Ownership in SL

I've heard a lot of people talking about owning land in SL, but in reality do we own anything?

IMO you can only own a few things in SL:

* full-mod textures which you can export to your hard drive.
* animations which you created and still have on your hard drive.
* scripts, but since the language is SL specific, not sure what the point it.

In other words, I think you can only own those things which you can keep/use outside of SL.

You can't own land. When you "bought" your land what you were buying was the privlege of renting a particular piece of "land." If you are banned tomorrow, or SL goes out of business, you have nothing. I say privlege because your access to SL is solely at the pleasure of LL.

I would argue that you don't own the objects in your inventory for the same reasons. You can only use them in SL. You can't export them. And you can't guarantee that you will be in SL to use them.

I'm not putting a value judgement on any of the above, but I think our discussions might be more productive if we used clearer concepts.

Thoughts?

Well said!

Very well stated =)
Kudos

www.hurricaneradio.net - - - Feel The Force

Nicely put. If you read the TOS, it explicitly states that everything in our inventory could go *poof* tomorrow and there would be nothing to say about it. It's actually kind of amusing wording, talking about treasure and experience points, and being reset to novice level. How many experience points does it take to advance in the Landowner class from Reseller to Baron?

I think around 56,287. But I could be off +/- 5%.

Concidering the entire catalogue of items, land included, within SL is purely data on a collection of hard drives it is hard to quantify exactly what we 'own'.

However, in many cases that data represents many hours of work, the results of which we 'own' the rights to. These rights have value both 'in' world and 'off' world (ie, the real world).

Within SL, the right of ownership gives you ability to sell or protect your creations as you see fit and prevents others from simply taking without your consent. (The ability and suitability of inworld tools to achieve this is a different discussion, it's principle I'm talking about).

Out in the real world, your ownership rights in SL give you the ability to 'sell' your creations there as well. The trick is developing a product within SL that can work (and hence have value) in the real world.


EXAMPLES I hear you cry... TRINGO, I reply. In a "game" where you're intended to slay dragons and go hunting for gold coins, the game developers claim all rights to all "data" (objects) within the "game". This is often their argument against items being "sold" on ebay for example, and would include anything created by users and hence if Tringo had been developed within EQ (assuming that were possible) the game owners could quite legaly claim Tringo as their own. The intelectual property rights within SL mean that Kermit is able to sell Tringo and hopefully earn a fortune from it, and I wish him all the best in doing so.

Technicly you can "own" any texture...

The magic of the print-screen button and paint!

Well, you don't own it if your hard drive crashes!

Better do those backups, folks.

Surreal, I do hold the hope that somehow we'll be able to host our own personal sim, if they release it open-source. (Or some variant). But until then, you're right - its like a webhost and we're leasing space.

I also hold hope of object exports sometime, some easier way of archiving our work when it comes to builds. I've made my own system, but frankly its a pretty ugly hack for something that could be really elegant if LL had time/initiative to do so.

Good points.

The article on grimwell is a good summary of all the actual court cases and the legal scholarly thinking on the issue of virtual property. It's worth making the distinction between the virtual intellectual property that is the copyrightable material of creative content, and the virtual real property (for lack of a better term) that is the space on the server (like the land in SL):




These rulings seem to hold that a player cannot sue for loss of real estate because he has the choice of other video games, i.e. other entertainment like movies, to go to.

It would be interesting to see if there is any US court case pending or completed that acknowledges virtual real estate (virtua estate lol?) as like real estate with the same kind of ownership and transfer of ownership rights, or that overrules a TOS -- the TOS essentially seems to ensure that virtual estate is not transferrable.

All true, no arguments here, but the important fact to remember is that the ownership is valid as part of the "game experience". As long as there is a game, and I participate in the game, I own my land and inventory. If I choose to quit playing the game, I relinquish my ownership by default. If I do something stupid and get banned from the game, well I guess I have to step up to the plate and take responsibility for my loss.

The points are valid but why such distinction? Are we being philosphical? I'm not sure... But ownership really isn't an issue.

There are very few things you actually OWN in your life. I would say we own nothing, not even our bodies. You only own that which cannot be forcefully taken from you (ie, ownership is about what people let you keep or have no power in taking away from you)

That being said, take it upon yourself to archive your own data if it proves to be an important aspect you need to keep control over. Don't leave that up to a company leasing you server space in return for building a stable micro economy. That's risky business Keep your ideas intact. Itellectual property is very hard to take away

Dont' be surprised that LL is not an exception to the ownership rule. After all, if the power companies have more rolling blackouts, regardless of whether LL pays their bills, they can lose what they feel they "own." which will most likely cause us to lose what we "own."

Ride the bull while it's kicking, Make the money while it's available This is not the right world to chit-chat about wonership rights when everything can poof This whole world is dependent on the assumption of the electron and residual magnetics on a very tiny, fragile scale.

~Lefty

Well, sure, anyone who lives on this earth realizes our lives are "as grass" and if we live a mile from Ground Zero we realize that even tall skyscrapers, let alone our lives and property, can be pulverized in an instant.

But let's not get so abstract and philosophical here that we don't have a useful discussion. We can Dada-up the concepts to such a nihilist nil that we are left with nothing, as if the $9.95 debited out of our credit cards each money actually bought us nothing, when instead we know that it brings us a huge world of not only entertainment but really real engagement.

To be sure, we have something that is little better than a pet rock, something we bought for more than its founder had to pay to get it, that has value only because we put value into it and name it something. But aren't most human things like that?

Let's try another legal concept to see if it works. How about the notion of "usufruct"?

"Usufruct" is the legal right to use and derive profit from property belonging to someone else provided that the property itself is not injured in any way.

So we are all enjoying our right of usufruct (in the US this can be more or less depending on the state, as I understand it). We buy the land in SL and sell it for a profit, or put a store on it and derive rental profits, or put a content workshop or store and sell content, or a club or casino and get dwell and vendor profits, etc.

So each of us enjoys the usufruct ("fruits of the use of" the LL servers under the terms of the TOS, i.e. provided we don't injure the property in any way.

Of course, we can't even touch this property being far away from California and the physical servers (there are might be the minority of malicious scripters who try to bring the thing to its knees but that doesn't happen very often).

But under the TOS, there are certain notions that the company perceives as "injury" like assault with weapons, etc.

The fate of other Internet sites does give us sober pause. I remember zing.com which promised "free archives for life". I used to put tons of photo jpegs there in stories. Then the whole thing went belly up because offering it for free wasn't rational, and they couldn't make enough money off the photo prints people would sometimes use.

Right now, I guess LL has enough of a cash flow or at least paper profits and investment capital not to turn into zing.com It strikes me that if a certain critical mass of factors begin to go south, it could turn into a zing.com but I don't know enough about how web-based commerce does these days -- the memory of the 1990s bubble, building boom and post-bubble devastation in NYC is very clear in my mind but maybe long forgotten by others.

I was mulling over the ownership concept in regards to land because my partner Ferran and I "own" a private island sim. Well actually only one of us owns it, becuase Linden Labs only allows for one owner. Now both of us contributed the funds to buy the sim, and the proceeds from our joint business support the sim fees.

So what happens if the "owning" partner is hit by a bus tomorrow. LL doesn't have a method to designate a beneficiary for something that is worth around $1,000 USD. A U.S. judge could determine that it is part of her estate, and her heirs would all of a sudden have rights to something that once they understood it would probably upset them a lot. (Surviving partner spends frantic day removing all sex balls, etc.)

Or, our option, you can draw up partnership papers that list the sim as something you both have rights over. The problem you run into there is trying to get a legal description of the sim from Linden Labs. We had no luck doing that btw. So we are forced to describe it as best as we can. For that matter, as business partners, if one of us is hit by a bus tomorrow, the other partner needs our Avatar account, since we each hold pieces, but not all of our business.

I think these issues are only going to get more important and that we will see RL legal ruling based out of current laws.

I didn't even mention the first time a private sim becomes part of a messy divorce.

...Your Honor, I need a restraining order to keep my spouse, also know as KinkyFurBall 150 meters away from our virtual real estate, XXXThong Island.....

Very very interesting points!

I'm curious about how other web assets are handled by law. I assume things like web space, etc. have been involved in the legal matters we are all now pondering

Since alot of new legislation is born from the ashes of past cases gone wrong, it's interesting to think that this might not be a new situation. Anyone have any stories?

As Henry said, I havne't given much thought to the web in terms of legality and commerce since the 90's bust. Can anyone shed some light?

The TOS makes it sound like our intellectual property is kinda sacred but do they have anything to back that up with?

~Lefty

When you buy a music CD (remember those?) you own the plastic disk, you own the right the listen to the music on it but you don't own the music.

If you buy a computer program on CD you own the plastic disk, you own the right to USE the program contained on the disk, but you don't own the rights to the ptrogram.

SecondLife is the reverse. Linden Lab own the computers, diskdrives, server software even the client software. It is in their interest to maintqain these resources to keep their business running. You own the rights to anything you create within SecondLife. As I posted before, some creations such as tringo can survive outside of SecondLife, however most creations rely on SecondLife just to exist. This is where the grey area is.

Very interesting thoughts, but I wonder why one single question was left unanswered?



From what I've read, most of you tend to view that talking about "ownership in SL" as being pointless, since an accident can happen, the plug can be pulled, and the LL servers disappear from the Internet - so, you don't really "own" anything (except for intellectual propriety).

Let's think about the way the whole Internet works. There are millions (billions?) of Web sites across the world. The way they are set up reflects the ingenuity of those millions of people. Some are run at people's homes, with their own machines connected to the Internet. Some are "company servers", run from inside a company's connection to the net. Some are on people's machines, but hosted on a data center. Some are rented/leased from a co-location facility. Some have Web space rented on servers; some of that web-space is, in turn, rented from ISPs on co-location facilities. Some have just a FTP password or so to a friend's larger site. And I'm pretty sure I have not even skimmed the diversity of different possibilities of "owning space on the Internet".

We tend to equate "ownership in the Internet" as having the intellectual propriety over the content, since the Web is mostly text + multimedia elements, which is similar to other text-based media - books, magazines, newspapers. Those have been studied and legislated for decades or even centuries, and we feel familiar enough with them, to try to correlate what applies to them with what should apply with the Internet. However, this hasn't always been pacific. Some of you may remember the old-age dilemma: if I print a book or magazine encouraging pedophilia, it will be a matter of criminal prosecution in almost all countries of the world. It's easy to understand the parts that are involved: the author, the publisher, the distributer, and even the reader - all them are party to the crime.

But when the same thing happens over the Internet, the definitions are more blurred. The author is certainly a criminal - if you manage to track him down. But what about the ISP hosting the content? An ISP with millions of web pages is unable to scan all that material, in an acceptable time frame. Worse than that - between the ISP hosting the content, and the eventual reader, you have a very complex network of other ISPs, handling the transfer of bits and bytes over the wired (and wireless!) medium, until it arrives to the destination. Are they all to blame? Or, in legal terms, are they all party to this crime? If not, how can we prevent this to happen? And if they are, how can we sue all ISPs of the world which are carrying (unknowingly) forbidden and illegal content?

As you imagine, the question is not easy to answer, but fortunately we can use other examples to help us to define roles. If you insult someone over the phone, and the insulted party sues you for libel and difamation, is the phone company accessory to the crime as well? (after all, if they provide a service that enables people to insult each other, shouldn't they be guilty as well?) Phone companies have been operating for over a century now, and thus the common approach is that they are never parties to these kind of disputes. They are "carriers" and not responsible for the use given to their technology -- although some countries demand that they assist the police with investigations, when a court demands it.

That was also applied to Internet carriers after much discussion, although things are still not so consensual in that respect. A few countries still control ISPs' content actively, and they are liable for the sort of content they host.

What this means is that, no matter how "ephemerous" and "flimsy" the Internet may look - after all, sites go down, servers disappear, content changes from a place to the other at the whim of their creators - real world laws still apply. This is mostly my point: Second Life, and any other upcoming virtual reality, is an application service built over the Internet. No matter how "different" it may look, "owning land" in SL is as "real" as "owning web space" on a web server. On many earlier posts and on my own blog I talked a bit about this relationship - the way "land" in SL is an abstract concept (but a much easier one to follow for us humans) for things like MBytes of database space occupied, share of CPU, share of bandwidth, and so on. Equating "land in SL" to "shared assets on an Internet-connected computer" is just a matter of definition (sadly lacking in the ToS - if you read it, you'll see that "land" is never defined, just mentioned in regard to refunding issues).

But as soon as you accept that land - and the objects on that land - is equated just with shared resources on an Internet server, you can safely apply all the laws and rules that already are in place for web space. Thus, you "own" that land as much as someone who "owns" a web site. Although we are in the post-bubble days, the notion that "ownership of a web site" is valuable (despite the fact that when you turn off the power of that website, it disappears) -- and which was the basis of so many dot-coms setting up sites, claiming ownership of it, and reselling it for a profit -- is flawlessly carried over to Second Life. The difference being that there is just "one" Linden Lab, and that, at the moment, you cannot take your "land" elsewhere. But this, I think, is irrelevant. The point is, taking the restrictions of the current ToS in account, your "land ownership" in SL has the same value - legal and economic - as "web space ownership". You can draw legal, binding, RL contracts over "SL land" (at least, in many countries, and I expect in many US states as well) the same way you do legal, biding contracts over the "ownership of web space". I found Surreal's ideas of divorce agreements covering SL land as well very amusing, but I certainly view them as being perfectly valid and correct. And if they sound amusing in 2005, imagine the first time a judge had to arbitrate a case of "web space ownership" in the mid-1990s. I expect that the reactions on those days were the same we have now - "how preposterous! How can someone claim rights of ownership to something that doesn't exist any more if you trip over a cable by mistake?" But nowadays companies are built around a web site, and ownership of just that web site allows them to go public and sell shares at NASDAQ. We aren't surprised about that any more.

There is a difference between ownership of land in SL, and ownership of the intellectual property of the content created on that land. The latter is much better defined in the LL ToS - there is absolutely no question about who owns the content (although LL is allowed, under ToS, to use that content for their own marketing purposes, but not more than that). But "land" is not "content". "Land" is the medium which enables content - like saying "I've got ownership of an Apache web server on the net" (which may, or may not, have any pages hosted there!). Both are "real ownership" - and not IP ownership. Although I find the ToS a bit lacking in that respect, I also know that LL is actively and routinely working with experts and lawyers experienced in the digital legal framework, as well as participating in all sorts of workshops and conferences related to digital law. I expect that, unless ToS changes, most courts would equate the "ownership of SL land" to "ownership of a (share of) an Apache web server" for now.

there was a mention on Grimwell i believe regarding the intellectual property ownership of not just "land", but of modifiable land, which makes things even more interesting.

wrt the confusing perceptions surrounding 3D content, i recently wrote in my blog:



last time i noticed, promoters could sue no-show performers for lost revenue (i.e. sue for damages based on lost sales... not of a "real" product, but of an Experience).

it does feel like the mid-90's internet.

I fully agree with you, Csven! And that's what I find so exciting. I wonder if we're going to do all the mistakes we did back then, or if we have actually learned something...

i thought repeating mistakes was the rule

Sadly, Csven, you're more right than wrong. Ah well. You have given us fair warning That should count a bit.

I agree with much of what you say, Gwyn, and that's why I wish Second Life would behave more like a common carrier, i.e. a telephon company providing a service, than...a thingie...whatever you want to call it. I mean, even as the founder or main architect of the 3-D metaverse, I'd like them to get a little more neutral, a little less huggy with the bears, less hands on with world-activities, etc. There's just something about it all now that is too claustrophobic and not open-ended enough.

I think of SL land as very similar to tripod.com websites that only have so much space, and you can only upload so many mbs, and so many pictures, etc. until you then have to upgrade to the next level, going from the free tripod to the $14.95 tripod to the professional tripod, to the blogger tripod for $34.95 or whatever. I think of it as *exactly* the same thing as SL land, except of course with the music and pictures and stuff, not to mention the RL dollars one can try to squeeze.

Most of the time I think of SL as more like whole life insurance though, the insurance agent always tells you to invest and tells you its an investment, to pour money into a company that can then only pay back less than what you paid into it, or loan you your own money back to you at a low percent, and finally give your relatives, not you, a large sum of money...but less than what you might have garnered for said relatives if you "buy term and invest the difference" as the advice contrary to the whole-life advice goes. The equivalent of "buy term and invest the difference" in SL might be buying leasable private islands? Not sure.

I really think LL hasn't spent as much time developing land rights as they have content creator rights, but they seem to be moving towards fixing the holes in the group tools, etc. and I suppose we can look forward to better protections for land down the line. Right now, a mis-step on marking up and selling land is causing at least one player to reach for the litigation approach, even though I maintain that whatever grimwell says or a thousand other pundits, this is a closed, private club with some entertainment, you pay the admission price, you either enjoy it or not, and trying to sue for not enjoying it is like telling a movie theater they need to give you your $9.95 ticket back because you hated the movie and the popcorn was stale, too.

Nice post Varian! I agree with all you stated.