Limiting theft by limiting creation

Nothing except the time and hassle of dealing with each one individually, that is. Listening to their claims, going through the motions of checking your data, making the decision to assent to their demands, etc. Do enough of them, and you'll eventually tire of it.



To be fair, the vast majority of your creations you either give away, or sell at a marginal cost, thus the anecdotal nature of your experience has a logical basis. Not everyone is in the same situation, nor should they be.

You're completely missing the point. I'm not opposed to creating second class citizens out of empathy with the poor n00bs, it's because it creates a chilling effect on creativity because people will be in the game who won't automatically be able to take that step from users to creators. Because it changes the nature of the game to a far greater extent than ANYTHING that's been done since mid-2005... and it's a change that would impoverish us all.

It's less hassle to make them good without bothering to roleplay a hardnosed businessman. If I did that, yeh, I would tire of it.

I've also got more people out there who have a copy of my products than 99% of the businesses in SL, so if it was all that commonplace statistics would seem to make me a target.

Perhaps edit would work but only on objects owned by them, likewise with link/unlink.

Maybe make them manually copy any item they wanted to transfer to a friend

Ahh.. but that's the thing. They aren't "people who can't be happy without being #1". They have a goal of some kind which they want to achieve. It's _SL's design_ which injects the need for them to be #1 in order to do it - most notably, the fact that SL fails to tame the Pareto Principle.

Let's mention Zynga again. And Farmville - that's the one with 60 million players. The main reason to play that game is to create an attractive farm that your friends can visit. (There are money and XP systems, but those only ultimately work towards that goal.) But.. it has a trick: it leverages social networking to divide users into subgroups. If you have 8-10 "neighbours", it's easy to visit all their farms every time you play. Everyone in that group can have a farm that gets attention. They don't need to compete. 100% of the population can have that goal, at once.

If it didn't do that division, then wild horses wouldn't make you visit 60 million farms every session, and so there would be a competition to be most visible and to be noticed.. and some people would lose.. and some people wouldn't be happy building something no-one ever saw.. and there wouldn't be 60 million people involved, ALL creating.

You are always really keen that everyone should get to create and contribute, well, you can hardly fail to notice THAT.

Now I wonder if that's what LL have their eye on when they talk about integrating with social networks; using RL social networking to beat Pareto. I agree that this would be a bad thing for SL because the ability to be "someone else" is important. But can we find some other way to get the beneficial side?

Yeah, but they WILL be ABLE to do it, automatic or not. It's not even remotely a significant barrier for most.

I don't think it is anywhere near as chilling as any of the other solutions, including ones which start restricting tool creation. Most people won't even care.

I think if you had numbers of people regularly coming to you with sob stories that aren't backed up by the facts, you'd tire of it, too, regardless if you "made good" on them.



Not if you don't sell those products which are ubiquitous, or sell them for anything above marginal cost.

Hell, if we're going to use that as a litmus, I could claim that 99% of the WarpPos scripts out there have my code in them, too, and thus, I should be a target, but that code is free as a part of the free WarpPos script that Kekhnev Psaltery posted years ago, and doesn't count.

It doesn't have to be much of a barrier at all for it to have a chilling effect on creativity. There's already been too many changes in SL already... there's products, really cool products like Starax' Wand, that just wouldn't get created in today's SL because of the way it's gone from a place where build is universal to a place where you may have to fly a couple of dozen meters to find a place you can rez something. If it wasn't for the flood of griefer alts in June 2006 that may not have happened.

No, most people won't care. I don't care whether they care. I care about how they behave. It doesn't take anything overt and obvious to push things over a tipping point, you might not even see it happening except in retrospect, but the result is real.

I do get people coming to me regularly with sob stories. I often give them free upgrades, even if they aren't customers, and they go away happy and I stay happy. If I can't help them at all, I may have to give them their money back, but that's only happened a few times. If I had someone coming at me totally abusive right out of the gate I don't know what I'd do, that hasn't happened yet.

What litmus? You said I didn't count because much of my stuff is cheap... I responded... it might be cheap, but it's popular in a way that makes me a target.

Does it have your name on the script, so when it doesn't work your name is the one that comes up in "Properties"?

Bull. Total bloody fabrication. Second life is full of little in-groups of people who share a sim or a club and compete, if you want to use the word, with members of their own circle... whether they do it by building stuff or buying stuff, they naturally move in circles of friends about the same size as anywhere else. Unless you manage to alienate everyone you meet in SL I can't see how you can miss that happening.

Winning prizes by playing mini-games in a distributed version of Animal Crossing or Harvest Moon isn't "creating".

If that's what you want to do, then go do it. Live it up. Don't let the door hit your butt on the way out.

Good for you, then. Personally, I get tired of it, and I get tired of the entitlement mentality that is often presented to me as a first contact. I don't care much for people who want to lie and cheat me. Maybe it is a subconscious punishment for doing so. Maybe it is a weariness of the soul. Who knows? It still doesn't make me any less of a person for taking such a stance for my own products.



I didn't say you didn't count. I said it is likely the specifics of how you sell/distribute your products may have an impact as to why you don't see it as often.



Even better, it often has my name as one of the credits IN the script, copied from the forums or the Wiki, so I get people looking to me for support, EVEN WHEN the script and object have someone else's name as the creator. Go figure.

Regardless, the whole point why I responded was that your message came off as "I don't have abusive customers because I have a superior way of marketing/selling". My point is that even superior presentation and treatment aren't always a mitigating factor, and one can get abusive customers despite superlative handling.

Nah, it was "I don't get abusive customers because I have better customer support". I suck at marketing and selling.

Didn't Starax make all his stuff BEFORE the 6/6/6 floodgates, with the original restrictions of having a PAID account back then? If such a restriction would have a chilling effect, how would even greater prior restrictions NOT have had a chilling effect? I'd even argue that the "warming" effect of having such a restriction would outweigh any "chilling" effect it would have. Content creators encouraged by the fact that LL has a bit more of a handle on the copyright infringement problem.

No, most people won't care. I don't care whether they care. I care about how they behave. It doesn't take anything overt and obvious to push things over a tipping point, you might not even see it happening except in retrospect, but the result is real.[/QUOTE]

It could even push things over a tipping point in the POSITIVE direction, though, couldn't it?

I was intending customer support to be included in that as well.

That still doesn't mean you can't or won't get abusive customers, because some people are abusive before you can even exercise your "superior" customer support.

Yes.

I have repeatedly stated that I am in favor of requiring payment information for everyone on the grid, and why that would not have the same effect. The bottom line is that a smaller community where EVERYONE is a peer is more open and creative than a larger community where the majority are operating under a restriction... whether they care about that restriction or not.

If you consider There.com, Activeworlds, and IMVU "a positive direction".

Yes, and I've already said "I guess I have been lucky."

Here's a speculative four fold question - How many creators participate in IP theft? How many customers participate in IP theft? How many creators are also customers? How many accounts fall into all three of those categories?

I'd be interested to know what people's guestimates are and how large they think the center of a graph, like this example (ignore the text in the graph), might be:



I'll come back later and see if there's a differing opinion on this.

How would it be "more creative"? Less people = less creation going on. Prior to 6/6/6, you couldn't create a SL account without PIOF/PIU, so that's a HUGE restriction. It creates an even greater level of "class separation" than simply limiting transfer would. That was the same as Philip's argument when he "opened the floodgates".

No transfer without verification doesn't restrict creativity in any way. Create all you want. Modify your and other creations you buy/are given (that you can) all you want. If you want to SELL or even GIVE them away, all that is asked is you verify so that legal standing with respect to ownership of the things you sell/give away is achieved.

I would never have said "no" to that, and I can't fathom why anyone would. Well, unless they have no way to verify, or are planning on shenanigans, that is.



I think that is a rather disingenuous comparison.

That depends on how many of the people are creative. I believe that if everyone in the game automatically has the opportunity you'll get more creativity expressed despite a smaller population. I believe that you would end up with more people with payment info in a world where payment info is required, than you would where it isn't.

There's always going to be a separation between people outside and people inside, because not everyone in the world is inside. But once in, it's important that everyone have the same opportunity.


Sure it does. Being able to give someone what you created is an immense incentive to create.

It's not whether they would say "no", it's whether they would think to consider the question.

I consider it entirely apposite. There's more people in IMVU than Second Life, and most of them don't care if they can create or not. If creation is limited for the majority of the SL population, how would it not be like IMVU?

Simply being able to create and distribute what you create, automatically, is a subtle and effective drug.But not one that people are likely to break down the illusion of anonymity for if that's all they get for it.

I doubt you could make even a wild guess at it.

I do think that the combined amount of copyright/trademark infringement by "copybotters" is dwarfed by the amount of infringement by what everyone considers to be legitimate upstanding content creators.

One popular skin creator was found to not have the proper license for the base material she based her skins on. At a rounded up $4/skin make-up that probably at least involved making a few thousand US$.

I honestly have no idea what a "commercial copybotter" can make before they're found out and banned (assuming they can even find a way to cash out) but I'd think that at the most it's a 3 digit number rather than 4-5 digit ones.

The amount of infringement that happens with DJs who don't pay the proper broadcasting license fees for the music they're streaming isn't trivial either. There's also the question of just how legal all those movie sales in SL are.

I doubt anyone really wants SL to be a model citizen when it comes to respecting copyright/trademark and in that case what everyone usually means when they refer to "content theft" is the most damaging to SL as a whole.

Yes, but those circles aren't isolated. Even if they're in a small circle of friends, most of the content they use will have been created by one of the top 20%.



You have obviously never actually played Farmville. (It has no mini-games.) I was also surprised to find out that it's mainly a creation-based game. It resembles Metaplace more than either of those two.

That's not entirely true.

The details are very fuzzy but I distinctly remember that there was an option to "verify" by phone in which case you didn't have to put in payment information. What exactly it entails I don't remember though, but it certainly was possible to be a NPIOF account before 6/6/6 (though we didn't have that field in our profiles back then so there was no way to ever tell).

They didn't get the L$50/week stipend either and they were likely a tiny minority (which I actually have no problem with as long as most people are verified).

And how many people create content in Farmville? Let's see...

Well, damn, there's nothing about that on their webpage. Lots of stuff about how you grow stuff and decorate your stuff in it and related mini-games, but nothing about creating stuff.

It looks almost exactly like Harvest Moon, with updated graphics.

As far as I can see 100% of the content is created by 0% of the users.

You build your farm with a graphical editor. Yes, you do it from fixed building blocks, but you can still design it yourself, and there's still visible different levels of achievement in how people do it. And.. well, that's probably how the vast majority of people on SL build, too; designing their house (or whatever they want to make) from components they've bought. It is _the_ standard building mechanic on Metaplace, thus my comment that it resembles it.

(Edit: Take a look at http://www.flickr.com/photos/funcrunch/3792970423/in/set-72157622334294798/ . None of that layout is hardwired into the game. Doesn't that illustrate design? Arti? Creativity?)

I think you will have MUCH more creativity expressed if there were no financial boundaries to cross versus a simple verification boundary. Financial boundaries are real, hard boundaries.



Is that true of SL now versus SL before 6/6/6? I don't think so.



I agree, everyone should have the same opportunity, which includes the same restrictions. It shouldn't be imposed only on a small subset of people arbitrarily, and it should have an actual, tangible benefit, in more ways than one. Just like many of the rules in the ToS and CS.



So? If the only hurdle to overcome is to take five minutes to verify, how would that diminish that particular incentive to create? People create for all kinds of reasons; I am not even sure I would class that incentive as the most important. When I came to SL, I came first to just play around; if I didn't initially have the ability to give away stuff right off the bat, I wouldn't have thought twice about it. I would have discovered what it took, and fulfilled the obligation, especially since there are very good reasons to do so. There were when I joined, and I think there still are now.



Why wouldn't they, especially when it is presented to them from the start?



I consider it disingenuous, since the suggestion I am making is NOWHERE NEAR the way any of those worlds work, to my knowledge. As such, they are not an appropriate analogue for this argument.



I don't agree. People were willing to give up a lot more real and substantial resources/information when they joined SL before 6/6/6; I don't think the vast majority of people are going to think twice about giving up something they really didn't have anyway, and doesn't cost them anything real OR substantial to attain it.