Prim Rights Selling Scenario

As I understand, we will be able to sell our unused prims. A potential problem for discussion.

I have 4096m in Minna and dont build a thing. I sell my prims to my neighbor on a 512m plot. Neighbor can build an awesome place with a lot of prims over his land use rights because he bought them legitimately from me.

A month later, I release my land in Minna. Someone else claims the 4096m. Now the real questions.
1. Will the new owner have the same right to the base amount of prims on the same 4096m of land?
2. Will the owner of the 512m plot be persecuted for using more prims that are routinely allowed on that size plot? Remember, he bought them fairly from me.
If both are permitted to have all the prims, and this scenerio is repeated a couple of times, sims will fill up with object use just as they do now.

Just a potential problem, hopefully there is a quick answer for it.

I personally dont think that selling prims will be a popular thing to do. I will have access to prims that 4096m allows and I probably wont come close to using them. I doubt I will sell them because there may be a time when I will want to use them. If I dont use them and just have unbuilt land, am I going to be persecuted for not being productive?

I am just trying to stem a potential problem, not trying to be a wet blanket. Please discuss thoughtfully, or just let a Linden respond.

It is my understanding that while prim trading is a wanted feature it won't be ready for 1.2 . (I have a feeling 1.2 is essentially feature locked at this point - bugs and critical changes only kinda stuff).

I would say that at that one option is for land trading to be on a monthly rental type basis. I may 'sell' you 100 prims for 1 month, but next month I have to do it again, etc.

Another option is that land plots could have a prim # associated with them. When I trade you 100 prims, then the # for my plot goes down. Anyone who views the properties of a plot sees the max number of prims available to that plot. The problem becomes: a good interface for users selling prims who have multiple plots on a sim and what about splitting plots up or 'releasing' land and buying in different sized chunks. I think those could be handled well with some thought.

When the other player buys your extra prims, s/he/it pays a L$Dep deposit (to be held by the system), where Dep is:

C = Cost of all land you own in sim (L$)
P = Prims normally allocated to all land you own in sim
S = Prims you are selling

Dep = C / (P / S)

Say (for the sake of argument) you have L$1000 in land, and that gets you 500 prims. You are selling half of that, so the deposit looks like this:

Dep = L$1000 / (500 / 250)
      = L$1000 / 2
      = L$500

Then they pay you whatever you are asking on top of that.

If they sell back some or all of the prims, that proportion of their deposit is returned to them.

If you release your land, the deposit goes to whoever (eventually) buys it, as a way of compensating them for the reduced prim capacity of their plot.

In order to prevent one person from slowly (probably very slowly) accumulating a huge mass of prims, you could cap the number of total prims owned per simulator at 1.x times the allotment for their owned land in that simulator. If they wanted to release or sell land, they'd have to bring their prim usage below the threshold first.

P.S. If someone with bought prims wanted to transfer some prims to a third party, the proportional share of the deposit would be paid by the transferee and credited to the transferor.

P.P.S. Someone else figure out how groups would work.

The way I'd handle selling prim allowances is that you can't sell more than half the land's base prim allowance. That way, if you later decide to sell the land, it will simply be reduced in value, rather than practically worthless.

I'm not sure there's a way around this problem at all, except to keep the prims tied to the land. If you want to give someone some of your prims, you have to give them the corresponding amount of land. What do you need the land for if you're not going to build on it anyway?

I agree there is a problem here with prim exchange, which is probably why it's not implemented with 1.2.

I think the only way to handle it is to make sure that handing prims to someone else is NOT a financial transaction, so it should probably be limited to exchange among group members, and carry the warnings that it is non-transferrable and will be revoked instantly if the land-owner sells their land.

And anyone who has their prim gift sold out from under them should get a message warning them of this and a grace period in which to pull down what they have in an orderly fashion.

Someone may want to create a low-prim plot -- a park, for instance -- to hold events and collect the dwell that goes with it, but also make some L$ by letting someone make use of the prim allocation that would otherwise go unused.

Well, this is my first post relating my real-life development experience to SL, so here goes...

It is possible that you could treat Prims sort of like you would an easement in the real world. When you sell (or give) an easement, you are giving someone the right to use that portion of your land for a specific purpose. You still own the land, but you are giving someone limited property rights. Something like mineral rights can be thought of as a special case of this - and is more akin to how Prims might be addressed.

What follows is an explanation that closely approximates "real world" rules for such stuff. It would require some small changes to the engine, but nothing too drastic:

By selling Prim rights, you are making a legal agreement that is bound to the property in question. If someone wants to buy that property from you, they are also buying whatever Prim situation you have set up.

**IMPORTANT CONCEPT ALERT**
Because Prim rights within a sim are proportional to land area, you can say that certain Prims "belong" to a specific land unit. In fact, you *must* say that in order for Prim rights to work at all in a sane, transferrable manner, no matter what system you use.
**IMPORTANT CONCEPT ALERT**

For example, I sell the rights to 500 Prims to Bob, specifying which land units those Prims belong to. A year later, Alice comes along and wants to buy part of my land. For those land units whose Prim rights have been sold, Alice is subsequently responsible to Bob for those same Prim rights. Now, if Bob wishes to vacate those Prim rights, a deal can be struck whereby they return to the property owner - but that is between Bob and whomever happens to own the affected land at the time.

This is a good way to do things because it respects Prims as a scarce resource, and also takes advantage of property rights as interpreted by common-law, a system which has already been proven to be fair and equitable in the real world.

As a side note, I'm really concerned about some proposed approaches to development issues in SL. I know that part of the point of SL is to *not* be like the "real world", but it's important to respect the fact that many ideas regarding development practices have already been worked out over hundreds of years...no reason to try to re-invent the wheel for *some* of this stuff.

One example of this is the terraforming slope limitation. By hardcoding a specific rule into the simulation, it was hoped that issues such as spikes, etc. would be avoided. However, simple laws like that never work in the real world so why should they be expected to work in a virtual one? Real-world planning and development tends to leverage democratic methods in combinaton with law, so why not try them out in SL? For example, each sim could appoint a "planning and zoning commission", whose role would be to approve developments. Most developments would probably be rubber-stamped obviously, but the commission could also easily catch some of the ridiculous stuff such as walling a neighbor in - or not, depending on what the democratic process turns out. Penalties could possibly take the form of fines, to be assessed by the system and redistributed to the other sim landowners proportionally.

-Morse Dillon

This is an interesting concept, and something like it may actually work, but frankly sorting out ECR's (easements, covenants and restrictions) in RL is a major pain and horribly complicated legal process. Oftentimes you'll find mineral rights and such negotiated away back in the days of Ulysses S. Grant! It IS a fair way of doing things where real property and money is on the line, but it often takes weeks or months to negotiate on large projects. I'd really rather not see anything like that instituted here.

Imagine if every time you went to buy a piece of property you had to contend with a multipage list of prims given away (some to people who no longer play) and zoning rules that apply to the property. Ick.

I'd rather just have a no-transfer rule. Prims can be shared but not detached from the property.

Ananda,

You make a solid point that real-world negotiations get pretty tied up with the paperwork, documentation, etc.

However, that's one of the advantages of having a virtual world! Nobody has to go to the courthouse...

It would require some work on the part of Linden Labs, but a summary of all prim right assignments for a given parcel could be given at the time of sale. This would make things a lot simpler than the real world - you could have a complete accounting right there in front of you, including summaries of total Prim rights retained/assigned to another. Also, since we're just talking about a single resource here and not the whole ECR kit-and-kaboodle, that makes things a lot easier.

I'm not saying it won't introduce a little complexity, but I believe Prim rights are and will continue to be an important issue, and the problem of how to transfer them would have to be addressed eventually.

You could also look at the courthouse issue from the other end -- we don't have one for a number of reasons:

-- Lack of enforcement power beyond that of the Lindens, who set up the TOS that we all live under. By and large, everyone agrees to not break the TOS. That gives us a sphere of influence.

-- Lack of complex issues requiring arbitration. This prim rights scenario, while it might be interesting to see, would add complexity, and then we'd need to set up a system of jurisprudence to handle this.

</devil's decaf advocate>

Maybe I'm missing something (I often do), but if prim rights become sellable, what will prevent the current problems from resurfacing? Currently people with a lot of L$ can afford prims and many people have trouble finding land where there are prims left (so I've read, at least). If prims are transferrable from the land for money, won't they again be accumulated by those with the most money, leaving behind plots with little or no prims to use?

The Lindens will be making something of a promise when they sell someone a monthly subscription for a certain amount of land and a certain number of primitives. How will they guarantee this promise if prim rights have been shifted off of large amounts of land?

I apologize if I'm being obtuse.

Your question is valid...except you are missing something in the whole prim-selling transaction. Namely, the fact that whomever sold the prims got money in return! If you step back and think about it on a larger scale it works.

Here is an example to get you in the right mindset:

1. I own 1000 sq. m. in a single sim.

2. I sell HALF my prim rights - say, L$1000 for 1000 prims just for the sake of discussion. The fair market value of these prims then, is established at L$1/prim. Additionally, this has a small "feedback effect" into the value of a L$.

3. Later, I go to sell my land, and let's say that land (not counting Prim Rights) is worth L$2/sq. m. So the land alone would be worth L$2 * 1000 = L$2000. To make it interesting, let's say that some developer in the same sim is doing a really detailed building and has hence caused Prims to go up in value to $1.50/ea, making my retained Prims worth L$1500. So - fair market value for the land is now L$3500.

My total take was $4500 on land that was initially worth L$4000. Now, I have $500 more than when I started, and I'm closer to being that guy with the deep pockets to whom I sold those first 1000 Prims.

The point is, if everything is fair and there aren't silly artificial controls, the economy will find its own level and hum along quite nicely.

As for a sim being "harvested" and all of its Prims being concentrated in one area by someone with deep pockets, what is wrong with that??? It is entirely natural that you would have fallow land surrounding areas of heavy development - possibly even *preferable* depending on how you look at it.

-Morse Dillon

After re-reading your question, I see the need to provide additional response...

First, now that I have that money, I can always go to *another* sim and find somewhere with more Prims. If there isn't enough land with Prims, that simply means that the sim is overpopulated.

Prim depletion such as what you described is an important issue, and I believe that the fairest solution would be for Linden to simply ensure that enough new Sims come online to give every new user his "40 acres and a mule" that they promise. This is pretty straightforward I believe, and is a fairer and more realistic solution than putting an iron shackle on Prim rights.

As I said before, transfer of Prim Rights needs to be addressed anyway. Without a formal system in place, people will still trade them away in various ways and that's when subsequent property owners will *really* start getting screwed.

Hmm, but new plots won't have to worry about what goes on with two other plots in the sim. If the owner of Plot A buys all the Prims from Plot B, and someone comes along and buys Plot C, then C isn't affected by the other two. Of course, B has just become worthless in this transaction, but it is known up front that it is worthless. You don't just buy B and all of a sudden the next day you can't build because someone on A rezed a 500 prim coffee mug.

As for enforcability it should just be a matter of upping plot A's allotment and lowering plot B's within the 1.2 land/prim allocator system, and making a note of it. There's no playing nice involved except for negotiations, as the mechanics would be taken care of by the system.

Now the one hassle I can think of; what happens when you release the land to the public?

Without a lot of deep think on the matter, prim right trading could revert the system right back to what it currently is.

Why would anyone want to buy land where half the prim rights for it have been deeded away to someone else? I wouldn't, and I suspect neither would most people.

As far as neighborhood planning and zoning commision, the phrase "buzz kill" comes to mind. The commission would be a clique and anyone who wasn't a part of it would be at a big disadvantage. There's no need for this kind of thing now as long as prims stay with the land they belong to.

Here's the only way I can see this working... if someone wants to share their prims with someone else, they must give that person the right to build on their land that they pay for, and rent that land for L$ to offset their additional land costs. It's simple, and it effects no one else when that land is sold.

If prims become a tradeable commodity, their price will skyrocket. Speculators will make land owners an "offer they can't refuse" and the entire purpose of making prims free of rez cost and tax will be defeated. I think prim trading is a bad idea in general and will cause a whole lot of problems.

If you want to share your prims, let someone build on your land and pay you rent, or do it as part of a group. Anything else will bring us right back to the exact same problems 1.2 is trying to solve.

If we agree ahead of time that prim trading would make plots of land worthless, then why allow it? Nobody in their right mind will ever buy Plot B, so you'll just end up with large areas of empty land to compensate for more prims elsewhere.

It's not a bad thing for there to be stretches of undeveloped land, IMO, but if it's what's going to happen, why not just make the owner of Plot A buy plot B as well? There's nothing wrong with people owning empty plots of land just for the prim rights. (Unless people are trying to dodge version 1.2 land fees.)

I think that prim usage, land usage, and RL fees all have to be tied. If prims can be sucked out of parcels of land, you're going to just get sims with 50% land ownership and 100% prim use, and not only have we not improved anything, but we're starving LL of cash money they need to continue operations (if only 50% of the land on any sim is owned, it's that much money per sim they don't get.)

>Why would anyone want to buy land where half the prim
>rights for it have been deeded away to someone else? I
>wouldn't, and I suspect neither would most people.

Hm...maybe because they need space, but not Prims? This is not unreasonable. But it doesn't really strike to the heart of things.

The real issue here is that in SL, Land is not really the scarce resource, Prims are. Only because there is a tenuous link between Prims and Land have people been treating it as the reverse. I will tell you, it is a serious mistake to try to think this way because then you are basing your economy on a house of cards instead of reality.


>If prims become a tradeable commodity, their price will
>skyrocket. Speculators will make land owners an "offer they
>can't refuse" and the entire purpose of making prims free
>of rez cost and tax will be defeated. I think prim trading is a
>bad idea in general and will cause a whole lot of problems.


Think of it in these terms - Prims are what you're "really getting" when you start out in SL. If you barter them away like a fool because you believe instead that land is the scarce resource, that is your problem. There may be a tiny bit of speculation at first, but it's a no-brainer that the market would quickly establish itself and then would function normally. What you describe is simply not an issue.



>As far as neighborhood planning and zoning commision, the
>phrase "buzz kill" comes to mind. The commission would be
>a clique and anyone who wasn't a part of it would be at a
>big disadvantage. There's no need for this kind of thing now
>as long as prims stay with the land they belong to.

Apparently you don't trust the democratic process. If the *community* establishes who belongs to such a commission, there shouldn't be a problem. If you don't like the way things shape up, either get yourself elected and work for change, or you can always move.

-Morse Dillon

16 people do not a democracy make. I don't trust human nature.

The whole reason prims are being directly tied to land ownership is because they're the most precious resource, and a small percentage of wealthy SL'ers were controlling a disproportinately large percentage of them. Your system would just recreate the exact same problem. But hey, if you own some land in freelon I'd be happy to buy all your prims from you. Oh... you changed your mind and want to build something now? No problem. You can have them back for $1000 each. heh. Baaaaadddd Idea.

>If prims can be sucked out of parcels of land, you're going
>to just get sims with 50% land ownership and 100% prim
>use, and not only have we not improved anything, but we're
>starving LL of cash money they need to continue operations
>if only 50% of the land on any sim is owned, it's that much
>money per sim they don't get.)

You are assuming that because nobody is *using* the land that nobody actually owns it.

I think part of the problem here is that LL assesses based on Land instead of Prims. In a world where Prims "cost" several orders of magnitude more than Land, in terms of processing power and real-world cost to LL, it is maybe a mistake to base your economy on the latter.

Can anyone from LL comment on this? Any chance of moving things to be more Prim-centric? In my opinion the economy is likely to be "broken" as long as things remain otherwise...

-Morse Dillon

That's exactly why they're making these changes Morse. If you want the prims you pay LL for them by owning the land they belong to. Breaking that link defeats the entire purpose.

And what I'm saying is, by doing that instead of basing the economy on Prims properly, you're hobbling the future development of the economy. Linking Prims to Land is the "easy way out" and creates a VERY artificial aspect to the economy. If that is acceptable to people, fine - but for those wishing that they could get things right the first time, it's an awfully big disappointment.

I also wanted to address this, because frankly talk like that makes me see red. Are you arguing against people becoming wealthy and amassing more possessions than their neighbor, assuming that they came by it because they were smarter and/or harder working?

If you're going to have a virtual world my friend, you're going to have people that will try to get ahead. Otherwise, the game loses its draw to 90% of the population. Just because they use their resources better than you is no reason to cry and whine that things are 'unfair'.

-Morse Dillon

Why do you think doing it your way wouldn't just recreate the exact same problems that 1.2 is a response to? Right now new users can't build because all the sims are at their prim limits even though there's available land. Now if you buy land you will be guaranteed the use of the prim allotment that goes with that land. Your system would be great for me because I could afford to buy the prims from anyone in the sim willing to sell them, and I wouldn't be giving them back to the next person who came along and bought the land the prims had been sold away from. Welcome back to the exact same situation we have now.

That is why I said to base things on Prims "properly"... If a user was guaranteed X number of Prims for their membership instead of X number of land units, you could transfer Prims and still have it fair.