have sl changes given cause to rexamine sl justice?

The judicial principles of SL were laid down in a time where there were hundreds of players and virtually everyone knew everyone else. This is similar to tribal communities where personal reputation serves as a huge "civilizing" influence upon individual action. In short, people do not wrong their tribemates because that wrong will become common knowledge to the detriment of the wrong-doer.

Second Life has reached a population level which pushes it well beyond the tribal threshhold and more into an urbanization or nation-state. Social justice of a tribal form falls apart where personal recognition becomes the exception rather than the norm. In short, one can do as one pleases without fear of social sanction, even if that sanction is merely a diminished trust by one's peers. The story of Kitty Genovese is an extreme example of what happens when a community becomes effectively disconnected, none of the thiry-eight witnesses had any motivation for there would be no repurcussions to their inaction, nor had they any affirmative reason to care. All the actors in that tragedy had effectively no relation to each other.

Many of the SL principles of justice presume a tribal model which no longer applies due to lack of reputation ratings, a population of strangers, and the ability to use alts to effectively escape any past malfeasance. Furthermore, Linden Lab had a great fear of retributive justice where the accused would exact reprisals upon the accusuer. This is a model that can work when all adjuication is yielded to the government, but as has been amply demonstrated, Linden Lab does not want to be a judiciary.

If a personage in Second Life scams, stalks, harrasses, or injures another in some manner, would not the community benefit from this knowledge? Yes, there is the court of public opinion, there are cliques, and agglomerations of power that could in principle make open justice an invitation to gangland abuses. Contrariwise, the US Bill of Rights to a speedy and open trial, to face one's accusers, to appeals and due process were created by people who thought long and hard about transparent justice and were willing to attempt it in order to make a society that was better for all. In a very broad sense, the American Grand Experiment was successful in large part because of these "rights". I daresay that the authors of the US constitution were far wiser than Linden Lab collectively and had a real interest in making a working real society.

Is it time to rethink Linden Lab's tribal justice? I think it is beyond high time to do so.

I agree and nominate myself Chief Justice of the New SL Supreme Court. I ask the Lindens to ratify my nomination and proceed with the appointment of the rest of the court.

Thank you for your thoughtful and incisive contribution.

Move to SL Politics?

Anyway. Yeah. Well. I'm broadly sympathetic to the idea that LL's enforcement does not match the limits that it puts on retributive or discouraging action; a group I am in is in such a position right now, for instance, and I have a new weapons system that could utterly prevent the culprits from doing any such thing, only I can't actually use it, legally speaking. This offers me the choice of disobeying the law or having myself and other group members clean up after griefers endlessly until some action is taken, maybe the suspension of an alt for a few days.

Of course, I have no intention of acting in any way against ToS etc etc.

I'm not sure, however, quite what you're proposing as an alternative. The OP suggests to me some sort of local community system of justice and enforcement. That's obviously got problems. What I would like to see is a greater sense of community within areas, where people form mutual agreements to help each other, banning each other's griefers from their land - and also not terraforming things to get maximum space in a way that ruins the look of the area, not selling land to UglyAdBuildCorp#6345 and so on. But that's not up to LL really. All of the above could be achieved within the current ToS.

A few more scripting tools (e.g. llEjectObjectFromYourLand - why isn't this there?) would be useful but it's my opinion that it's the way land is sold and distributed that really encourages the disconnected "I live in my skybox, you live in yours" situation. As I was saying to someone last night, "it's enough to make you want to live in Neualtenberg".

Do the entities that lie in the background of the internet providing the technical substratum that makes it possible have anything at all to do with defining and enforcing "internet justice"?

SL is a stepping stone towards a protocol, isn't it?

Yes, the Internet Engineering Task Force (http://www.ietf.org) is the body reponsible for disseminating standards for internet operation. If you want to connect a service to the internet you have to conform to their requirements or you are considered not a part of the Internet and can be disconnected. In the earlier days, conformance didn't come "out of the shipping crate" so there were real instances of non-coformant routers or mail-servers or DNS servers being formally disconnected. For the most part today, this isn't an issue.

However there was a case back in 2004 where the major DNS provider called Verisign wanted to "hijack" the DNS protocol and return the address of their search engine when the standard said they should return "no such name". This resulted in a long an pitched legal battle between the DNS international authority and Verisign which has only recently been settled (Verisign agreed to conform).

So the long standing "internet justice" has been play by the rules or you don't get to play in our sandbox. If this is apropos to my point, the strength of the Internet is that from the start the standards have been open, conformance is easy for almost anyone to verify, and violations are noted in the public sphere; in other words, transparency.

That doesn't really have much to do with abuse reports in Second Life, does it?

Sounds like you are stretching a lot more than Mr. Fantastic or Plasticman could ever have hoped to.

Does Second Life run on the internet?

No not really, but it did answer the question you posed.

Cliched but true...

There is no justice

There is just us.

Agreed, but there are better and worse forms of attempted justice. I don't think that anyone can credibly argue that the justice of King George III was better than that which Jefferson and pals supplanted it with. The US Bill of Rights reads as an inverse indictment of Crown rule and its unifying theme is transparency.

Two words - peer review.

There does need to be some sort of tribunal system to hear grievances between two parties that has no interest in the situation as a whole (besides behavior which is not detrimental to the community) with the blessing of Linden Labs so it has some sort of enforcement.

Certainly this gets into questions like "jury duty" or if it's a standing court but Democracy Island has an amazing courtroom to use. There's never anyone there it seems.

Three words:

G. F. Y.

Thats what anyone wanting me to go to a SL kangaroo court is gonna hear.

In a nutshell - I don't pay to have another player work out what I can and can't do.

Three more words:

Snowing in hell.

That's what it's doing, cause I agree with Siggy. I don't pay to have another player work out what I can and can't do.

coco

I expect these posts about player courts or juries don't refer to my original point which was that "hidden justice is indistinguishable from no justice". I am simply advocating that the "privacy rights" of virtual people begin to impinge on the operation of an orderly society when the community significantly increases in size and the degree of interpersonal recognition approaches zero.

To wax slightly bombastic, some people in the US are getting a little peeved with recent secret government action when contrasted with a couple centuries of the openness. My three words?which, admittedly, aren't quite as pointed as Siggy's.

See - even the most unlikely people can connect at some level. It aint that strange a thing to happen.

What if I was offline? What if I can't make a certain time?

What if, if its done by whos online, I'm in the middle of a slingo game?

Jury duty wouldn't work.

No, I am explicitly not advocating peer review, or juries or anything of the sort (athough some in the thread have). I am simply asking if the "totally behind closed doors" administration of justice by Linden Lab is still suitable for the size of the world now (if it ever actually was suitable).

Well said. I took the time to read the link on Kitty Genovese you provided, sad indeed. I see your points clearly.

Cat

You seem to have the idea that this would be some sort of activist court. The idea of a legislature is something entirely different. This would be a mechanism for settling disagreements that were brough by two people of their own volition and would be a neutral arbiter of said disagreement.

So if you want to keep shooting at your noisy neighbor with a flamethrower, go right ahead - so long as your neighbor didn't want to take you to court for said flamethrower incident.