Should Free Accounts Go

I didn't read all nine pages to see if I'm repeating someone, but... I think at the very least, you should be able to link your alts to your main account before they contemplated removing free accounts.

Lol... I guess I am... go figure...

One user strongly disagrees.

If a newbie wants to make a freebie, they should be able to.

I'm a content creator, and I take IP rights seriously. But protecting content rights should not thwart *anyone* who wants to make something and distribute it.

+1

Unfortunately, that wouldn't keep someone from making any number of unlinked accounts. A great idea nonetheless.

But I agree with the point that to thwart undesirable behavior, attack the undesirable behavior rather than tarring all sorts of innocents with the same brush.

THIS!!!

Something about this objection seems a bit 'off' (and I'm quoting you only because you stated the position succinctly---I know a lot of people are opposed to restricting the power to transfer all but notecards and snapshots).

If a new registrant is community-minded enough to want to create and distribute freebies, then that person is probably not going to be the type of person who'd object to giving LL payment or age-verification info.

I can't help suspecting that for some objecting to the type of plan Lewis Luminos outlined above, the 'right to distribute freebies' is just a cover for a desire to preserve other 'rights' that are less defensible.

I don't oppose anonymity inside any company's virtual world platform. But I don't necessarily think that those who choose to be anonymous inside some company's virtual world platform have anything like a fundamental human right to powers that enable them to steal content and/or grief.

The company (LL, in this case) is perfectly justified in restricting those powers to those who are willing to be accountable for what they do.

And if they're outside the US, so they don't have a credit card that Linden Lab can handle, to hell with them? Remember, that was Linden Lab's original reason for opening up the grid to unverified accounts in the first place in June '06... they couldn't readily verify people outside the USA. They made a huge deal about the way this would make Second Life an international community.

I agree that any disparity between ease of being verified in the USA and ease of being verified elsewhere is a continuing problem for LL. Given that USA members are a minority in SL, LL's best interests would be served by making a greater effort to erase that disparity.

(I'm not fully informed on the age-verification process--I've never gone through it. Is it unavailable to those without US credit cards?)

Sorry, first let me admit that I didn't read carefully and missed the part about PIOF etc., qualifying. That softens my point considerably. The only arguments I'm left with are those above about people who can't provide identity, and my simple statement that a newbie should be able to make a freebie, for the fun of it, without jumping through any hoops. Admittedly, this last is more of a wish than a moral perogative.

BTW, age verification wouldn't help to thwart the problem, because identity information is not retained. It doesn't provide any kind of identity trace. (The age verification mechanism only serves ONE purpose, which is to help indemnify LL. One wonders that it will even serve that purpose, since it's so easily fooled.) You have to remove that from your list.

No, it's irrelevant. The Aristotle age verification process does not provide LL any form of identification they could use to go after copyright violators.

Note: I am not opposed to requiring all residents provide payment info. I'm opposed to creating a two-tier world where fundamental functionality is not available to some residents.

This is bad rhetoric, "poisoning the well." If you can't make a valid point, don't make it, especially when the point could be deeply offensive to those of us arguing this side of the case.

It's all and well to open up and get bums on seats, but it also means a lot of the people sitting in your establishment are possibly just bums, just because a country is outside the US doesn't mean Credit cards are no longer common and possible, sure I could go down the road and get a Colonial Union Credit card then whine about how my credit card doesn't work to pay my tier, but I can also go down the road and get Visa, Mastercard, American Express that do work in SL or just direct deposit money via my online banking into Paypal to use.

WoW and other online platforms go worldwide and don't have a worry about people in countries without credit cards being able to accesss or not. It's simple whether you have high speed internet or not, if you use potatoes and chickens as curency, you're not going to play WoW.

Why should a developer feel obligated to provide full services for people in countries if it is apparently impossible to pay for services from that country?

There's no point in arguing with *me* about this, it's Linden Lab who said that allowing unverified accounts was a requirement to allowing SL to truly become international. I opposed it from the start.

No idea. I don't think they should have opened the floodgates in the first place. Having done so, I believe that nerfing some residents abilities changes the resulting in-world society in a way that I consider undesirable. And it doesn't matter *why* some residents are nerfed, or *how* they are nerfed, it's simply *that* they are nerfed that creates the two-tier society.

It appears that you misunderstand the meaning of the term "poisoning the well". It doesn't mean, as you seem to believe, "making an argument that I [Lear Cale] can't counter so therefore I'll accuse you, without foundation, of committing some random fallacy." There's a good explanation of the actual meaning of the term, with examples, here:

A citation of suspicions of the possible motivations that may lurk behind a stated rationale for continuing full-powers-to-transfer anonymous accounts, is nothing to do with "poisoning the well". It is, instead, a citation of suspicions.

An example of what actually MIGHT constitute "poisoning the well": if I'd posted some negative personal allegation about you as a reason for people to disregard your opinion. Of course I did not, but that would be an actual case of "poisoning the well," as compared with what I did post, which apparently you can't counter legitimately.

I can see arguments on that side. But I also value accountability.

I'm not saying that you don't value accountability, too, but...well, where do you stand on that in this particular context?

(Interesting about the current age-verification system--sounds as though it was designed to preserve anonymity. Which all fits in with the libertarian views of Philip and the other founding parents of SL, I suppose. It's always going to be a trade-off---'freedom' to steal content and grief goes hand-in-hand with freedom from accountability. Personally I prefer a middle ground between regimentation/accountability and enabling exploitation/anonymity. Both coins have two sides, after all.)

I'm not sure I understand your point. I have already stated my opposition to having *any* unaccountable avatars on the grid. But we lost that battle in 2006, it's over. Trying to keep fighting a rear-guard action at the expense of the egalitarian society in Second Life is simply pulling disaster from the jaws of defeat.

I agree that this is a problem that needs to be solved. I, too, think it would be unfair to place restrictions on those who would be willing to provide identification, but cannot because of LL's limiting rules.







Well, nothing about the system Lewis Luminos outlined would prevent the newbie from creating. And if he or she was reallly all that community-minded, he or she could always make a notecard with the instructions for making the item (including the textures and scripts, too).

I don't know. This isn't an issue I'm passionate about; it just struck me that Lewis's plan made a lot of sense, and that the majority of people it would inconvenience would be those with hostile intent. I wouldn't like to see those who can't (as opposed to "won't"prove identity inconvenienced, though.

Hmn, maybe. But I think the concept deserves further discussion. Who knows, someone might come up with a plan you could get behind.

It's been three years now, so I don't think it's going to happen.

Noob's view: Given the numbers of first-timers who leave SL after being overwhelmed, I think the free accounts are critical. I have brought in two people this way. They are watching my benefits as a paying resident. SL has now become a necessary part of my RL and is budgeted accordingly.

Of all the ideas I have seen, I like yours the best. It is well thought out, does the job of putting RL "tracers" on content created and sold in SL, and is the least burdensome. As long as these conditions I quoted are OR'd and not AND'd, then I could fully support this idea.

I could not stand behind this idea, because of the requirement for one to be a premium member to be able to sell anything. I am a basic, and I make and sell things so that I do NOT have to put RL money I simply don't have into the game. So far, I feel this arrangement has worked quite well and made me a good, productive member of SL society. If I had to become premium in order to sell anything, then it would completely defeat the whole purpose of me building and selling anything in the first place, and I would be far less inclined to do so. How many other content creators do we have in SL who are basic accounts would also feel this way if forced to go premium?

I think it *was* over, but I don't think it's going to *stay* over. They haven't been challenged on the effects until now.

We all know that any technical approach to the IP infringement problem is useless without some means of enforcement (and the will to do so). The current ability to associate accounts with RL identity is too scattershot. I don't especially think it *necessary* to make that association through payment either made or on file, but something is going to need to be done to make it better or LL will be out of business for good. The current IP leakage isn't tenable, and we now have a lawsuit intending to prove it.
What if it costs LL an extra US$5 million a year to protect IP to the level necessary to keep the platform from being shutdown by lawsuits? Who should pay that? Should we just keep taxing landowners for it, like everything else?

Maybe. Seriously, that may be the right approach, but it has consequences now: the monthly cost of pixel land is high because something like 90% of all LL costs are balanced on it, and that discourages new Residents from staying in the game, having land, and buying any content to put on their land.

I think an argument could be made that shifting some of this "tax" burden from land to content distribution could benefit the overall economy, especially for newbies, and expand the content market by more than it costs content creators. Such an argument seems more viable in the case of a "fee" specific to detection and deterrence of IP infringement, which initiative would differentially benefit content creators.

I'm not advocating that position here; I honestly don't know how I feel about it. I'm just saying I think I could see an argument for it.

This wouldn't really make any difference from what we have today:
- age verification doesn't provide LL with anything but "yes they passed" or "no they didn't pass". Not only is it easy to spoof, but even if it was perfect and unspoofable then LL still wouldn't have any identifying information to keep someone from age verifying an unlimited amount of alts with the same information and LL would have no way of knowing that they're all owned by the same person
- payment info on file only stops people who don't live somewhere where they can pick up a disposable credit card which they can use to verify without having to give LL their actual RL information
- having a premium account really isn't any different from having payment info on file so it's not a useful requirement

Which leaves registering RL information with LL and the only way to reliably do that is to send them a notarised copy of your ID or another identifying document (ie where a govermental entity vouches not only that the copy is authenic but that it belongs to the person who showed up to get it notarized).

Regular copies of ID would just be relatively easy to spoof (nor do we need to have someone at an iceskating rink suddenly realize that when people have to leave their ID as a deposit for hiring skates that they could scan/copy those to sell them on as something that can be sent to LL as "proof".

Even registering RL information with LL might not dissuade all that much (after all the chances of getting sued are practically non-existant) but it would allow LL to match up alts and make "license revocations" stick across alts and for that to work the RL information has to actually be accurate with little to no room for impersonation.

They're not likely to go back to requiring payment info for all avatars, and anything less will be another assault on the society in SL.

Isn't this all rather extreme? Not to mention a MASSIVE violation of privacy? Most of us don't even have to go through those kind of hoops to open a RL business. I have to think that a substantial number of current content creators would walk away rather than go though all of that - and that's for those who live in countries where divulging government records to private entities isn't illegal!

There is NO foolproof way to eliminate 100% of all content theft. Using less draconian, more sensible options such as what Lewis outlined may help eliminate 95% of it. Your method may increase it to 98%, but at very significant cost of personal privacy. Is going after that three percent worth all of that?