Another ban-this suggestion: Full perm reselling!

oh yeah

thats a real improvement.

Which Linden came up with that bright Idea?

I have to agree. As the clique goes: The roads to hell are paved with good intentions.

Jami, try to calm down, your tone will get you in trouble. It's ok to disagree but not threaten other users.

I think the biggest lesson here is "take it slow" if you're a newbie. When I bought my first land (2.5 months after getting into SL), I had a neighbor who paid someone $800L's to build him a house. Later that day, he was on my land chatting, and he mentioned he wasnt really happy with the house, but was fairly broke now that he'd spent $800 of the $1250 he got for signing up. I proceeded to give him folder after folder of free houses, and he was like OMG, and didnt realize that there was a freebie market out there. All too often, people get in-world and go overboard rather than take a month or two to learn the intricate nature of SL. Often times, if I see a newb and we're chatting, the advice I give is to hang out, learn, talk to people, etc. before making any decisions about buying objects or land. As a newb, you learn about freebies fairly quick, and when I did, I was on a freebie hunt daily for the first few weeks. After seeing BIAB's, I, by then, had realized that they were just boxed up freebies being sold by talentless people who apparently didnt like to camp/thought they could do better.

Lets look at this logically. Of course we don't like freebies being sold for money, but how do you expect linden lab to deal with the sheer amount of freebies being sold? If you expect them to go on a banning spree all over the grid, I'm sorry to inform you that it isn't going to happen. Most of the lindens I've met are always busy in a quicksand of IM's and loads of linden stuff (whatever it is lol). So i don't think this would be top priority to them. I think this is something we as residents need to handle by trying to prevent it from happening in the first place if possible.

*floored*

I met people in world who are very worried about all this full perm and freebie selling stuff. They have the idea of creating a group for people who want to fight this.

I think uniting these people can be a good idea. But I have on ideas on how to actually fight these scams. Well, none other than informing people so far.

I have bought some freebies myself over the months. I am very sorry I did. It were never expensive items, so it has not really damaged me, but I hurts me I gave money to someone who purposely set up a scan to gain from my (and many people's) ignorance.

I always try and help new players and give ideas to people in general, (which I've been screwed over at one time by the result of that, but I keep plugging along no matter how successful she become over it and has turned her back on me pretending I don't exist now), but these "snakes in the grass" are only out for the buck they could careless about who their screwing over. They have no conscious. I couldn't sleep at night knowing I have something for sale I didn't create. Their not contributing a thing to SL!

ONLY $99 like that is suppose to be a deal where it all started out by someone getting it for nothing. I recently saw the Linden's 4 Houses In A Box being sold for ONLY $299 Then each house was being sold separately for ONLY $99
The ONLY $10 boxes and stores are just has bad. Some are just blatantly out right selling free creations that have been around for a long time.

It just saddens me to know that new players are getting ripped off by these "snakes in the grass". I know there isn't anything that can be done about. If we keep showing our dislike about it long enough new players will get the message about these "snakes in the grass". The bigger SL grows the more back stabbing and swindling and corruptness grows out of pure greediness.

What the OP is addressing has Always been a problem with Freebie objects, and the Third of the Three permissions. The Permissions read as follows:


Now if you Put a Check in the third box, it Reads completely as "Next Owner Can Resell/Give away"

Here is the Bone of Contention, the Third permission Explicitly Gives permission to Resell the Object. IF it is the creators intent that it should be a Freebie, then In addition to that Perm, the "COPY" Option should NEVER be Checked, if copy isn't checked then the new owner could Yard sale their Freebie Once, and Once Only. The Creator may Intend it to be a Freebie, but people Have EXPRESS Permission to Sell it if that third Option is chosen. If it's copy, they have EXPRESS Permission to Sell it More Than Once. What the Creators Intent is, Versus. the Express Permission Given is the Problem. IF it ever went to a Court in RL, the Judge would favor the reseller. Why? because the creator Told him in Writing he May Sell the Object AND Granted him the ability to make more than one. Whatever he, the creator intended, MUST be reflected by what is written, But the Options Given by the Lindens for Permissions are limited.




Ideally, they SHOULD Divorce "Resell", and "Give Away", Granting FOUR Options, Not just Three. If the Creator wanted an item to remain a Freebie, he leaves "Modify" Unchecked, and Checks "Copy", and "Give away". The New owner can Now Give the object away. . In Order to prevent it being sold through a Vendor, it could be arranged that this permission Not allow you to Place it Within an Object, Or, having done so, the Give away permission becomes Neutralized. The Money Boxes remain Greyed, The ONLY time they should light up is if the final "Resell" Option is Checked.

If this sounds like a Solution, How about if Content Creators Start Snowing the Lindens Under with Feature Requests for an Upcoming version. It would be Easy Enough to Organize, Mall owners could Get their vendors On side, vendors who place at more than one mall can get other Mall owners on side. it's worth trying.

Angel.

Considering what Chip informed us about the Linden Idea on improving permissions -

Id just as soon they left the current system in place forever.

Its not perfect - but the alternative sounds worse.

Implementing any new system of permissions is likely to cause initial problems and glitches and maybe even to introduce new sneaky ways to fool the system. So I fear it will only increase the number of products to fall victim to malicious resellers.

What I would really want is the idea of Fair Play to be re-introduced to SL. SL used to be a place where creative people did their own thing and were able to make a (tiny) buck by selling their creations.

I think there would be mass revolt if they ever attempt to implement a forced open source system (and as far as I know that idea isn't dead yet). I can understand what they were thinking though - that it would lower the barrier for people without prior experience and give them an easier way to get started creating without having to reinvent the wheel. It would spur development, but at the expense of people's livelihoods. Forced altruism turns the most innovative and prolific creators into slaves of the collective, which gives the Ayn Rand fan in me a serious case of hives.

It would make more sense if SL wasn't linked to real world finance and was just a sandbox playground, but even then I'd still think it was dead wrong. People get angry enough at having their freebies resold. Can you imagine if people could resell your commercial products without your consent? *shudder* Having said all that, I still think we should continue to press LL to revamp the permissions system. Restrictive permissions "wrappers" that expire would be a fine option to have as long as no one was forced to go that route. Making "give away" and "resell" into seperate options is a no brainer, and there are lots of other things they could do to help open up secondary markets without taking away people's ability to keep their work proprietary.

I suppose sale of freebies is an especially offensive and easily observed practice, but in perspective it's just one of the vast array of SL merchant behaviors justifying caveat emptor. (For example, there are scripts sold every day that are positively criminal in their lagtastic inefficiency, or that open gaping security holes for the user, or that invite ToS violations. And then there are the prim-happy furniture makers, clothing designers who can't match seams, skin designers who sell no-mod zero-alpha skins with no refunds, just to name a few ways for buyers to burn themselves through no malice on the part of the seller.)

So I think a huge amount of buyer dissatisfaction--including but not limited to the "freebie sales" problem--could be alleviated with some well-thought-out consumer educational information, perhaps at Orientation stations.

Specific to the "freebie" thing, though, would be some better way of indexing, searching, and publicizing what's freely available from legitimate sources. I don't know of any way for somebody who wants to release an item under Creative Commons (for example) to make that item readily found, and hence not so easily mistaken for a product that should be priced for sale. (Well, there's the Scripting Library, but it doesn't take much search to find almost any script in that library for sale in somebody's in-world shop or on one of the web merchant collectives. Assuming those items are selling, there must be a lot of script-buyers who don't search the Library.)

Unfortunately, I have no clue how such a clearinghouse of public domain and copyleft items could be implemented effectively. But maybe somebody does.

Right problems identified. Wrong solutions.

First, there's a difference between business-in-a-box and freebie items that are resold. The first is that, for a legitimate business-in-a-box, the person acquiring the business-in-a-box is acquiring the rights to sell those items. Unless the right to resale is specifically limited, the re-seller may put on the item whatever price he or she feels the market may support. That's not unethical; that's capitalism.

By contrast, some items are made freebies with the intention that they remain free to everyone. Sale of those items, without permissoin to resale, is unethical and probably illegal as violating the copyrights of the original provider. (And no, someone who makes their creation available for free does not lose the copyright to that creation. The creation is available for no cost, but subject to the use restrictions of the creator.)

With a legitimate business-in-a-box, if customers overpay for items, it's often due to lack-of-information, not just about the product but the Second Life economy in general. There just simply is no good dissemination of consumer information in Second Life. Comparison shopping is difficult; try-before-you-buy is sometimes difficult; and Linden Labs offers nothing at all in terms of consumer protection mechanisms. None of those problems with the Second Life economy are the fault of the creators of the businesses-in-a-box, or the resellers. None of those problems will be fixed by banning the business-in-a-box.

As to the freebies that are resold, that too goes to lack of consumer information, but also to the fact that, as a truly practical matter, there is no enforcement of intellectual property in Second Life. The selling of freebies is an issue that could be handled by enforcement of existing policies as to intellectual property without the creation of new policies.

Not all businesses-in-a-box have low-quality items. Like any product, individual quality varies.

The quality of products doesn't depend on whether they are sold directly by the creator. You can still find low-quality items available directly at a creator's store.

I have bought quite a few businesses-in-a-box. One reason is that, resale aside, I can make a lot of personal use from full-permission items that I acquired for only $25L anyway. The second reason is that I can use them for resale on a value-added basis- for example, I can animate but I don't have the hang of making furniture yet, will I can make my own animations and sell them along with furniture I get from business-in-a-box. (At least in theory- upon rez, none of the furniture I have bought from businesses-in-a-box seem to be of high enough quality for me to use in such a fashion; but I may have spent $75L total on that chance, not really a big deal to me.)

In fact, the real issue of the cheap businesses-in-a-box are not that the final purchasers of the products get ripped off- it's the ones buying the businesses-in-a-box thinking that they are actually going to pull a fully profitable business out of a box without having to do extra work.

Banning the business-in-a-box isn't going to help anything. The deeper issues are consumer information, consumer protection, and intellectual property protection. Those are the issues which I think Linden Labs needs to address.

Couldn't they just add one little box to check next to Mod/Copy/Tranfser called "Distribute Freely" that would grey out all the resell options such as Price and Original/Copy/Contents in the same way that checking off the Mod box greys out the options under Edit/Object ?
That way anyone could distribute the object freely but never be allowed to assign a price to them.
How hard would that be?
I mean it wouldn't help with a lot of the crap that is out there now due to permissions exploits nor would it address textures, but it would start to curb the problem. Wouldn't it?

Would work great -


But that wouldnt let them force you to lose control of your creations after 1 year, so obviously it must be a bad idea.

The official viewer makes it trivial to get the key of any texture on any face of a prim, you even have helpful "how to" posts in the archives for it here when people felt the need to go into detail about all the other ways textures can be reused/stolen during the copybot "crisis".

Beyond that, the only reason you can't see the prim parameters on no mod objects or objects you don't own is because the viewer has a simple "if (canmodify)" check. It would take anyone less than a minute to comment all of that out.

The only people you annoy by having no mod are actual customers, anyone who wants to copy/steal something doesn't even have to own/buy it to do so.

"Resell" and "Give Away" are linked because you can't give something away without being able to resell it at the same time.

If they were split, you'd put the items into a plywood box and put that up for sale. If they were able to block that, you'd use a networked vendor so everything is kept in a prim that isn't for sale.

There's just no way to stop something that is both copy and transfer from being infinitely resold one way or the other (Obviously taking them to court over it would do it).