Open letter to Linden Lab Management, and specifically addressed to:
Philip Rosedale - Founder and CEO, Linden Lab
Robin Harper - Vice President, Community Development and Support
Ginsu Yoon - Vice President, Business Affairs
Dear Philip, Robin and Ginsu,
Our company KI Media has had a presence in Second Life since December 2006. We run a large successful swingers dating website at http://www.swingersfunclub.nl. Swingers are couples that are in search of other couples for erotic experiences. Our members are of all ages (18 to 65+) and come from all social classes and include (but not limited to) people with public professions like artists, police officers, lawyers and politicians.
Before we came to Second Life, the primary means of communication between our members was by webmail and by using the chatrooms on our website. When we learned of Second Life we saw the potential of having 3D avatar based chat over conventional chat systems. We also evaluated competitive environments like Active Worlds and Outer Worlds. The choice for using Second Life was primarily based on usability, the high level of personal freedom, and the fact that Second Life was accessible to all of our community members without any obstacles (financial or otherwise).
Establishing our presence involved buying an Island and building a Swingers Club as a central meeting place for our members. The island now also features houses for our members and a shopping mall for Swingers Lifestyle related merchandise. Since the opening we have actively promoted Swingers Funclub in SL as our community chatroom, which resulted in extended news media coverage because we were the fist party to establish a virtual Swingers Club in Second Life. Although we do not have explicit sexual photographic content, some of the graphics used on our island are of an erotic nature. Our members who visit our club are usually in search of contacts that are erotic in nature as well. That is why we have marked our Island settings as being a "Mature" island.
We have been reading the announcements on the linden blog regarding the age verification system with great concern. On the official linden blog it is written at Thursday, May 10th, 2007:
"you will need to verify age only if you want to enter parcels/estates flagged as containing adult content"
Although we welcome any initiative that makes Second Life more secure, we have serious objections against the announced identity verification system. Access to the grid is already regulated by your terms of service (TOS), which states in article 2.2:
"Users under the age of 18 are prohibited from accessing the Service [...] By accepting this agreement in connection with an Account outside the Teen Area, you represent that you are an adult 18 years of age or older".
This means that anybody under the age of 18 accessing the main grid is in violation of the TOS, and any legal liability for doing so lies entirely by the offending person, their parents or their legal guardians.
We can understand that you would like to give island owners and parcel owners the opportunity to deny access to accounts that do not have an age verification flag set. However this should be a choice to be made by the owners of the land, and not enforced by Linden Lab. In the TOS under which we bought our island it is stated in article 1.2:
"Linden Lab is a service provider, which means, among other things, that Linden Lab does not control various aspects of the Service.
You acknowledge that Linden Lab is a service provider that may allow people to interact online regarding topics and content chosen by users of the service, and that users can alter the service environment on a real-time basis. Linden Lab generally does not regulate the content of communications between users or users' interactions with the Service"
The announced age verification is in violation with the Second Life TOS. When Linden Lab denies age-unverified members access to our island, it is then actively regulating interaction between users, and between our customers and our service. Linden Lab should behave like a service provider as specified by the TOS and not intervene in communication or content, unless the intervention is required by order of a court of law.
Age-unverified only means that a person's age has not been verified, it does not mean that a person is not of adult age. The nature of our Swingers Lifestyle Community is such that our members do not want to be officially registered as being interested in erotic content or related activities. This is especially the case for people who have public functions like artists, police officers, lawyers and politicians. From the protests that come out of the broader Second Life Community we understand that the majority of the Second Life population does not wish to be officially registered as being interested in erotic content or related activities either.
You may be well aware of the fact that your customers have no control whatsoever over the extend to which their identity information is going to be stored, used or sold by any 3rd party. We assume you have made a legally binding agreement with the 3rd party prohibiting the use or disclosure of identity information. But even then, when that 3rd party goes bankrupt or changes ownership, such agreements become void and the identity information could then be used or sold by any party that gains ownership over that information.
We hereby would like to state that Swingers Island is our virtual property, and the choice to who to allow access to our island is entirely ours. We believe the responsibility for being the legal age is entirely with the visitor and we are against enforcing this identity registration and verification system.
We are seeing that the majority of the Second Life population is rejecting the announced age verification system as well. This means that when Linden Lab is going to restrict access to our island there will be substantially less visitors. Fewer visitors to our island will ultimately have financial consequences for our company, for which we will hold Linden Labs entirely responsible. Such liability may ultimately also include the investments in time and money already made in developing our Second Life property.
Therefore we would like to ask you urgently to guarantee unrestricted access to our island for all our customers.
Kian Stardust
KI Media
The Netherlands
Phone +31-20-6920737
Fax +31-20-6920734