Would commerce continue in SL if Permissions were Abandoned?

But for steadily fewer total dollars.

We don't know where the steady state will be, but it will definitely be a different music industry than we have now. We're in a transition period. They're always terribly exciting.

I read something recently that speculated that in the last 30 days illegal downloads of music files had increased by 15%, movies 20% and software 5%. They attributed this to the economic crisis and predicted that as people will be more cautious with money over the coming year/s then media theft will increase dramatically.

I agree with your above quoted comment as well. I've been around since the inception of file sharing back in the early days of newsgroups and am astounded how widespread the phenomenon has become. I think teenagers today have a completely different mentality to the previous generation and have no regard for copyrighted material. It's just natural for them to log onto bit torrent to download an album and from studies I've read a good proportion of people don't even realise they are breaking the law. As you said, we are in a transition period and it will be intresting to see what state the media industries will be in 20 years from now.

The question isn't "will commerce work" but "will the grids stay open."

It takes one email from a content creator to inform an ISP that unlawful content is on their servers.

For websites, this usually means the site is taken down by the ISP until such time that the unlawful content is removed.

Which will be very hard to manage on a grid where ten idiots could log right back in and be uploading away the moment the grid came back online.

It's just a matter of time. The only respite I can think of might be on servers outside of recourse from western law. Iranian server or something like that.

AFAIK the whole point of the DMCA Safe Harbor rules is to make the overall site immune to this as long as it responds to complaints it recieves.

Also, you don't need an Iranian server, just to be big. Try contacting Youtube's ISP!

"Will the grids stay open?" is a good question for a different reason. If the level of economic activity diminishes, is it still viable to run servers to support it? This gets transmitted from consumers who don't buy the product they consume, to creators who don't get much revenue from their product, to grid operators who don't sell much "land" to creators.

If you ask me, the whole thing is on the rough edge of viability as-is. I very much doubt it would survive a substantial cut in real money input for virtual goods.

Like Pep says, certain types of services would still do well.

I doubt the customised scripting business would be affected much.

Sure once the scripts are delivered the customer would be able to change them or have them changed by anyone but whilst that is not always great for the scripter, it would be for the customers. Scripters tend to mostly charge on a time basis anyway.

Oh, gee, I dunno about that. I think loss of permissions enforcement would just kill the weapons industry outright, and most of vehicles. But even scripts for more "commercial" applications depend on there being a market for the things in which the scripts are embedded, or the things sold by the scripts, or the things the scripts count when they sell, etc. It wouldn't be "lights out" but if there was just less money in the economy, there'd be less money to pay scripters, too.

The same is likely true for services, if perhaps to a lesser extent. People who buy L$s directly to pay for services might just continue, but any services to content creators would suffer--and you can bet that tips from those content creators would dry up, too.

I'd expect a general deflation: everything costing less, but less of everything--both goods and services--from which to choose.

I was talking about services to people who are the end user, not a reseller of the work. There would not really be any resellers in the waythere are today anyway. Exactly for the reasons you outline. Does that really impact the need for scripters? Not really imo.

People would still want things scripted in SL however as much of what you can do relies on scripts and a lot of people do not have the skills to do what is needed even if they have some code as a base available, they will be willing to pay for the time and expertise of those willing to provide it.
Therefore the skills of a programmer will always be in demand for such a platform regardless of how the market works.
I stand by my assertion that time based services should not change so much.

I can kinda see it that way, if I think of "time based services" being linked (somewhat) to RL wages. In contrast, if the SL economy were a closed system, then the lack of commercial demand for scripters' services should be expected to reduce the price that could be commanded by a fixed supply of those services. But yeah, because scripters can just leave the SL marketplace and script somewhere else, those who remain might not see that much of a decline.

Well it would continue to an extent, i.e. someone's itunes example.

A lot of people PREFER to do the right thing - itunes didn't exist when some were downloading MP3s, and people said "make a way to do it legally and we will" - and they did.

As for SL, there's no way people could possibly hit all the shops, gather all the freebies and give it to everyone else in SL. Most people's friends lists are not all that long and people would just say they could get their own at the shop. Not everyone wants things others hand out. They wanna pick out their own stuff.

Certain things would be more ripped off than others. Furniture, HUDs, things everyone can use. Clothes, maybe less so. That's more to individual taste.

There are already freebies available and people still buy things for up to a couple thousand lindens, they prefer that one. Not quite the right example but I think people would mostly still go get their own, and pay for it.

I use itunes, I dont want to download and mess with other things...and in SL I wouldn't want an inventory filled with tons of things I took just because it was handy or someone offered it. But, there are way too many shops and too many people for things to take a serious hit. How would it all be passed around efficiently? Websites offering free versions could be pulled down, same with SL groups offering free handouts of paid things.

For now. In a few years down the road, it wouldn't surprise me if you could take inventory with you.

That assumes you're selling your objects as if they have scarcity which doesn't exist in that scenario, instead of selling your time as a creator, which remains just as scarce as it does now under the existing system.

Case in point: People were saying you'd never make money with open source software, because it lacks scarcity. Instead, people get paid by the hour by some companies to work on open source projects their company either uses or backs themselves (Linden Research does this for Debian and it's own SL viewer, even); and a multibillion dollar service industry cropped up creating and packaging software distributions.

Time is what is valuable in Second Life. Not prims.

I wouldn't blame this on "kids these days." The lack of respect for copyright isn't their fault. Rather, the overextension and abuse of copyright by the likes of Disney, et. al. for the last century is. As it stands right now, copyright is essentially unlimited to the same degree it was in England when the US revolted from it. If we simply brought copyright back to their original, limited grounds and left copyrights limited as required by the US Constitution, we wouldn't be in this mess (largely because anything from 2001 or earlier wouldn't be covered by copyright AT ALL at this point; the constitution only allows for copyright protection for 7 years).



I'd love to see someone download only stuff that was originally copyrighted 7 years or greater in the past and fight it to the supreme court to bring copyright back within constitutional bounds. At this point, unlimited copyright is hurting the public and stifling creativity. Why make something new if you came up with the next Mickey Mouse last week and can milk it under copyright until the mid-2100s?

I'm not sure that's even the case with most grids. Granted, openlife is susceptable to such an attack, though not the volunteer grids. Mostly because volunteer-operated grids are spread out all over the world on dozens or hundreds of ISPs.

YouTube's ISP is Google. They have their own backbone.

You mean "upload". It's the person who distributes the material that would have to fight it.
If they're a grid, aren't they sharing an asset server? That asset server is what they'd apply the DMCA to.

Sure there would be. Think more like a contractor. Don't charge for content, don't consider the content the final product Don't sweat what happens to your prims after you make them and receive payment for your time. Bill based on time spent creating the content.

I'm a contractor. I can't imagine anyone on the grid would be willing to pay any kind of useful contract rate for in-game services.

Arguing semantics is pointless since we both know what we're getting at.



Not necessarily. It's possible for each sim to have it's own asset server, which means trying to make money the hard way (selling prims as opposed to labor hours) has the potential to being reduced to a personally-destructive game of whack-a-mole (I say personally destructive, because I'm pretty sure we're seeing this out of the RIAA already. I'm not a pirate, though their anti-piracy measures have ensured that I won't buy an album from a RIAA-member label, and take albums I'm gifted back to the store so the money goes to a group that isn't out to destroy a major pillar of our constitution).

Like the distinction between the sim and the asset server, or between a group of isolated sims and a grid?
If each sim has its own asset server, what happens to attachments when you move from one sim to another?

Well, with a "can't do" attitude, I'm not surprised. I made L$144,000 in November. The only overhead I pay is Lindex fees and the fee to get LR to cut me a check for my account credit (there's a sandbox every 9 feet in SL, and plenty of free places to live; since I practice what I preach and therefor don't have any vendors, and given that 100% of the profit goes to offsetting my college bills, even if I used it for business, land is an expensive luxury that would only take food out of my mouth right now, at any price).

Argent, I know you're more talented than I am, as is just about anybody else who builds in SL. If I can make L$3,500/hr being an odd-job in SL, I have no doubt that a more experienced builder couldn't do at least as well as I am. Quit being so hard on yourself.

I was arguing about who was doing the infringing in the copyright scenario.



They get copied from the asset server you just came from. Check out http://opensimulator.org/wiki/Hypergrid

For how many hours? That would be a nice monthly bonus, but if I had to spend enough time at it that it cut into my regular work I couldn't afford the pay cut.

41, almost 42 hours. That's about the most I can really handle while college is in session, as I'm taking a full load this fall and a larger load in the winter.

Lmao Ok Where Ya High When Ya Were Thinking Of This The Ppl That Take Stuff From Others Would Have A Day At Having Fun Just Taking Whatever

Only Retards Would Ask This ?