Recommended Bill for N'burg: Ownership of objects within N'burg

This may not be getting suggested in the appropriate format, but I think that it directly addresses one source of recent/future problems for your project.


Part The First: No "City" objects may be owned by an individual. All "City" objects must be deeded to one of the City groups. "City" objects are any objects that relate to the infrastructure of Neualtenburg: Streets, walls, streetlights, manholes, scripted objects/server objects which perform civic functions, buildings on public property. The city shall be given reasonable time (90 days?) to come into compliance if the law is passed, and vested with authority to negotiate for rights/ownership of objects that are deemed necessary or valuable to the city's existence.

Part The Second: No objects may be left permanently anywhere in the public areas of the sim if they are owned by a non-citizen, unless they have been granted permission by appropriate authorities. Violations of this are to be dealt with by N'burg authorities on a case-by-case basis, and determinations made as to whether it was accidental, "littering", or an attack on the city and/or its residents.

Part The Third: Any questions of object ownership must be resolved if/when a citizen leaves the project. At that time, the citizen must either give ownership of any applicable objects over to the city group, or take them back into inventory. If the emigrant is unavailable or unwilling to negotiate, the city must, within 30 days of departure, return all objects back to the former citizen. The city is vested with the authority to negotiate for fair price/attribution if the objects are deemed necessary or valuable to the city's existence.

Philosophy: Since Neualtenburg is supposedly not about any one person, this bill is designed to ensure that essential civic structures are owned by the city and not any one person; also, that non-citizens and former-citizens cannot claim unfair use of their objects. Once donated or sold to the city, the city has technical and legal control over them. This bill is also designed to ensure that non-citizens and former-citizens are limited in their ability to disrupt civic life by modifying or deleting objects within the sim.


Of course this doesn't address the recent allegations of copyright violations, but I suspect that there would be much less trouble between the city and Ulrika if the city had taken the time to either buy, beg or replace all of her objects back when she "left" the city.

I like it!

Except this part I am not sure what you mean, please explain. What objects are you talking abut here? It seems that Part the First gives ownership of necessary objects to the city, yet Part the Third has the ownership of objects still in question at departure time.

Are we talking about these same city objects which were really only temporarily owned by the city, or are we talking about the citizens personal objects? If we are talking about the former don't the conditions and nature of the ownership need to be further explained and if the latter, then at what point do the other objects become owned by the City?

I am guessing that by the "bolded" bit you are meaning something like, "the City has to negotiate with the citizen when a citizen leaves the project, for ownership of any other objects the city may deem to contribute to the city that it does not yet own," or something like that?

Pretty much. The idea is that occasionally citizens will leave, and occasionally they'll have created things that merge pretty well with the city. Basically when someone leaves N'burg, the city has 30 days to approach them about acquiring their objects into perpetuity, and if the city is unable to do so, it must return those objects to them because of Part 2 of the bill, which excludes outsiders from keeping/leaving objects on public N'burg property.

2 Examples:

1. You leave the N'burg, and your land is transferred back to the city to be sold on to another citizen. Since your old parcel is now public property, you are not permitted to keep things on it (you're not a N'burg citizen anymore). But let's say that you built something great on there, something that the city would like to keep on the parcel because it makes a valuable contribution to the project. Maybe they want to keep it, but move it elsewhere within the project. Maybe acquire full rights from you to copy/modify/transfer it at will, to make it a basic freebie house or something for new residents. That's where the 30-day grace period comes in. They have this amount of time to negotiate with you and reach an appropriate settlement. This also accounts for unusual circumstances, such as, your computer blew or you lost internet connectivity. This allows a reasonable period of time, even if you are experiencing RL hardship, for you to log back in and negotiate in good faith for rights to your objects. But you won't for example, give a chat-log permission for them to keep it there (with you still the owner) and come back in 6 months and suddenly delete it, because you're mad a Gwyn for insulting your mother.

2. Same as above, exept you leave your objects on the private property of a friend who remains behind in N'burg. The law doesn't apply to your objects in this case, because they are on the private parcel of a current citizen. So if you were best friends with Kevn Kline, and left one of your houses on display on his property, that's between you and him, so long as *he* isn't violating any N'burg laws by displaying something which violates the building codes of the sim. If you zapped back in in 6 months and deleted your house, that'd be his problem, not the city's. You wouldn't be able to majorly disrupt city life by doing this, because your actions wouldn't have destroyed public property or civic infrastructure.

Dianne, forgot to add:

One reason that I worded the bill as I did, is that it allows for the possibility that citizens have objects posted *on public land* which would still not be considered part of the civic infrastructure or otherwise a "City object". Maybe you have a vendor set out, or a gift-giving device or polling station. I don't know, I tried to account for as many situations as possible. If it's owned by you though, and you leave the city, the idea is that you have to take it with you, deed/sell it to the city, or it gets returned to you within 30 days. The law limits your ability to disrupt N'burg, or exert control over it from outside. When I say "control", I don't necessarily mean that you dictate what they can do. I also mean what is going on at the moment: You shape the direction that the city takes by clogging up their court system with issues even after you are gone.

Even as worded, the law would allow for you to keep your object on public property if authorized by city authorities (maybe you have their permission to continue selling Leiderhosen from a vendor). It would also not prevent the city for seeking authorization to use your works after the 30 days are up; but the objects would have to be removed by the "zero date" regardless, pending any successful negotiations. This again reduces your ability to hold the city ransom, and forces the city into a mindset of being independant of any single creator.

The problem with this is that anyone in that group can than modify that object which could be a bad thing. We've seen just this week what a sim manager can do with objects.

I like it.

Ironically, one of the reason I left is because the city was refusing to pay for my past work and contributions!

~Ulrika~

For purposes of Neualtenburg, I think that this would be acceptable. If owned by group, say the architect's Guild (I'm making this up, I wasn't memorizing N'burg's group structure), one duty of theirs would be to maintain archival records of objects. If someone changed something in an unacceptable way, the original form could still be put back, or closely restored. The actions of citizens are still subject to review and sanction, and even trial if they are deemed to have seriously violated N'burg rules. Giving them the technical ability to make changes to the sim does not give them the legal ability to do so. It seems sensible to make certain that the only people who have the technical ability to move/modify/delete these objects should be people who would actually have reason/authorization to do so. So, create a group for this purpose, and make certain that its membership was kept current.

The purpose of this bill was not to limit the ability of *current citizens* to cause damages to the city. I think this is a worthy goal also, but should be pursued with a different bill or series of bills. I think that current citizens are prevented from causing damage to the project because:

1. Their involvement in the project. They have (I think?) a desire to see it succeed, and good faith is shown in them until they prove otherwise

2. They stand to forfeit their citizenship, their good SL name, and possibly land with assignable monetary and sweat-equity value.


On the other hand, the non-citizen has very little to lose by disrupting N'burg, since N'burg can at worst ban them from the sim.

The bill as proposed aims to reduce the ability of non- and former-citizens to cause harm, and to reduce N'burg's dependance on these classes of SL'ers for its everyday continued existence.

Although I still don't care for the group ownership idea, your argument is quite sound. Indeed BladeDancer could remove the entire church in one fell swoop tomorrow.

~Ulrika~

One of the reasons I'm going to attempt to get the Guild to begin storing inventory into Guild accessable library prims.

Kendra, I think that the goal of archiving City Property (textures, shapes, objects, scripts) dovetails nicely with your goal of historic preservation. I don't think that preservation should be limited just to "what's out on display". Putting Civic property into group/committee hands I think would actually make it easier to recover from a disaster; for example Neualtenburg Church ver 2.3 could be accessed and pulled out in the event that the current one was deleted. The highest goal for the city should, IMO, be to have as few achilles heels as possible, even under trying circumstances (for example, a heavily-involved member leaves and relations with tehm turn sour).

Nonsense! Who could leave disgruntled from such a Utopia?

~Ulrika~

Thank you for your proposals in this thread (and others). They are entirely sensible and helpful. I haven't had time to examine this proposal in detail but it attempts to do what we need to do - ensure the contination of the project and not be too reliant on a small number of highly motivated individuals. There are a number of good ideas for achieving this being passed around.

I thought that even in Utopia, it was possible for an individual to be completely miserable

Actually, I was kind of surprised that my suggestion even had to be made. Before all of this blew up, I just assumed N'burg was protecting itself from such things by having "public" objects owned by the government rather than by an individual. With the way that things develop in SL, friendships, committees, circumstances and land ownership change over at light-speed compared to the real world. With a big project like N'burg, one of my first concerns for the government would be to protect itself from former members by assuming technical control of as many public works as it can. The question isn't just how to defend against a disgruntled former Utopian, but also how to repair/upgrade/extend public works. What if a former project member quits SL completely? How are you supposed to repair your town hall if the asset server chokes on the next point-release update and vomits a section of your building's roof into the electronic ether?

Then again, up until 9/11, I was just kind of assuming that all the major airlines were instituting commonsense precautions against the worst-case-scenario disasters..... namely cockpit doors that can't be battered down, and pilot training that you-do-not-allow-hijackers-to-gain-control-of-the-airplane-no-matter-what.

Ulrika, you've already compared the virtual government of N'burg to RL governments. Is the Town Hall near you owned by a former mayor?

It is most certainly not. Yet, I should point out that the company who built that structure was very well paid. I don't have a problem with transferring content to the public trust provided this transfer is done by contract and not by imminent domain.

Show me teh money and I'll transfer teh structure.

~Ulrika~

Fair 'nuff. But you do see the comparison to RL. For all intents and purposes, your town hall, public library, state house.... all are "group owned". The town, county or state owns the deeds to these properties. The possibility exists that people with technical control over them will modify demollish or sell them, and yet this hardly ever happens because it would be a fairly simple matter to trace the deed back to the culprit and arrest them.

Yeah it totally makes sense to me, I thought was seeing the reasoning behind your words even as I elucidated my initial confusion on the one point, but I went ahead and posted anyway as it didn't seem certain that this was what you were thinking.

A big part of the problem with the setup we have inherited from Ulrika is that many if not most of our founding document are hazily worded cut and paste jobs that constantly have to be interpreted. Multiple authors were in on the writing of our founding documents, but Ulrika's influence is paramount. The documents are so poorly written however that the government has been all but paralyzed by the constant job of interpreting them.

I find I am always reading what appear to be very plainly worded passages in the Constitution or the Nburg TOS and trying to interpreting them in the clearest way possible, only to have Ulrika pop up from the sidelines to state the "real" interpretation of the passage( even though it's not written in that way), and quote five or six hazily worded clauses in some related document that she believes justifies the interpretation.

The clarity with which you phrase things is much appreciated, at least by myself.

It's also great to see a document where the intention of it seems to be to merely to codify a legal situation. Our founding documents do that but there also seems to be things written "between the lines" for the purpose of promoting personal political agendas or envisioned personal power struggles.

You actually left in a good mood and on reasonably good terms. You then *became* disgruntled and returned.

As I'm not permitted to do anything practical as a moderator on this forum, I'm going to call a foul on this one --and suggest politely you move this to private conversation before it escalates.

I'll ask both sides of the impending argument to refrain from unflattering characterizations. Your stances are both well known, and the wheels are already in motion for you to bring your case properly before the public.

Modesty aside, I think that my suggestion is a step in the right direction, and I suspect that others were already trying to formulate bills which accomplish a similiar end.

Howsabout aiming your critiqe at my suggestion's merits, or lack of them?

Ok, your idea sucks!!


Just kidding

I like the suggestion very much, I'm attempting to clarify some the language -- I do think that if Group owned it cannot be Group owned by any of the Three Branches of Government --as this would throw our checks and balances completely out of whack.

In fact , It makes me think that there is an inherent conflict of Interest in having the Sim Manager be a member of any of the branches of Government.

It seems to me that this might be needed as well if we were to implement your idea.

Bill 4-30: Sim Management Bill

Sim owners and land managers, due to the intrinsic power provided by
the SL system of sim management should be chosen by members of the RA
from a pool of willing citizens. The selected owners and managers
will be members of the Guild and are not allowed to hold any other
elected or selected office in the government, including the SC, RA, or
Guild Master position. This limitation is to prevent a conflict of
interest and abuse of power. These individuals must be in good
standing with the city, recognize the city government, and be trusted
with public structures.

Philosophy

The philosophy behind this law is to seek a balance between the power
conveyed by the SL system of sim governance and the power conveyed by
the N'burg system of government. By reducing overlap, the possibility
of abuse is reduced and all officials have the same approximate
influence.