How landcutters are still hurting the mainland

You missed the point.

I was pointing out that the way he was defining it wasn't what I was saying.




For one parcel? Probably less than 10. Probably more like 3-4, depending on whether the plot is bordered by protected land or not.



How about if someone wants to GIVE you something?



He is neighboring land owner, which I think qualifies for this express purpose.

He said he IM'd all the neighbors in all the sims he owns land. You do know who he is, right? We're talking about thousands of parcels, not one.



He said he Im'd about parcels for sale, not parcels to give away.



He is not a neighbor. The realtor with a sign in the lawn is not a neighbor.

You discarded the context which was in the quoted part of the message. Way to go.

I suppose Elanthius will have to clarify whether he meant all parcels, but with the context of the quote, I took it to mean microplots, which he offers for free to adjacent landowners, and for sale to everyone else.



I, for one, am glad you're not at the switch, then.

LL already does enough stupid crap to jump out of the frying pan and into the flames of Hell.

I know very well who he is. He never said he would IM thousands of people about any one parcel or group of parcels. He said he would IM the NEIGHBORS of a particular parcel about THAT PARCEL. There's a distinct difference. The fact that he has X number of parcels across the grid is irrelevant. I can own and use land in multiple regions. If I decided to leave SL and wanted to give my NEIGHBORS the right of first refusal on my land before I put it up for sale, I don't consider sending them a SINGLE notification EACH spam. Period. Even if it totalled up to several hundred individual communications.



Yes, and the context is that the microparcels are set for sale, but if you know as much about him as you think you do, you also know that he offers to give them away to adjacent landowners.



Splitting hairs. For this purpose, I think he qualifies.

I'm glad you're not at the switch, I'm more than happy to do business with The Ninjas and would welcome im's regarding such deals in the sims where I have parcels. I've bought land off Elanthius more than once.

The messages are substantively similar. The specific identity of the parcel does not change its nature, otherwise the job spammers on Usenet wouldn't be spammers, because "each message was about a single job".

Merely owning land in the same sim does not create a business relationship, or else there's a lot of "targeted" real estate telemarketers who wouldn't be facing $250 default judgements in small claims court over violations of the TCPA.
Yes. There are many people who don't know, misunderstand, or deliberately ignore it, but that doesn't mean it doesn't have a precise meaning.

I'm not saying that what he's doing is a bad thing, I'm just pointing out that it does appear to (perhaps unfortunately) qualify as spam.

Which is why I don't see this as spam either. We own thousands of plots across the grid and have only received one IM from this bot so far. The plot in question WAS WORTH checking out, even though we didn't buy it. A single targetted IM is not even remotely as annoying as the numerous group invites and greeter notecards from around the grid.

Those with land in the same sim are almost always willing to pay a premium price for land, especially if it keeps the extrortionists and griefers away. Alot of the problems of the past are the result of extortionists beating neighbors to the land and cutting it or pricing it through the roof.

Even though Elanthius' group and ours are competitors, I have no issue with "value added" land sales to communities, especially with current market prices the way they are.

I think the problem people have, is Elanthius sets his land high and it graduates downward over time, which leaves the neighbors with an uneasy period of waiting, which could be seen as high pressure tactics (even extortion). Perhaps if the land was not set for sale for a short period, which allowed neighbors to buy at a set rate, might work.

After that, set the land as he normally does.

In business, it's reasonable to exploit a "gray area market", provided the "gray area tactics" are minimized. Nobody suggested he shouldn't profit from motivated buyers. It's just that he should be seen as offering a discount to neighbors first.

I've done exactly that, with good results. (I leave the parcel--and this is generally a non-tier-sized bit--not up for sale, but put a message to the effect 'will sell to first neighbor who asks for L$5/m' or such, in the About Land description area.)

If I get no response after some period of weeks I'll usually IM the immediate neighbors (not the entire sim's residents) with a notice that I'll be putting the parcel up for sale to Anyone in a week or two weeks.

This policy keeps my conscience clear.


EDIT: I should make clear, I don't think that this policy should be necessary or expected for parcels of 512m or up.

Nor were job spammers on usenet targeting specific people, either. That's what made their spam "spam".



As a neighbor, I don't have a "business relationship" with my neighbors, either.

I also don't know of any real estate telemarketers offering land for free, but maybe you do. *shrug* RL is not SL is not RL. The analogy just doesn't work.



Well, your "precise definition" isn't my "precise definition", so call me misguided, ignorant, or not understanding of it if you must, but I think we both know where that is going.



I think that is my ultimate point. That you cannot overgeneralize everything into a hard/fixed set of rules that is black and white. Sometimes you have to look at what is being done and go "that really isn't what was meant" and go by the spirit of the rules, not the letter. Simply because (as you well know) NO set of rules can EVER cover all possible situations. Sometimes, "letter of the rule" spam is just not "spirit of the rule" spam.

Any judge who awarded a default judgment against Elanthius for notifying them of an offer to GIVE THEM SOMETHING FOR FREE needs to be classified in the same bin as ones who reward patent trolls and the MAFIAA for their shenanigans. IE, stupid, and need to be disbarred/impeached/removed from the bench.

The ones doing the smae thing in email, though, WERE targeting specific people.
No, but you don't have a hundred neighbors. So it's not "broadcast".
I'm one of the people who came up with the original definition of spam back in 1994. The definition that everyone uses.
That's why, on Usenet, we distinguish between "spam" and "cancellable spam". Not all spam is actionable.

Still maintain it is a different situation.



At one time, I had very close to 100 neighbors, what with all the stupid microparcel farms next to my land.



Apparently not "everyone".



Not all spam is "spam", either.

Not all spam is "spam"? *snort*

Defining spam in terms of the characteristics that make it dangerous (bulk/broadcast, unsolicited, and from strangers) is necessary, because if you say "this kind of material is OK for unsolicited broadcast/bulk messaging" then the spammers will use that loophole. If you say "Certain exceptions can be made for certain kinds of low volume UBM, on a case by case basis, but that doesn't change the definition of spam" you avoid that trap.

This is not something that was just made up, this was something that evolved over a decade and a half of spamfighting. Other approaches, including the kind you're suggesting, have been tried... including several state and federal laws... and all have been far too easily turned.

I swear, there's only a few dozen people on the internet

Yep. Not everything *YOU* think is spam is "spam". I shouldn't have to explain that.



OK, what makes what Elanthius did more "dangerous" than "helpful"? Hmm?

I really want to hear this one...

..and I don't want to hear the cop-out explanation "well, if we allow him, we have to allow everyone else" bullshit argument, either. We don't.

It's the same crap that Linden Lab has been spouting over fixing adfarming and extortion plots over the last year, and is why they have to keep coming back with more new "policies" that take months to agonize over, when it is BEYOND clear who is being abusive and who isn't, and punishing those who are swiftly and efficiently.

It doesn't take a lot of thinking to discern a beneficial information service from one which is clearly self-serving and detrimental and is, thus, "spam".



The problem is that SL isn't the internet isn't SL. The internet is an unmanaged wilderness. SL is a managed community. LL *CAN* determine what qualifies as spam and what doesn't in a reasonable, rational way, and take steps to curb it. In this instance, they were wrong, which is not surprising, since they screw up on all kinds of things. They have been punishing people for sending as few as a handful of messages, so it is clear that THEIR definition of "spam" is even more stringent than yours, at present.

I have no problem with anything thats opt-in
but for me its simple, if I get something I didnt ask for its spam

If you express yourself more clearly you wouldn't.
If it's not spam for Elanthius to do it, it's not spam for people who are sending less benign content to do it. There are enough people with motivation (if not justification) and the ability to abuse holes you carve in the definition.
That's precisely the problem. Many of the early spams were people really trying to be helpful, or performance art, utterly benign, and that's something that led the net and the law to avoid creating rules about spam that targeted the factors that made it bad behavior. And this is not just a factor on the internet or because "it's the unmanaged internet", there's no fundamental difference between unsolicited automated cold calling and spam... and the telephone is a highly regulated service. But it took several generations of laws that tried to carve out exceptions for different kinds of content delivered through "telephone spam" before the TCPA let people sue telemarketers in small claims court... even if they could claim their offer really WAS a bargain.

And it's notable that Elanthius has already been the star player in a perfect example of "if we allow him, we have to allow everyone". He's the guy who really developed land bots, and that was a major factor in the first land bubble. And a lot of the bot runners were a lot less nice about things like land accidentally set to sell for L$0, but because elanthius had been allowed, they all had to be allowed, until the bubble burst.
On the contrary. It's the lack of rules that allowed adfarming to take off, and their slow response because they didn't have any rules that allowed it to take off. Their lack of rules and their idea that you can let things go until it's "clearly abusive" and then over-react that led to the OpenSpace problem, and the problems with their odd and occasionally abusive ageplay policies, and all kinds of other craziness. People are getting hurt, regularly, from LL's G team's weird, random, ad-hoc decisions because they don't have any rules.

And their current adfarming rules are STILL not targeting the behavior that's the problem... the abuse of tiny plots. You can STILL abuse tiny plots, I've STILL got an adfarm in the sim next to me while people who set up discreet, unobtrusive "for sale" signs on large plots are getting them taken down.
Spam isn't about one message, and one incident. Spam is a problem BECAUSE "if you let one person do it, everyone will do it". It's a problem not because one incident is or is not a problem, but because it's NEVER just one incident.
SL is a community managed by leaving little problems to grow until they become unmanageable, then overreacting and hurting thousands of people.

The term used to descibe 'spam' in most jurisdictions is Unsolicited Bulk Email - or Unsolicited Bulk Electronic Messaging.

It doesn't matter whether or not the content of the message is of interest or advantage to the recipient.
Spam is defined by the activity of sending UBE. It is not defined by the attitude of a recipient.


There are people whose definition of spam is "something I didn't want to get", and in SL this mistaken definition can encompass a one-off handcrafted IM and or notecard from a neighbour related to something on the sim.

Elan's bot messages would constitute UBE if the recipients had not requested them.
Some recipients might welcome those unsolicited messages, but they would still be UBE.
Even if nobody ARed the messages, they would stil be UBE.


Elan ran the risk of someone(s) raising ARs, and those ARs being considered valid by J.Random.Linden.Droid. Apparently this is what happened.

The droid could take the view that the messages are only going to landowners in a sim and concern land in that sim. They might decide that landowners should actually be grateful for notification of land becoming available. Perhaps they would dismiss the AR even though technically the activity is UBE.

On the other hand, the droid might take the view that what Elan is doing is (ab)using the IM system to achieve a higher than market price, and rapidly. The IMs would ensure ensure that all landowners are (1) aware that a parcel has become available and (2) are aware that all the other landowners in the sim will have been notified. If the price for the land is high and decreasing over time, the effect of the UBE would be to exert pressure on landowners to buy at a high price, because they know that *everyone* could be considering extending their holding.

Or... the droid could just stop at UBE and go no further. No time!!


*IF* the IMs made clear that the land was being offered at a fixed reasonble price then it could be argued that this was a service to sim landholders.
But... what is the "market price"? Elan says he doesn't know. It's defined by what the market is prepared to pay.
However, his bots buy land at "below market price". This implies that he has a good idea of what a *reasonable* average price is. Maybe he even has profiled 'great location' sims to determine a percentage uplift above mainland average for those sim types.
If he hasn't then this might be a SL job that he could offer.

The problem with putting land up for reasonable is that it opens a possibility for an opportunist to swoop and immediately set it back at unreasonable.
However, the chances of the opportunist swooping are lessened by a price that is above bot prices.

It would be possible to use codes in IMs to trigger a bot to set land for sale to the IM sender. That seems to be the only way to restrict a sale to one of a list of avatars.
However, that that would take some development and database resources.
Going to that effort in order to effectively sell land at less than "market" price, might seem counter intuitive. On the other hand, doing it that way could generate a higher turnover rate from landowners in the sim.
This would be "stack 'em high and sell 'em low" model as opposed to "buy 'em low and sell 'em high (eventually)" model.


But whatever the model - absolute self-interest or pro-bono with a bit of interest -- the initial IMs involved would be UBE and carry a risk of an AR that gets noticed.

QFT



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QFT




It's just like RL isn't it?

Okay, okay. I can kinda see both sides of this.

Well, several sides, because I think Dave Herbst has a point about the reverse auction thing being scary to neighbors. I get it that this isn't the intent and that rather the objective is to let the market determine value--and in the absence of regular auctions available to residents, it's perhaps the only plausibly systematic way to price land.

Neighbors don't want to buy at a price that makes them patsies, but they don't want to wait for the extortionists to pounce. So even if the reverse auctioneers' hands are clean, they (unwittingly?) benefit from the threat of extortion by others. (Hence, one might discount opinions of those practicing reverse auctions, when advocating freedom for extortionists to set any price for land.)

Considering another "reverse auctioneer"--an ex-banker turned ex-adfarmer turned extortionist--I really wouldn't want to get an update every time he adjusts the price of the parcel he has adjacent to my land. (Actually, I'd buy that parcel if it ever got anywhere near a reasonable price, but for months it's been "reverse auctioning"--more of a random walk, really--between L$250/m2 and L$40/m2, so I don't want to know about it anymore.)

The problem is, how to appear impartial, yet allow Elanthius to do his thing without permitting the same for robber-banker-baron?

In theory, they could treat "edge cases" individually, and when necessary devise post hoc explanations for why a particular case is a violation when another isn't. That sounds good--but so far, we have overwhelming evidence that LL (or G-Team, anyway) is just not competent to handle these cases. (Harry's pet purple casino crystals, a case in point.)

Personally, in this particular case, an "opt out forever" option would be fine with me, but I can't honestly say that this would satisfy everybody nor every situation. BloodLines is a conspicuous example where "opt out" ain't good enough--even though LL seems content to let that universally despised spam continue, with only the most obnoxious imaginable form of "opt-out". (What was I saying about impartiality?)

This is another problem with Elanthius's scheme. It might convince LL to put new restrictions on IM, or cause them to badly implement new throttles. It might also convince people to implement crappy filters.

I remember a time when email was reliable. It just wasn't credible to say "I didn't receive it". If you sent it and it didn't bounce, they probably received it. Now you have to accept that messages get eaten by spam filters.

Nobody's business model is so important that we should make everyone's lives difficult to accommodate it. I'm tired of hearing about edge cases.

That is almost wholly correct. It is not spam if the message is sent only to those who would have an interest in knowing the information. E.g. if I started to manufacture a new range of ballpens, it would not be spam if I emailed (or posted) information about the new range to all the ballpen retailers in the country, or within the area I'll deliver to. But it would be spam if I emailed every email address I could get hold of. The word "bulk" isn't the only arbiter of what is and isn't spam.

I haven't read this part of this thread, so I don't know about Elan's messages, but informing all of the occupiers in a sim that a piece of land in the sim is for sale isn't bulk messaging and neither is spam. More than one message does not make it "bulk" or spam. If the occupiers of the next sim were messaged, then that would be spam, because they have no interest in the information. If the messages are sent after every price change, without the recipients requesting the information, then it would be spam, imo, even though the low number doesn't constitute "bulk".

I disagree. I collect fountain pens, but I don't want every fountain pen retailer to send me unsolicited emails. By every definition of spam I've seen in the IT world, the focus is on the unsolicited part and sourcing of lists, and I've sat through probably an average of one serious seminar on the subject every quarter since gods know when. The first official spam was sent to a very limited group of people on ARPANET and every person on that list could have been considered a potential interested customer.

If you had an existing business relationship with them, which seems likely in this case, I suppose not.

On the other hand, there's no fundamental difference between "I started to manufacture ballpens" and "I started to manufacture printer cartridges", and from there there's a small step to "I started distributing ball pens/printer cartridges/monitor cleaning cloths in your area/city/state/country", and I had to take my email address off the contact page at work because I was getting so many messages from people selling "screen cleaning kits" and the like.

Informing everyone in a few hundred sims that you have land for sale in those sims, and making it an automated operation, isn't the same thing as letting the three or four people around a single plot you're selling know about it.
How many messages makes it bulk is debated, but someone operating at Elanthius scale is going to step over that line sooner than later... whatever it is. And IF HE DOES IT, then a hundred scammers are going to start doing it and pointing to him to justify it.

If Linden Labs hadn't let the Impeach Bush Guy get away with it, we wouldn't have had the adfarm problem in the first place. If they'd objected to Elanthius' landbots, we'd probably have saved ourselves a land bubble. Let's be glad that for once they're drawing a line early.

Hiya, just wanted to pop back and say that after giving it some thought I largely agree that unsolicited IMs are spam and should be avoided.

Hey! No fair! WTH have landbots got to do with the stupid bubble?