The Question of Land Cutting

We have set ourselves a goal to create the most enjoyable Mainland experience that we can. As part of this effort, a few months ago we took action to limit Ad Farming (especially adverts that are intended solely to drive an unreasonable price for the parcel it is on; think visual spam) on the mainland. The effects of that program and the response from the community have been overwhelmingly positive. We're continuing our mission to improve the Mainland and wanted to present a new issue, discuss some possible next steps and elicit direction from the community about the best way to move forward.

Let's talk about land cutting and why we feel this is an issue that needs to be resolved.

Land cutting is the deliberate chopping up of parcels into smaller pieces in an attempt to sell those pieces collectively for more than the value of the original parcel. Whenever you see land that has a grid of 16m parcels for sale that are all clumped together, or in a checkerboard pattern, then what you're seeing is an example of land cutting.

To be clear, we are not talking about creating one or two small parcels for legitimate reasons or as part of your normal land management, we are referring to the commercial cutting up of land, usually for profit and on a larger scale.

This practice has a serious impact on the Mainland. Fragmented land is usually unattractive to look at which can lead to lower land values in the region. Rarely, if ever, do the segmented areas get consolidated back into large parcels, and if they do it typically causes more harm than good to local landowners.

Please remember that this issue only applies to the Linden Mainland, it does not affect the private estates.

In early February we would like to announce a policy that makes the deliberate and extensive cutting of land a violation, similar to how we dealt with ad farming. The owning of cut land would not be a violation (unless you cut it in the first place), rather it is the act of cutting it that would be the violation.

Before we do this, I'd like to canvas opinion from the community.

Here's a list of questions we'd love to get your opinion on in the forums.

* Do you agree in principle that land cutting needs to be a violation?
* Are there any legitimate reasons for land cutting (excluding profit) that we should consider when setting policy?
* With land that is already cut up, but still mostly owned by the resident that cut it, should we ask that the land be joined back together?

Please join me in the forums to provide your feedback.

Finally, it has also been suggested that parcels of 64m or smaller have their sale value clamped to be no higher than the current average price per meter. This would obviously involve development work so wouldn't be something we could deliver quickly, but I'd be interested in hearing your thoughts.

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Reposted from Jack Linden's blog post at
http://blog.secondlife.com/2009/01/28/the-question-of-land-cutting/

this spot is reserved

If you have no problem with people cutting land for their own use and just for the selling than why not just have the minimum size that you can sell be 128x128 or 256x256 or something like that or make it that parcels smaller than that can only be sold person to person. To prevent "orphan parcels" you'd have to have a check to prevent someone from selling their land in the region if it would leave them with less than whatever the minimum size is and to prevent extortion via person to person sales you'd have to expand the TOS to cover that.

This would allow every conceivable use of legitimately having small parcels in a region while making landcutting absolutely pointless before we even get into the realm of AR's. This also has the added advantage of being much lower maintenance for LL.

As someone that tries to buy roadside land for small shops I am constantly annoyed by the cutting of what seems to be 95% of all empty roadside land into 16m2 plots.

* Do you agree in principle that land cutting needs to be a violation?
Yes, I can see no reason to split a somplete strip into 16m2 plots

* Are there any legitimate reasons for land cutting (excluding profit) that we should consider when setting policy?
Given your definition of land cutting I do not think so - there is a need to split small sections of land from a main plot (allowing market stalls their our land steeings for example) but I do not think you are counting this kind of thing as land cutting

* With land that is already cut up, but still mostly owned by the resident that cut it, should we ask that the land be joined back together?
Adjoining plots, yes I think so.

At last someone is thinking about the look of SL again. Well done

The biggest issue I see with code solutions is that everyone is penalized for the unethical behavior of a small minority.

If you simply delete the accounts of the land cutters and throw them out of Second Life right now the issue is over. Nobody else would risk it and the crooks that caused this issue would be gone and would not be coming up with new ways to steal and extort.

That draconian suggestion that must be put forth made then some non vengeful suggestions/comments...

The excuse that will be put forth is the 16m parcels are for "extra prims. Yea right. However, this is a valid use of 16m parcels if the cuts do not detract from the environment.

The issue is the cost of enforcement.

So basically the only effective strategy will be the code method whereby price per meter for parcels under 64m are clamped.

So the cutters will cut 64m donuts.

See still doesn't work.

The only fix is the elimination from Second Life of extortionists for their past crimes that have cost a lot of money and said money was cashed out and never helped the economy anyway.

Get rid of the extortionists. Period.

A good way to deal with already cut land is to have a policy to seize land of landcutters who have ARed and that have been confirmed to be cutting land in a region and allow "right of first refusal to people who's land directly adjoins the parcel(s) and second refusal for anyone else in the region before putting it up for sale to the general public.

This is very needed.

* Do you agree in principle that land cutting needs to be a violation?
Yes I do.

* Are there any legitimate reasons for land cutting (excluding profit) that we should consider when setting policy?
There is some like for ads but I do not like ads and like to see them all go away. there maybe other legitimate reasons to.

* With land that is already cut up, but still mostly owned by the resident that cut it, should we ask that the land be joined back together? Yes I do.

Ann, explain how making you sell 16m parcels only person to person instead of generally and making you own more than 16m in a region hurts you? If you need land for extra prims then you already have the land in the region to meet the requirement and if you sell that greater amount of land you don't need the 16m2 anymore.

What about having to shed a 16m plot so that you don't get bumped up to a higher tier level?

Legitimate reason for cutting land to small pieces - so you can have many different audio or video streams in one place?

This is a policy that is long overdue as even though the ads might be able to go, the ability to harass and extort through the cutting of land has always been the heart of the issue.

It is a good start but I am concerned about the issue of owning the cut land. Many of the landcutters have the ability to hold on to tiny parcels and leave them set at high prices for YEARS. Not only does the original landcutter need to be held accountable, but the overall intent of having the small parcel must be addressed. It must also address what the overall intent of the small parcel owner is.

These extortion practices must also be addressed:

*Seperate but joined cut areas (4-corners) set at a high priced, rendering the surroundings unusable.

*Extreme terraforming. (Allow surrounding landowners to match the parcel) Stop the cratering.

*Small areas which are no fly, no script, no object entry.

Please please limit the prices of anything under 64m (and also the ability to swiss cheese an area as a loophole.) Unlike a product that a person created, cutting land MUST have price controls. It is NOTHING more than a tool to grief the community to pay extortioners.

Thank you for addressing this desperate issue on the mainland. It has been out of hand for far far too long.

I think the price limit on tiny parcels would solve a lot of problems, every where I go there are some 16m2 "prim" parcels for sale for absurd high prices

there are probably enough good reasons to keep small parcels around, like selling a bit to a neighbour if you dont need it, group purposes, vendors etc

oh and disabling no entry lines on small parcels, its nice if you want some privacy but on 16m2 its useless

I agree that in many cases land cutting negatively affects the mainland value. I've seen many tiny plots near the land that I own and it's generally stuck in between larger plots owned by different people. It's really useless to anyone and it might as well be tacked onto existing plots. If a current Mainland landbaron owns a large amount of land and say a large amount of said land was being used for rental property. If each rental 'plot' was subdivided into 512, 1024, etc. sq meters, how would that be looked at? Would such a new policy require that group and/or personal owned land be joined into one large plot? How would the policy affect the ability to configure multiple parcel settings such as media, access, landing points, etc. on land that is all owned by the same person/group? I think there should at least be the ability to divide/separate these settings without actually having to divide the land.

Your # 3 question is a little concering... particularly I am worried about how that is implemented. I have had the need on several occasions to "cut" up my land into wee bitty parcels TEMPORARILY to create a larger size parcel I desire. Temporarily I have needed to create 16sqm "parcels" so that I could join them to others for a size parcel I need (especially for parcels whose boundaries do not align with the grid, and thus you get that "pinking shear" jagged edges)

I am not sure what creative way you are going to come up with to get around this without major functional changed to the land edit tool. The only suggestion I could make is to have some sort of automatic function that "rejoins" parcels under a certain size back to the original parcel if not "joined" by the owner within a specified periods of time (like auto return).

Also, it would help eliminate the wee bitty parcels if you would allow non-adjoining parcels to be sold togeter in one "meta-parcel" in one transaction.

Thanks!

Hula

Hi, Jack. Nice to see LL talking about this issue.


Yes.

I guess stores or places like The Shelter/NCI might use them so they can have multiple things that are parcel-wide. One example: Torley has cut up her sim so multiple videos can be done with the parcel media stuff. Maybe also as spots for vendor server objects.

I think a timeout period would be good here. If they can't start putting the land to use within some amount of time, it's time to give them a poke.

It seems like there's something wrong with that idea but I don't see it. I'll save my vote for now.

/me notices she still does not have a Pete Linden Bear in her inventory.. :\

edit: /me also hides a link to all Jacks posts on page one for when he starts replying, since this is likely to get to be a long thread.. /invalid_link.html

* Do you agree in principle that land cutting needs to be a violation?
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Yes


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* Are there any legitimate reasons for land cutting (excluding profit) that we should consider when setting policy?
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Some but please be careful of creating loopholes and making extortionists legitimate.


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* With land that is already cut up, but still mostly owned by the resident that cut it, should we ask that the land be joined back together?
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Yes


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Finally, it has also been suggested that parcels of 64m or smaller have their sale value clamped to be no higher than the current average price per meter. This would obviously involve development work so wouldn’t be something we could deliver quickly, but I’d be interested in hearing your thoughts.
======================

Please look at this as a governance issue before throwing code at it, if possible, if viable, could you please consider extending the concierge land team and diverting land governance issues to them. At the moment there are a lot of crossover issues that would be well served with a few select Lindens specialising in land issues including the governing of mainland.

Basically I agree with Gordon Wendt, we should continue to allow land to be cut into these small parcels, there are many legitimate reasons for doing it BUT they should not be saleable.

I would go further than Gordon and make any parcel under say 256m un-saleable, I can't see what difference limiting sales to named avatars makes - land cutters would just leave parcels sitting not-for-sale but with a message in the description to contact them to arrange the sale - basically nothing would change.

If you want to stop the extortion that land cutting really is then all you have to do is remove the financial incentive for doing it, leaving the rest of us to manage our land as we see fit.

1. Do you agree in principle that land cutting needs to be a violation? Yes.

2. Are there any legitimate reasons for land cutting (excluding profit) that we should consider when setting policy? No.

3. With land that is already cut up, but still mostly owned by the resident that cut it, should we ask that the land be joined back together? Yes.

you also need to punish the people who do this to deter other such practices. These people will just find another exploit to make their money so maybe creating an internal list of violators so that you can track them as they move from one scam to the next is the answer. Make it a TOS violation to participate in a pattern of behavior of using exploits to make money.

Bot farms for gaming the traffic numbers and search results needs to be on the "to do" list as well.

as long as there is only one video stream per parcel i want to be able to cut my land into as many pieces as i need to in order to present several videos simultaneously.

how about one stream per prim?

A rare, legitimate use for multiple minimal parcels on Mainland would be listening booths for music, similar to what TRAX does in its listening booths.

Perhaps the price of a 16m2 parcel could be forced to L$10 if it's up for sale.

If you own the land on 3 or more sides of a 16m2 parcel you could
claim it for L$10 even if it's isn't up for sale.

I think the idea of limiting the price on smaller parcels would be a better
way of discouraging cutting rather than making it a violation that has to
be enforced.

These are people who have made a point of abusing and harrasing others. Too much has been lost in the community as a whole by those who left not only the Mainland but also Second Life altogether due to their experiences with these extortionists.

1) Yes
2) If by land cutting you mean any cutting at all of land to the smallest land size, yes. If by land cutting you mean the cutting up and resale, no, there is no good reason to do so for prices above fair market value.
3) Only if those individual parcels are for sale. there are legitimate reasons for keeping as small as a 16sqm piece of land (such as setting up individual shops in a mall to show up in search)

I'm pretty sure they meant they would ask the landowner to merge the parcel if someone submitted an abuse report about the mini-parcels. It wouldn't be any sort of automatic feature and wouldn't affect your use unless you leave your parcels cut up for days or weeks at a time.

exactly ... same goes for video-galleries