lindens latest blog: dob a neighbour

Related in so far as it concerns the TOS

http://www.secondlifeherald.com/slh/2007/05/unconscionable_.html

I just question their motives. If no media storm over ageplay had arisen, if the Corporate entities had not come waving their wallets would they still be looking to clean up SL? I doubt it to be truthful. I'm a jaded cynic, I know that. Some will say this is a natural business decision, and I would agree. Then please stop with the self serving patronization about makins SL Safe for Children, or how the Community finds something broadly offensive. I don't buy it.

Curses! I've been discovered!

DISNEY LIFE!

And it would almost be worth it to see the back of this bunch of tossers!

I think someone's gettin ready to sell their game off.

Or looking to start dodging legal bullets.

1) It is NOT possible to "rape" someone in SL. Rape is defiend by the victim being UNWILLING. Quite frankly, anyone who says they were "raped" in SL is an idiot. (Turn the computer off stupid).

2) What LL, and others, may concider "broadly offensive", others may concider "art". Erotic pictures have always pushed this envelope. SL is simply another media of expresion.

In the hopes that a Linden may actually read this:
LL has just made SL more UNSAFE. As stated by many, LL just put another weapon in the hands of griefers. False reports will be flying and I suspect many more innocents will be harmed by this example of poor managment.

If LL thinks of nothing else, think of the negative impact this will have on the PR. It may seem like a good step to try to deter "deviant" behavior, but is having serious negative impacts.
a) Residents are angry/frustrated/annoyed.
b) Many many posts/forums/blogs that new crews (nad prospective investors) look at will be detailing that disent.
c) By even mentioning it, LL brings it MORE into the focus. If people are only finding "sex" in SL, tell them to STOP SEARCHING FOR IT! I can go days in SL and never see such. If you look for it, you will find it. Try looking for something else.

~Jessy

Having barely survived the great mass deletion of hundreds of journals on LiveJournal, I find this decision of LL's most intriguing. There must be something in the air on the 'net these days.

However, LiveJournal learned that they could not make repressive policy financially viable (the money lost from users was calculated to far outweigh any lost advertisers and court battles with the wing-nuts) and it's my hope that LL will learn this as well.

I'm willing to give LL credit for trying and knowing what needs to be done, but their execution fails on a massive scale. I look at LL policy announcements as Beta versions. They put out their first draft, garner a reaction, and then flesh it out appropriately.

I'm not willing to doom and gloom this yet. I sent them a letter last night expressing my feelings (same as almost everyones here). I'm sure they know loud and clear by now that they need to release Policy version 1.0b soon.

In the meantime, I continue doing what I'm doing in SL and enjoying myself.

Peace.

LL is going to do this no matter how much people b*tch about it on the forums. They are trying to draw in more corporate dollars and probably feel that they have to clean the place up in order to do that. And yes, they're going to step on some people's rights by doing this. In one way I'm glad because I prefer PG areas, and now steps will be taken more quickly to get rid of inappropriate items in those areas. But on the other hand, I do feel badly for those of you who want to participate in mature activities in mature areas as consenting adults, who feel threatened and limited now because of this. And I wonder what they're going to do next to keep Second Life "safe".

The important thing is, you need to do whatever you can to protect yourself under this new regime. I think everyone should go in right now and state in their profile that they are over 18 years old, and that any activities they are seen participating in are fully consensual. Get a security orb if you have to, to keep people out of your bedroom 700 feet up in the sky. Of course nosy folks could always sit just outside the range and cam in, but a security orb will make it less likely that they'll stick around long enough to be offended.

yeah, my money is on that.

based on the events of the past few weeks, I say the sooner the server code is open sourced - or at least licensed to third party hosting companies - the better.

a platform creator having full, godlike control, over their platform and its entire userbase is proving to be more undesirable and divisive as time goes by. could you imagine CERN banning pornography from the interwebs because that's not what they designed the WWW platform for? this kind of action by LL just makes me see SL as more of a game than a platform, which of course is not what King Philip wants at all.

with the sim market opened up to third-party hosting companies, at least not all of them would have a knee-jerk response to media exposés, and with regards to those that do - well at least we'd have a choice to shop elsewhere after they closed us down (even that would be better than bannination and seizure of all assets and $Ls). hell, promises of less censorship and more freedom to do what you want on your own sim would be a good way for these companies to compete with other sim providers.

Paging Pastor Martin Niemöller...

A lot of this blog post is no surprise. I also think *most* people would agree that they too don't wish to see any of the above within their Second Lives. I know I personally have no interest in sexual ageplay, rape/forced sex, or graphic violence.

This said, I know a unique way of handling this for me. I don't tend to go to places where such is going on. I'm not going to make any trips to Gorean sims, for example.

There is a part of me, though, that smiles at all this. When it was merely about sexual ageplay, there were few willing to point out the flaws in the arguments. Now we've gone down the slope a bit more, into other verboten categories, as well as leaving plenty of room for just about anything to be terms "broadly offensive."

As with us kids, it is likely that LLs belief is that there is a specific line - in the case of child avatars, it is obvious sexual acts, but you are largely okay up to that point. One could them assume that the same is true of these other categories as well: guns are okay, blowing someone up into a big chunky mess is not. sex play/BDSM/etc. is okay (in your home or some other appropriate venues), but depictions of forced sex (yes, I know: tp, log out, etc. Nevertheless, this would apply to any noob with a prim penis deloberately bumping you, I think) is not.

From the viewpoint of residents, who have a sizable pool of time adnd imagination to draw upon, that "specific line" is very broad, very blurred. Can a child avatar go "skinny dipping" or hug their in-world parent. Can someone be tied up (which usually requres some assent on the part of said avatar) in some master's dungeon? Can another someone get pushed across a sim in the combat sandbox?

Above this, who is the arbiter of this? We're based upon community standards, but who is giving these? Much like LieJournal recently, will we find our own "Warriors for Innocence" acting as a "vocal majority" (sic.) and helping reframe CS to their liking? I mean, most folks will not speak up and say "no, I don't really care one way or another about ____" -- it is only extremists who make up vocal groups: and a lot of people with too much time on their hands and a radical agenda yell the loudest.

If a report is filed, who decides? What sort of recourse is available? When someone sees me in a public place and says "zOMG! Ageplayer!" and files a baseless report, how do I fight it? Can I?

Mari

I believe it was in March that they first teetered at the top of this slippery slope when advertising ageplay was banned. Most of us saw this coming, but gobs of people told us we were over-reacting.

The imagination is a dangerous thing.

The imagination must be contained.

The imagination must be regulated.

The imagination must be repressed.

The imagination must be reported.

Oh Brave New World, With Such People In It.

I think I said this would happen after they banned ageplay a few months back. I remember posting the following poem, and suggested that next would be the furries, goreans and BDSM communites. Although I had no interest in ageplay, I stood up for it, because I knew other types of activity would be next.



I'm amazed that they reckon they have a 24/7 team to respond to ARs of this nature, when all participants must by definition be consensual yet don't ever seem to do anything about acts of (non-sexual) violence perpetuated upon innocent people.

On a personal level, I now have a dilemma. I'm involved in BDSM, yet I also have considerable assets within SL - land and cash, mainly - that I simply can't afford to lose. I also have a business, with plans well underway for expansion. Do I risk those in pursuit of an activity I enjoy in private with a consenting partner, or do I treat SL simply as a cash cow and go elsewhere to actually enjoy myself?

I think we would all be a lot happier if said team was doing in world customer support. Personally, I miss the Lindens....

if there were boundaries then there was no freedom to begin with. what a lot of people seam to not understand is that there is no middle ground, there are no limits, no exceptions, we are either standing at the top of the hill with our freedom of expression in hand, or we're sliding down the hill watching it get farther away.

So... LL will actively intervene 24 x 7 to ban anyone reported for sex or violence, even if it is between consenting adults. Even though no one gets hurt at all by that. But when people steal L$, in-world content, or land, that is merely "a dispute between residents" and LL refuses to get involved? Land griefers who destroy the value of property with rotating signs on 16M parcels and extortion-priced plots, or people who build a field full of flaming toilet plungers next to my perfectly landscaped Victorian home and demand millions of L$ to go away are just fine, but tying up my consenting adult lover isn't?

If they want to ban people for passing out RL photos of kiddie porn, that is fine with me. I disagree that an "avatar portrayal" of sex involving a child is kiddie porn, but I can even live with them clearly banning that. Even though I know people that will definitely leave SL if consentual sexual Ageplay RP between adults is banned.

But the rest of that post? Sexual violence, graphic violence, or merely "broadly offensive behavior...", AS DEFINED BY WHO? Jerry Fallwell?

Is participating in a combat sim banned now? It's definitely graphic violence, and I personally find it broadly offensive and objectionable. Guess I better head over to Jessee and Rausch, and AR all participants, and AR the Linden Lab staff too for owning and managing those terrible, violent places.

Is it "safe" to be out as a Lesbian, or a Wiccan, or any other social minority that some hate groups find "broadly offensive"?

Welcome to Bizzarro World. Where "safe" is defined as "Rated G - No sex or violence", but does NOT include being safe from real-world financial losses. Lie, cheat and steal to your heart's content, just don't distrub the morality police!

If this ruling stands, the Goreans, the BDSM community, the gays and lesbians, and for that matter just about all sexual or violent business in SL better pack up, cash out, and move on. Because the Inquisition is waiting for all of them.

I just wonder how much Disney has offered for SL, provided it can be purged of all sex and violence first?

*Heads for the sims she is building, locks the sim borders so no one can enter the entire 5-sim Estate but herself, her client, and the sim owner, and hopes to wait out the crystalnacht of SL.*

Ceera, welcome to the new definition of "safe and welcoming for all."

A week or two ago there was a notice about Second Life being investigated by the German government for a depiction of two adults having sex while posing as child avatars. We in this country have no control over what Germany or any other country does to SL. We are a global community, and if you live in Germany and dissagree with this type of "monitoring" then it is up to you to speak out through your own channels. American standards of free speech don't apply here, not that we don't have our own problems here.

Now I think about it, it's just as well I delayed ordering my islands until next week - the only reason I didn't order them this week was because I changed my mind about their names... I might now be changing my mind about ordering them at all.

I can see how open-sourcing the server software or at the very least licensing it to third party companies who then host their own server facilities might resolve some of the current craziness. Our oh-so-vocal moral minority could host their own servers with pg-welded underpants, a sword'n'sorcery server facility, a gangsta server facility, a furry server facility, a sci-fi server facility, etc., etc. Whether they're all hooked up in a common virtual world is another matter altogether.

Could you please explain to me the similarities between expression against an oppressive government and, oh, say, child pornography? Both are expression. That's pretty much where the similarity ends as far as I can see - please enlighten me.

Oh great, ban me now.

I'm five foot zero inches tall and 95 pounds in real life. My AV (and alt) are five foot tall. I get called a child AV and an ageplayer at least once a day because I choose to be my real height in SL. Most people are way taller then they are in RL so I'm seen as a child. Better start banning people who have short AVs specially if they enjoy SL sex. Let's start banning based on race too since some races tend to be shorter than others.
Ageplay is an act, it's pretty obvious the way they look and act like pre teens or younger and it has little to do with actual size.
Some say my features make me look younger than 18 (and yes in RL I'm told sometimes I look younger than my 21 years because of my height) so you better start removing skin makers who make delicate looking female skins because I like looking delicate and soft and god forbid a women looking anything less than a sweaty linebacker amazon with tattoos all over her body and breasts the size of basketballs. And you men better not look too thin, better be safe and look like human wedges. Get yourself pumped up and make your head look really small so your muscles look even bigger.

How about just make second life only for basketball players?

*Shakes his head*

While it's too soon to see where this will all eventually lead, I'm certainly not happy with the idea of LL sanctioned moral witch hunts and that blog post seems to be asking just for that.

I guess I'm not surprised that things are going down this road though. Sexual content is often the first thing to appear with a new technology or media environment, but it gets pushed to the wayside once that environment goes mainstream. SL is starting to go mainstream and the inevitable pushing the sexual content that was part of its start off of SL has begun.

I could see SL splintering into a general SL world and a second second service to cater to more mature audiences. The second service would likely be run by another company using technology licensed from SL.

It's odd... I was feeling pretty safe before, but Daniel Linden changed that. Now I can't stop worrying if some of my wares probably fall under "other broadly offensive content". I call myself an idiot that I ever chose to rely on my SL income, and invested all my time and work enthusiasm (not to speak of a shitload of money).

How can a virtual world be safe if every griefer is encouraged to scan the grid for everything they remotely dislike and denunciate the content creator / land owner, who will then be immediately banned and lose his money, his income and the land he acquired under the assumption that he'd not only own it but also be allowed to create "other broadly offensive content" there (offensive by the standards of a christian fundamentalist, who will surely be among those people who take this call to arms serious)?

Ironically, I just finished designing a burqa. I'll put it up for sale this afternoon. Heck, I think it'd be hilarious just to GIVE it away and get as many people to wear them as possible, and show up to a Linden town hall.

This thing is INSANE. One really cool thing about SL was that it is flavored with a little potential "danger" if you wanted it, or totally PG if you didn't. Aren't we grown up enough to make up our minds which we want?