Is it legal to gather information in SL.

I will gladly sell you my Ban List. Thankyou

Agree, but in cases like this lets hope that moral judgments don't end up lashing out into legalistic arguments on whether just because people don't like something it should be forbidden or in this case the information always hidden.


Interesting idea, would you mind if I ran with this idea and started a JIRA on it as a feature request?



/me Wonders what types of poseballs Strife (ironic name for a forum mod btw) has that he wants unscanned, though probably doesn't want to know


Doesn't really apply since it's publicly available information already.


Again, doesn't apply, since whenever you go near any parcel and get land info it's already sent to you in an intended matter it's not interception by definition.


From what I can gather the OP is gathering it legally and isn't doing anything illegal with it, actually come to think of it since it's public information by definition since anyone can access it just not in as an efficient manner as her scripter friend found out I don't think there's anything "illegal" she could do with it, unless she used it in conjunction with ill gotten or illegal data like real life info or cc info or the such which would be a different issue.



Not to go off on a tangent but that sounds eerily like Orwell's 1984

Serious question: is the aggregate of publicly available information still public when its aggregated form is not publicly available?

The ban list for any given parcel is available, the ban list for all the parcels on a sim (or for the entire grid) however is *not* publicly available (I think?), you need to collect it parcel by parcel before you can you compile your own (private) list which to me makes it non-publicly available information.

It's publicly available in it's original form for anyone else who wants to use it but if you don't make available aggregate data that you got that isn't public, so in a sense it is and in a sense it isn't public.

I'm still curious about how the information is being acquired / where it is coming from. The OP said, in the other thread, that you could get the info by either going inworld and looking at the banlist of each parcel yourself, or you could get it from some other, hinted at, somewhat secret, not usual, but direct from LL, method.

I asked twice what that method was, but was ignored in the first thread and refused in this thread.

If it is a bot teleporting around SL checking all the parcel banlists, then why not just say so?

If it's some other web-based thing, why not say so? Why hint that there's some other un-publicized way of accessing all the banlists in SL?



So the second way is "to obtain the information from a general list kept by SL that stores the information for all properties.." Is this second list available to the public? Or is it some hack or exploit into LL servers?

It sounds to me like the information is individually available to the public, i.e. go to the parcel and look, but there is an internal database that has been accessed to give the OP a direct link to stuff that is *not* available to the public. If it was public why not provide the URL or access info to the rest of us? Hmm?

-Atashi

It just occured to me that the ban ratio the OP is talking about would sorta make sense - if, say, said script also checks how many of the banned residents are logged on.

Mind you, it would still be highly corrupted data, since a lot of people are probably gone from SL or don't show their online status, but then the ratio to ppl being online would actually make a certain sense. Aside from the fact that this would be a MAJOR invasion of privacy...

Please do.

I didn't mean me personally. In my almost 4 years in SL I have seen the erotic furniture industry evolve from nothing to being a huge industry producing all sorts of products. Some of those products are so extreme that I have trouble imagining the owners wanting them indexed. Even with vanilla stuff, many people wouldn't want Google indexing their home. Americans can be very up tight about sex, they want everything involved kept behind closed doors. (It is not uncommon for breasts, including the nipple, to be shown in public advertising in Europe; this does not happen in the US).

Which brings up an idea, we need a "robots.txt" like system for SL.

Hmm, I can make an educated guess why a student studying human behaviour is interested in how people react within Second Life, and would suggest we may be treading on grounds a well protected lawyer, social services, or a police agency may be cautious to tread.

In real life (and in many democratic societies) there are laws against discrimination on the basis of colour, creed, religion, sexual preferences, and disability. Openly cross that barrier at your legal peril.

But some people do, because it is an aspect of human behaviour that may be genetically hard wired into us.

Because we all have free will (and maybe are mindful of the law) we can make a conscious decision to ignore/over-ride that human instinct.

There are far less barriers to human behaviour in virtual reality worlds.

For example in WoW it is required I (a) go around killing things, and (b) seek favour and preferences from one fraction at the expense of another. In Second Life, much activity is constructed around human behaviour including very explicit sexual preferences and activity.

Both of these behaviour preferences are either forbidden (killing and discrimination) or subject to legal and social restrictions (sex) in real life.

Bann lists are one way of saying I do not want you in my virtual life, blanket ban lists at an extreme are one way of stating preferences for one group over another. That data "might" be one indicator of true human behaviour more or less free of first life restriction.

For those unfamiliar with "robots.txt", it's a file used on webservers to *advise* search bots not to index parts of a website. It doesn't prevent anything however.

In theory, the new Search should only index objects that have been opted in by their owners.
Right now it's horribly 'could_be_improved'.

The most sensible approach would be for LL to make the owner opt-in of objects available in the same way that other information is already available. Then we would have a functional equivalent of a 'robots.txt' in which people have to positively opt-in their objects and land ownership to both SL and independent Search.
If the data gathering bots respect the flagging, then all is ok.

It may be more sensible to deal with detected misuse of information not opted-in rather than to restrict the availability of data on the basis that it might be misused.
Commercial use of data that had not been opted in could be made a TOS issue.
Publication of such data could also be a TOS issue.