What happens to our land if Second Life closes down?

As shaky as it is to believe in a wistful, shared dream...

...when weighed against such sureties as US 'social security' I'll take a crashing sim full of griefers any day.



Guts, vision, and nerves of steel. Or a felt-lined cubicle.

And in my experience, cubicle does not deliver...

Disappearing alts was covered in the Linden blog today...

"If you find that certain accounts have been locked out of logging in to Second Life and you believe you’ve have committed no violation, it’s probably because the account is in violation of Terms of Service section 2.1: You must establish an account to use Second Life, using true and accurate registration information."

There has already been a lawsuit filed sometime last fall but I don't have the ruling. Someone was banned from SL for questionable land practices and LL confiscated all his holdings which were substantial. The resident in question was a lawyer and sued for compensation stating that LL sold its server space as real property, etc. I think this lawsuit is what caused the tightening up of the TOS.

Anyone have the ruling on that case or is it still in process? It was filed in the eastern states somewhere.

It all appears to be an attempt to "clean it up". They opened the doors some 8 or 9 months ago and now have the get it all neat and tidy. But, apparently from the threads concerning "disappearing alts" it was poorly planned and implimeted............again.

You know, I'm so willing to give LL the benefit of the doubt.......but damn they make it hard. I don't know where SL will be a year from now..........but I ain't betting it will be what most of us hope it is.

I suspect the decentralisation into web services has a lot to do with the open source sim effort.

I think Elanthius is right to be worried about the land market in 12 months time. I've done some preliminary cost figures, and it could likely bring the monthly cost of private island sim costs down slightly below the cost of sims just before the private island rate hike - using some preliminary figures of what LL may charge for hookup combined with current costs of leasing a quad core gaming server with similar specs as a Class Five.

Will land be cheap... no. But there will be far less of an artificial scarcity for land with multiple companies providing sims.

The threat to the land market in open source comes in the fact that anyone could order a sim, and have it literally in a few days, from any variety of companies competing in the market to lease sims and entire servers - which would be four sims to a single server, with far lower setup charges - or perhaps even none.

LL will continue making money by acting as a registry charging for hooking into the grid, similarly to companies like Network Solutions/Verisign. The potential business there is huge if LL manages to get their act together.

he found a vulnerability in the auction system didn't he, and took advantage of it for his own financial gain instead of reporting it to LL. didn't think he was a lawyer but maybe we're talking about different cases.

Edit: yes, you're right, he's a laywer. or rather an 'idiot lawyer' as a forum regular describes him over at second citizen:
http://forums.secondcitizen.com/showthread.php?t=3718

I thought it was more "ambulance chaser"? What happened to that case anyway, it all went very quiet.

Latest I can find on his website (http://www.chescolawyers.com/) seems to be a beg for money. Pardon me for not feeling any sympathy.

Broccoli

there doesn't seem to be any news at all since Dec 2006/Jan 2007. i have issues with LL's confiscation of assets from time to time (like what happened with satyr last year), but as you say it's hard to feel sympathy for this guy given his actions.

I think it's safe to say that second life is going to be around for a long long time, despite what we may think due to some of their decisions. They have made a bunch of bad choices yet were still here aren't we? Possibly the only way they will close down is if something they do becomes illegal somewhere. Even then all they have to do is modify things and their good to go.

I am totally in agreement. In fact, I think this is just what is gonna happen BUT where is the country???

In my view Linden Labs is a pretty standard looking Internet Start Up.

They did their first Demo in 2002, looks to me like it came on stream and attracted a significant customer base in 2004 ish.

Linden Labs has been heavily financed and in my experience investors don't come in to change the world. They come in with a clear exit strategy and time frame in mind, and it looks a wee bit like they might be looking for some return soon.

Look at what's happened over the past few months.

1. Free accounts/No CC needed - Why? To ramp up numbers as quickly as possible.
2. Heavy spending on PR - Why? See point 1..
3. Open Source - strange if they are holding out hope of making money from a proprietry infrastructure.

Linden Labs admit themselves that they have a 90% churn rate. This means that out of the 1.7 million users who logged on over the past 2 months..there are probably around 170,000 who will come back... and if you look at the number of people actually signed in at any one time then I reckon they are punching no more than about 50,000 real active clients.

I'll let you take best guess on who actually pays tier but when you do the sums - even being optimistic...LL isn't making a lot of money - are they even profitable yet..?

Yeah, they have first mover advantage..still.. which would worry me some. First mover advantage, especially in software is usually gone pretty quickly if competitors see a viable market. My big worry would be why don't LL have people snapping at their heels yet.

All in all, I'm not an investment analyst, I like SL and I wish LL all the best. I do get the feeling that the honeymoon period is coming to an end soon and LL better make some cash or there will be some people taking their bankroll elsewhere.

My view is if you pay as much for an acre of SL land as you pay for an acre of RL land then you're off your rocker..

Just my two cents..

The Question : What happens to your land is SL closes down.

The Answer : It's gone baby gone.

The Next Question : Where do avatars go when they log out?

The question isn't "which country", it's "which countries". Highly unlilkely that they would ever consider abandoning San Francisco as their headquarters, at least in the foreseeable future. But they are definately going global, and will establish operational facilities in multiple countries. This, in my opinion, is the driving reason behind the various policy decisions in recent months. It's not a Disneyfication of Second Life. It's an acknowledgement that the grid cannot be operated as if it existed soley at 1100 Sansome Street, San Francisco, California, 94111, USA.

my thoughts are this..when you invest money to make money the first thing i do is pay myself back my intial investment that way i am only playing with profit money..
if you are buying a sim to have a sim and not worry about making a profit then it's a luxury..
just like renting anything you either use it or in the end lose it.