Re:Copybot, The World Isn't Ending, Film at 11

I noted Linden Lab's measured response to the mass hysteria surrounding CopyBot, and thought to myself, "they must know something we don't know, or the response would have been radically greater".

And sure enough, a simple reaffirmation that the use of any tool to duplicate intellectual property without the owners permission is against the Terms of Service seems to have been completely sufficient, and much to a vocal minority's suprise, the SL economy did not, in fact, collapse overnight. This, so far as I can observe, was a marvelous demonstration of public relations kung fu.

My question is this: how much of the time of Linden Labs staff is spent on economic stabilization and related issues, and how much of its time is spent on the purely technical aspects? Knowing this would shed a little light on the inner workings of Linden Labs and the stability of Second Life as a virtual economy.

Hello Kalel — while I don't have exact figures or man-hour logs, generally speaking, something which is often understated is how interrelated things are in Second Life and here @ Linden Lab cross-departmentally, and how a technical advancement which seems irrelevant to social development is, or becomes, quite prominent. We do have more Lindens working in non-economic-focused areas than developers who do, but the latter in itself covers quite a large degree of disciplines (simulators, UI, graphics, physics, ports to other platforms, etc.). We of course have a CFO, Zee, who pays close attention to the state of the economy, and developers like Lawrence who specialize in LindeX.

Additionally, I'm glad you mentioned "related issues", because then, it quickly becomes apparent such features which ease buying and selling in SL (such as click actions, revamped Land Sale dialogs, etc.) tie in directly with the economy. So I'm not sure what would be considered "purely technical" if it didn't have a broader application.

However, perceptions of "public relations kung fu", while nice to hear, is likely more incidental than intentional: we strive to keep a close eye on emerging developments. Some of them are emergent and dependent not wholly on us, but by the wishes of our Residents. We don't consider the TOS "completely sufficient" in difficult situations like this, but rather, one means, among other things (like first-use metadata) we hope to implement in the future. One exciting — and certainly challenging — aspect of Second Life, is how it's so ongoing, how things keep developing and growing. Some things turn out as forseen; others, much like prominent offline-world events, are a surprise.