Revise ownership provisions for 16sq.m. parcels

There are and have been many discussions on Resident Answers and in the jira about changing ownership provisions for 16sq.m. parcels, to deal with rampant and spreading adfarm blight and extortion on the Mainland. The various proposals for dealing with these parcels differ in how effective they might be at addressing the intended problem, and in how much they'd affect other, benign uses of parcels of this size. I'd like to explore here what considerations are important in formulating any policy guidelines or processes that might change how 16sq.m. parcels are handled.

This is NOT about whether any change is appropriate; indeed, other means of solving the adfarm problem may be preferable. But at the moment we don't have a comprehensive list of what might be good or bad about any particular proposed change because we haven't collected in one place all the non-adfarming uses for 16sq.m. parcels. So, in hopes of finding the babies at risk in this bathwater, an attempt at constructing such a list:

Scenario A: 16s necessarily in the same sim as larger landholdings.

A1. Extra prims. (For example, a bonus 512 deeded to a group could use the tier bonus to hold an additional 48sq.m. in that sim to maximize prim allotment.)

Scenario B: 16s necessarily widely dispersed, ideally one per sim.

B1. Avatar keyscanning for Name2Key.

B2. Sim H/W neighbors (Max Case database).

B3. Other data networking, the purpose of which is not known.

B4. Parcel philately. (Collect one in each sim to win! )

B5. Safe landing spot for bots.

The following are hypothetical in this category. Have not seen them mentioned as an actual application, so can anyone confirm, or shall they be omitted?

B6. (Hypothetical) Sim statistics collection. (Perhaps uptime, performance stats, administrative events, perhaps for use by Linden Labs competitors?)

B7. (Hypothetical) Sim parcel mapping. (Boundaries, owners, descriptions... perhaps for use by landbots to expedite evaluation?)

Scenario C: One or a few 16s on separate sims

C1. Script server redundancy.

These may unintentionally misrepresent the use cases. For example, I don't think I understand B5: unless blacklisted or security orb'd, isn't everywhere >50m above ground level safe? I guess it could be a pain in some sims to learn where to go to avoid the orbs, but is it more of a pain than holding the 16sq.m. microplot in tier--and still sometimes have to manually deal with b0rked orbs or encroaching prims? So maybe B5 is just stated incorrectly, or doesn't hold. (For all I know, the bots may only be there to service the scripts on the parcel itself.)

Also, right now, only Scenarios A, B4 and B5 seem to depend on actual parcel ownership; otherwise it seems to just be the ability to run scripts in a sim somewhere. If, hypothetically, script execution were possible without land ownership, are there other uses missing from this list? (Do any scripts of interest for such applications actually require parcel permissions for some reason?)

What have I missed, misunderstood, or misrepresented?

I don't think the parcels should be limited at all. When it comes to ad-farming, all the farmers will do is use bigger parcels and charge even more money for them, or put even more adverts on them etc.

In my opinion the best option for solving this issue remains the ability to hide the contents of a parcel, or hide objects from a given user, from view. There's a heavily voted-on issue about it here:
http://jira.secondlife.com/browse/VWR-1017

There is a very simple economy to small-parcel extortion. Advertising is not the problem... and its rarely the point. If you disrupt the economy of small parcels, by making their maximum value proportional to their size, you will see the get-rish-quick types blow away in the wind.

I am on the fence about any kind of "visual muting" - its an interesting topic, but with some very real social impact and technical concerns. And it will -not- cause the a significant enough reduction in land extortion. There are several gaps in that system which still can be easily exploited. It also seems very "pie-in-the-sky" to me and a long way off.

Instead, we can attack the land economy and quite resoundly crush extortion by implementing a scalable cap on land prices. So many benefits to this... mostly in that it doesnt require any Resident or Linden to lift a finger after the code is implemented. The ad farmers will eagerly combine their parcels for sale at affordable prices.

Check out http://jira.secondlife.com/browse/MISC-894 . Log in and vote for it. Punish the extortionist the way they've punished us - in the pocketbook.

The problem with attacking land in this way is that it can harm legitimate uses. For example, what if I have a 16m square parcel containing a sculpted object that I put a significant amount of effort into and would value at L$15,000 and am selling with the land. I know it's not common at all, but it's a possible case that could become impossible, but which isn't extortion.

Object hiding should be easy enough, as all it really requires is for you to be able to hide objects owned by a certain person. So long as they become visible if you're going to collide with them there shouldn't really be an issue. After that you can add the ability to attach hiding information to your own land, and that way visitors will benefit from clear views without having to do anything themselves.

But basically so long as the users have the power to easily ignore ads without building work-arounds themselves or having to pay the extortionate fees, then ad-farming should become very unprofitable, very fast.

So easy in fact, that Nicholaz implemented it months ago!

Well, kinda. The Nicholaz viewer provides a good proof-of-concept for this, but it doesn't solve the whole problem. For one thing, it relies on the viewer itself knowing what to mute without any information from the sim. And, I believe to be scalable and effective, the muting will have to be "parcel-to-parcel"--that is, a parcel owner would set what other parcels are to be muted for avatars who are in that owned parcel. That makes the amount of data that has to be retained on the server and passed to the viewer pretty minimal, compared to all the other junk that gets passed at parcel boundaries already. Of course that doesn't solve the problem for explorers who just never want to see yellow-on-black defamations of a certain religious/ethnic group, wherever they go--but if local landowners do what I expect them to do with this, that won't be much of a problem (but LL has to figure out what to mute from the Linden-owned infrastructure, too, which is another whole can of policy worms).

Now, all that said, the point of this thread is to understand what the implications would be if 16s were to be treated differently in terms of land ownership policy. And I'm very grateful to Haravikk for the input on what I guess is:

C2: Visible prims (e.g., sculpture of up to 3 prims).

I guess it's part of Scenario C because at least in theory, anybody could buy the land+art without owning any other land in the sim. I have to say I don't even begin to understand the market for this sort of thing (but then I think privately owned art is a contradiction in terms, so don't mind me). And it's problematic in that there's a fine line between art and the afore-mentioned defamatory prims (re: Andre Serrano in RL!). But anyway, that's what this thread is for: to try to cover all effects any changes might have, by understanding all uses.

Eventually I hope to get the time to wade through the jiras and categorize and describe the various proposals, such as Sammy's, for changing the ownership treatment of 16s, and see if we can establish which proposals break which kind of content or business process.

The reason to pay some attention to this is that I sense LL is quite fed up with this problem and what it's doing to our world and their bottom-line, so I'm guessing they will act with policy sooner than a "code" solution can be in place. (I'd feel differently if the Windward Mark folks weren't so busy making WindLight play on every buggy OpenGL driver--I'm pretty confident those folks could complete the "code" solution over a long weekend, but their priority has to be to get the non-WindLight viewer out of the maintenance cycle ASAP.)

True, but given the resources he has, he's done a great job.
(Notably, I've never used the feature--I think I stopped logging in before he actually released a client with the ability).