Avatar's Bill of Rights

It was proposed, sensibly I think, elsewhere that an Avatar's Bill of Rights would be a useful document to have.

Here are a few of my favorite:

1. The right of private liberty - With absolutely no exception, all avatars have the right to act wholely limited to their private sphere of like-minded adult avatars as they so define.

2. The right of privacy - all avatars have the right to communicate or completely exist in absolute privacy as long as they are reasonably known to be only excercising the rights as described in this document.

3. The right of mobility - all avatars have the right to enter, remain in, and leave any area designated as public.

4. The right to effect legal change - all avatars have the right to peacefully propose and advocate legal change

Last right - Right of Expression - no law shall be passed that infringes on the right to express that which celebrates, exercises or defends the rights as described in this document.

Here's a cool website to check out on these ideas:

http://www.eff.org/legal/Constitutions/

Wow, great job, Blaze... I must really apologize for not having more time to spend with it as well

Yes, we definitely need a Bill of Rights. The more controversial ones will be centered on Freedom of Speech/Expression. I would also remind you of the Right to Own Private Property. And a short notice that Neualtenburg fully supports the UN Declaration of Human Rights (as long as they apply to SL avatars). It's a simple document to read and the most things stated there will apply to us, except perhaps for "family"

I particularly like the last article:

Article 30. Nothing in this Declaration may be interpreted as implying
for any State, group or person any right to engage in any activity or
to perform any act aimed at the destruction of any of the rights and
freedoms set forth herein.

This is an excellent argument to combat griefers

The Right to Own Private Property is more applicable to the objects in your inventory than to actual land.

I worked on something like this a few years ago when Activeworlds was going through it's "Black Friday" days...

http://memeticdrift.net:8080/refs/58

original text for those who don't wanna click the link:

Introduction
All citizens of Virtual Reality Universes should be granted certain inalienable Rights. This is a suggested list... please add any more you think should be here. (editorial note: The word 'AW' and 'AWC' has been removed and the word 'company' has been put in its place with the intent to make this document apply to all VR vendors) Originally written by: Artillo


1. Right to have builds protected from deletion on public building worlds (within content guidelines), even if citizenship lapses;

2. Right to protest peacefully against company policies or practices in any public world, and in any manner they see fit;

3. Right to post links to chat whenever necessary (within content guidelines);

4. Right to disclosure of company business changes that affect Citizens and tourists with adequate warning and consultation;

5. Right to have concerns heard and to have the company respond back in a timely and informative manner;

6. Right to conduct or provide business or personal services through the companies browser software (within content guidelines);

7. Right of world owners to decide for themselves if they wish to allow tourists;

8. Right of world owners to choose their hosting and object path and not be discriminated against by choosing non-company affiliated sites;

9. Right to associate in VR space with whomever you wish and not be forcibly ejected (within content guidelines) for speaking your mind;

10. Right to have protection from individuals seeking to cause harm to people or builds by IP lockout (company server side), Telegram Blocking, Ignore, or similar devices;

Excellent, Artillo I like your proposal a lot

The only "disadvantage" is really that some things we can't enforce in Neualtenburg... since we have no control on Linden Labs (ie. their will is able to override Neualtenburg's own collective will) Would this mean that we shouldn't put the rights in the Bill of Rights? (note that we can advocate the right to have Linden Lab NOT interfering with us, even if cannot enforce it)

Satchmo, I'm intrigued, why does the right to own private property not apply to Neualtenburg? You mean because all land belongs to the group? But if I own the right to use one of the many homes, and put my own stuff inside, don't I have the right to declare these items I put there my "private property" (ie. effectively not allowing anyone to remove them by some reason)?

Yea keep in mind that the proposal I had done a long time ago and related sort of specifically to the way Activeworlds was being run at the time (and AFAIK is still being run!)... in face quite a few of us had thought that a non-profit, citizen owned, citizen developed 3D Platform company would be the best strategy. I did some preliminary org charts as to how something like that might work.

see here: http://memeticdrift.net:8080/refs/60

Hope this info helps a bit! It is inherently a problem of dealing with a Company (aka profit-motivated), so it would be cool if there was some kind of overall "community guiding principle" that steers LL in one direction or another. I will say that I think LL more than any other 3D VR World community that I have been involved in has really taken the feedback from the users and run with it, resulting in an overall better program, but as always there is room for improvement.

Arti

Bravo, blaze! This thread is long overdue. Thank you so much.

My plan regarding land in the city is to keep ownership in the hands of collective. The city would then grant rights to a piece of property (not the land but the dwelling space). Users would be allowed to transfer rights to a dwelling from one user to another either for free or for a fee. All transfers would be taxed progressively to discourage lease barons.

The lease would be respected and enforced by the city, although the city would reserve rights to move dwellers for building upgrades at the city's expense.

Once the city is complete, there should be parcels which are very desirable to live in and others which are not. It will be interesting to see how individuals will buy, sell, and trade leases.

~Ulrika~

Private property is just real estate?

I'm sorry. I wasn't implying that private property was only real estate. I was simply throwing out an idea that I had concerning leasing land, so that we'd have it recorded.

~Ulrika~

Got it, Ulrika I like the idea of land "lease", well, at least for Neualtenburg's beginning.

BTW, Artillo, I looked again at the site you posted. Seemed that you guys have had lots of fun defining the workable structure for your project. I also read the comments/forum part of it, and it certainly mirror several of our own discussions. I wonder if these people are still active or if they know about SL. Several of those comments were very interesting.

As you said very well, the concept is different since in your case you needed to have an "interface" to an organization providing the hosting services, and measures for the "government" to interact with the "hosting company". In our case, the hosting company is Linden Lab, of course, and the "interactions" are two-fold: paying for tier and abiding by ToS/Community Standards, which we can't change (ie. no action of the Neualtenburg Government will directly interfere with those two principles). Still, if we forget about that part, the rest of the flowcharts - how bills are proposed and voted upon - should be "usable" for our purposes with some tweaking.

I noticed that the proposed system was a directly-elected democracy with a system much more copied from the US constitution & governmental system, ie. people were really trying to think how the US Founding Fathers thought about setting up those things. Neualtenburg is way to different, for many reasons Nevertheless, by looking at how things were set up on earlier "virtual governments", we certainly can learn with their experience...

I am eager to see how this will be expanded if we ever do get AI, "NPC" avatars in SL. Will they argue for being sentient virtual lifeforms? It may be some ways down the road, but definitely something to consider.

Sentient virtual lifeforms in 16KB of LSL??? If someone pulls that off then, yes, they deserve rights (and a Nobel for the creator).

Well, you can always use the 16 KB scripts just as an interface to an external machine Ok, XML/RPC isn't 100% functional for that, but it is possible. Only painfully slow.

Anyhow, I would certainly only grant citizenship in Neualtenburg to AIs that pass the Turing Test

I'm trying this out for my work. I have some perl scripts that is caled Ooda Agent. It knows the environment and can move around and succeed in certain tasks. I'm trying to use SL as the visualization framework for it.

I never cease to be amazed, Satchmo...

Just for the sake of my curiousity, how exactly do you use SL as a "visualization framework"?

If I had to pick my top right, it would be:

1. The right of private liberty - With absolutely no exception, all avatars have the right to
act wholely limited to their private sphere of like-minded adult avatars as they so define.


Basically, this means a set of avatars can build whatever they want, say whatever they want and act in any manner they want to as long as they are knowingly in the company of like minded (mentally fit) adult avatars and their actions do not have any impact outside their private sphere.

I can think of several instances where I would be hesitant to allow private spheres of adult avatars to do as they wish.

One example are groups where there exists two classes of individuals, a ruling class and an exploited class. These can be found in corporations, brothels, and strip clubs to name a few. I'm especially sensitive to divisions in power which center around sexuality, where males are typically in positions of power and their subordinates are female. Further, I suspect that many of the female avatars which fill the ranks of the sex trade in SL are in fact males in RL, who are acting on conscious or unconscious misogynistic impulses and reinforcing negative stereotypes of females.

Because of this I'm uncomfortable with granting any group complete freedom, as it will invariably include the freedom to exploit.

~Ulrika~

Wow! I'm working on a forum summary right now and just read through your bill of rights. I was fascinated by the fact that they refer not just to the rights of citizens with respect to the city but to the rights of all SL members with respect to the company of LL!

I think this is something we should include in our bill of rights. Further, as SL's only true government, we should actively engage LL in a dialogue to formalize these rights for the benefits of all avatars, even if it means modifying the ToS.

~Ulrika~

It's an excellent debate.

There are many cases where 'deviant' sexuality can have an impact outside of a private sphere. For example, posession of explicit pictures of the under age has a huge impact on encouraging that trade outside of the sphere.

However, the exploitation that occurs in strip-clubs or in brothels doesn't necessarily occur because of brothels, but because the distribution of wealth is unfair.

Some people are inherently sexual, natural exhibitionists and enjoy getting paid for something they like to do and are good at rather than having to do something they find tedious or difficult. Someone who gives massages is not anymore or less dominated than someone who gives blowjobs for money.

As for corporations, that is not a private sphere. Decisions in a board room have an impact on what happens outside the board room, so that's a bit of a red herring.

What it sounds like is that you think the government has the right to legislate what happens in the bedroom between two consenting adults? I'm impressed by your honestl and it is an interesting perspective, but do you really think it'll fly? Don't you think that the tide of public opinion will be greatly against you on this one?

Yes actually the original group I was with, a few years ago, our original intentions were to come up with a "bill of rights" that was general enough to apply to ANY virtual Citizen (regardless of platform), but that is a REALLLY difficult task!

It was vitally important to define the "rights" between any company and it's "users"... ones that must and should extend beyond simply protecting the company's assets/liability, TOS, etc. I think that content protection is the most important of all when dealing with the rights of virtual citizens. For me, just because something I made resides on someone else's server does not give them any specific rights/ownership to it ( the opposite was pretty much true in Activeworlds), and SL has come a long way w/ tools etc. to ensure that created content is protected, but I think they need to go a bit further. I would really like to see some form of localized (offline or local PC) asset storage in case any data was ever corrupted on their servers for whatever reason.

I realize that this opens a whole can of worms with regards to security and hacking and possible theft of Intellectual Property, but I think that eventually it will be something that they will have to deal with directly. Imagien a citizen coder who spent months on a piece of scripting, only to find that the compiled objects/system etc was corrupted or destroyed by a freak server outage or something... I think that someday there will have to be a way for content creators to save their work locally as insurance for all their hard work, especially as the metaverse grows and becomes more mainstream with businesses flooding in and attaching real profit to the technology!

Onward!

Arti