History of SL land access

Were land access lists or other property access control stuff in SL here from when it was initially released, or were they was added later, and if so, for what reason (i.e., was there some kind of incident that made people realize they'd be a good idea, or did someone just think of them). Any old-timers around who know about this stuff?

The reason I'm interested in whether there was some interesting incident or set of incidents that led to land access controls being added is that I want to tell a story illustrating a real example of how a social problem in a virtual space was fixed by changing the way the world itself works. Hypotheticals are easy to come up with, but it'd be great to have a real example to discuss. If anyone here remembers anything of that sort or knows someone who does, I'd love to hear details about it.

-Blossoms

well for your overall topic, i'd say look at prim allocation being tied to land ownership, which happened in 1.2 as a *DIRECT* result of some very bad abuses to the existing 'shared resource' prim model...

to yer specific question, they were added in at one point, i think more as a feature tho than as a specific social issue... basically LL wanted to make it possible to have 'closed' events that could be 'pay per view' as it were, aka you wouldn't be able to enter and enjoy a parcel/event without first paying to access it...

that model however never really took off, and most of the limitations on the current land ban system make it little more than an innefectual 'joke' from a dealin with problems/people standpoint

Nobody but a Linden can tell you exactly why land controls were added. It seems fairly obvious that they were probably added to protect users from griefers, maintain privacy, allow group projects to be restricted to group members, etc... lots of stuff was added all at once back in 1.1.

These transcripts are from two town halls held before the change, and they have some questions and answers about land:
http://history.secondserver.net/index.php/Town_Hall_9/29/03/430pm
http://history.secondserver.net/index.php/Town_Hall_9/29/03/8pm

There is a complete archive of release notes here:
http://history.secondserver.net/index.php/Release_Notes

In particular, 1.1 release notes here:
http://history.secondserver.net/index.php/Version_1.1.0

eltee: Okay, it sounds as though access lists are the wrong tree to bark up, then. Could you tell me about the prim problems in more detail, or point me to some people who were there on the ground and might have stories to tell? That's at least as interesting to me as the land access lists - the problems they're addressed at (compared to the real world) seem similar.

Eggy: Thanks for the pointer to those notes - I'd gone to your wiki, but hadn't found the right sections of it. I did try to talk to the Lindens (i.e., I wrote to support), but received silence in reply. Is that typical? Is there a better way to contact them? In-world, maybe?

As a side note (reading the 1.1 release notes), did objects originally not have copy/edit permissions? I'd be interested in interviewing (virtually or otherwise) someone about the problems not having those permissions caused - it's pretty clear what the problems would have been, but I'd like to get the story.

Thanks, guys!

Ît would be best to contact them directly. Perhaps Robin could be of assistance. If you are a "real" researcher, I think you will get better support, but you will have to sign something in order to do research in SL. Just a boilerplate agreement dealing with the protection of our privacy etc.

Re: permissions
In the beginning, only objects had permissions and they were very different.
Group permissions were turned on by default, so anyone in your group could delete your objects or take copies of them.
Scripts were forcibly open source, there was no way to protect the code. Textures were also infinitely copyable by anyone - in Beta, we even had a "Copy Texture" command on the pie menu that encouraged us to "steal" textures from each other's objects for whatever use we deemed fit.
There was also no way to prevent things from being transferred / resold. I was at least one of the people who proposed such a feature back then and today it is widely used.

Re: prims
Primitives worked on a per-sim basis. You're in luck, I was also the one who invented the current system of tying prims to land and proposed it to the Lindens. Not that it's rocket science or anything and for all I know they might have had it planned from the beginning
There were 10,000 prims for everyone and they were not tied to land. They did cost money to rez but it was fully refunded on deletion. I could talk about this forever but I'm kind of in a hurry right now... main problems this caused was, people left around a lot of empty land and grossly overused prims resulting in people who arrived and bought land in a sim not having any prims to build with. There was also hoarding. I believe this is documented on the wiki and I can dig up a few relevant forum threads later.

Have you seen these? It seems you are interested in the social and cultural aspects of SL.

http://history.secondserver.net/index.php/Social_History
http://history.secondserver.net/index.php/Culture
http://history.secondserver.net/index.php/Misc_History_Articles

Eggy: I'm a "real" researcher only to the extent that I am a student taking a law seminar on the subject and intend to do something reasonably scholarly with what I learn. I'll bring that information to the Lindens and see what they say. In terms of contacting Robin, should I do that in-world, or write to feedback and request that my email be routed to Robin?

I've only begun reading the prims threads linked off your wiki, but the situation described seems to be almost exactly what I'm looking for (a social problem - tragedy of the commons, as you note - with an architecture solution, and the "bookshelves incident" provides a good case). I'll read through them and come back.

Thanks!

Yup, tragedy of the commons. I mentioned exactly that in the original thread where I complained about not having prims to build with, back in the summer of 2003. Nobody gave a damn, and in fact they actively flamed me... probably because back then I was a noob and nobody likes a noob with ideas
Robin's email is [email]robin@lindenlab.com[/email] though I can't guarantee you will get a reply.
Try Pathfinder, or even the SL campus program - [email]education@lindenlab.com[/email] - or something.
Also feel free to mail me whenever you like, I will gladly answer any specific question you might have.