And the casinos come crashing down....

Yup. A limited and revocable license to use various aspects of the service. Zero rights.

I don't see the Casino's and their Corporate Lobbyists letting that happening, nor the states who own a lot of the Gambling outlets in many States. Vegas is already taking a big hit from the Asian Casino cities.

That is an incredibly naive view in my opinion. If I own a RL bar, and one of my customers commits a crime there, I am to blame for providing the place to committ the act, but he escapes culpability? While aiding and abetting is a possible offense, we are all responsible for what we do, just like RL, eevn though society seems to think otherwise. And please stop with the free speech nonsense. A private group, or company has no obligation to your free speech. Free speech pertains to Government hindering your expression thereof. The Providors can dictate everythging we say or do in their world. If we don't like it, there is the off button.

I say immediately following that sentence about free speech, with a FULL acknowledgement that the Lindens can decline any ad they want. MY POINT, seems pretty clear, that the act of suddenly declining casino ads does nothing to legally protect the Lindens from the actual act which legally could get them in hot water. The Lindex exchange. You see, the law is clear, you should read it, you cant be the middleman who cashes in chips from an online casino. That means, if you choose to trade lindens for dollars, you have an obligation to insure that they aren't monies from and illegal source like a virtual casino operating from a jurisdiction where it's illegal. The transaction is the legal point here, not culpability for others acts, but instead your own culpability for enabling that transaction.

AND BTW...

Like it or not, the US law as has been applied in the states in fact does not go after the players. That may seem like a mis application of the law to any sane person, but thats what is happening. They are going after the people who make the transaction, the middle man, which is why so many companies had to, as a direct result of the law, change their business practices. I think the law is stupid. That people should not be restrained from spending their money gambling if they want. But the BIG GAMBLING LOBBBY has paid off the politicians to the point that they have no shame whatsoever.

I just think the Lindens are doing this backwards. The obvious thing that is going to happen here is that casinos will have to create their own payment scheme's and hope they dont get arrested. If Linden Labs wants to remain in business I would bet they are going to have rethink the entire Lindex exchange and currency. We also had a tlak here with a lawyer quoting from Blacks law dictionary concerning the question of whether the Linden is a currency. You see the in house counsel thinks it isn't, but I have to disagree. In fact for a lark I bought 500 Lindens form the exchange today. Here is the report I got in my account page.

2007-04-07 13:50:33 LindeX Currency Buy $2.18

So you see, for a company who says that the Linden isn't a currency, they fact report my purchase as a purchase for LINDEX CURRENCY!! LMAO


I will probably be shot for saying this, but we may be on the brink of the first virtual run on the banks. It really should have been expected, history tells us that economies in thier infancy are a risky business.

Thats exactly what I see happening. Each Casino could create thier own "currency" that can't be redeemed for anything of value. lol.. sorta takes a big hunk of the fun out of it, but you won't go to jail either for running one.

Seems like a pretty nice idea, though impractical to implement. The system can't tell one scripted object from the next. There are many thousands of objects that receive and pay Linden dollars in the course of "legitimate" transactions. How would the system know to flag gaming payouts red, and rental cube refunds, JEVN payments to retailers as green?

Also, if you take your gaming winnings, and purchase virtual goods with them, your winnings are as a matter of course translating into somebody else's financial gain in the real world. In the end, I could take all my gambling winnings, buy bogus product from an alt, and my alt could convert those Lindens to cash. Unless the red money stays red forever, in which case I as a business owner in Second Life no longer have any motivation to develop a product for sale. I would have no inclination to create and sell content for Linden dollars I could never convert to US dollars, because my customers won the $L they spent on my product playing higher or lower at Joe's Casino and Hotdog Stand.

Basically Gaybot is describing a system where in SL you can have a Computer game that simulates a casino with no money changing hands - just points.


This would be legal.

Course with no money involved it takes a lot of motivation away for gamblers and casino owners.

Which kind of destroys the whole "Its not about the money" argument

Well, the points could be redeemed for fabulous prizes, just like Dave and Buster's.

BTW..Who is GAYBot?
Just make Lindens made through Gambling not removeable from the world. You can buy stuff, pay tier, rent a sanitized escort , whatever.

nah those tacky places like SL casinos fabulous prizes are low quality freebies anyhow

yuck

That brings up a good point

Most SL casinos could stand to get banned on the Tacky factor alone.

To interject a more general observation her: This whole brouhaha exists because of the prevalent concept of a "victimless crime." Who gets hurt in gambling? MAYBE the gambler, but in general he/she is not complaining and doesn't feel like a victim or claim to be one unless the cards are marked or the dice loaded or the game otherwise rigged. Mostly, people gamble for excitement: adrenaline rush at what they consider an affordable price. True, there are gambling addicts, but there are sex addicts too, and no-one is making sex illegal (at the moment, anyway).

Gambling is not the only victimless crime. Most any personal "vice" qualifies. Essentially everybody reading this has a practice or weakness that is illegal somewhere in the world.
In fact, if no-one in particular or society in general is suffering harm from an action, society (and the laws protecting it) has no legitimate justification for banning that action. There are only self-appointed moralists and other assorted scum who have decided they have the right and duty to tell others what they may or may not do and act on that. THEY are the enemy.

As long as the concept of a victimless crime - an action where no-one is hurt except possibly the person(s) performing the act who are willing to pay whatever the cost is of doing it - is generally accepted in the world, the kind of nonsense people are railing at here is going to come up again and again. And SL is going to have to deal with that nonsense.

Don't blame LL for restricting your rights in SL; in general they seem to be trying to keep things as loose and free as they can. Blame the concept of victimless crime, and the zealots, lobbyists and demagoguing politicians who will exploit it for their own purposes. They create the conditions and the laws in which SL must find a way to survive.

There is hope, but it is necessary to do something about it. Prohibition came and went. Free-thinking became acceptable. Sexual titillation in the media achieved legality to the point of becoming overdone - my apologies to those who don't like, but I personally rather like seeing naked ladies all over the place. Even homosexuality has become socially tolerable. So, as I said, there is hope. But don't attack LL for this problem; that is not where the problem lies. Address RL. THAT is where the problem lies.

While this is a good point. A lot of so called victimless crime - Isnt.


Once its all sorted out what is actually victimless crime and what supposed victimless crimes include exploitation, then Ill agree with your liberty for vice argument.

Its true theres not a huge effort to do that process going on. Thus were not making much progress.

Ask the families of compulsive Gamblers, or their employees after they embezzle the company away if Gambling is a Victimless Crime. Otherwise you do make valid points.

the fact that that is possible.

Is more disturbing than the Lindens doing it.

Hmm, I know LL has (or had, anyway) a policy of changing an avatar name that has offensive content. Perhaps the "gay" part of the name got reported on by someone?

Seeing as how the internal communication channels over in lalaland aren't exactly clear (the official blog has more than once backtracked on itself), I wouldn't be too surprised to find that it was one linden changing the name in line with that old policy, and teh one you contacted not being aware of that old policy.

Agrees.

I actually went to grade school with a girl whose first name was Gay. More PC nonsense if you ask me.

this is important enough to derail this topic

I agree this exploit has to go.

And give the power to the lindens a lot of people would like to change their names.

LOL

If I were to make gaming devices that paid no money.. A Freeroll type system, and I wanted to advertise that, I couldn't because the Lindens are in trouble with the Government perhaps and have banned my ability to list my freeroll casino in the serch system. There, think i got it out.

It is the Lindens who allowed the Lindex to possibly violate the Gaming laws, not me who might want to attract traffic with free poker night or some such event.

Get it? This is the kind of twisted reality you get when you turn a blind eye, which the lindens have for some time now.

There is no indication that I have seen that this is the case. It seems to be a carefully considered preemptive move, not a response to being in any trouble.

I don't think they are in trouble yet. I think this is the goverments way of saying "yes we are watching you" and letting SL know they need to take some responsiblity and start cleanning up their own back yard which they have now started to do.

Hmmm victimless? I bet you would feel victimless when you discover the machines you have been feeding over a few months have been scripted to milk your bank balance to the max.