Should Free Accounts Go

Not true. I can all but guarantee with the syndicate investors that Linden Lab has, it is NOT free to simply raise more capital by doing another equity offering. That's simply not the way the real world of VC funding works. Institutional syndicate investors like the ones that currently hold equity in Linden Lab have stockholder rights far and above those of a normal stockholder in a public company or friends and family investors in a privately held company, including the right to prevent dilution of their equity without their consent for any private placement round. If it makes sense to the syndicate investors they will allow additional investment rounds, but not without favorable terms for them to also invest further or receive further equity value by revising their preference and conversion rights and/or receiving additional derivatives. All of that can also cost as high as six figures in legal and accounting fees. That's assuming of course, that Linden Lab could attract additional investment on such junior terms to the current investors.

That being said I don't think having some kind of nominal fee for basic membership is going to infuse any meaningful capital to Linden Lab and if that is the motivation then I don't think it makes sense. If it would help thin out dead/inactive accounts that might serve transparency in actual user numbers but that is not in Linden Lab's interests so it will never happen for that reason. If anything it is a reason NOT to have a basic membership fee. When you weigh that against the final interest of reducing griefing, I don't think it makes a compelling enough interest for Linden Lab to do so, so I agree with Nika in that I don't think it is ever going to happen.

I think the focus should be on making premiums worth the upgrade to current basic account holders, something Linden Lab has not only failed quite miserably in accomplishing, but has actually taken several steps backwards in terms of the way it runs Second Life.

You should teach a class on this. Thats the FIRST time I have ever really understood this stuff.

You got to remember that that is because we are feeding 100 people from a sack containing only 80 pieces of fruit, once you get ride of a few of the weakest, the rest of us have enough fruit to survive
Continuing to allow content threat on the basis of aiding the weak only helps the system get overrun and aids the theives to get started easily.
Even the act of a one time $10 fee to sell content would probably weed out a lot of people who at the moment continue because unlike real business it's practically free to continue failing.

There's no such thing as an unalterable watermark on a texture as long as software exists to grab it raw as it's displayed. Even without that, removing or defeating a watermark is not that hard at all. There's even freebie photoshop plugins that do just that. Only enforcing HDCP compliant hardware for SL users, along with a viewer file hash check/scan for 3rd party software ala punkbuster would make an impact. That's also 100% not workable as open and open source as SL has become.

Bull. It's not a zero sum game. The people who are feeding from the sack are putting fruit back into it, AND attracting other people WITH fruit to put stuff in the sack.

More business owners doesn not necessarily mean more money coming into SL and more business closing would not necessarily mean alll those business owners would leave SL or stop putting money in either.

The "let any noob run a business" policy isn't necessarily attracting that many spending people to SL in my opinion.

I think we artracting more people to the sack that expect free fruit myself or a good opening to steal it.

Unfortuately there isn't much you could give to Premiums that you wouldn't be taking features from free accounts anyway, stipend is peanuts, not worth the electricity used to add it to a n account, I'd rather pay a couple less bucks membership or tier and just remove it completely.
If LL gave premiums a better viewer choice, nope wouldn't matter, not enough premiums to make it worth the effort of an extra viewer. No more new features for free accounts? can't see that working either.
Removing some content creation powers from free accounts? I don't see that as being productive, letting people learn to create is the first stepping stone to encourage them to be business owners.

from post #153


I'll go through the rest of your post tomorrow, when I have more time, as it might be useful to examine some of your claims.

But for now, I'll just note that in the post which you characterize as "insulting [you] personally", I specifically said----specifically!----that I was replying to you ONLY because you had succinctly expressed the position being posted by many. In other words, I was NOT making any allegations about you personally.

(Frankly I don't think any reader of good will could read my post [#126] and believe that the opinions and speculations written there were About YOU.)

You can't help wondering if they've ever considered doing that. I'll bet their view is that the stipend encourages spending inworld enough to be worth the accounting and electricity.

If they took a poll on "what would make you go Premium" (or took another, if they've done it in the past), I bet the top answer would be either 'lower tier' or 'the right to hold 1024sqm free of monthly tier'.

I like this.

Clearly LL would be wise to have some sort of message box appear on next log-in for those who have items removed from their Inventories, or they will be overwhelmed by tickets (and bad word-of-mouth about SL to people who might potentially have become customers).

I wonder if LL could have a regular page on the site with something like "content _____ was determined to be an unauthorized copy of content that can be found at [give store name and location]"....at least people who happened to like the vanished item could acquire a genuine copy of it, even if at a price.

Linden Lab may eventually start doing that, but it's something that takes up man power and can't be handled by a lowly Linden liaison (i.e Simple take down). I also suspect Linden Lab doesn't like the idea of deleting content that somebody has paid for, regardless of whether it's a copy or not. They'd much prefer upsetting a single content creator by not doing anything rather than upsetting several buyers of copied goods by deleting their items.

It takes big balls to punish somebody for innocently buying coped items. I don't think I could do it.

I believe the answer to the problem is transparency. We can't stop people copying stuff, but we can make it difficult for them to resell/transfer copied items. The only legitimate way to transfer items should be through a marketplace like XStreet. This way we can all see what eachother is selling.

Transparency

Quite a while back I have created a script as an experiment to open and close my doors in my house (I know, basic thing). Friend of mine asked me a while back to show him the basics of scripting in SL. Since I was standing next to the door at the time, and simple scripts is the easiest to understand, I copied that script and gave it to him to look at and ask questions about. I suppose I could have put it on XStreet and sold it to him, but that would be counter-productive.

Also, I often send notecards to people, because their IM's gets capped quickly.

There's too many legitimate reasons for on-the-spot non-commercial transfer of items to force a marketplace.

Few thoughts:

If they link inworld shopping with Xstreet, this might work. People want to see some items inworld. My houses for instance. Pictures never will replace the actual viewing inworld. So when someone comes to my store, views a house and when they click to buy it: a window should open directly to the product on XstreetSL without the need to log in first and they only have to hit "buy" This idea might work.

it should also, in this way, not be necesairy to check the 'view adult content' button on Xstreet. after all, the person that might want to purchage an adult product, is (or should be) already standing in an Adult flagged store in the first place.

another little issue: I don't need to pay LL commision on items sold inworld.

The idea, when done right and meeting those conditions, would have my support.

I think everything would be no-transfer for a nerfed* account, so scripts, etc., would work the same as they do now for no-transfer items. Bots that can transfer items would be tied to RL identities, too, in the assumed condition.
There are different kinds of watermarks; we're talking here about those that are (relatively) undetectable, so they wouldn't be removed by the viewer. Some of these are also more or less robust to simple transformations (X and Y scaling, rotation, color- and contrast-shifting, some blurring/sharpening). Digital watermarking would only protect images (AFAIK, although I guess I can imagine something similar working with waveforms).
HDCP is interesting. First, as long as content is rendered on the client machine, it would be vulnerable to copying whether or not the rendering software itself is open-sourced, so the HDCP discussion usually assumes streamed video from the service provider (obvious problem with network bandwidth and the provider's computing capacity). Also, HDCP is illustrative because it only protects content by threat of legal enforcement. There's nothing magical about HDCP: it could be defeated to create perfect digital copies of the streamed data. It just provides enough of a hurdle to introduce a single point where a violation would be worth prosecution.

_____
* I'm adopting "nerfed" because I tentatively accept Kitty's and others' claim that no amount of financial information can really bind online and RL identities, so instead imagining some state of "nerfed by lack of some other identity registration"--which is only hypothetical.

Yes, and it will make SL completely unusable for some people. I still have an analog monitor and an analog KVM switch, so I cannot support HDCP, and therefore I would be unable to come to SL at all. As would a lot of people that don't have DVI monitors.

Or for that matter run Linux. Does HDCP work on Linux? I never checked this before.

Okay, so including Aristotle verification is not a good idea. I get that. Still, Lewis's idea is still sound, with a little minor tweaking.

As for verifying through pre-paid credit cards... Yes, this can be a problem. However, constantly buying new pre-paid cards gets to be a rather expensive solution real quickly. Only the incredibly stupid would pursue this "workaround" for long.

Perhaps scripts and notecards should be fine for transfer. But yeah, somebody is always going to be inconvenienced by removing inworld object transfer. But we need to get a balance. Right now it's just too easy for Shifty to sell copies in his corner store without the original creator noticing. But even worse is the greifers that can release a copied item with full perms enabled.

Removing the ability for most people to share snapshots or textures (I just realized it's probably not very hard to trick the sim into marking a texure upload as a snaspshot since the image is supplied by the viewer which is inherently untrusted), clothes, objects, animations and scripts is rather a big thing.

If you spend any time socializing makes a conscious effort to pay attention to how often you or other people give someone something and ask yourself how much it would impact you if you were prevented from being able to.

It would also mean a number of technical changes: the ability to buy group deeded objects would need to go (probably not that much of an issue) as well as "Share with group" and "Modify rights" (not only do both indirectly allow the transfer of inventory, but they could also be used in a "create on demand" sale of stolen content where a bot would manipulate your own prims to create a new copy of something for you on the spot using your own prims without any inventory transfer taking place).

This isn't an argument against it (I proposed it on the lawsuit thread too), but just against the casual dismissal that this wouldn't impact a whole lot of people in any significant way.

The majority of content transferring between avies is going to be harmless and if that needs to be completely disrupted then it might as well be something that is actually going to make a difference rather than something that merely raises the bar a notch and won't make much of a practical difference. Otherwise you're just punishing a great many people for no actual reason.

*bump*

Buying items at unknown stores and finding those items deleted would drive people to prefer larger, well-known creators, but it's ultimately only a matter of time before a well-known store is found not to take IP rights too seriously (there's enough precedent of exactly that happening) and then you're left without anyone you know is safe to buy from.

And maybe I'm just naive because in 3+ years I've never comes across a "copybot store" (or encountered stolen items released as freebies for that matter) in all of my shopping trips so either people are just going out of their way to look for it (in which they likely wouldn't buy the original at its real price anyway), or the impact is more emotional than it is financial.

If the overwhelming majority of people never - knowingly - buy stolen content then harming their confidence in knowing that what they buy today will still be around tomorrow might turn out to have a far bigger impact on sales than copybot ever did. Anything that harms consumers is likely to come back and hurt creators when they suddenly find that their own customers no longer trust them to not have used an unlicensed texture, sculptmap or animation *somewhere* (and I'd think either of those is unfortunately far too likely).

(Not that LL might necessarily have a choice in the matter, enough people have pointed out that strict compliance with the DMCA would mean that LL has to do just that)

I have not been able to find any conclusive evidence or report that it does. However, given the proprietary nature of HDCP, I'm pretty certain it does not. One of these days, I'm going to have to borrow a Blu-ray disc from someone and try it out.

You're only considering whole-item infringement though.

A texture thief steals a bunch of textures and/or sculptmaps (everything is reuploaded to have the seller's name on all the textures) and sets up a legitimate looking business (or distributes them as freebies).

One content creator ends up using one of those textures in furniture, another content creator ends up using a shoe lace sculpt map in a pair of shoes.

The original creator DMCAs all the textures and LL dutifully sweeps the grid clean.

People who bought the furniture will log on to either find the furniture gone, have its texture(s) replace with gray (if it's no mod then it's good for the trash bin), and items in inventory will no longer rez ("Object missing from database".
People who bought the shoes will find that they can no longer wear them at all.

(Those actually aren't hypothetical scenarios, it's things that have already actually happened at one time or another when LL did do a thorough clean)

If someone is unlucky enough to have that happen a few times it won't be that long before their sympathy of content creator's plight begins to erode into resentment. The "helpful" message also wouldn't be of any use in this instance, nor would it be of any use for skins for instance where the creator simply stole the base from Renderosity.

(Edited to add that I don't mean to be negative with every post . But a lot of suggestions or solutions tends to be understandable knee-jerk responses, but everyone needs to look at the full impact of any given suggestion. If someone still agrees with it then then it's a founded opinion, rather than result in a "but I never intended this" when it's already too late to turn back the clock).

That's not the proposal that Tegg made.

If you want to turn SL into a crippled environment like There or IMVU, instead of a real virtual world, you can do it without me.

More businesses in SL means more variety of STUFF in SL, and more people in SL.

In my opinion you're completely wrong, because I know too many businesses that have become successful in real terms that wouldn't exist under your proposed regime.