Limiting theft by limiting creation

You don't think there's a risk to paying US$20 over and over whilst only making US$5 of sales each time? Maybe some theives really could be that stupid I suppose.

And their money coming in and out doubles your chances of tracking them down.

The current ones aren't working because theives can create disposable alts faster than the DMCA process can deal with them. LL would have to employ a person for every theif and creators would spend more time finding and dealing with their stolen content than making it.

You missed elitist and snobby

You are right, it appears certain posters and their alts have a lot to lose by any further improvements clamping down on content piracy.

I don't believe there is any risk whatsoever unless Linden Lab actually starts punishing content thieves.

I monitor my credit card balance. Also, I spent quite a lot of time in SL before I became a premium member, to make sure I really wanted to be here. But I can say that if it was not for some extraordinary pressure on me, I would not have come here in the first place, no. And I would not have spent a cent here at all, since I dislike spending money on things I have moral problems with.

I am sure none of the people in SL I have spent money on would have minded not having me as a client at all. You would rather have told me to go away right from the start and washed your hands off me.

Nah, not at all....but might have given you a kind word to help knock that chip off your shoulder.

So do I, but I keep paying my taxes anyway.

No, some posters disagree with you about how to improve the system.

Doing for IP protection what was done for Adult Content and Bots is not an improvement.

No, I'm just interested why people could trust LL with access to probably all data on their PC and even their CC number but not trust them with their RL name and Address.

Adult has been seperated to comply with the law, it still has a lot of bugs to be fixed but it will get there and the bot policy has dropped about 10,0000 bots from the login figures with still more to go.

Success of the previous "do nothing" proposals at this point would have been zero on both counts.

Sure ther may be disagreements on how to improve the system but there is also an obvious opposition by some to discuss anything because some residents gaming the system have a lot to lose.

Suggest anything new and watch what happens...............

Nah, won't work, since I won't create an account, so you won't know about the chip and therefore can't remove it.



I can monitor charges on my credit card. I get an SMS every time anything gets charged to it. So if LL wanted to commit CC fraud, I can solve it fairly quickly, and banks REALLY frown on that sort of thing. As for my PC, it's as protected as I can make it. I cannot check more than I do at the moment. But there is little on my PC that can be used against me, from a privacy point of view. There's no guarantee that there's anything sensitive on my PC in any case.

As for my name and address - given that, you can open a bank account in my name, and make debt independent of the CC info you already have. Then I have to go and fight that. And this is above and beyond the spamming issue.

Do you agree that the route NewsCorp wants to take will earn him his millions? He wants to put everything behind a paywall. I frequent sites like Slashdot and Fark, more for the news than anything else. There are lots of people there that refuse to even register for a FREE account to read news. They would rather stay without than join in. Similarly, I resell software on a professional level, to corporate customers. One of the downloads on our website is a study done by a large client of ours. We offer this up as a free download, with the only requirement being a name on there. I don't get any submissions with a valid name, and the phone numbers I do get are all garbled. So people are unwilling to send me any information that can be used to identify them.

The only thing that a paywall (even once off) or a registration wall will achieve is drive off new potential customers. SL is a niche market. To survive and grow, they need to attract new people all the time, otherwise they will stagnate. The creators will only have their existing client base to service, and eventually people will have done all the shopping they wanted, because who will create new innovative things? The current crop of content creators? Are they creating new exciting world-changing things every day? Or are these done by new content creators with fresh visions?

Will you give your personal information every time you are going to a RL mall, even though you only want to browse around? Or will you rather go somewhere else? If there's a need for a place like SL, but LL can't provide it in the way their customers want, then people will go elsewhere. Content creators will HAVE to follow if they want to be successful. The simulator and client software are open-sourced, so creating a new world doesn't mean implementing everything from scratch again. There are hurdles, yes, but they can be overcome.

Please note, I am NOT in favour of copybotting, and won't do it myself. I do purchase all my software, and I do sell copyrighted software, and develop software on my own. I just think that the methods presented here is not the correct way to achieve the end goal.

Have a careful look at the RIAA and the MPAA and the BSA and NewsCorp and the publicity surrounding them. Some are more effective than others, some are more accepted than others. But do you really want the kind of coverage that NewsCorp is getting right now directed at LL? Will SL survive that and grow stronger? Because if SL does NOT grow stronger, the content creators inside it will suffer as well.

Restricting casual users with a pay/registration wall or a limit on what they can do in the world won't grow SL either. Content creators, by their very nature, needs content consumers. Content consumers need creators to be in competition with one another. This will lead to a strong and thriving economy inside SL. And as for enforcement? There are many ways of enforcing your copyrights IRL. Use them. After all, it's YOUR copyright, you should be the one to protect it, you can't move that burden onto the consumers or LL to do.

What if people submit false information because they HAVE to put something in? Will this increase or decrease your problems? How would you verify my information I submit in any case? Is no information better or worse than possibly false information? Than possibly malicious information?

And for shopkeepers with draconian measures (discussed in another thread), treating your customers like thieves will not lead to them buying more from you. There are good and bad ways of enforcing it. Ask youself this: Why is the RIAA reviled, and Steam tolerated? What are the differences in their approaches to the problem?

And as a side note, why doesn't Steam need my home address? Surely they handle as much copyrighted stuff as SL does?

The claim you need respond to is that there is no such risk, that they're not paying $20 over and over.

You're missing the point. If repeat flagrant content rippers aren't getting their accounts terminated they don't need disposable alts, and the assertion that you need to be countering is the claim that they're NOT getting their accounts terminated. I don't know if that's true, but if so that's a WAY bigger problem than disposable alts.

From what I've seen everyone AR'd has been taken down pretty quickly, I can't remember seeing any threads mentioning a theif continuing to sell stolen content months afterwards or is that because people have given up caring?

Well supposing we get LL to terminate their accounts they are allowing to continue to sell stolen content, what do you think is the theives next tactic? Disposable alts of course. Is there any point bothering to take them down quicklywhile we leave this easy no loss option available to them?

And if LL really is letting the same account to continually sell stolen content for months after repeated AR's and DMCA then no wonder there's good grounds for a lawsuit against them.

Unless they pay for a new licence with each alt they don't get to show in search or X-Street or even sell items if that could be eventually coded in somehow.

There's been mention of it in this very thread.

Hey, Yumi, you might want to have a closer look at how Farmville works before bragging it on the forums:



If people are worried about getting ripped off in SL, I gotta tell you, SL is a bloody island of total virtue compared to the Internet as a whole, especially compared to social network sites like Facebook.

http://www.techcrunch.com/2009/10/31/scamville-the-social-gaming-ecosystem-of-hell/

So you'd frown on LL using your CC info they have to verify you too?

Newscorp is like any other bank or corporation in the last 5 years, run by idiots in accounts who approve anything that looks like it has a 2 year profit and makes them look good. So they will happily revelle in the additional money they collect from the few thousand people that are stupid enough to pay for what's on the radio and TV every 30 minutes, then piss off to another company with glowing references and leave someone else to wonder why website hits have plumeted and advertisers are leaving in droves 3 years later.

The clowns in modern day management wouldn't approve a requistion to phone the fire brigade, till the fire starts showing an effect of more than 4 digits on their monthly Excel spread sheet.

I didn't want to point out specific examples, but the Farmville one is a good example of the reason I prefer to keep my private info, well, private. There are many more such stories. I have learned not to trust online businesses, and I will continue to not trust them until there's a marked change in the way companies operate. No one else will protect me, so I have to do it myself.

The recent banking fiasco was not a good indication of such a trend, though.



My credit card I can cancel and get re-issued, then it becomes worthless to LL. My address, not so much.

Tell me, for a person finding SL for the first time, what differentiates a NewsCorp paywall from their signup? And why should be trust LL but not NewsCorp? And why would he give his private info to LL just to join? What makes LL different from the Facebook scammers the youth see every day?

LL may be more honourable, but what indicates this to a newbie when all he sees are the other scammers about? And how would you go about gaining his trust?

You wouldn't need to verify with LL until you could remain completely anonymous under the current disposable alts system and even learn and create stuff, until you reached the point you decided to become a landowner or sell your creations, in which case you need to supply a CC or RL verification or possibly for those that can't/won't verify cough up a bond that you lose of course by not playing by the rules.

I don't see any current strategy by LL reducing the number of scammers a noob will see, in reality most noobs won't know their scammers till the get stung.

That could possibly work, yes. However, how do you define "selling?" How would you regulate that?

I can transfer money to a avatar for any reason. You could block money transfers to a NPIOF avatar, but then I can't give a newbie money to buy an outfit with. And not every vendor in-world have a gift-card system. You can stop the transfer of items from a NPIOF avatar to anyone else. But then he can't give me a notecard, or a non-working script that he's got trouble with and want me to debug for him.

Right now landowners need to ID anyway, in virtually all cases. Either the land is a island rented from LL directly (in which case you could have the sim owner held responsible), or a Mainland resident who likely needs to supply a CC/PayPal in any case.

Go to hell.

Um, fair point. Although let's remember that SL had those too - any number of dodgy survey companies offering L$, and likewise illegal L$ resellers on eBay. Arguably it's different because they didn't have any explicit deal with LL, but the counter-argument is that if LL freely allowed anyone to do that kind of thing (which they did, pre-Risk API) then that's simply a modus operandi of offering the deal to the scammers.

But don't get me wrong here - I'm not saying that Zynga is a model company. I'm only referring to what they show about game design. Farmville demonstrates a) that competition _can_ be removed without coercion or other unnatural behaviour, and b) that removing competition is far more successful at encouraging creation than other strategies, because it removes the otherwise-inevitable failure rate which puts people off more than anything else.

There's a huge difference between what goes on in SL and having the whole damn game based on scamming customers like Farmville.

Farmville isn't about removing competition any more than it's about creating. The whole economic basis of Farmville is about winning game money to buy game stuff and make your farm look better than everyone else's... in your area. It's fake competition and fake creation. Nobody who's actually competitive or creative is going to be satisfied by that.

SL removes the *necessity* for competition by giving you other things to do than compete. It's full of cooperative opportunities. If you can't think of anything you want to do if you're not the ringleader, that isn't a problem with SL.

From what I read in those interviews, it sounds like the game was designed around paying for game currency, and then he basically allowed anyone who wanted to, to advertise and offer that game currency; even scammers. Yes, that's rather unethical, but before the risk API, LL were basically doing the same. The chap from Zynga admitted that he accepted advertising from Zwinky even though he suspected their toolbar was malware; but SL, with the "anyone can do what they like" policy, would have effectively accepted it without even trying the toolbar out.



Yes, it _is_ about removing competition. By using Facebook to form small social networks, it ensures that the risk of anyone's farm dropping completely off the map, and just never being noticed by anyone, is minimized. In SL, those odds are much higher, and that _does_ put people off creating, and it _does_ put people off spending money.

People are a lot smarter about this than they used to be - it seems that the market has shifted. Look at the old MMORPG "Overlord" - that offered the ability to compete to 'rule the server', which used to be something saught-after on the older MUD games. But it flopped, because the population realised that a) there's only one overlord, so likely you will not be them, and will have to put up with someone else overlording over you; and b) the competition will basically come down to who is the biggest nerd. On SL it's the same, except the competition comes down to who has the right DNA, which is even worse.

As for the "fake" issue - many people would say SL was "fake" too, and that if you were really good you'd be out being a real architect/modeller/artist/programmer.. ultimately, though, which is better? A real thing that you do not get or a fake thing that you do?



Right, but because the networks are too big, even those cooperative opportunities are subject to competition. Bear in mind that you're the one who introduced the idea of a "contest" - I only said that the social network can't give the majority of people what they want, without specifying why. Often, for example, the cooperative opportunities depend entirely on being in the right place at the right time, which is arbitrary.

Also, many of these "co-operative groups" are actually one person who wants to create their vision while getting other people to split the work, which isn't really co-operation at all..

There's no "and then". Watch the damn video. His business plan, right out the gate, was to deliberately get money from crooks.

How the hell does my avatar "drop completely off the map, never noticed by anyone"?

Yes, you have to, you know, hang out with people and socialize in SL. But THAT IS WHAT SL IS ABOUT. If you aren't interested in that, what the hell are you doing here?

The problem you keep talking about is only a problem if you're not actually interested in living a "Second Life". If you're trying to use SL as the basis for some reputation-based meta-game.

*heads off to Zindra to check this theory*

*thinks 'yeah, that's why I'm going there'*

Yes, and what I'm saying is that, THE REASON WHY PEOPLE DON'T WANT TO CREATE, OR SPEND MONEY IN SL, IS _BECAUSE_ IT'S ABOUT SOCIALISATION.

Whether I personally like it or not is irrelevant (my mood about it changes pretty much constantly anyway). Whether it's "the way it is" in SL is also irrelevant - yes, it seems to be the decision that LL have made, but there's no reason we can't say it's a bad decision.

How can your avatar be unnoticed? Well, if you're hanging out with a group of people who you're friends with and talking about your RL.. then does the appearance of your avatar really matter to them? It might very well not do. So in that case, yes, your _avatar_ is unnoticed (although you are not). Does the fact you've built a house matter to them? No, we're friends as real people, we just want to chat, we can do it in conference IM. Obviously in real life you wouldn't say that your looks and house don't matter to a friendship, but that's real life; in Second Life, everyone knows there's a "real" layer behind all the avatars, and that ultimately tends to be what people connect based on, so why spend money on the middle?



You speak as if "a Second Life" was a design objective of the world. It wasn't, it was just a better name than Linden World or New Viewer.