to utterly miss the point of what Second Life is supposed to be all about.The future of this place is supposed to be in our hands yes? Can you honestly sit there and go and visit 10 sims and then tell me they're not all the same?

Just a collection of jumbled together builds with about as much point as a Bush administration?

What this place lacks more than anything is a direction and a POINT to it all.A world wide government would'nt work,of that I'm almost certain,but LOCAL ones would bring about a myriad possibilities for this place.

Agreed Sox. There were no rules at all in EQ as to how groups could pursue high end kills. Over time we developed a system, (anybody remember the PoT rotation, or even before that, the ToV one?) that NOBODY even thought of ignoring. Why? Your group would be outcast; you would essentially be locked out of the game because players would simply pay you back in kind by ignoring your rights within the server community.

This even applied to whole guilds. One guild decided they were going to eschew any and all conventions; if they got their first, they would pursue the kill, period. The rules of the game allowed this. Needless to say, the guild didn't last and most of the players could not obtain any meaningful spot in any other.

You abandon the rules and they will abandon you. Nobody wrote that law on my EQ server, it evolved and was ultimately considered absolute. Players that tried to live outside of them could never get beyond a certain point and invariably packed up and moved along or drastically altered their behavior and were eventually redeemed.

The WoW PvP server, very similar. More than once I XPd right next to a Horde player. We did not attack one another, and in fact assisted one another, because we knew the price of ganking at that level. These rules were BRUTALLY enforced by the players; violate them and you would not be able to set one foot out of a major city. People would forego everything to hunt you for a month; I personally am responsible for at least two drastic behavior modifications. When it was time for war, yes, bodies everywhere. But the community evolved the rules on their own. No admin told that horde shaman he couldn't attack me...because, in fact, he was allowed, and by the rules, expected to. But he didn't, because he knew that retribution would be forthcoming, and that his own reputation would prevent his attaining the real high end of the game.

Under such a system, rogue griefers do not last, and the hermit soloist is generally ignored, or pursued favorably if they appear capable.

We, however, are declawed by LL. As far as defending ourselves against attacks, we are little more than playground children tattling to LL and smirking behind their skirts when they take action on our behalf. I am guilty of this myself, but only because I know that if I took matters into my own hands, you'd have seen the end of Tcoz Bach.

If a group of EQ or WoW players can do it, so can we. But, LL has decided we are not to be allowed to evolve in a similar manner.

I would very much like to see a "no TOS" grid. I tell you for a fact I would release all my land and put all my resources into it so that I could enforce my rules, on my land, my way.

I think they want to know. Hence, Polysci forum. QED.

I never said to dismiss this out of hand totally. What I have not seen is

A) outline of what to expect governmetn to do.
B) Outline of consquence for "abuse of power".
C) How or if LL will observe this closely to see how it resolves.

Right now it sounds all like theory to me and yes it would work great but until there is a Box for the sand then this discussion goes nowhere fast.

might be a good time to have LL speak up if they have any plans or idea for a government so we can address THAT insted of world wide domination.

PS. Might get alot of us to stop running around in circles as well.

Simplicity ok?

Take three sims, zone them for residential,commercial and entertainment to make something of a small town.

Then take Four players - three players take responsibility for the three kinds of zones and one player is 'governor' with a deciding vote if needed and to generally over-see the whole thing yes?

Those four players sit down and decide and a set of community standards and laws.Once you have those in place you open your three sims to residents.

If nobody moves in it will fail - simple.

Consider this also - this kind of thing already works in SL but on a much smaller scale...for example.....

I own Lestats Dark Erotica - a club. As club owner I decide on what music is played,what events take place and what is 'lawful' and what isnt. Miscreants are banned from not only the club& groups but my whole land. People who enjoy it come,those who do not like it stay away.

I run the largest group in the whole of Second Life so I must be doing something right.

Now thats EXACTLY the way your towns would work.If you do it right then people will come and they will want to be a part of what you are doing - if you do it wrong they will go and live somewhere else yes?

After a period of time you could actually hold elections too - it could even work with 'bought' land - when you buy your land you agree to abide by the standards set down by the 'governor' and if you do not then you fully understand that you can and will be removed.

It's possible.....and I think it would work like a dream to be honest.