Have Lindens Removed Dreamland Citizens' Right to Sell Their Land?

Exactly.

Furthermore LL is beholding to investors and doesn't "own" this land any more than Anshe or Anshe's customers do. If LL fails then all this land "owned" by Anshe vanishes.

In the meantime Anshe simply distinguishes between a 'deeded' plot guaranteed by her to remain inviolate for the life of her lease with LL. Renters, on the other hand, have a finite term of their rental and the land or building can be removed or altered at any time after by Anshe.

I really fail to see how this differs substantially from RL in fact. The ONLY reason any land 'owners' feel as though they actually "own" land in RL is because of the stabiliity of the government and, in the U.S., that emminant domain forced sales are relatively rare. However it should be pretty obvious from a cursory inspection that other countries with less stable governments have gone through changes and simply taken property 'owned' by citizens or foriegners without so much as a by-your-leave.

When I was a child my parents bought property in the Bahama Islands. At the time of purchase the government was wanting foriegn investment and land sales were quite common. About five years later though a change in government brought with it a new rule that the land owned by foriegners could not be sold or developed and if taxes weren't paid it was confiscated...tantamount to simpy taking it.

So basically land 'ownership' is a hugely misused term. What Anshe is doing is in no way problematic for me and I fail to understand why it is for anyone else. She apparently explains quite carefully what 'ownership' means. Even LL uses the term "own" in the following point on sim lease...and they too use it VERY loosely since the sim 'owner' does't actually OWN squat.

"4. Can a Group Own a Private Island?
Island owners can now deed out the land on their private island to a group. The actual ownership is not conveyed to the group (you still own the island) and group members cannot pay for the island by contributing land allocations. The owner (you) will always be billed the full island monthly payment no matter how the group land is set up."

This part is not right. She was never able to transfer ownership. She could only deed it. The buyer still had to make a group and Anshe deeded the land.

The only thing she could do differently was advertise it in the land sales tab. Then a persn would fly all the way out. Get excited about the low price, attempt to buy it and then find out that they couldn't just buy it. They had to wait for Anshe to deed it to them.

So no, Anshe was never ever able to sell land directly. She could advertise it like regular land

This was why LL changed it. People were confused. Say you saw Dreamland for sale at a low price, but there was another parcel you were thinking of buying. You decide on the Dreamland parcel, but only to find out the stipulations. Okay so now you go back to the other parcel, but now it's been bought and you lose out.

So LL did it for a reason, not arbitrarily or just to get Anshe.

Let's not rewrite history.

Wow blaze, it wasn't right. (See my post.) I'm surprised. You dropped the ball on that one. And I thought you were all seeing and all knowing. Good thing I checked this thread.

I agree totally with Hiro on this one. This has become a problem for many of us. People seem to think that we can sell our land because they think they are able to buy in other private estates. I hope that the Lindens will come out and give us all the proper guidelines to use. It is time we all get to the same page and go from there. I am more than willing to follow the guidelines but we all should follow the same ones.

Does anyone know when the the next estate owners meeting will be?

It'll be much more productive of them to give us a timed rental feature that allows us to enter a price and period for people to purchase. After buying the lease, the resident retains full control of the land for the time period. If the owner recovers the land, the leasee's money is returned from the owner's account. The owner has no ability to escape the agreement without paying back the funds. If their account balance is insufficient, they simply cannot recover the land until the lease expires.

This works for the mainland as well as estates. One difference on estates is that the entire island will be bound for one parcel rental. If the owner wishes to clear the land or transfer ownership of the estate, they'll have to be able to cover the automatic refunds.

Why don't we have this feature? Does anybody know?

Comparing whole sim versus private island tier levels hardly seems representive. One person does indeed pays $195 in tier whether for an island or a mainland sim. How many people are renting whole sims? Most people are renting smaller parcels. In the case of 2 individuals residing on 1/2 sim parcels, LL would receive tier payments of $125 each or $250 total if they did so on the mainland rather than the $195 LL receives from the private island owner who {rents/subleases/...} to these 2 individuals.

Carry it further: four 1/4 sim mainland residents gets LL $300 in tier payments, four 1/4 sim private island residents gets LL $200. Eight 1/8 sim mainland residents gets LL $360, eight 1/8 sim private island residents gets LL $200. How is this not a loss to LL in tier payments?

I'm not arguing about the labor costs of having Anshe or Hiro or anyone else provide zoning to those residents who want it versus LL providing the manpower to do it. Just in terms of tier revenues, how is this not a loss to LL?

This is a good question. My answer is that it is not a loss, tho how much is taken from my biased position is up to the individual of course. For the number of hrs it takes to run the communites vs the small financial gain, I doubt employees could do it cheaper. You also need to add to this the obvious reduction in costs to LL with respect to billing and admin. I'm sure it's something LL have either thought about, or are doing so now, I would be astonished if they haven't. If they come to a different conclusion to mine, I am sure zoned LL sims will be on the horizon.

This is a great idea but does have small problems associated with it. What if the resident fails to pay tier? Does the sim owner then have to pay back in full to reclaim the land? I guess a work around is to include the tier in that lease amount, but then the cost mounts for the potential resident.

Also there is the problem of zoning. 99% of tenants either follow zoning, or do so once its pointed out they are not with, no problem at all. Occasionaly tho, you do get the odd teen grid escapee who's only purpose is to piss people off. This new suggested system would put them in a position where they know they're going to get their money back. Would you also get people try to force the sim owner to reclaim the land when they no longer want it, using griefing tecqniques etc.?

It's a great idea, but certain things would have to be addressed first.

The interface can include a weekly tier amount to be paid to the owner from the renter. If the renter doesn't have the available funds, the land reverts to the owner. If the owner wishes to extend credit, they can simply reestablish the lease for zero dollars up front and give the leasee another week to begin making up the difference.

The owner will retain use of the land features so be able to delete items and such. But yes, if the owner chooses to terminate the lease, they money will be returned to the renter. You don't have to tolerate griefers in your estates; but you can't just keep their money because they didn't follow the rules. If you want to be hardnosed, ban them from the land and let the lease perpetuate. They'll lose the money, and you'll be covering the cost of the land just sitting there for a period.

These are the kinds of things that could be roundtabled with a feature team if there were any such thing as feature teams and if we had any faith that our time wouldn't be wholly wasted. Or am I the only person that feels this way?

It seems like a lot of work, to benefit a few people. It would also take away from sales on the mainland grid. I don't like these ideas at all.

Khamon, your feature suggestion sound nice for normal rental.

Unfortunately it still won't address the needs of most our customers in Dreamland. They buy, own and sell land deeds within our ownership system. What we really need here is one market that faciliates the trading of land deeds within our continent. The removal of our sales from the land finder without any feature to replace it, has been perceived by land owners in Dreamland as rather discriminating move by Linden Lab. People in Dreamland don't want some "rent" button. They want put their land deeds for sale as conveniently as people do on mainland now and at least as conveniently as people did in Dreamland before May.

anshe, i may be repeating something said earlier in this thread, but what just popped into my mind as I was reading this was "maybe anshe can use some of the new SL mapping tools being developed to create her own continental land sales map".

Even if LL does not include private island plots in the land sales directory, you're getting big enough to have your own map/directory and people would actually look there.

Not being a techie, I do not know how complex/costly this would be to build, so this may be economically infeasible. Nor do I know if there is a way to integrate something like this to the Linden map via landmark generation or the like.

i'm not sure how ROAM's search engine works, for example, but it's useful

Same.

Not a few April. There've been many requests for this type of feature dating back to early 1.2 when people first started renting apartment space to the nonlanded. People even extended the idea to include Z coords that would facilitate rental space over a lot between given heights to accomodate multitiered shops and such.

It's one of several intensely popular ideas that have been acknowledged as necessary and doable, but put off and worked around until the time that they qualify as critically necessary features far from being developed. I fear that these types of things are already causing a downward trend in our retention stats.

It is true. What you need to execute your model correctly is a seperately hosted grid, appearing on the Lindenworld map, but being maintained by your technicians at your own colocation allowing you and your staff to be the "Lindens" and allowing the Dreamlanders full land rights in your domain. I believe, for billing purposes at least, this arrangement will be sooner achieved than a rewrite of the estate settings.

I have been away, and haven't time atm to read the whole thread, but at a quick glance no-one seems to be giving this poster the straight answer required to correct such a total misunderstanding of the situation.

Germinian - Your land is in a private sim. Officially, and technically, and in LL's eyes, and in mine, this land has never belonged to you, it still belongs to the original whole-sim owner. This is why you cannot set it for sale in the "About land" dialogue.

It has never been possible to sell a part of a private sim. The owner must sell it all in one piece or none. LL has stated that the only possible way of you holding such land is by renting, and that that is what you are doing. The fact that you were persuaded to pay a large non-returnable deposit, and maybe were told it was the "purchase price" cannot alter this.

The benefits of private sims (less griefers, more building control) all flow from this "one person" ownership, which means they are the dictator, and can evict anyone who disobeys them, the true owner seizing back possession of the land entirely as he/she sees fit.

The person who talked to you about a "change" may be remembering a brief period of 5 or 6 weeks when it was accidentally possible to set a "for sale" price in the box, and have it appear in "land for sale" but this happened in error, people were asked not to use it, and it was eliminated as soon as the software could be corrected. Even at this time, actually selling was still impossible. This was, oh, at least 6 or 7 months ago.

So you see nothing has changed, in LL's eyes you never owned this land - it was and is technically impossible and forbidden for you to do so.

If this was not made clear to you when you acquired it, then your isssue is with your landlord.

So please, no more uninformed criticism of LL in this matter. You have very seriously misunderstood.

No-one really owns any land in SL except LL, mainland or otherwise, in the way that one can own real estate in "First Life". It's all leasehold, and on a month-to-month lease at that! Whether that fee is called "Tier", "Premium Account Fees" (for that first 512 square meters), or rental of an Island sim. The only way to get anything close to owning land would be to have it on a private server running over your own internet connection... and I can't see how that could ever be technically possible given the inter-sim bandwidth requirements for assets and the digital property rights issues...

You will have to contact anshe chung.. she really is the "owner".. its just been deeded to your group

Many words are used in SL to represent something virtual. It is blindingly obvious that these things are not actually the same, and the words are not meaning exactly the same, as in RL.

The whole point is that the creator of SL chose to use words which have RL parallels, to make it easier for us to talk about and understand the virtual things we are dealing with.

But these words, and meanings are actually unreal, and just chosen by SL.

They chose to use the words "land" and "sale" and "own" for a piece of SL virtual space over which the software was designed to automatically give a subscriber certain technical rights.

Just because some group of subscribers then come along, and want to alter the meaning LL chose for these words, by extending them to cover something partly similar, but not supported by the software, not intended by LL, and indeed a use directly and openly repudiated by LL, does not make it so.

The meaning of this word "sale" was arbitrarily chosen and defined by SL to have special meaning in their system. You cannot use arguments about RL meanings and RL objects to argue with their choice.

The objects and relationships are none of them real. They are invented, virtual, unreal, ghostly. What they are called is up to their inventor. Not to us.

Why would anyone want to argue? Seems strange and illogical, doesnt it, like demanding that Coca-Cola change the name of their product.

So why ? The answer is that there is financial gain to be had from presenting something that LL definitely says is a "rental" as if it were a "sale".

Like Ford putting up a whole philosophical pseudoargument to defend them calling their cars "Ferrari".

In that case its obvious what the motive is. This one is the same, but its easier to confuse people, who don't see that you can't apply RL judgements about word meanings and definitions in a virtual invented world, as if you were talking about real things. The inventor has the right to say how his inventions are named. No argument or disagreement is logically possible. Any such attempt is suspect.

I'm sorry, Prof. On this key issue you are wrong. For a little while, by mistake and until corrected, it was possible for private sim owners to advertise plots of land via the automated system.

But never, never to actually sell them automatically, and indeed at all in the only way which has meaning, ie by transfering the normal ownership rights and privileges registered on the LL servers, or transfer the corresponding obligation to pay LL tier.

Clicking on "buy" never did anything in a private sim. Its always been inoperative.

This is a central point, and really needs to be understood. Nothing has changed but the ability to advertise.

oh well she could use the automated land system to facilitate transfer.

I believe that LL knew, or at least should have known, what anshe was doing. They should have communicated with her more closely when she went to purchase the 20 sims.

If Anshe cant' get any respect, I dont' see what chance the rest of us have.

No she couldn't. It still had to be deeded. I know because I bought land that way. I had to wait for her and I had to join a group. The only thing that was different was that she could advertise the land for sale. People would fly out and try to buy it and find it had to be deeded. People were up in arms about this.

ok, well, it facilitated the marketing of the parcel.

For me, marketing is always the hardest part

Thank you Ellie. Are we the only ones to remember this?

Since more than 9 months, hundreds of people bought, owned and sold land deeds in Dreamland sims. This happens within the ANSHECHUNG.COM ownership system, not that of Linden Lab, and the terms are made clear to every buyer before purchasing land.

We have always openly and proactively communicated to Linden Lab what we do and plan to do. There was no objection or warning or indication that any feature we used was not an allowed feature - not before we ordered sims, not after we paid for sims and not for weeks after starting Dreamland. Until today, more than 9 months later, we have not been asked to change what we do, how we do it or been critisized for what we do.

Any changes or efforts that negatively effect our residents' ability to buy, advertise or sell their land deeds within our ownership system we consider acts of violence. The open and hidden lobbying of some people, many of them competitors or friends of competitors, for changes that negatively effect our customers' ability to trade their land deeds is immoral. It doesn't matter if the motivations for this lobbying and campaigning are ideological or outright self-serfing.

In any case, since more than 9 months the owning and trading of land deeds in Dreamland is a fact.

I think it is about time for some people here to recognize this, as well as the rights and interests of more than 350 land deed owners in Dreamland. It has been disturbing enough to watch some people ignore the legitimate interests of somebody who invested tens of thousands of US$ and a tremendeous amount of time in sims, based on the features and information available in February and March 2005. But the way some people here kick the interests of more than 350 land deed owners in Dreamland with their feet is beyond description. It is as if 350 people, or 5% of the land owning population of Second Life would simply not exist. There are people who made a choice to buy in Dreamland, to own their land deed within our system, who saw the land, read the terms and found exactly what they want. Every day there are new people who come to Dreamland and want the same. Trying to take away choices from people or to even "nerf" something that people have already invested in is simply wrong.

I invite everybody on this forum to work together and find constructive ways to improve things for everybody involved, including people who already own or want to own land deeds in Dreamland or in other places such as Azure Islands. Finger pointing, arguing, ideological debate and "infomercials" for certain rentals is not helpful. The real questions that matter are:

1. Why do people want to buy and sell land deeds in zoned sims?
2. What difficulties do they face?
3. How can this process be improved?
4. How can this be done fairly in a win-win way for all those involved?

And the most important question:

5. How can we make Second Life better for everybody? I am part of "everybody", you are part of "everybody", the land owners in Dreamland are part of "everybody". Real progress usually begins with recognizing the situation and the needs of everyone effected.

Anshe, if it is clear about the ways to sell land in Dreamland, why did the original poster of this thread post this? If they were informed, why didn't they know the reason why the For Sale tabs are not used on Private sims? Why did they not know that if someone does want to buy their land, they have to involve you or one of your employees first? This person thought he/she was a landowner when they are a leaser. This is the difficult part of this whole process. And because of this misinformation, his/her whole experience in SL has been negatively affected. He/she is also under the impression that this happened with their permission. Which says they were not properly informed when they gave you money for the land.

I support helping to improve Second Life for everybody. But we can not do it while twisting facts.

Renting, leasing land on private sims is a good deal. But there are drawbacks. Which people need to know up front. There are cons, which include zoning and other things. But to try to make it equal to mainland is just not feasible.