Limiting theft by limiting creation

Free accounts drive the growth of SL. Linden Lab is unlikely to do anything to jeapordize that.

Stroker's lawsuit will more likely result in LL having to enforce copyright laws. Which is what they should be doing.

Then these people are so divorced from reality they probably think their works of fiction are a document of fact.



You are aware, I hope, that any content creator most likely has to fund the SL economy at some point, meaning that somewhere in the chain LL do indeed get a slice of the pie. Even if you use all free textures, sounds, animations etc, if you sell on XStreet LL take their cut on the purchase price. The L$ used for the purchase will, somewhere along the way, have come from LL, most likely through a currency exchange, where LL take yet another cut for processing. Anything sold results in money for LL, nobody is getting a free lunch even if they're buying cheapies with camping money. So if it's the burden of fiscal freeloaders that bothers you so much, you should worry no longer.




I'll say it again, every transaction sees a percentage go to LL, be it directly through the Xstreet "sales tax", or further back in the chain when the L$ were purchased (regardless of who purchased them, that money still entered the market with a fee incurred).

Aside from that, the difference is it costs LL approximately half of bugger all for users to hit the build button. You could argue the load on the servers means better/ more expensive hardware needs to be in place, but there's no more load on the server end than with various other SL activities, and probably a lot less than with many. When I choose to build, a pencil, lump of clay, guitar is not magicked into my hands, I am disturbing some electrons that were already quite perturbed.



Just a small barrier here, trivial hurdle there. All you have to do is prove you're worthy, and of course we'll let you in. What, you don't wish to be treated as a wrong doer until you are caught doing wrong (which you and the majority may very well never do)? Hmm, don't like the cut of your jib, you must be up to something...



LL don't seem to have a good track record of wise business decisions. But then, I don't see the world, be it real or virtual, as nothing but a marketing opportunity.

How would you like to be unable to replace your own hard drive because you weren't a licensed electrician?

I agree, and I hope you're right and LL don't give in to the pressure they're going to be facing to change that approach. I'm just not convinced, after all, if millions of not users can cause mature land to mean nothing, then what can a few hundred or thousand actual users clamouring for membership restrictions on creation achieve!



Indeed. Restricting this, or demanding that, is a knee jerk over reaction (and not even a half sensible one at that) to resolving something that is already resolvable. Just because LL have been remiss is maintaining a sensible policy, doesn't mean we should demand of them a whole new, superfluous, crippling one instead!

No, they don't. They put a reserve on the card, just as any business where you provide a credit card as a pseudo-deposit does. This is NOT a charge. They don't get any money and you don't have to pay interest on it... it doesn't cost anything.

Linden Lab had the opportunity there to do away with unverified accounts with the adult content policy, and more reason to do so. They did not.

I doubt Linden Lab will act on the hand wringing of a few residents railing against free accounts and alts.

Let's not forget that business friendly mainland is still on the agenda, and businesses are likely to want the chance of exposure at some point, which means visitors, free ones at that. Basic accounts aren't going anywhere.

I just wanna say ITA with Shambolic's posts.

Some of the others, ye gods, is "A Christmas Carol" a bit early around here?

Did you take something personal, Melita?

If someone replaced a hard drive and it killed someone by shorting out because they did some bodgey stuff with a soldering iron bcause the plugs were different, catchig fire and burning the house at 2am Being a licenced electrician I'd say some technical training is required for people who repair appliances. 100's of people are killed every year from home appliance or lead repair gone wrong.

Sure you're not likely to electrocute someone with a hard drive being only 5v & 12v, but how about a 240volt pool pump or washing machine motor, the green grounding wire doesn't reach, don't worry about it................

Yep and once the mainland eventually goes PG and they let unverified teens loose on the grid it's going to get even better.

No, Mickey.

That doesn't answer Argent's question, though. Many house fires are caused each year through domestic mishaps, and people die as a result of them. Do you say, though, that people should be required to complete some technical training before they're allowed to use a frying pan at home, in case they set fire to the kitchen?

NPIOFs do not pay for anything; they can not by definition so your analogy really breaks down.

PIOFs do not pay for anything either - or they'd be PIU - but they at least showed a willingness to submit payment info which is the very least anyone can do.

I never used "premium" as a determining factor but rather "payment info *something*". You can't even tell whether or not someone is premium in the general case.

And do you really believe every NPIOF is living below the poverty threshold? Of course not. Most could easily payment verify or buy L$, they just *refuse* to do so yet keep on sticking around for months and years and it's that attiude that sets them apart and is reflected in everything else they do.

The fairy tale that all - or even a significant portion - NPIOFs are outstanding content creators is a cute little fairy tale as well. If you pick 1000 NPIOFs at random you don't get a cross section of content creators, you'll be lucky if you even get 1.

Then like I said: use the term you're using to describe yourself rather than using it on other people.

You can disagree to changes but at the end of the day it's LL service and they'll set terms as they please. It may be different in different parts of the world but when LL changes the contract then you should have the option to not agree to the new terms and you'll be relieved of whatever obligations you had to them and walk away to find yourself a different virtual world.

But if you're still convinced of your right: I signed up when SL still required payment information to sign up (not entirely accurately since you could verify through phone and be a NPIOF before June 2006; you just didn't get a L$50 stipend) so then according to you LL is obliged to require everyone to verify payment information or be shown to the door. After all, it's what I agreed to when signing up .

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You don't really believe that, do you?

Let's say I buy $100 US worth of L$ (so L$26k) and that that money comes from Supply Linden so LL gets the full $100.

I spend it shopping, tipping, etc. What I spent is then used by others to shop some more or pay for campers or whatever else and the money circulates around and around.

That L$26k can change hands in-world an infinite amount of times and it still won't give LL a single extra cent of *real* money beyond the $100 they got when I bought it. What happens to it after I bought it with real money is completely and utterly meaningless in terms of real money.

And yes, if it changes hands a total of 10 times then you can boast that in-world trading represents the equivalent of $1,000 but it's still meaningless because the *real* value is still merely the $100 I paid for it.

If you assume that all of it makes it back to the LindeX at some point or another then one or more people are going to spend another $100 to buy it back but this time the US$ is going to a resident so all LL gets this time is $3.5 (+ x times the 0.30 cent transaction fee for buying) and that comes from the people who are *buying* the L$ on the LindeX and *not* from whomever passed it around in-world.

If you don't buy L$ then you really don't matter as far as LL's revenue is concerned. The best thing for LL is that L$ circulate as little as possible in-world because only when it passes through the LindeX does it actually have any value and that's the only time where they get to profit from it.

But nothing of that can happen in Second Life. And the plugs aren't different. And nobody did anything bodgy with a soldering iron, anyway, because you don't have to do that when you replace a hard drive...

I didn't write "a 240v pool pump", I wrote "a hard drive". But since you seem to be deliverately missing the point, what if you needed a bloody cooking license to make scrambled eggs instead of buying them from McDonalds, or a bloody artistic license to paint their own mailbox. That's the world you're trying to create here.

Not necessarily true. The real money maker for LL is tier, and so anything that adds value to land will help them make more money that way. That can include L$ sold to pay tier, but also, the experience of "having an audience" can be important too. Ok, it's not organized and thus not reliable, but having more people around improves the chances.

If only you knew how many people died every year scrambling their own eggs.

Restricting creation of content technically isn't possible, without forcing untenable changes. So why are we even discussing it?

Completely disallowing any new NPIOF accounts would have the benefit of accountability. Nothing else that's been suggested would solve any problems without having severe side-effects.



There are two serious problems with your proposal, which have been raised above. Unless you can make a case rebutting these, your proposals are baseless.

1) Money has nothing to do with the issue: accountability does. Why require a payment? What purpose does that serve? PIOF should be sufficient (except for point 2 below).

2) Having a different kind of account doesn't solve the problem, because rippers can modify existing prims.

So, your solution has unnecessary baggage (payments) and doesn't solve the problem

So, you're saying that we need to limit copying of copiable content? THAT is "putting something onto the asset server that didn't previously exist," and it's the flaw in any technical scheme that I can think of, because a ripper could take any freebie prim, duplicate it, and edit it into the copied content, without ever "creating" anything.

To avoid that problem, you'd have to make all copiable content no-mod, in which case a single formal asset could represent the design for all instances. This would probably be a pretty big change to how SL works, and rather disruptive when they switch to that implementation, but it's conceivable. But it would mean that, for NPIOF, all "copy/mod" content would NOT BE MOD. I don't think it would fly; it's too confusing.

LOL, sounds like you never tried it. We *wish* it were that simple, but so far it isn't! (This doesn't detract from your point, though, just poking you a lil in the ribs. )

Please don't make the false assumption that those who don't put real money in the economy make no contribution to the economy! Money is only one side of an economy. Products and services are the other side. You can have an economy without money, but you can't have one without products and services.

Kitty: Sorry that I'm only harping here, because you've made a number of salient points.

Hopefully you got my point above, after you posted this. But I'd like to amplify on this, because it's a common bit of misunderstanding.

Anyone who adds value to the SL experience in any way (even if it's just standing around in a dance club saying clever things and making people happy) *do* matter to LL's revenue, because they make SL more enjoyable to others, who pay (whether in $L or $US) for products and land.

Also:

- LL profits directly from XStreet sales.

- LL profits directly from landlords who rent out land to NPIOFs who earn $L inworld.

- LL profits directly from people who buy $L for poducts made by people who have never transferred a dollar ingame

- LL usually profits indirectly from people who earn $L and then buy products or services, because product makers and service providers usually have expenses that wind up in LL's pockets (e.g., rent).

- LL gets "free money" to use for all $L that are ingame and weren't put there by the monthly account payments (sorry, I don't remember their term for it).

As I said above, an economy is much more than a mere currency.

Personally speaking, I pay in rent to a landlord, I pay commissions on my XStreet sales, and since I have never cashed any Lindens out, all the Lindens I have in my account are essentially free money to LL. At best, that's free capital, at worst (were I to spend them all or transfer them out), it's an interest-free loan.

The assertion that was being made was that non-paying/non-L$ buying accounts provide LL with a source of income merely by shuffling L$ around in-world though.

If the tier for your store is $25 and you get L$7k in sales from NPIOFs alone then it's still deceptive to claim that "see, they matter! They can't buy L$ but they shuffled enough L$ around so I can pay my tier thanks to them".

Because in reality you can't pay your tier with that L$7k since LL is expecting $US from you. And the only way to make the hop from L$ to $ is if there's a/several L$ buying residents waiting to hand you their real money in exchange for those L$.

So ultimately it's not the NPIOFs that paid your tier, but it's the US$ spending basics/premiums that made it possible and the L$ they bought from you are valueless until the next time they hit the exchange with an available buyer.

We simplify it so that there's no difference between me handing you $10 or L$2,700 but only the first actually represents money. They second merely represents something that can be exchanged for money but only for as long as there is a demand for it. Encouraging a culture of entitlement where noone wants to spend money because "hey, get someone else to pay for it. I'm too good to pay for stuff" isn't helpful when a big chunk of SL relies on there always being people ready to hand over US$.

It also continually increases your operating costs with no hopes of ever recovering any of it from those accounts since they've already shown they're not interested in paying for their usage.

I'd really love to see how much tier would drop if LL recalculated their costs to include every account paying for his/her usage and tier only having to cover the actual operating cost of the server + sim development.

If that's the definition of the "at cost" that's used for educational pricing and I'd get to choose between paying half of what I pay now and kick out NPIOFs or pay twice as much as what it actually costs just so some people with an overgrown sense of entitlement can ran around boasting about how they're too good to pay for things they use then I know what I'd pick.

NPIOF and PIOF accounts can spend money. They just aren't getting it directly from Linden Lab. You can buy L$ from other sources.

In which case you should have argued against that false claim, rather than making a contradictory but also false one. The context of your statement does not make it any less false.

However, it's the products and services that enrich the SL experience, for which people put $L into the game.

Again, you're focusing only on the money supply, and there's a lot more to an economy than the money!

NPIOFs and PIOFs can make a significant contribution to the SL experience and thus the SL economy, as well as LL's bottom line, by motivating PIU's to put cash in.

Your statement that NPIOFs and PIOFs make no contribution to LL's bottom line is false, and even a bit insulting, by implying that we make no economic contribution to SL. All our effort, care, enginuity, and creativity is for naught. (I'm gonna go eat a bullet! )

When I brought up the shadow draft branch here in the forums ages ago I talked enough people who had absolutely no clue as to what they were doing (that isn't meant in a bad way) through it and they all managed to get a functional binary .

Don't they take a commission in L$?

If that's the case then they don't profit at all because any L$ LL receives are "destroyed" to form an economic sink.

You can argue that sinks provide the opportunity for Supply Linden to sell more L$ and then you'd be correct but then the US$ comes from whatever resident buys those L$.

Tier isn't paid in L$, tier is paid in US$.

If there are no US$ spending/L$ buying residents then your L$ are utterly valueless. What's so hard to understand about that?

All your other examples always boil down to the same thing as well: LL's expenses are in US$, residents' tier is in US$ as well. It wouldn't matter if you offered LL L$1 billion to pay your tier if there's not a single soul willing to trade your L$ for US$.

And yes, as long as you have a steady supply of buyers then you can treat L$ as it were money, but if everyone stopped spending US$ and adopted the freeloader entitlement mentality then everything breaks down and no amount of L$ in-world spending is going to raise the money needed for LL to cover its expenses. US$ is what matters, not L$.

And that's quite true, but if it wasn't for those NPIOFs, I wouldn't have the L$ in the first place. Especially for small businesses who might make income by selling at "camper friendly" prices and aiming for volume, that can be important.



No, but their presence may encourage other people - who do pay - to pay more. If you're an artistic builder then chances are, if lots of people show up to your build, you'll feel appreciated and want to build more, which means either you or someone else will buy more land. Of course it's not guaranteed that every such builder will get noticed but the more people there are around, the greater chance there is that an individual will be.