Bad news of the day: They're thinking of merging the Teen Grid into the main one

Someone asked about child avatars - which is a difffernt argument but I would imagine taht it would be considered illegal in many countries to misrepresent oneself as a child to a genuine child and could be construed as sexual predation regardless of teh actual conversation taking place and subsequent acts such as play and innocent games being played.
Teens on teh grid would almost certainly cause child avatars to be regarded as improiper and illegal. Probably same goes for dogs and rabbits and beasts of various kinds. Yiffing will have its last yapping.

Hmmm. Too bad the tentacle sex monsters aren't portable... you could do both at the same time. Product idea!

i'm 28 love... old enough to know what a stupid idea this is!

iirc sensual stoneworks does have a portable one

they have great classes there too

I think I read somewhere that 2/3 of SL residents are from outside of the US. So what happens when a German or an Aussie or an Indian or a Mexican or a French person or a Russian or a Japanese person initiates a sex act with a 13-year-old from Alabama (or, for that matter, an American with a child from any of those other countries)? Whose laws apply? Does the perpetrator get extradited to the home country of the "victim"? Or do the laws of his (or her) country apply?

What a tizzy. What a question, what an issue. Sadly there will be no input as normal by the users it will just be decided for us. Here it is take it or leave. People will scream and so forth but little discussion will really take place. More ranting and raving.

We have known it was a coming for a long long time. Age Verification was a hint. End of the day after all the issues my feeling is that the kids are loose on the internet where there are chatrooms and porn available with out any "Are you 18" a plenty. It is a new world and they are growing up faster. Not going to let my daughters into SL until they are over 30 and that will be with me hovering over their shoulder.

For those who have clubs and the like it is going to be one more headache. Is that avitar of age? There is the "age verification" but that is as good as the information to get through it. Grandma's licence, some rock stars passport on internet or the US Social Security system who provides all one would need online to "verify".

But as Blue Linden is quoted saying, "I will have to argue that many of the adults on main grid are more imature than teens ;p" and I would agree.

Universities in SL (and I am associated with several of them, as clients for my building services) deal with the sex in SL the same way they deal with the adult bookstores and movie theatres that crop up on the edge of RL campus. The faculty and students are recognized to be adults, and what they do on their own time is their business. But when a student or faculty member is in the University sim, or when they are actively wearing a group tag for the university or recognizable signs of affiliation with the university, they are expected to follow the code of conduct for that school - which means leave the revealing clothing and sex stuff elsewhere when on campus, and don't flaunt your university affiliations when in Adult venues. Most real-world businesses that have a presence in SL have similar policies.

It's a simple enough matter for a University or Business to ignore the sex that happens elsewhere on the grid. But when you start adding in a large under-18 crowd, then the assumption that they are adults and what they do on their own time is their business doesn't hold true. And the comments from Blue Linden indicated they would NOT visibly 'label' the under-age residents, just as they do not now visibly label people for age authenticated status.

There is a university for that, too.

Excuse me, a college.

Err, did you miss this?

The fact that it's under discussion is disturbing enough. One of the best features of SL is that they they have this separation of kids and adults.

I dunno. I don't mind when retarded ideas are discussed. Like,

A Linden: "How about we merge teen grid with the regular grid?"
B Linden "You're an idiot."

That's a healthy, helpful discussion right there.

more like:

A linden "How about we merge the grids?"
B linden "cool idea"
Lawyer on retainer "are you both morons?"
A linden "well I'm sure accounting wil like the idea?"
Accountant "Are you out of your damn minds?"

C Linden: Then we're agreed, it's a go!

The news seems to indicate that most countries are quite willing to cooperate with each other in cases where one of them is trying to nab a perv.

That's really a bad idea, with all that you can see in SL, everybody knows that it shouldn't be accessible to children ! And Second Life as a not-adult-game-anymore would get really less interesting...
NO WAY !!!!

/me grabs the lab by the collar

Face it, your game is basicly all about sex. throw kids into the mix and you got yourself alot of explaining to do infront of your congress, or you can remove all the XXX stuff that made SL so popular with the Digital crossdressers and perverts

I have to think the lawyer would like the idea
what a huge cash cow it would be for them

not when they are on a retainer.

Now if they were paid by the hour/case maybe.

But a retainer is a flat fee for the year, regardless of the cases they have to deal with

It's really not what content a PG only Family Affair Grid will lack, it's more what it will have. Even at it's adfarmed worse, I prefer seeing all those eyesores in my travels than what will be coming. The endless, CocaCola, Nike, Best Buy, Toyota, etc etc...ads that will be springing up. It's nevitable. Wherever Joe Family goes, the marketing noise will follow. It's nice to have a little escape from that noise.

Comments from Blue Linden about how some teens are more mature than some adults show how out of touch with the reality of the issue Blue (at least) is.

It does not matter one bit whether a teen is mature minded or not.

Facts:

1) In RL a lot of teens have sex with other teens
2) In RL teens have access to porn if they want it
3) In RL teens come in to contact with non-pg stuff almost everyday
4) There are mature areas of most cities where teens are not restricted from going by the authorities.

Why are these things allowed to happen, why do the authorities not stop this? Answer, they require the parents to do a good job of parenting and educate the teens. Not so that it stops these activities (because you cannot), but so that they are able to take responsibility for themselves and decide what is safe and advisable or not.
The law does not monitor teens, it only deals with them when they step over the lines.

That brings us to SL, even mature minded teens are going to want to engage in some or all of these activities in SL, just as they do in RL, mostly with their own age group.
SL can never be made safe enough so that they cannot engage in those activities - you would have to disable all building and all text, voice communication.
So that means SL would have to be like RL where it is the parents job to parent and educate their teens to behave responsibly on SL and LL would have to be absolved of most of the responsibility for what they do or it would not work, parents would have to still shoulder the responsibility like in RL.

The only way the grid can be made "safe" (by safe I mean totally confined to society's ever restrictive definition of PG) for anyone would be to turn it off completely.

thank you for the most sensible commrnts here so far. Another small point, teens cant get pregnant or catch STDs from virtual sex.

( Ducks and covers with a flameproof blanket ).

G2 is *always* sensible, and it is quite refreshing.

Myself however, that is another story.

The problem I see is not one of protecting children from adults. The problem I see is protecting children from accessing mature content.

The key difference here between Second Life and a game like World of Warcraft is that in Second Life, the users create the content, so Linden Lab has no effective way of controlling the content. World of Warcraft, on the other hand, has an easy way of controlling the content- they tell their art departing to keep it Teen-Rated.

By merging the grids, Second Life is essentially inviting minors to come into a big porn store. That's a much different situation than the teens sneaking in to access the porn uninvited. It's sending that invitation to the kids to access porn that's going to put some legal liability on Linden Lab.

Linden Lab can try to create Disney areas, but we know that Linden Lab has absolutely no meaningful way to control the content that users upload. And they have more of a problem, given that they have been able to enforce the PG-Mature distinction for years. How do they explain to a judge or jury that it was a reasonable precaution to declare PG areas and limit teens to those, when they have years of proof that they are unable to enforce it?

Particularly the "Disney" ones named after Japanese cars.