That sounds interesting. At the risk of getting too off topic, let me cite two fundamental readings for any society:
http://www.unhchr.ch/udhr/index.htmhttp://www.robertsrules.com/Roberts Rules of Orders contain basic meetings procedures and include fundamental organizational principles like: the person who has a grievance in a motion and has a conflict of interest has to recuse himself from a vote. Thus, the vendor who has joined a mall group because he is mad that a mall owner bought land next to his can't trigger an officer recall vote on that person with whom he has a dispute as a way to "get them" using the highly-flawed group tools for recall today in SL.
Then there is the Universal Declaration of Human Rights. The principles contained in it, whether right to freedom of expression or right to a fair trial or freedom from torture, are all the result of years of the work of diplomats from countries with very different cultures and history hammering out a document they all felt represented universal human values.
A crucial concept within the UDHR is Art. 30:
Nothing in this Declaration may be interpreted as implying for any State, group or person any right to engage in any activity or to perform any act aimed at the destruction of any of the rights and freedoms set forth herein. This very important curb on maximalism in rights, in entitlementarianism in rights, is so often overlooked. What Art. 30 tells you is that terrorism by non-state actors is not OK. What it tells you, is that you can't use your right of freedom of speech, your right to freedom of religion, your right to a fair trial, etc. etc. to cancel out another one of the rights enshrined in the document. It is about balance and restraint, a built-in protector. It means that freedom of speech isn't incitment to kill, because that would take away the right to life enshrined elsewhere in the document. It means using your freedom of religion doesn't mean that you get to destroy the equality of women before the law enshrined elsewhere in this and other treaties. And so on. It is a break on the kind of my-rights-firstism that one so often sees especially among Americans, where I live, who identify civil rights with human rights and have little clue what human rights are as understood universally.
This might seem way, way, way off topic, and if the thread moves, I understand. But try to picture how it plays out in SL. Your right to build on your land or make what you want doesn't extend to a right to incite hatred and incite killing. Your right to build on your land doesn't extend to completely taking away the game enjoyment of someone by blocking their land completely with big huge ugly builds, and blocking the entire skyline "nothing can be construed in the TOS that destroys the TOS itself, i.e. with your right to build what you want on your land, you can't destroy the right of what someone wants to build on your land." Your right to do what you want in this game within the TOS doesn't mean you use it to throw the TOS itself on its ear in some kind of twisted way by always trying to come up with a way to explain what you do as "art" which gets a free-expression pass.
There's a tension between two schools of dispute resolution. One school says that conflict resolution should be used to deal with disputes, and in this theory, all parties in the conflict have a right to exist, and all parties reach a compromise through dialogue, negotiation, etc. Another school of thought says no, there should be a human-rights approach. In this scheme, one party is a violator of rights that all had recognized as universal, and the other party is a victim of violations. You don't make a victim sit at the table with the violator of his rights and make them equal and think you can "dialogue away" things like torture. Obviously, there is a sliding scale of when you can use one school to resolve conflicts and when you can use others.
It is very important to have not only a TOC about game space, but a disputes resolution mechanism that is part of a culture. The problem with disputes resolution is that they never get made in games because creating their machinery is too complicated and cumbersome for widely diverse populations. I would prefer to see a culture rather than a machinery of dispute resolution emerge, where parties with grievances would have simple procedures -- first go to the community association on your sim, or a dispute resolution group created just for that occasion, next involve a Linden, and only far down the line, involve some somber assembly of players, Lindens, outside judges, etc.
