Upcoming Changes for Adult Content: Answers to Questions

That's exactly my point. I'm not in anyway saying i am an expert, but i will say with confidence, i know more than a few adult business owners. We don't all see eye to eye on a lot of things. They do it their way, I do it mine. I'm not judging them, they don't judge me. BUT, at the end of the day, it all boils down to the same thing. If they screw one of us, they screw us all. In this i am confident in saying... we simply want to be treated fairly. The decision's have already been made by LL. We all simply want the new rules, spelled out plainly, concisely, and with no more room for rumors, or speculation. If the move is inevitable, and obviously it is, we, the ones that have worked thousands of hours to build Adult worlds, have spent hundreds of thousands of linden and RL currency to build our businesses, buy our land, ect.. want some consideration.
This whole action targets us, specifically. The outward reaching ripple effect.. we have NO CLUE how far, and hard it will reach.
The ones that may not actually *run* an adult business, but support US in our right to do so, deserve consideration. Since obviously there is no way this is NOT going to happen, stop beating around the bush, and simply give us a time line, how/where to apply for the new land, and lets get the show on the road.

This move was first brought up inside LL about a year ago.

They will not be stopping it anytime soon.

I would have been very surprised if this hadn't have been planned for a long time, just because of the logistics of it all. I think the coming months are going to be very interesting as LL changes and evolves again.

I am looking forward to seeing how they deal with us adult businesses and what the next moves are. SL is never boring with LL at the helm, i am just glad i don't invest more than i need to for just these reasons but its still value for money for me and for what i need SL for. Thank god the RL adult business pays for here

I agree totally. LL just let us know how we apply for the new land and let us move and rebuild our sim on the new land and give us an HONEST timeline not some company truths please

No matter how many customers or sims or dollars it costs them. Running a company with blinders on - good way to get bowled over from the side unexpectedly.

So many vague responses and terms, it made as much sense as instructions for a calculus calculator written in japanese for an american to read... and I'm sure it's been said before, but I'm gonna have a go at it.

You've stated that the definition of 'Adult' can change from region to region, lifestyle to lifestyle but then you want to make a firm definition and still expect to please everyone?

Let's just come out and say it, LL. This is about sex and sexual matters. There's ~alot~ of sexually oriented sims out there, and from the sound of it, you're gonna force them to move to a mainland and enforce access via a verification method.

~~This is just re-introduction of the age verification that happened previously that caused such an uproar in the community.~~

It all comes down to 'Blame Canada' in the old South Park movie. People wonder into a mature sim and shock, surprise! They see mature subject matter! And they don't want to admit they made a mistake (cause that's not possible!) so they blame someone else before the blame could possibly hit them. Unfortunately, you guys at LL have to shoulder this and on behalf of the SL population, I apologize about that.

It's like going to a rated R movie and being offended at seeing breasts onscreen or hearing swearing. The word 'MATURE' isn't enough of a warning?? As far as protecting people from seeing something they don't want, you already have a good system in place. Being able to search places in SL based on keywords. If I want sex, I search 'sex' and BAM! 100+ search results of places for sex or sex related products. If people search 'guns' and the sim happens to have sex as well, it's thier fault they're seeing it cause they didn't bother to read the search tags before teleporting there. These places have these things going on and ~WANT~ people to know they have it, so they put it in the descriptor.

But after a long rant, it comes down to the fact that this is going to fix nothing, LL. It's just gonna be another inconvenience to the SL public, because you've given freedom, then you take it away. You've done a great job in creating a virtual world in which hundreds of thousands can have practically anything they can have in real life and more.

And this means....
It's a kink for a small percentage of the population to go out of thier way and cause havoc to offend the rest of the population.
It's a kink for people to have sex where they're not supposed to be doing that.
It's a kink for girls to wear skimpy skirts and nothing under them, so they have a risk of showing off to a complete stranger.
Etc...
Etc...

And with the freedoms SL allows, THIS STUFF WILL ALWAYS HAPPEN.

Make adult content move to an isolated area that only verified people have access to. People will ~still~ get offended in seeing things they didn't want to see because there's people in SL that will do as they wish regardless of who it offends. Because they will live in SL the way they live in real life. Blindly moving around and doing what they like. It's a kink for people to have thier 'hot buttons' pushed so they can have something to rant and complain about.

Honestly, if you want to save time, money and frustration for the SL population but still have the same impact as what you're proposing, maybe REINFORCE to people the fact that they are entering a MATURE REGION and have the chance to be witness to provacative material and behaviors. Do a message window popup when they enter a mature sim that states this and have the little clicky option to shut off the warning. If they shut off the option, then it falls on them if they see something. They were warned and decided to proceed anyways.

Obviously, they believe it will work out for them when all is done. Maybe, but if not, they wouldn't be the first company to make a fatal error in that regard.

It will be interesting to see how this whole thing shakes out, especially from my vantage as someone with little investment in SL, either emotionally or financially. I'd hate to see it go bust, not so much for SL itself, but for all the people who have put so much into it, and have made it a place for a casual player like me to keep coming back to.

Very true, very true. As much as all this sucks, this is still true. By playing SL, we agreed that LL can do what they like with the content we create. If we don't like it, we're not required to. Best we can hope for is they honestly consider the feedback.

But I'd like to point this out to LL and hope they listen: listening to shareholders and not listening to your customers is mainly what led this economy into the spiral it is in with companies collapsing right and left.

Please, think of the players, the people that have given you the success you enjoy.

Very true,Very true. In fact the shareholdrs should be thanking all the content creators and business people who have brought SL this far, in spite of LL's mismanagement.

Not quite. We've agreed that they can do what they like with it in the context of the Second Life service. They can't, for example, use it to build cities under contract to Blue Mars, or release it for use on OpenSim.

I can think on different ways for input to make them finally listen, but we have no closed ranks, no dignity and no courage to make them listen. Too much different interests and individual decisions, ambitions and motivations standing against it, wich is the biggest advantage for LL and this let's them act as plain as Teflon and bigmouthed and unsympathic as they are.

If they understand only numbers as information-input, then we would have inworld enough different ways to give them input to listen. And if it were, as one of thousand ideas, that the North-, South-, East-continent would be transformed into a complete desert. All back into inventory. Everyone sets all land for sale on astronomical high prices to make it unsellable. Each sim and lot at the highest possible number in the land sale field. 9999999999999..... so that no noob can and no Anshe would buy it.

Desert and the whole map yellow. And no one moves to Ursula. Ursula stays empty. Even if they would give it for free and no tier. Complete strike. Wich would need the support of the landlords too...bah, and they wouldn't...

For months if needed. No cashflow. Ok, it is stupid, hahahaha. Maybe others have better ideas. But: all would fail, because: there is no potential to start anything. We are unfortunately not french people wich are able to bring their government or their biz sharks, or often both, down on the knees, frequently, with a good old traditional general-strike - on keyword the whole nation - and through all classes and interests. They celebrate such a thing all few months along a year.

We have no dignity and no brain, to do anything accorded ever when the Lab goes mad. IF OS debacle or this adult thing: we are unable to bring something on track. This is the problem and not so much these handfull average Mickey Mouse Managers at the Lab.

They are not the brightest, hahaha, but we have no potential on the action-side in background.

We are unable to create a fat chaos to wake them up from their Brown Bags and to make them run collective to see what happened.

They do not listen, because they know that we have no serious megaphone wich would be loud enough. This forum makes them laugh all day. And we are too lazy to start anything and if it were stupid, to force them to reactions and to react creative to force them constantly to react.

Blondin rocks that here alone and has a smooth job. Between 2 sandwiches and a diet coke he drops in his 8 indignities a day - and some days not... and we are sitting here like idiots, telling him: thank you Sir, but, oh Sir, I would have there this or that additional question, Sir. LOL.

Hahaha, we are hanging on his virtual lips like believers of a new guru of a new sect.

And everyday we wait longingly on his holy appearance and on that the master speaks to us a few complete meaningless words.

If the cash flow melts down and the world becomes a complete uninteresting desert, this would make them listen and begging on their knees.

In this present case we are the ones who are begging on their knees. lol. We are: too weak. But not made by them, it is our own weakness.

Reasons: egoistic emotions, being addicted, hooked and greed.

Ah, a good revolution can be so much fun.

If not too much people would have more fun in being lemming or being collaborateur with the enemy.

Misfortune.

In summer we are then triple rated, betrayed, folded, bended, debased, deplaced, segregated and broken.

Wonderful.

This was the weather forecast. Stay tuned while a commercial pops up.

Yes, you can link a PayPal account to your SL account. That is considered "PIOF" and will verify you for the adult continent, as I understand it.

This may not be what you wanted to hear, but it is a way to get qualified without giving a CC number.

I strongly recommend listening to an interview with Mitch Kapor (25 January 200. The most important part is the middle third.



01. LL owns the leading virtual world platform
02. Opensim is not competition atm (and is unlikely to be for some time)
03. Linden Lab intends to sell the server software (boxed SL platform)
04. That means a constellation of robust virtual worlds coming on the market
05. XStreet can be the central content marketplace for all SL-platform worlds
06. LL and IBM develop interSL platform content transfer capability
07. LL wants the middle ground under the bell curve of the future constellation
08. Disneyfication helps position SLworld for the middle ground
09. Entrepreneurs and content creators move to other worlds
10. New content flows back into SLworld from other worlds
11. LL future revenue comes from SLworld and SL platform sales

It's worth remembering that country music outsells all the rest. Disney makes a ton of money. Smurfs, Care Bears and Barbie are MEGA cash cows. So, we freaks go off to Second Matrix or Metaspherica or Cyberotica. Linden Lab lives off SLworld and turns the SL platform into the new 'Windows'.

Linden Lab have everything to gain and little to lose from adopting conservative strategies. Banality is probably a good thing for them. Anyone with a successful business in SL knows that the money is not in high-end, premium land/content; it is in the mass-market stuff. Can we fault Linden Lab for adopting a similar strategy?

And is this not the fate of all innovative ideas? How many cool bands 'sell out' and go mainstream? How does one resist 'the money'? Very few people on Earth have an overarching esthetic that keeps them sane and creative when the mass market throws gold at their feet. Don't get me wrong, I have nothing against profit, but history remembers those who transcended riches to achieve something that stands as a monument to human excellence.

Forget the issue at hand, I think what really saddens so many people is the failure of leadership - the lack of vision to stand up to social conventions and even governments in order to defend the first completely new world since the founding of the United States. There are no Jeffersons or Franklins at Linden Lab, no Washingtons or Madisons. Instead, the company is run by programmers, accountants and lawyers. Decisions appear ad-hoc, reactive, petty. I think many of us feel, gee whiz, you could have done something grand with Second Life. You could have shaped the future, shaped the real world, and yet you chose mediocrity. It is this, in my opinion, that hurts the most.

This whole idea needs to be stopped. No direction, no definition, no forethought, no clue.

Really, it's an epic fail yet again, it was an epic fail in 2007, it's an epic fail now. Go back to the drawing board.

Look at this realistically, this fiasco is no different from the open space fiasco a few months back. What is in common?

Poor execution and poor management without any forethought.

* With OS, LL blamed the performance issue to OS when they should have fixed their own sim performance rather than pointing the finger and singled out the OS users as the villain.
* With Adult content, LL again blamed the adult content problem by singling out the adult business, and labbeled them out as the villain.

Why is there such an outcry by the majority of the users in both cases, not just the OS users, and not just the Adult content users? What is in common?

* With OS, everyone felt betrayed and ignored by our concerns when we are the core users of SL, not just the OS users.
* With Adult content, everyone felt exactly the same when our voices are not heard, and it affects not just the adult users, but everyone in our community.

What's the solution?
* There are alternate ways to do it. Many have been suggested if LL is listening. It does not need to behave like a tank that only knows how to bulldoze people head-on but incapable of making turns.

That is why good intentions can end up so horrible as a result. It is in the execution of implementing the policy that is so rigid like a tank bulldozing people around that made this so agonizing to everyone. But it doesn't have to be executed that rigidly and micromanaged.

If LL is seriously concerned about cleaning up the place, then enforce the existing policy will clean up the few abusers. Even if the new proposed policy is in place, LL still have to do exactly the same to enforce it.

That is why laying the blame on others only displaces their problem when everyone sees it was LL's enforcement problem that they are not addressing in the first place.

Sounds familiar?

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Animations are not specificly exempted in the 2006 amendment... the legislation extends existing provisions to animations. At least that is my understanding.

It is relative easy, and I think, we would help them, because over the years, an increasing community, highly diversitive, from hundreds of countries, was able, more or less without directives of the company, to integrate and if integration was only to ignore some scenes but let them live in peace, but also in a welcome attitude for new attractions - in all these meanings we made an self-integrating space, where so many different social andexperimental biotopes have found their places.

If the company is in need - for economical reasons and for expanding their biz - to integrate more and specific targeted sorts of social and economical biotopes, LL has two choices:

They can do that reactionary and repressive. This is the actual socio-economical-culture-politic they do: they jumped on the reactionary and repressive track, because they think it would be fast and effective.

They can also chose to move the scales on their so called roadmaps forward, with non-reactionary and non-repressive ways.

This universe can expand in different ways and on many levels to add new socio-economical biotopes.

This is then a sensible socio-ecological job. The capital for that, is: we. And they could need some brains with a hint of that and how to do that on the board too.

Not only tech freaks, attorneys, investment lobbyists, eso-biz-speech flatchatter like Kingdon and pseudo taoists like Rosedale and dreamer like Kapor.

They can create only a biz-philosophy, ridiculous enough. Instead of a real one.

They can, if they want, add worlds, without removing other worlds, especially while we are profitable for them, but also because of our experiences and creative power.

I was mainland sim owner - well - while we don't own nothing of a server, I was sim renter, like we all, and I jumped on the OS debate some days because there was unfairness in the air and is still, even without any personal interest in OS.

But how the company acts brings me frequently upon the top of the palm.

Same with this adult thing. I am not in escalating ex -or impressions, but I am at the same time not shocked by them.

But here are principles touched. Human principles.

I like what second life offers to create and to do things.

Just that. An asylum for really crazy or ingenious, resourceful ideas.

This is a money machine, but it is also an asylum and/or a platform for extraordinaire cool developements of all sorts - there is high potential and much brain connected, globewide, and maybe all possible alternative trashy expressions, but in a mostly ironical and funny way.

Microspheres, macrospheres, a colorful mosaic in all possible qualities and quantities.

So my problem with all that is: they need help to learn to add things in a non-reactionary and non-repressive way.

We helped them, ah no,we tried to help them, with the simple idea to let all like it is, but adding a zone for ascetic and concentrated on biz-meetings and learning/edu oriented folks.

No prob to have them here - we wouldn't disturb them. May they learn and blabla in peace on whatever continent. We deliver the fashion, the interior and the buildings free home per express delivery and for small prices. lol

Since LL plans to offer them a private firewall,to be not seen and watched, well. Good idea this blog entry a few days ago. Lock them! Hide them. All ok for us.

And LL avoids our compromise to give Ursula to them like the devil avoids the holy water.

As if we wouldn't had welcomed each and any one and each and any scene very civilisized and all of them have established their being here successfully.

To wipe out things and to turn the pressure machine on and yelling: "guilty", this worked never and will never work. Not in such a complex world wich can only live through it's multi-rational complexity, otherwise: boring like three days old grey socks.

It worked not under Mao, not under Stalin and not under Hitler to synchronize the masses on the smallest and cheapest level. It works not with animals and not with humans. Even mono-cultures with over-protected plants are not able to survive in the long term. One false breeze and they are dead and no substitution available then. Result: hunger, death.

Conquer is conquer and war is war - but if I think back and if one has a clue about history in details: even Alexander and especially the Romans were been able to add and to integrate and to take some input from taken environments and cultures, instead of pure meaningless destroying things and mentalities. Also there was no ghetto-thinking after a while - it became a multi-cultural prototype.

At the end these spheres became so attractive for economical and social and security reasons that extern spheres wanted ambitioned to be integrated, more than the ex-conquerers could manage at the end, hahaha.

What LL makes now is the opposite: they try to hollow existing spheres (wich are so far the only stable spheres they have...) and to exchange groups and interests in an aggressive and disrespectful way.

This will fail. To arbitrarily stigmatize people fails ever.

To create a gourmet buffet, with much menus for every possible taste, needs some spice and some intelligent organisation. It holds the components together. We are the spice and the cement. Not only that: we are the cooks. LL is only the kitchen and the equipment.

This is what the Lindens are unable to understand in its whole dimension. They drop now too much salt into the soup and too less pepper on the meat.

In result they will end up as the McDonaldism of the virtual space. Maybe rich, but somehow poor. Fat but unflexible. Technical overequiped with 3D cams and 3D voice

(Mitch's new old man's ideas...for creating the most realistic avas and expressions ever - hell, why not use then just modern cisco- big-stylish-flat-screen video-conference systems, these are on market and in use and they cost companies only one time money instead of leasing fees, and they are such stylish, big, real packages for real biz)

but intellectual and social LL will stay under-inspired - without us or with blackmailed customers.

The end of all pharaos. De-ge-ne-ra-ted.

Actually my premise was not that people are more passionate about realism but that the goal of realism is to engender passion.

People do get very passionate over strange things, though, which is why while many here may argue that cartoons are just cartoons, the goal is usually to make the experience more real rather than less real. If it was to make it less real, then wouldn't scenes of, say, forced sex in SL consist of toasters sitting around a table playing bridge?

Or even scenes of regular sex consist of random shapes just sitting nowhere near each other, just sitting there not even in communication? (Note that could in theory be simulated bondage....).

People get passionate over imaginary things because they see them as relating in some way to them. To them, they are 'real.'

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Sounds more like marriage

Never heard of the bonds of matrimony?

There is an old joke that when men twist their wedding rings they are franticly trying to figure out the combinations to take them off .

Bored. So I popped over to Pervz to see if the place was still there. Yes indeed. I smile remembering how I and a couple GFs went there to check out the 'Dolcett' Toaster. I laugh again now as we laughed at the time - each of us giving it a go. One of the girls was definitely not into BDSM. She simply rolled her eyes as we took our turns - making jokes at the ghastly scripted chat (no mod).

The reason why we laughed is because...it was not real...in the same way that most funny jokes are not real - they are stories, shadows or mirrors of reality that we can look at without going blind. Obviously, none of us would wish to come into contact with a REAL toaster. I doubt anyone could bear the site of such a thing in RL. We laughed and played with it in SL precisely because it was NOT real. It was a joke.

If people can no longer understand the difference between fantasy and reality, between abstract and concrete, between photo and flesh, then we have a serious social problem. To confuse a metaphorical toaster made of prims and particles with a real toaster made of steel and plastic - to confuse an avatar with a flesh and blood human being - is, quite frankly, a sign of mental illness.

The Canadian government flirted with 'metaphorical crime' and backed away from the Abyss. The British government stares into the blackness - fascinated - leaning closer, closer, closer...

Except that a kid cannot get into the R rated movie without showing ID or being accompanied by a parent, who must stay with the kid the entire movie.

R rated SL content, the kid just has to say 'yes I would like to see that please,' and it does not even mean 'I just want to see it' but also means 'I want to see it and have the option of playing too'.

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