Wagering Policy Timing: One Possible Explanation

This is just speculation of course but I remembered something about July, 2007 being a significant date for the UIGEA (Unlawful Internet Gambling Enforcement Act of 2006) and pulled this old article out titled "Gambling and the Law®: Unlawful Internet Gambling Enforcement Act of 2006 Analyzed" © Copyright 2006, all rights reserved worldwide. (Gambling and the Law® is a registered trademark of Professor I Nelson Rose, www.GamblingAndTheLaw.com. Note – This paper is copyrighted. You may quote it at length, republish it or distribute it for free only if you include this copyright and trademark information.) It has this reference to the date of July, 2007:

"§5364 Federal regulators have 270 days from the date this bill is signed into law to come up with regulations to identify and block money transactions to gambling sites. At this writing, President Bush had not yet signed this bill, but he will. So the regs will go into effect by the beginning of July 2007.

The regs will require everyone connected with a “designated payment system” to i.d. and block all restricted transactions. So all payment processors are suppose to have systems in place to prevent money from going to operators of illegal Internet gambling. The first step will undoubtedly be to take the credit card merchant code 7995 and expand it to all money transfers. Visa created the 7995 classification in 2001 to avoid having its credit cards used for online gambling. The federal government will order banks and all others involved with electronic money transfers to cease sending funds to any Internet operator who has a 7995 credit card merchant code. Any financial institution that follows the regs cannot be sued, even if it wrongfully blocks a legitimate transaction."

Coincidence?

If not this goes a long way to explain why this is happening now and why Linden Labs changed the policy. It would have very little to do with insulating itself from a criminal prosecution and much more to do with its ability to conduct transactions through banks. Note that banks can block transactions even if the Internet operator does not fall under the provisions of the UIGEA. They just have to have a good faith basis for believing that they might fall under the UIGEA.

Id say its a reasonble posibility.

Linden Labs concerned that Credit Cards will stop payments to them?

That would be pretty high on a priority list.

NO NO NO NO! Don't you people realize the evil conservative puritans have taken over LL and want to destroy imagination. It can't be that Philip Linden may lose money and face jail time if gambling is allowed.

/me goes off to get another layer of tinfoil for my hat.

Someone else suggested that it's not actually online gambling that is the issue but unregulated gambling and I think that could very well be the case. Online gambling prohibits credit card funded gambling, but you don't directly do that here.

I find it interesting that "loss of imagination" is being equated to the banning of casinos with a straight face in some areas of complaint.

It's especially funny when you see some of the builds that house casinos. The loss of imagination happened for many of these people LONG before LL got involved!!

One thing I wonder, though, how is LL going to police the casinos when they can't even police their 'broadly offensive' rules?? They have to rely on snitches to AR people for broadly offensive content. Is it going to be the same thing for casinos?

If that's the case I bet there will be plenty of speak-easys...which would actually be pretty cool! I wouldn't participate in it since I have too much to lose to risk being banned, but the idea is pretty cool.

I'm totally with you on this one Squeeze..if only they had built a Moulin Rouge or something with some imagination.

yes but see if Second Life becomes marked as a "online gambling site"

Then some credit card providers will feel they have no choice but to deny all charges to Secondlife ..

Even by people who arent gamblers ..

Sorry Colette, what I meant was that it's maybe not online gambling that is the issue here, it's gambling full stop.

I'm not sure I've made my point any more clear here!

Way off course here but I thought that the Four Deuces sim and the design of the poker house was pretty nice. The sim was not designed just for poker. There are residential townhouses and stores, a museum, a central garden with a gazebo, a boardwalk with some non-gambling games to play, and a cafe with live music on occasion. They also often had a live DJ taking requests. The owners just happened to be poker afficianados and managed to make decent profit from hosting Texas Hold'Em Poker tables and Blackjack tables while having some fun in the process but they are builders too. It was a good example of how having a casino did not have to be disruptive to a sim or have to be the sole purpose of a sim. Now that gambling is prohibited they will probably convert the space for the casino house into something else like a night club which should not be too hard albeit less profitable. If you have time to take a peek drop by and let me know if you think the sim looks more akin to something nice and less akin to an ugly unimaginative monstrosity.

I wish a Linden would respond to this and let us know specifically what motivated them to institute the prohibition on gambling and to do so at this particular time because if it is because of the institution of federal regulations affecting incoming funds to Linden Labs from US banks then it will quiet a lot of speculation as to why this happened and what the future holds in terms of future policy changes.

LOL id settle for them just being clear on what rules are actually in place.

Im not ready for them to try an communicate their motives in the same muddy and confusing way they do the rules.

Has it hit anyone yet?

With this act of banning virtual gaming involving L$ in its product Linden Labs has made a defacto admission that Linden Dollars are indeed a true currency. And, as such, L$ will shortly become subject to all income and taxing regulations regarding said “real world” currencies; throwing the door open wide to taxation and regulation by every country in the world.

They can no longer stand on the long held (and difficult to challenge) position that Linden Dollars are just cyber game licensed tokens and, in and of themselves, have no value.

The "dyke" is broken; the flood is on the way. Watch as the “wave” washes away LL when it gets far enough inland.

By this one act LL has destroyed itself. It will just take a little bit of time for the "scavengers" that are the varied and numerous world government taxing entities to sniff out and devour the wounded carcass.

RIP SL

Uh huh .. I've been involved in SL just about nine months and already I've seen its obituary written six or seven times over various issues, and I understand it had already happened several times before that.

Some people just don't seem to be happy unless they can predict impending doom.

I don't want to feed into your paranoia, Chris...but tinfoil doesn't work anymore.

"They" have new technology that they got from alien visitors...you can't hide any more!

I done all I can in SL, and so far the most enjoyable thing to do was to play a virtual Gaming device while chatting with the few friends I have here.

Take the Games out of the Game and I find it much easier to use MSN, AOL ect. to chat with my few friends. No lag either.

I remember when I wouldn't dare play a Gaming device online or in SL, to play for no gain or the chance to lose, takes all the fun away from winning.

Like I said, I had done everything else till' my avatar turned blue.

There is no REAL income coming from SL, unless you actually made a Gaming device that sold well.

I don't understand why our pennies have to be nitpicked, and then forced to use them for things other than fun and enjoyment.

Woo woo I just bought a box o' fun, wee fun...see me have fun...wee weee >:

(who took the BBS code out of the BBS?)

.....


This made me very, very sad.

In my opinion - its not the UIGEA or the FBI that has brought this on. Its all the corporations and big clients and the idea of making SL mainstream and politically correct to attract all those BIG guns. The big guys TuT TuT the Casinos, well Casinos must go to make the prospective/current client happy.

Here is an interesting note that involved the perfectly legal business of prostitution in New Orleans in 1917. Thousands of folks made their living and supported their families, fed and schooled there children, and supported their local economy through this completely legal endeavor. In the matter of one month - all these people were thrown out of work and all their property that had taken decades to build up made completely valueless. Why, because one man decided that even though it was legal - it wasn't "right" that these people do this. Does this story sound familiar?

THE STORY OF STORYVILLE

During the Civil War, the occupying Union Army found the bawdy houses to their liking and a string of them opened along the old basin canal. In the 1870’s, New Orleans’ most famous madame, Josie Arlington, formally opened her own bordello in this neighborhood.
Around the turn-of the-century, Alderman Sidney Story proposed an ordinance to rid the better residential neighborhoods of the bordellos. The sporting houses were then restricted to a single area on the far side of the French Quarter. Ironically, the area came to be called “Storyville” after the alderman.

In Storyville, women such as “Countess” Willie Piazza and Josie Arlington ran pash and luxurious houses with oil paintings, fine wines and potted palms. Many of the houses were staffed by the madame’s stunning octoroon and quadroon “nieces”, who were usually girls whose families had fallen on hard times. The popularity of female Creoles of color in the bordellos caused many old-line Creole families to send their strictly raised daughters to convents until they were old enough to marry.

When World War I began, Josephus “Tea Totaling” Daniels, Secretary of the Navy, threatened to close down the New Orleans naval base if Storyville was not shut down.

Because of this, the district was officially closed in 1917 and prostitution once again became a clandestine activity.

Most of the area of Storyville was torn down in the 1930’s to make way for the Iberville Housing Project.

RIP SL

I am friends with 2 people who make their main RL income from SL, and I am aware of many more.

I'm sure they are...
People with the appropriate skills and boocoo time can do quite a bit...
a musician and sound engineer on the other hand like me, bla...worthless...
But, that's a different discussion.

Not necessarily. It could just as easily be argued that they are proactively protecting themselves in case a government agency makes that determination for them. Surely one of these days the IRS is going to take a good hard look at this issue, and make a legal determination one way or the other.

And until that happens, it's still a very real possibility that PayPal and credit card companies would refuse to process payments to and from Linden Labs, acting under the same concerns.


.

I make a few hundred USD a month personally (on average), am very good RL friends with someone that makes $2000USD or more per month, and personally know several others that make much more than that.

NONE of the people I mentioned make Gaming devices. Most of them still have "day jobs". None of them are the "big timers".

You've never bothered to check the actual numbers, have you? There may not be thousands of people making big bucks, but there's significant money being made in SL, when you add it all up.


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Hear hear!

He's talking about gamblers only, gamblers don't make much money in SL. Gambling in SL is a thousand times smaller than any real online casino. The only company that actually made quite a lot of money with SL gambling was LL, and that's why the FBI was watching them.

Is he? That wasn't, and still isn't, clear to me. It seems to me as if he's talking more generally than that.

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I don't think I understand this anymore...

I create things in Real Life that are tangible and aren't interpreted by binary codes.

I don't see what the fuss is about buying virtual stuff, and put in a virtual place with other people doing virtually the same thing, and creating a virtual world that has absolutely no consequence on real life.

NONE OF THIS IS REAL >:

It's imaginary...

Why can't I play my Imaginary Games?

So what, if I pluck down $5 a week into it.

What is going on when the people that make imaginary stuff make more money than someone that makes something REAL, It is driving me INSANE. Someone make me understand what happened.