Should Free Accounts Go

Go check the Jira. There's thousands of possible enhancements that could be added to premiums.

And it would also restict my ability to make someone a birthday present. Or to create content that are public-domain and/or F/OSS. Not everything in SL is commercial, and forcing me to rent space in a marketplace just so I can create free content is not fair towards me. I do not agree with copyright infringement, but this is a solution worse than the problem.



Yes. This. Agreed.

Once it was set up on the server they would only have to enter the UUID and it would replace every copy of an object in SL with a new object. No real manpower required but a godlike tool only to be usedunder proper proceedures. I suspect such tools aready exist in the asset servers anyway.
There may need to be plenty of warning on this one say from January 1st it comes into effect. And post up a complete list of everything marked for deletion well in advance.
Maybe have a initially have a 30 day cool off as each item is marked for deletion, and ramp it down over the next months, though I suspect a court order could make that an immediate requirement sooner or later.

Careful!

Linden Lab no longer bans "difficult" customers, they just add specialized features to drive them off.

Never tell them what you don't want!

As you point out in another post, I'm probably confused about what specific proposal we're discussing here, but in general I do not think it has to be a losing proposition to adjust the barrier to entry in such a way that it differentially discourages businesses such as BIABs and copybot malls, even if some few legitimate businesses are also discouraged (or, I think more likely, delayed).

Again, it may be a balancing act between losing the "easy come easy go" businesses and losing those that have been getting ripped-off to the point of leaving. (It *may* be that, if some mechanism is devised that has that effect and actually deters IP infringement--about which I'm not yet convinced one way or another.)

So my point remains that inconveniencing some would-be businesses is not enough to dismiss a proposal out-of-hand.

Okay, you can have it your way and play Second Life all by yourself. And you'll be able to send your alts a birthday cake.

Turning SL into something like IMVU or There where most people can't even pass on a cool gesture they made, would destroy it even if it had NO effect on business.

But it would block more businesses than you think, since most of the people I know in business... including ones with multiple sims now... started with "easy come easy go" as you put it. Hell, the L$10 upload fees were discouraging some until they found out about the Beta grid.

If it wasn't for the easy ramp up, I really doubt most of the current businesses would ever have gotten started.

It's not, as I've noted, even primarily about "inconveniencing businesses", it's about destroying one of the things that really distinguishes SL from other platforms. It's about destroying one of the things that makes it worth even caring about what happens to SL.

But...

I do find it hypocritical that now-successful businesses are interested in slamming the door on competitors by destroying features of the environment that helped so many of them get started.

A Linden employee (with huge balls) will still have to launch an investigation into whether a copy really is a copy and you haven't solved the problem of deleting copied content that people have paid for. They won't be happy!.

People may even lose interest in SL when they realize that they have to launch an investigation into a store owners background before making a purchase. Either that or risk having their purchase deleted a few days later.

Are you seriously saying that there will be no more commercial content creators left if this is not done? And that there will be no-one else left in SL? It may not be such a bad thing. I've seen certain free items here that are much better than the corresponding commercial item(s).

I have nothing against commercial content creators. I have purchased a lot of stuff in SL in my life. However, I don't think the content creator's rights to protect themselves trump my right to enjoy my experience here. I will not steal or copybot items, but by the same token I don't want to be subjected to a lot of regulation. I can get that in my First Life, so if I wanted that I would stay there.

I suggeste they actuially replace the item with a notecard like "deleted stolen content #6789" and in it list the name of the item/theif and also the orgininal creator so people knew where to get a replacement. This also means as long as people kept the notecard the decision could be revesed and swapped back if necessary.

The notion than eliminating free accounts helps in any way to fight content theft and IP infringement sounds absolutely stupid to me.
The point of someone who commit such actions at large scale is to make REAL money out of it, so you can be sure that those people have accounts that identify they RL identity. Obviously they may sell the illegal content under free accounts to complicate the track but, ultimately they can't cash out the money without identifying themselves. A thorough investigation would easily track the money lead.
The problem is LL unwilling to allocate resources to support the victims of content theft. That's the point of the SexGen lawsuit (and it's not even content theft, it's more about using the label "SexGen" illegally).

Well if that means we have to provide tools or they have to learn how to check the age of another resident so be it I guess. Sooner or later court orders are gong to force LL and anyone else to do instant deletions of stolen content anyway. the current court case may mean sooner.

We're not suggewsting people can't make a birthday cake and send it to a friend, but they can't sell it on Xstreet or inworld unless they have a selling licence, premium account or own a sim.

It's pretty easy for someone to set up bot clients to spread and difuse money over a few hundred disposable alts and in the end if it goes to an alt linked to a Yahoo account, you're at a dead end without major court action anyway.

Yeah, they may feel they have no option but to delete copied content eventually. But I can see why they've been reluctant to do that. It is ethically uncomfortable to confiscate stolen goods from somebody that didn't know any better.



I know, and that's the problem I'm having with a lot of the suggestions people are putting forward. It's not the folks selling copies that worry me the most, it's the greifer types that enable full permissions on items and drop them into a sandbox or give them to their friends. Just for the hell of it.

Another underlying issue I have with all of this is that to verify whether somebody is copying stuff Linden Lab has to read customer history/chat logs etc. This is a major privacy issue for me. Do we really want Linden Lab being our big brother?

This may also be illegal. If you buy a stolen watch from a jewellery shop in good faith, do you deserve to lose the item and your money? Instead, the original owner should make a case against the jewellery shop, not the end user.

What's a "Yahoo account"? Do you mean PayPal? If they ban that PayPal account, then the crook needs to get another PayPal account for each run, and PayPal already takes action against people who try that.

Oh I'm sure it is illegal, but how do we prevent it?

And then there's the famous "what can we add to premiums to make them more attractive" thread here, started by a linden... and never been acted upon.

Don't go after the end user. Go after the person how infringed your copyright. Get LL to ban his account. If he transferred money out of SL, then LL will have a record of where it went, then make a court case against him and PayPal/his bank. If not, the L$ is still in LL's database and renumeration can happen.

There is nothing more certain to get a end user's resentment than "Your X was broken because of a complaint by Y". The user may just stop buying from Y, because of the unpleasant associations.

Well it's LL, Sony or Blizzard I guess

Full perm copies are also a problem that may need another approach again there isn't any one answer to all stolen content, there needs to be a few things implemented.

That's why I feel it's incumbent on me (rather than, say, Stroker) to try to advance this argument, because nobody could ever mistake my puttering for a successful business.

The whole thing is the nature and height of the barrier to entry. It's not as if SL is remotely like RL anyway, in terms of getting to the point of being able to give somebody something. In RL we don't have to choose our own name, solve a CAPTCHA, and download a viewer to get started. (Instead, I suppose, we have to get born and develop the concept of object permanence or something.)

Not to belabor that whacked analogy, but if there were some additional step needed beyond the viewer download in order to enable content transfer, how difficult would that additional step have to be to have a net negative effect? The answer cannot be "nothing, ever, not even a checkbox, else it's IMVU." That just ain't true.

No I mean Yahoo, it's like Hotmail, a disposable email provider.

If someone can make a birthday cake and send it to someone else then they can copybot content and send it to others.

Keep in mind that distributing full permission copies is far worse than someone who sets up shop and sells what they copied C/NT or NC/T. The infringement in the first case will never end, the infringement in the second case ends as soon as they're caught.

Since the watch belonged to someone else it may not be a good example. Recovering the watch and returning it to the original owner wouldn't seem out of place. Theft in SL is about intellectual property, not actual property.

Someone pirating CDs and DVDs (making them look like the original with printing on the DVD and cover art, etc) and selling them on eBay (for a realistic price to rule out a "too good to be true" counter-argument) might be a better fit. The only interest there would be in shutting down their operation, but noone who unknowingly purchased a pirated copy is suddenly going to find the police at their door asking for the pirated copy back.

I think I'd rather go play WoW than start court cases against some teenager on the internet.



Yes, I'm sure the user would stop buying from Y.

...and X, and Z and the rest of the bloody alphabet!

"I was with my babe the other day and my prim thing suddenly vanished. Turns out it was an illegal copy!!! Screw Second Life!"

LL does not transfer money to Yahoo accounts. They transfer the money to a bank account, write a cheque and post it to a physical address, or send it to PayPal. A PayPal account can be investigated by a court, even if it's associated with a Yahoo or other free account. PayPal has certain fiduciary obligations regarding verification.

It's not easy to get money out of SL and make it untraceable. Not impossible, but money laundering is not for the faint of heart, or a teenage griefer. And if the government starts to suspect money laundering there are more serious things in store than simple copyright infringement.