Prokofy Neva

What a terrible analogy and what a whiney entitlement-happy freak you are, Tateru.

Hotels do not supply you tools and a matrix to create art and start your own business. They are just places where you sleep and have a meal temporarily. It's not only apples and oranges; it's oranges and toothbrushes.

There.com closed because it costs too much to keep demanding people like you online, entertained and functional without wrecking the place. The customer service state is not endless. It's expensive, just like international justice, and not a tenth as effective, and that's like saying it's like in the minuses.

Virtual worlds are interactive media. They attempt the impossible, to make it possible for you to create and share media on their platform and to enable both you and them to make money.

I think it would be likely possible to grab an opensim and make your own grid and own TOS. I'd be fascinated to see what you came up with when you would be forced to move from the extreme leftist opposition to practical work. Talk about recreating the wheel!

Furthermore, you're revealing your hand here as in fact being up to only an extremist and tendentious agenda -- if this TPV were really "only" a reiteration of the TOS and therefore "redundant," why, you'd have no reason not to sign it.

Again, let's keep a focus here. What on earth is your problem in registering code and agreeing not to violate copyright, grief people, and invade privacy?!

Er, no, Tateru, literalism and Fisking doesn't cut it on obvious things like this especially. Any intelligent person can go read the TOS and see that it is necessary but not sufficient, and that it is not a blank check to make any viewer as long as it doesn't violate the TOS in some unspecified way.

First of all, the TOS is for Linden Lab's viewer. It governs the use of that viewer on those servers. Here's what 4.2 says, *about Linden Lab's software*:

4.2 You agree to use Second Life as provided, without unauthorized software or other means of access or use. You will not make unauthorized works from or conduct unauthorized distribution of the Linden Software.

It does not *specifically* in its intent and scope govern the creation, deployment and use of third-party viewers; it governs the use of LL's software. Hello! Can you tell that obvious fact?!

Indeed, it says this, "You agree not to create or provide any server emulators or other software or other means that provide access to or use of the Servers without the express written authorization of Linden Lab."

If anything, that gives the Lindens a hook to demand a registry of third-party developers that are cleared against a set of guidelines -- which is essentially what the TPV *is*.

Furthermore, 4.2 says this, creating a subset of the definitions of "software connecting to the Servers" as follows:

"Notwithstanding the foregoing, you may use and create software that provides access to the Servers for substantially similar function (or subset thereof) as the Viewer; provided that such software is not used for and does not enable any violation of these Terms of Service. Linden Lab is not obligated to allow access to the Servers by any software that is not provided by Linden Lab, and you agree to cease using, creating, distributing or providing any such software at the request of Linden Lab. You are prohibited from taking any action that imposes an unreasonable or disproportionately large load on Linden Lab's infrastructure."

If this paragraph were sufficient, we wouldn't see the rampant griefing, stealing, invasion of privacy and general havoc of load on the servers by all kinds of rogue third party viewers.

It's also a matter of principle in civil law countries in particular to have sub-legislative acts, regulations, etc. that explicate general law.

And it's not good enough in international law merely to say "inter alia, by which they may be bound" regarding other treaties or existing treaties; you have to actually have the other treaties and spell out what those TOS violations would be. The TOS doesn't provide sufficient amount of detail and scope to govern the deployment of TPVs. So LL has done so with this policy.

Unfortunately for all of us on many fronts, starting with free speech and due process and fairness, private companies get to make these terms of service at will, and put in regulations "for any reason or no reason" and unconscionable as they may be (and were once declared in the Bragg proceedings), they are generally honoured, because in the practice of the U.S. Supreme Court and other judicial rulings, freedom of association (corporations and their internal rules) trumps freedom of expression (script kiddies raising havoc on public servers with their code).

This TOS *only* talks about "violations of the TOS" (without any specificity, which is very broad) and only talks *specifically* about "disproportionately large load".

But the TPV talks about *copyright*; it talks about *privacy*; it talks about other issues of accountability for one's behaviour and the behaviour of one's code.

A separate policy is needed on such third-party viewers, end of story.

Again, what part of "accountability" are you not getting here?

No, dear, I don't suffer from that confusion because I understand what the Lindens are simply and clearly asking for. There isn't anything "contradictory" in what they ask for unless indeed you are a Stallmanite and edge-casing and fisking to try to find a way out of accounting for your code.

What's particularly annoying about this false debate around this issue is that no actual lawyers or even GPL experts outside the hothouse of the SL fanbase JIRA regulars is surfacing on SL-related websites. However, the slashdotters have spoken -- it's not a violation. That more than anything should clinch it, if you are the tribal type and need the tribe to tell you. I'll stick with the rule of organic law over code, which is what this is about.

both of which are already covered in the terms-of-service.

No, they are not.

The TPV adds the additional important restriction that you cannot do this *when making a third-party viewer* because as we all know, these viewers can easily be made to grief, copy, and invade privacy, and you can "hide behind the code" and "hide behind the mechanics of just how it is".

That's why this policy is needed. Because you all tend to go off the rails that way.

There isn't any "contagious liability" or some vague or openended sort regarding the code. It says you are responsible in a community of other people not to use this code to copy, grief, invade privacy.

Again, are you all having a problem with that?

I've never seen a more obdurate, blind, and extreme group in my life.

The language of the GPL license and the Linden TPV are all very clear, and make PN leaders like Fred liable *if they grief or copy content they have not created while connecting to the SL servers*. NOTHING in the GPL license text or jurisprudence implies that "cannot" be done. NOTHING in the opensource movement says that you *cannot be held liable for your bad behaviour under the law*.

There is NO obscurity about this, as the Linden lay out very clearly what you cannot use your code for -- griefing, harming the service, copying content not your own, invading privacy without notification. Are you people all having a problem with these norms? Apparently you are all unwilling to be accountable.

The language of the policy makes very clear that you undertake responsibility *for your code* and *with regard to these norms in the context of connecting to the server*. Not Linden Lab's, but your own. It does not say you are liable throughout the metaverse for any and all uses of your code; it says *WHEN* connecting to the LL servers, you must abide by their rules. Full stop. All normal, and all permissible, as the language of GPL even says "except when in writing".

Your wilful extreme and outrageous misreading of this is in pursuit of some agenda that isn't even in the spirit of your already-dubious opensource movement.

All of you have seem to forgotten what opensource code *is*. It's, um, open for anyone to work on and pass along for others to work on.

Is there anything in the TPV that prevents anyone from looking at and working on code and passing it along?

No.

There is only a set of social norms on top of this code -- which is what we like to call "law".

Good for the Lindens, standing tall in the face of this bullying.

http://secondthoughts.typepad.com/second_thoughts/2010/03/lindens-stand-firm-on-third-party-viewer-policy.html

This is just geeking edgecasing nonsense, Tateru, and it's especially silly when you don't tell us WHAT the errors were.

The *volume* of transactions still matters, even if it is merely money passed back and forth between somebody playing a slot machine, and then getting a win back from the casino owner, er legal game of skill owner every few moments.

Economies are agnostic about the content of the transaction. There is nothing something less authentic about gambling or other rapid transactions than there is in putting bus fare or laundromat payments and getting change or buying your groceries. It's just a transaction.

Your notion that the entire economy also consists of nerdy little kids standing around with script and passing money back and forth is also something invoked every time this discussion is had, and dismissed as a silly anomaly.

The volume may be exaggerated in another way, in that buying and selling Lindens is merged with the report of transactions strictly in world.

Your other notion that "newly minted currency" is a metric is also silly -- you're forgetting *the Lindens print money*. They have Supply Linden put into the LindEx unilaterally as an emission, i.e. not a facilitation of exchange between buyer and seller, anywhere from $100,000-500,000 *US dollars* worth of Linden currency a month.

The way to judge the economy is by the total amount of transactions over a dollars. In December, this number was 487,919 in December 2009. It was 458,783 in March 2009. That means that in nine months, the economy grew by about 6 percent. That's about how much it usually grows. That's the real number, everything else is speculative, but even so, it's useful to know the volume and velocity of financial transactions, and those have ground despite the removal of gambling.

I have many, many times caught Mentors doing the following, and have documented proof:

1. Telling newbies to go shop in their own stores -- and the Lindens even let them put their own stores and freebies on Orientation Island for awhile to try to curb this problem (!).
2. Giving newbies folders of landmarks that included their own stores or friends' stores
3. Steering newbies into various RPs like Gor or Vampire
4. Taking newbies to sex clubs.
5. Using their titles to bully others by threatening to "get somebody banned" if they hassled them or their friends (had this happen in my rentals several times)
6. Told me my land for sale was "too expensive" and I shouldn't be selling it for that price.
7. Griefed me viciously on my land because I publicly criticized a mentor's investment scam where people lost lots of money -- land near me was deliberately bought and ad-farmed with ads telling people to come and grief Prokofy -- after repeated ARs, this person was FINALLY removed from Mentors.

And so on.

So I'm unimpressed with Mentors. I've seen too many bad things over the course of five years, and it is not about "a few bad eggs". It's about a system that rewards people who like to swagger and bully and exploit. No one is in it for altruism's sake, they are in it either to take advantage of others or to "need to be needed". Neither of these are good motivations.

If you "helping" is so marvelous, there is absolutely NOTHING to stop you from continuing in another group to do the same thing but without the glory and the Linden connection and the ability to bully and exploit others. Full stop.

Yes, it's time to make the truth known, orientation is better *without* mentors who pushed their own agenda, "helped" the way they wanted to help, had hugely political or lifestyle or economic agendas, and were about feeling needed, not about really selfless help.

And the results show it.

botgirl, it's a good thing there is DRM, and it's a good thing there are obstacles to you transferring your inventory, which may include non-permissioned items and items with permissions whose creators didn't consent to have their creations taken off the SL grid and put in other worlds where copyright theft is even more of a problem than in SL.

If you love OpenSim so much, why not do all your creating there, and live in that non-economy where buying and selling is discouraged and everyone is supposed to share? Oh, you don't find that compelling and you want to be in SL where intellectual property is protected. Ok, well, then stop whining.