Would commerce continue in SL if Permissions were Abandoned?

I don't know when you last visited the opensim based grids but they have come a long way recently, I believe there are only 24 LSL commands in the 'not implemented' state.

I'm surprised to hear what you said about LCO not having a cashing out facility, that must surely be on the cards soon.

It was supposed to have been implemented late last year. But apparently it just hasn't been as high a priority with the developers there as some other things... *shrugs* I directly contacted one or the senior admins there, and told her that the main reason none of my products are for sale yet in that grid is teh complete inability to cash out. She apologized but couldn't give me a timetable as to when it would be possible.

Well put!

Lots of people would create content for the fun of it (e.g., people like me).

But really high quality content that requires a serious commitment of time and RL resources would be rare, compared to today's SL.

As mentioned elsewhere, services would continue.

Above someone mentioned that the textures market thrives despite protections. However, note two significant things: the market for products helps support the market for textures, and the fact that textures can't be trivially copied from products also helps support the market for textures.

There would still be a market for textures, but it would be more of a service providing the ability to find textures, rather than selling the textures themselves, as it is today.

Yes, that is another of the huge reasons I didn't bother uploading my textures to LCO and selling them there. There is virtually no one there to buy them, and no products to use them on.

The last time I was there and actually saw another avatar in the same sim, a couple of the admins were chattering extaticly about the fact that they had finally managed to import ONE animation for a simple dance into that grid. The locals were going crazy over the fact that they could finally dance! Tells you a lot about the lack of scripted furnishings, even g-rated ones, that would exist there, with no animations for the poses... So who would buy my textures of upholstery fabrics? There were a few buildings, some quite well built. But with so few residents, there was virtually no market for people building houses and other buildings for others. So who would want my window texture packs? The market just isn't there...

Creation would contine. Commerce would not.

They'be been dancing a while on OSGrid now
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=faI1aDJZuRM&feature=channel_page

So Einstein... is the harbinger of IP theft?

I think that would be Wheeler, or possibly Tipler.

If it were to switch right now? i think SL would take a hard hit..bye bye economy..
you would have a sudden drop in population..sims being turned back in and a lot of content pulled from SL..
SL would have never grown like it has if it were not for it's permissions and the ability to make a thriving business..you would see a reverse affect i would imagine..

it would probably be just another place to get noticed on the net for web sites..kind of like RLC does with their online adds everywhere..

I think you would see more photo plastering than anything turning up to have RL items sold from someones website..

it would affect so many areas that it's really hard to say where sl would end up..

i mean you will lose a lot of the population that came here just to make money..
the same for anyone that would have came here for that reason..
The linden would be in crazy shape i would imagine and probably mess with the money market..

we would probably end up with a population we had 2 years ago around the teen to 30k logins after awhile..

there are so many areas it would affect and so many places that depend on the linden to stay alive..
people that did sell content would be depending on donations more than anything...the rest would be doing it to get their art seen ..

god so many areas would be hit it is hard to even type up what would go wrong with the current SL

But like most communities with tools like this..it would probably turn into like a renderosity or something where artists meet and use this media to show something that is being sold outside of sl or that they want to get the attention they would have gotten here...i think SL would be a show room to other things..get noticed here and hope people are interested enough to take a look at your site..


i'm sure a lot of good things would happen also..like performance increase and the things to game and get noticed..
a lot of the reason for having a copy bot or whatever would be gone..any kind of bot really that would be here for anything but to spam websites..

i really think Linden would be stuck with a pile of serves just sitting in the corner with nobody to occupy them..

this is all nothing more than a guess..but i do see a lot of the reasons that a lot of people come here for that would vanish..

a lot of things could happen but it would affect just about everything i would think..

i have to say the OP's question is a great question and i think it is hard to predict what the final results would be until we saw them..

What is RLC? I keep seeing "RLC" tossed around in here, but not what it means.

{EDIT: I was making a completely wrong assumption here, but I'll leave it in place for the sake of later posts making sense... /EDIT}


"Restrained Life" client. It's a client especially set up for the submisive BDSM players. It has extra stuff in it so that collars, cuffs and other aparatus for BDSM play can not be detached without the "Master" approving and unlocking the device, or can in other ways restrain and restrict what the submissive can do. They can still log off or log on at will, of course. And nothing prevents them from logging off and logging back in with a normal client and doing anything they wish. But, for example, someone bound with a certain RLC-enabled device might be unable to change their attachments and avatar form at all, while using RLC as their client. Or they may be gagged so they can't use IM's, text chat or Voice Chat.

RLV is another acronym that means the same thing as RLC. The V being for Viewer.

It requires special code added to the collars, etc, to make them do anything special even under the RLC client. But a number of major makers of such attachments, like the TOKON line from xcite, have those extensions in their products now.

(I don't use that client myself, but I have some friends who do. They rather like it.)

I was actually referring to Red Light Center heheheh

*laughs* That is the problem with acronyms, taken out of context! Could mean almost *anything*!

thats what i get for being to lazy to type Red Light Center..
most times i end up having to type it again anyways
and i just thought of something..lol i wonder how many people think i am into restraint and things from past threads that i have used that in

Is about to be abandoned?
THats odd question...like Would you find 1000 dolars left in the street?

Theory wrongly assumes land and developer time stops having scarcity just because prims stop having scarcity.

you missed some..


Sudden drop and taking a hit does not assume sudden death and does not assume sudden stop..
It's a bit more like assuming the banging of a head on a wind shield and going into a coma for a bit lol

i never said anything about a prim.
prims are sl content .those are free and you can make anything from them..there is no protection on them now..anyone can copy a prim shape that anyone else has made..

textures and scripts and sculpt maps ect that people create and bring in is what permissions are for..
pull that income out and see if labor still makes what it does now days...

As for Land.
there won't be anything scarce about land if they were to drop permissions on content creators..
there will be a lot just sitting out there for the taking or waiting for LL to pick it back up because it was abandoned..
That would be great for land if you were a buyer looking for a really great deal..
Not so good if you are sitting on tons of land with tier payments coming up..
labor is gonna take a hard hit here as well..

people think the OS thing was bad hehehehe this would make it look like a spec in the universe..

as i said before ..you would see a reverse affect i would imagine..
that doesn't mean back to nothing.it just means back there somewhere way back then..where she stops nobody knows lol

I have not been following the development of those other grids, but there are technical solutions to that particular problem. However, a much worse problem is that anybody can steal anything (except scripts) from Second Life or any other grid, regardless of permissions, and there's really nothing that can prevent that. Permissions only keep honest people honest.

Because everything you see in the Viewer (prims, properties, textures, sounds, animations, notecards, etc.) are being sent to your Viewer. In other words, using the Viewer means sending a copy of all the goodies. So a modified Viewer can capture and record that information, and play it back (on the same grid or any other grid) as though it were being created anew. This is what the "Copybot" program does in order to backup or steal content. The only thing that it can't copy is scripts, which only exist on the server and are not copied down the Viewer.

Second Life needs a better permission system, not a lack of a permission system. But it's very difficult to solve the Viewer copying problem, because people can always hack the Viewer to circumvent any protections. At some point, the content must be in your computer's RAM, and at that point, it can be snatched. The movie and record industries have this same problem (Digital Rights Management), by the way.

Sure you did, by bringing up permissions.



That's odd, in the real world, that's what we use hourly billing for. Permissions just hinder the buyer from using what they paid good money for from using what they bought how they see fit. Permissions are also not a substitute for enforcing your own copyrights: If anything, it makes people less willing to honor them voluntarily. Copyright compliance is a social problem, not a technological one. You cannot solve social problems through technological enforcement without most people ultimately rejecting what's being enforced. RIAA learned this lesson the hard way.

I disagree. The SL permission system is an excellent example of a successful technological solution to the problem of copyright protection. Admittedly, it's not perfect, but it achieves it's primary goals while being relatively simple. Without these permissions, far fewer people would work as hard as they do making high quality content.

RIAA is not my hero, but their example doesn't prove your point that technology can't be used to *help* enforce IP property rights. It's merely an example of a failure to do so. SL disproves your point daily.

In general, the SL permissions system doesn't keep people from using what they bought in a manner consistent with the intent of buyer and seller. Quite the contrary, it drmatically helps to support both parties in keeping their implicit agreements.

That doesn't mean it doesn't have flaws or couldn't be improved. But it does completely discredit your point. I mean seriously, you don't have a leg to stand on here.

By analogy, there are flaws in the legal justice systems of all countries. That doesn't mean we should simply abandon them as useless, and hope for people to obey laws voluntarily. Furthermore, the SL permissions system is dramatically more effective at meeeting its intended goals than any country's legal justice system! Not to mention far more effective than hoping for voluntary compliance.

sorry you misunderstand me but no i didn't

ya hourly billing is one form of billing..the odd part is you fail to see it being affected by a shot to the economy..that hourly billing will not be affected if the economy goes sour??it has some magical immunity to being touched..in the real world if companies were to start to see a hurting coming from the economy unemployment would be going up from people working by the hour first.they will cut back on the hourly and up the time on the salary people..
look at all those banks and finance companies that were shut down..look how many people went to work and stopped by locked doors.most were hourly..now look at unemployment today..
is it the CEO's and executives on food stamps or is it the hourly labor force?

as far as permissions go..
you are talking copy rights i am talking theft..
obtaining a copy does not grant the right to start your own company with the copy you obtained..
not unless you were given the permission to do so..
hence the word permission..
take something as simple as money for example.
we have permission to use the dollars we obtained legally that are printed for us to spend but we do not have permission to copy those dollars and use them for money..
counter fitters getting caught = prison

No. Commerce and economy are based on scarcity. If there is no scarcity of goods anymore, there is no commerce anymore. Without scarcity of goods you got a Star Trek style economy that is neither capitalist nor communist but based on abundance.

The digital/virtual part of the world has already reached that stage - we are just fighting it as long as we can. As soon as the replicator will allow us to copybot physical objects, the question about commerce will be obsolete. We would just laugh about it.

Of course this is fiction for now, so all that reasoning is purely theoretical.

Since SL is imbedded in the real world economy that deals with physical, non-copyable goods (like the servers where the thing is being hosted), abolishing the permissions would mean only one thing: the demise of SL.

I doubt that's the case, there's a lot more Linux developers than Microsoft employees after all. Product excellence and price is a far bigger motivating factor than you think.



I can't see a legitimate purpose for any of the permissions bits as implemented that doesn't hinder fair use under the law. Rights of the consumer is a major factor for people, and not one that should be so readily downplayed.



Let's just throw out hundreds of years of legal precident and weld car hoods shut at the factory. After all, modifications void your warranty, so why not just make it no-mod?