Systems we can implement in world to make it harder for "fly by night" scoundrels.

I fully agree with you here. Creating and giving things away is a pleasure all by itself, and what hooked me on SL. Without that, I wouldn't have stayed. Anything that limits this will limit future users.

I don't think this system is really accurate. My shop has been in the same spot for over a year. Twice since the shop went up, I bought land next to my parcel and joined it to make a new parcel--more prims that way! The "About Land" indicates the last date the parcel was changed. So a shop owner might be on the same plot for years, but if he joined land yesterday then "About Land" will indicate yesterday as the date he became the parcel owner.

Yes, but they are still billed the $295 as an account charge, whether that comes from US$ balance or new money. Let me revise the idea to be

max PayPal Process Credit/mo = some number based on account fees and L$ purchases, the exact limit to be worked out later

Your homestead expenses should count, its land tier, indirectly.

I wasn't saying *you* are a scammer, but scammers tend to not put any money into the system either, so we need a way to limit what they can take out and separate them from legitimate businesses.

The exact numbers can be an item for discussion, but the basic idea is "if you never put anything into SL, we are not letting you take a lot out, and how much you can take out is proportional to what you put in over some past time"

(Their actually is a limit on cashing money out, by the way, I hit it last Nov when I took out an unusually large amount for the holidays. It's triggered by the riskAPI, and all my accounts were shut out for 3 days until I could talk to them on the phone and straighten it out. I had been taking out money monthly for a couple of years at that point so the only trigger was how much)

They already kinda do that. Maybe the numbers just need to be revised or something.

New Residents Level
0 to 1 Days, 2 to 7 Days, 8 to 27 Days, Level 1, Level 2
Buy L$.... US$30... US$100 US$300... US$2,500 US$10,000
Sell L$.... US$0..... US$0.... US$300... US$2,500 US$5,000
Purchase US$250 US$500 US$1,300 US$5,000 US$10,000


From the old days, I had to get my limits raised to run my estate. I'm at biz level 3, one of many options and certainly not anywhere near the highest, and is essentially this:

Buy L$
Per 24 Hours US$5,000
Per 30 Days US$5,000

Sell L$
Per 24 Hours US$10,000
Per 30 Days US$80,000

Purchase
Per 24 Hours US$10,000
Per 30 Days US$20,000

Need for transaction levels like that gets reviewed by a human in each case, I think, based upon past history and stuff.

Edit: for clarity, a standard "level 2" account would only be able to sell about 5000 USD of $L monthly, which is enough to cover tier on about 16 standard regions, but nothing more than that.

Land tier should definitely count as an expense, even though its paid indirectly via an estate owner. And based on earlier comments, Im now thinking more like this:

Paypal process credit per month limit = sum of Linden fees over 6 months (Buy L$ + Premium memberships + Mainland Tier + Proportion of estate tier based on parcels listed in your name as parcel owner)

So in your case, if you have a full homestead, that should count as 95/mo even though it is indirect through the estate owner. And with a premium membership and 4096 mainland, I get a formula cap of $792 a month process credit limit. The exact formula can be fiddled with but the basic idea is to have a reasonable cash out limit, while a guy with no bought L$, no premium account, no land, and only selling on Xstreet would have a process credit limit of zero.

There should probably also be a way to raise the cap in special circumstances, but have that require a phone call or fax - real life contact.

The Lindex trading limits Desmond quoted above are a separate thing, I'm proposing a limit on PayPal Process Credit, ie taking real money out of SL.

Why do we care about how long a store has been around?

Is the idea to discourage new competitors? Or am I missing something?

So someone making pretty lousy money, say, US$1000 a month from SL, would have to rent two islands they don't need just to get the money they earn out of the game? No, I'll pass on this idea.

I already have payment information on file. I am *not* willing to give up any more than that. As it is already, I have noticed an alarming number of calls to my house phone from unknown entities who have my name, my address, my phone number, and last four digits of the credit card I used for my SL payment info, asking if I'd "like a free gift card for being a loyal Visa shopper" or something along those lines. I am not saying that LL had anything to do with that; but it just further reinforces my desire to not have to give out my personal identity just for the "privilege" of selling a few houses, or selling a few sionChicken eggs, or giving stuff I make to my friends.

If this is the road that SL goes down, then it can do it with one less resident.

LL has at least 3 credit card numbers of mine on file, not to mention full identity, not to mention that I've had my RL identity and my SL avatar publicly connected for almost two years now. The sky has not fallen. I don't get any calls from unknown persons beyond political pollsters.

You can think you are maintaining some level of anonymity all you want, the reality is that you have none and anyone who really wanted to find you would do so pretty quickly. Welcome to the digital world, you lost your privacy a long time ago and every last detail of your life is for sale by some data aggregator like ChoicePoint.

Your use of the word "privilege" implies that you think being able to operate as a merchant in SL is an entitlement owed to you be virtue of fact that you joined up in the first place.

Ok, found the thread that I think inspired this where EH got ripped off.

But I don't think restricting new-account trading and giving away of items is a solution. Nor is tracking who has been in business how long and where of any use.

Linking alts to a global account name would also not work. A theif can still make a new account using new info. But adding this as an option would be of great use to some of us. I would like to be able to declare some/all of my alts as being versions of me. But I don't think requiring it would do anyone any good.

There are vast numbers of people who spend lindens every day and are socially active every day who are not on paid accounts, and sometimes even not on PIOF accounts. They get their money as gifts, payment for services, payment for creations, from main accounts, or they simply operate in the realm of freebies.
- Requiring payment to make an account, or to keep an account, would kill SL. It would turn this into a competitor against World of Warcraft - and that's a situation nobody wants to be in...

While it can be easy to see how a person in only freebies can contribute greatly to the social environment of SL - as for the economy, they are still walking billboards. Further, their participation in contests, services, camping, and so on - aid in moving $L's around.
- But underestimating their social influence's impact on the SL economy would be fatal.



The only solutions are going to come in going after copybot itself, and whatever weakness in SL's code allows it to function.

Good luck with that. You'll have to change some laws of physics.

Which means there is no solution other than Linden Labs human policing reports of copying.

I think that's the bottom line.

I'm not sure that a good, expensive copyright judgment wouldn't help.

Unlike the RIAA cases, where the defendants aren't trying to earn money from file sharing, and at least have a plausible case for the moral high ground, here the people doing the copying are trying to make a quick buck. They're more likely to be motivated by the risk of losing their money.

I and no one eles needs to support Linden Lab.. THEY need to fix thier screw ups.
Supporting a system that is broken is SSOO many ways is just stupid.

They used to have a dye that showed up if you pissed in the pool or so our parents told us, also the blue dye that stains people when they break into a safe or bank that is real.

If we could just register each build name with our name as creator somehow in a database and if it rezzed up with the wrong names it exploded or stained the av blue for a week...

Hence why this prim would just count days it was rezzed, I suppose this would mean someone could cheat by just sliding it elsewhere to set up a new store selling stolen content, but maybe it would reset or self delete if taken across a sim border or moved more than 100m in a day or something.

This only effrects the grandaddy accounts, you would have to limit the amount transfered between new avatars as well, the money would probably filter from the front line alts through a few layers of scondary alts by xstreet purchases, who would then buy stuff from the cashout alts. You know, that weird overpriced crappy stuff that has you wondering who would be dumb enough to buy it...........

Yep, it's an idea to try and show which store owners have been in SL for long periods and hence aren't likely to be selling stollen conten compared to those who set up 2 days ago and are just seeing how much they can sell before theri disposable alt gets caught.

We are talking about LL here, and some pretty crafty people who can use all sorts of scripts and bots to sell stuff around a big merry go round of vendors, Xstreet, through possibly hundreds of accounts in a day. The FBI probably couldn't track the smart operators.
They've been doing their best followinw the money for a couple of years now and they catch 1 in the time it takes for a dozen more to start up their theft rings.
Unless some major changes are taken this will just cntinue to snowball to the point they have competing disposable bots just standing around ripping our stuff and distributing it faster than we can DCMA them.

I don't think we stop residents transfering items, just prevent them from selling them, for profit at least, there is some debate of course about even blocking them from selling for L$0, but that would depend on how big a problem that really was to warrant that.

Don't bother trying? The copybotters will get bored and go away eventually after the economy has imploded.
Might as well call for the scrapping of af permissions system as it's clearly hurting residents as well as people who would abuse a full perms system.
Then we can all give presents of anything we own to anyone we want and everyone will feel warm & fuzzy

Well that's a very expensive strategy, if we look at absolutes only. There's a lot that can be done. For instance, baking avatar textures server side before sending them along. Stuff like that.

There's also a lot that can be done with the money path.

Right now, any account can cash out to *any* email address. This, in my opinion, should have been change #1 fixed a looong time ago. Should be: one account, one paypal email ~ and you gotta jump through major hoops to change it, is what I think should be done.

And if someone has been a brat, then that paypal email, and that real life name and that real life address never gets sent another dime. Plus the credit card info (if any) gets banned too.

We can validate our paypal email accounts against bank accounts and the real life information given, plus signatures we all signed at the bank years ago.* Not a validated paypal account? No cashout. That would go a long way right there.

Ah, and don't allow cashout until the account is three months old, or something like that. We might lose all the instant billionaires, though...




* Edit: I mean the usual paypal validation, not anything new. My paypal for instance is already validated in this manner; it just takes a coupla days and is a standard paypal thing.

Which will work when they double the price of tier to allocate 100 staff to just process the DCMA's 24/7 as the Goldfarmers continue to multiply.