The Question of Land Cutting

This is a social problem, not a technical problem. It calls for a community management solution, not a technical one. I agree with Desmond and Khamon.

It occurred to me that LL wouldn't have to publish that 'highest 30-day' figure---they could just program it to come up in the dialog box that would come up if someone tried to price their 16m parcel at L100/m (or such).

So what if this predator owns a subdivision?

That is why, as I noted previously, this needs to have a specific size limit in the rule... because Jack has previously ignored parcel size limits in the adfarm policy with the ludicrous result that the adfarm south of my land is still legal but someone putting a small and discreet ad prim on each 1024 they have for sale in a sim is counted as "adfarming".

SIZE DOES MATTER.

There are legitimate reasons for cutting land, but not for selling it cut. A mall might want to have 16m landing spots for each business but keep the overall walking-around traffic for the venue as a whole. That kind of thing isn't the issue anyway.

So... the simplest solution to me is to simply disallow the selling of land smaller than, say 512. You try to place a parcel smaller for sale on the mainland, you get a message saying it isn't big enough. This will annoy people who own a hundred postage stamps all over the continents, but, frankly, times change.

If you own something smaller than a 512 and you have been hoping the annoyance of it will force your neighbors to pay a war price for it? Well, cough up a war price and buy theirs. What to do with all the postage stamps?

Rezone. The time has come. We need, desperately, planned right-of-way for transportation, and not just in terms of large highways, but in subsections of the sims themselves. If this is going to be a stable world, we need open water, we need open AIRSPACE. The current system of land management is flawed in the "world" sense, but that is because, at least I think, LL never really thought of SL as a world with more than a wink and a nudge.

LL needs to stop thinking in terms of processors server load and continue what appears to be a new idea that *gasp* this is actually a world in which people coexist. Changing the perspective might actually reveal new ways of allocating resources, too. Improvements in aesthetics, etc., can lead to perspectives that do more than free up a small percent of load, they can reveal that assumptions about how we were going to use this venue might be different than how we actually ended up using it.

For so long this has all been about serving the people who day-trade land and wooing corporations to build ghost-town sims to hand out T-Shirts that no one wears. I hope that these recent changes are a signal that you see there might be benefit in serving in the actual users of the world.

Sounds like it is a pre-arranged deal to me.

Maybe I need to go back and read the original quote? I thought it said that if you cut after arranging the deal you were fine?

Well, if the intent is to harass or extort, I think it *should* count as against the policy, though not necessarily as a specific example of donut holing or corner cutting.

Again, *SIZE DOES NOT MATTER*. *INTENT* matters. How do you prove intent? How does the rest of the world prove intent in RL cases? Evidence; both actual and circumstantial. In the vast majority of the real "problem cases" here in SL, there is no doubt in anyone's mind what the intent is.

As such, the examples are intended to be framed within the context of the overall policy. Trying to isolate them outside of the policy is silly.

If the "bad" landcutters decide, as a response to this upcoming policy, to start cutting 512s (or whatever minimum size you want to set) to harass or extort someone, it STILL should be handled similarly.

Microparcels are the natural target of this policy, because economies of scale rapidly make it an expensive proposition to behave similarly with larger and larger plots. Thus, it becomes less likely on an exponentially reducing chance that larger parcels will be used for such purposes.

Microparcels are the SL land equivalent of "spam" (a subject you seem to know a lot about ). Individually, they can be created and placed in large quantities at a negligible cost each, but even with around a 1% sales rate, they are wildly profitable, to the point that there one can make money AND expand one's microparcel holdings with each sale.

Currently, the square-meterage of many thousands of parcels in SL is NOT a multiple of 512m. (This is true particularly in sims which contain Linden roads or channels.)

It is well-known to every person who's ever sold land that overwhelmingly, people choose to buy land in tier-limit sizes: 512m, 1024m, 1536m, etc.

Your rule would mean that when someone wants or needs to sell a parcel that is not one of these sizes, they would need to abandon the square meters that are 'over tier'---or face the prospect of going weeks or months, waiting for that elusive 'don't care about tier limits' buyer. The abandoned parcels could be as high as 496m in size.

How would the inevitable result of thousands of litter-collecting abandoned parcels improve the Mainland experience? (And sure, Lindens could police them all---if LL is willing to hire a few dozen new full-time workers. Is that likely?)

It would also mean that LL would, in effect, be seizing property. Sure, we all run the risk of not getting back our real-money 'investment' if we sell up---but this would be making property-seizure a POLICY of Linden Lab.





I don't disagree with you about the need for larger highways and airspace. But to get it without seizing people's property--that would mean a hugely-labor-intensive program of buy-backs and reassignments and dealing with disputes and.....in short, I'm not going to hold my breath.

It did. That is the scenario you described: owning a 32sqm, negotiating a deal to cut a 16 from it and then selling it as agreed.

How does cutting to allow for more streams work?

If you cut a 16M2 parcel, the new stream can only be heard by those in the tiny parcel. Why bother? That is not a legitimate excuse for cutting as it accomplishes very little, if anything.

Its no different than if you bought a neighboring parcel. You cannot run multiple streams in one parcel by owning several parcels.

Now, if you want a legitimate use of 16M2 plots:

Malls can use them to allow store owners to LM to their store directly.

Welcome to the reality of modern land ownership!! Imminent domain, anyone? A system of land credits could be created, i suppose. The empty spaces consolidated, and the people given the opportunity to purchase the remainder to have a full a 512 in the new rezoned area.

Sadly, there won't be a perfect answer. The question currently, in my opinion, is are you more interested in fostering a world with the stewardship that should have been given it in the first place, or do you want to continue playing 'prime directive' and letting the results of unscrupulous behavior ruin the landscape of a world that you've invited people to live in?

Given changes are being made, the decision must have been to take charge and realizing that it requires some sort of oversight to make sure the mainland is worthy of investment. This is no different than TVA's creation, or urban renewal projects, etc. Someone's Aunt Emma is going to cling to her 256 until the state troopers drag her off it. Sadly, that happens.

In the end though, what will be created will be of a benefit to everyone, and Aunt Emma can be offered the chance to have a 512 in a much nicer neighborhood.

The way it is done, as I understand it, is that there are either stools, or little booths that the avatar can sit in. So, it is actually a legitimate reason for cutting.

Regardless, Jack has ALREADY stated that cutting small parcels for your own internal land management purposes is not the target of this policy. People need to focus on the actual goals and intent of the policy, and not create strawman issues for things it explicitly will not be covering.



You don't need to cut small parcels for that. Just tick the "Create Landmarks" checkbox on the Options page in the About Land dialog. Voila! Anyone can create landmarks to any spot they want on the entire mall parcel.

So... you're saying that such landmarks would show up in the places search? Businesses rely on people finding them before they have had the chance to get a landmark. LL's classifieds are, well, obviously not really a good argument for not needing to be found in places, and not every place people want to go is a business, anyway.

And several people have repeated it. At least once every few pages, I think.

That won't, apparently, stop people from ignoring it, though.

Some mall owners like a fixed TP point for the mall. If they cut a 16M parcel the store owners can hand out their own TP's, but they won't appear in search and hamper the fixed TP point because 16M parcels don't appear in search.

Some malls charge a premium for being closer to the TP point. Personally I'm not a fan of fixed TP points but each to their own.

No, landmarks are inventory assets. They don't show up in any search.

Methinks you meant "landmark" in a different sense than normal.

Yes, if a mall owner wants to parcel out his mall so that the "owners" can put their shops in Places Search, that would be a legitimate use. However, I don't know of a safe way to make such a mall on the Mainland. Once you cut and sell a parcel to someone else, it is theirs. If you later have reason to evict that tenant, or if he decides to turn his small store parcel into a "home", there's nothing you can do.

I suppose you could just parcel the mall out, then manage all the parcel details for each store yourself, but that's a LOT of hassle. Not to mention that the mall has to be built to accommodate the resolution of parcels (4m).

I suspect that land credits probably ARE the way to accomplish the particular improvement of widening existing roads (and airspaces) and creating new ones, to make all of the Mainland more usable and attractive.

However, a land credit is of no use whatsoever to someone who needs to sell up and leave SL. If LL goes into the business of land seizure with NO compensation (which would be the case for those leaving SL), then they are crossing a line that they may not care to cross.

(I hope.)

In addition, I still can't see that prohibiting the sale of parcels less than 512m makes sense as a means of preventing one particular abuse that accompanies the creation and sale of small parcels (to wit: checkerboarding and donut-holing as a profitable enterprise). It still seems more sensible to me to make it UNprofitable (by tying the maximum possible price to the per-meter high of the previous 30 days), rather than to prohibit the sale of under-512m parcels altogether.

No, i was pointing out the hole in your argument, i.e. that a landmark is somehow sufficient.

I agree with:

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.

Well, frankly if you own a piece of property smaller than 512, it's a negligable loss. Sad, but true. If you own 50, well, odds are you are an abuser, anyway, and I'm frankly tickled pink that such people lose money. I hope they stub their toe while they are tossing a tantrum about it. I hate them, even more frankly.

As far as preventing that abuse, it is far less profitable and more capital exhaustive to checkerboard an area with 512s. So much so I doubt seriously many people would bother. If they do, then LL can fall back on the system they have for advertising, where the abused landowner can challenge the legitimate use of the parcel in question.

You can't forget there's a reverse to this, too. Quite often developers want a huge parcel but can't seem to get rid of the little guy with a 512 that is preventing them from their trump-esque estate. LL does NOT need to establish a system that could be used to unhinge people from parcels of a legitimate size to function on.

I'm not saying my idea is perfect But the other extremes seem fairness to the point of uselessness, or bureaucratic hell for both landowners and LL. Making 512s the smallest salable area would make it expensive to abuse, and then on top of it you risk LL's wrath if you are found to still be abusing. Land values will also be higher because the properties will be USABLE, instead of patchwork messes, making abuse even less attractive compared to just legitimately selling real estate.

Risk versus reward. Make the reward smaller and the risk greater, and the market will dictate the behavior of all but the most moronic and dishonest. Frankly, we don't want them here anyway.

There wasn't a hole in my argument. The OP said:



From that sentence, I interpret it to mean that Adam thought that you had to have separate parcels to be able to use the Create Landmark function. He didn't say anything about Places Search.

I think Ciaran might have understood it better, in that he meant allow people to teleport to stores directly. In that case, why go to all that trouble when you can just turn off the Teleport Routing/Landing Point feature so that people can TP anywhere in the mall, and allow the store owners and patrons to create/distribute their own landmarks to their stores?

Linden Labs is notorious for making a complete hash of understanding intent.

One of the most flagrant "corner cases" I know of where LL has handled it badly has been PRECISELY because they didn't specify size in their definition of an adfarm. There is NO REASON to ban a flat, discreet "for sale" prim on an ordinary sized parcel, but that is now against the rules because they didn't specify "size" in the definition.
I'm not trying to isolate anything, I'm giving them as examples if WHY the policy needs to specify the harmful activity, specifically, because Linden Labs has a poor track record of considering intent.

They won't, because the economics of landcutting require the use of microparcels. Target the behaviour that causes the problem.
And the standard definition of spam used by ISPs and spamfighters doesn't involve intent for this very reason. It just specifies numbers. Because SIZE MATTERS.

EXACTLY. Risk versus reward.

The point here is to make sure that the policy actually serves the goal of that policy. There have been problems with previous Linden policies, you see.

For example, if you set up 64m parcels for vendors in a mall, each in a separate group, then you have multiple parcels with DIFFERENT OWNERS (different groups), so the policy has to allow for the transfer of parcels smaller than 256m. But allowing them to be deeded to group or sold for L$0 to a specific user satisfies this kind of use case without opening up problems.