Today’s Town Hall with Philip now available.
Thursday, November 16th, 2006 at 5:20 PM by: Chadrick LindenThe Town Hall from November 16th, 2006 is now available for download in MP3 format.
The link:
As Second Life becomes larger, the capability for these Town Halls to be broadcast without drops in the audio becomes increasingly harder. If there are resident run radio stations that would like to assist in broadcasting the next Town Hall with us, please email radio@secondlife.com and let us know. The transcript follows at the base of this post and will be up on ITunes early next week. Thanks again to everyone for tuning in, see you next month. 
Below is the rough transcript from the Linden Town Hall Closed Captioning group, big thanks to Pathfinder, Claudia, Teeple, Michael, Betsy and Jean for helping type along during the Town Hall. Philip Linden: We’re going to get started Jesse Linden: This is going to be a town hall event…we’ll be accepting text and skype questions, please visit the blog for info. Philip Linden: we are going to do text transcription for anyone hearing impaired or not on the stream Philip Linden: I want to give some opening remarks then turn over to Jeska for questions and skype calling Philip Linden: thanks for coming, as always. great everyone takes time out to attend these, we have lots of people on the audio…. Philip Linden: In terms of things to talk about, I want to start with copying Philip Linden: The copybot discussion is an important one, I want to reiterate for those who haven’t been with us the past few years, regarding copying Philip Linden: Before I talk about copybot, I want to talk about how copying works Philip Linden: Like the web, there are things in Second Life you can see and copy, and things you can’t Philip Linden: In Second Life, the things you can copy are the things you see - textures, shapes, objects - works the same way you can view source on a website Philip Linden: There’s no real way to stop people doing that on the web…no DRM for textures on a webpage. Philip Linden: In a similar sense, there’s no way to keep people from copying textures or shapes of things they see in Second Life, cause that info has to be sent to you so you can see it on the screen. Philip Linden: Much like the web, there are things you can’t copy in Second Life, such as scripts. That info is info you cannot get access because it doesn’t have to be sent to you, similar to backend structure of a website. You can’t copy amazon.com because you cannot copy the databases in the backend code that sits behind the website, you can only copy images/text on the page. Philip Linden: I think that it is important to talk on our position on these categories for things you can copy in Second Life, what we’re going to do is add a lot of attribution. You’ll be able to easily see when an object or texture was first created. We can do this better than the web, since we know the identity of people and when they uploaded it. So we’re gonna make that info available to everyone. Philip Linden: It will help in two ways, helping file DCMA takedown requests, the second thing is it will help with the formation of groups and policies for people setting their own rules. Like someone setting a trade bureau. Philip Linden: This attribution info will let them take actions internally and get enough info in Second Life to prove that copying is happening, for things you cannot copy like scripts Philip Linden: The architecture of Second Life prevents them from being copying. we might make a mistake, but will rapidly make patches to secure that Philip Linden: I like to remind people that the copybot software is not able to copy anything beyond what I described. Only what you see, it cannot copy scripts, like a program that could copy websites. Philip Linden: Some of the same people who worked on copybot are people who have helped us by finding/reporting bugs about copyability. Philip Linden: So the next thing I wanted to say is, regarding the impact of copybot, there’s no evidence that it has any visible effect on the economy Philip Linden: We’ll treat inappropriate use of copybot as a ToS violation. The in-world numbers for sales are up not down. I looked at in-world object sales…things you can click on and buy Philip Linden: Looking at Wed vs. a week or two weeks ago…the number of buyers and sellers is higher than before Philip Linden: The top clothing sellers…looking at sales they’ve made. Again, they are making more money the past few days than less. That doesn’t diminish the importance of the conversation of copying, but you shouldn’t be worried about the economic stats Philip Linden: We also need to publish more data publicly on in-world sales… Philip Linden: Touching on issues of scaling, we’ve grown a lot. The number of people using Second Life daily in the last 3 months from 40k to 75k Philip Linden: This is difficult growth for any company. Our central architecture is scalable, but is still hard to scale with that much growth. For example, we have expanded into a second colo facility and have had issues with connections with it. we’re stumbling because we’re moving to deploy servers across the country now Philip Linden: Again, we’re going to do our best, but for as long as we’re dealing with dbl digit growth numbers each month, please be aware there will be bumps. I don’t think the architecture we have is wrong, but I can tell you, even doing double digit growth each month is hard Philip Linden: So in particular there are a couple of big gridwide problems we’re working on. One is packet loss, significantly higher across the grid, soon as we know we’ll do a rolling deploy. Philip Linden: Second thing is lots of crashing sims. Lots of people looking at these problems. These are examples of problems we’re working on a fast as we can. We’re working as quickly as we can to grow headcount and infrastructure. Philip Linden: The overall economy - the number of L$ in Second Life has grown right along with the user base. In October L$ transactions grew 23%; same for Lindex transactions … about $2.1 million US …. enormous growth rates. Philip Linden: I restated our mission in a recent blog post. To create a place where people can make things, do something and show it to people. We, the company and investors are in for the long haul, and are passionate about this. Philip Linden: We feel we have a great business here. The way we charge is great, there’s no magic in how it works and makes LL grow as a business. I focused in the Blog on the investors and the business. I thought it was important for people to understand how excited everyone behind this is. Philip Linden: And how little we need to change. We don’t need to partner to grow. The biggest problem we’re seeing with growth is the number of people working here. I’d like to invite everyone out there to consider joining us in working here at Linden Lab. Philip Linden: Linden Lab is a very inspiring, great, fun and less stressful place to work. More than just about any company we could find. If you’d like to do that, take a look at secondlife.com and take a look at the jobs link. Even if you don’t see a job that fits you, send us a resume. Philip Linden: We need more jobs faster. Most people don’t realize how small a team this is. We’re still less than 30 developers, overall headcount about a hundred. Whether in software, legal, customer service, we’d be interesting in hearing, take me up on it. Philip Linden: Let’s take some questions. Jesse Linden: We’re on Skype with sachi Vixen sachi Vixen: Nice to talk to you. Philip Linden: Fire away! sachi Vixen: I was wondering about Linden Lab’s relationship …with LibSecond Life Philip Linden: LibSecond Life has no connection to Linden Lab, we didn’t start it or organize it. They look at the Second Life client, to extend its capabilities. Philip Linden: There are many devs on the LibSecond Life who’ve reported many problems faster than we knew. But as a company we neither endorse nor reject LibSecond Life. Philip Linden: The question is should we aggressively attack people who reverse engineer Second Life. But the idea of preventing reverse engineering is absurd. It’s been easily done, and legal restrictions across national boundaries don’t work. Philip Linden: Since reverse engineering will go on, we want to make our back end to reflect that, and to gain information from these sort of people to improve the back end. sachi Vixen: Their blog posts recently seemed disparaging of Second Life. Philip Linden: The latest posts seemed to be a condemnation of the recent posts. If I find someone using the Copybot to violate the ToS, we’ll take action. sachi Vixen: A lot of people have a lot at stake Philip Linden: We’ll do everything we can to stop the Copybot that break people’s business. People say there has to be a way to stop a texture from being copied. But there’s no more way of stopping that than there is a way to stop music from being copied. sachi Vixen: We’d like to see more communication form the company. To keep the communication open. Philip Linden: We’d like to quickly and clearly answer questions…I think many can attest that you do not just hear from Philip, or Ginsu. We think we’re doing this the right way. Philip Linden: We confess our mistakes and work with the Residents. Our problem, again, is size. We’ll do this better as we hire more folks. Jesse Linden: Text question from Chmarr Walcott: How much investment is the Lab getting from all their investors? Philip Linden: I think I’ve blogged this. From start to profitability, we’re looking at about USD $20 mil over the six-year history. I was the seed investor, then Mitch Kapor came in, We’re looking at about $20M total. Jesse Linden: Text question from Alenzia Epsilon: What is being done to help protect creators rights? It seems that LL has been unwilling to do much more than tell people to file a DMCA - are they planning to do more, or not? Philip Linden: I think the attribution policy we’re putting in place right now (ASAP) addresses doing a better job of providing information for claims. Longer term, the Second Life community is going to have to establish its own standards for what happens to you if you copy inappropriately. Philip Linden: For that, we must provide the right tools for banning, governance, policy response…we need to let the emerging community to sort out the policy, and build the right tools for aggregate reputation management. Philip Linden: What we’re trying NOT to do, and folks would like to see the tactic, but it would be a strategic mistake, is getting into the dispute resolution business. Philip Linden: We won’t do it. We’re not the right party. Any mistake we make in valuation would be perceived as preferential treatment. It’s difficult to imagine an appropriate, Linden-run dispute resolution system. Philip Linden: Folks would like us to devote resources and money, but it’s not the right thing to do. Local authorities can evolve to deal with this, not the Lab. Pyrii Akula (via Skype): About Copybot again. I’ve spent some time today discussing this, finding out about it. My question is, is LL looking for a technical solution for stopping the current build of CopyBot? To deter folks from using it who aren’t fully determined to using and updating it. Pyrii Akula : Maybe the dedicated folks will be the real problem, but casual or undecided copybot users could be dissuaded. Philip Linden: Good question. The aggressive position we’re taking now is, the reported uses which violate copyright are our target. Philip Linden: We’re not starting a witch-hunt after folks who just have it. As far as a tech solution, I’m not sure we’re prepared to pursue that. There’s no tech way to prevent a client from trying to log in. This is the same thing that keeps DRM, like Apple’s “Fairplay” from working. You can’t keep clients from working. Jesse Linden: Text question from Teravus Ousley: What is your official stance on the use of HUGE > 10×10x10 prim? Philip Linden: The reasons prims are clamped to 10 meters relate to our physics processing. Large prims processing power from adjacent simulators. Philip Linden: (Thanks, nimrod, for the folder) Philip Linden: There’s no need to build prims that big, so we’re taking a look at that. Folks may choose to render prims on a local client, but that wouldn’t be the same thing. I’ll look into this with some people who have more familiarity with our collision management system. Jesse Linden: Text question from Claire Sachs: Why does it appear that the Second Life servers don’t check what the client claims to own? Philip Linden: In the case of CopyBot, the behind-the-scenes magic is that an object is being examined and reconstructed. It’s a situation where the viewer is uploading a new set of build commands, by examining a replica. Philip Linden: This makes it a bit more manageable: a new build request is going to have a different attribution (creation date, etc.)…this will work to the advantage of IP protection. Jesse Linden: Text question from Lola Marquez: Many software companies require a license for each copy of their product that you have or use, making it illegal to use more than one copy. Can LL implement something like this for items? A key/license per use. Scripts can be deleted so they won’t work. Philip Linden: Good question. The general answer is, “probably not.” Second Life is going to be so big…objects today are not managed in a central database. Second Life’s going to be a big system…there’s not going to be an authoritative server to request permissions to rez. Jesse Linden: Skype call from Lewis Nerd Lewis Nerd: Good afternoon in sunny SF. I wanted to ask about customer service. it’s impossible to get anything. I tried calling yesterday. I spent 20 min on hold… Lewis Nerd: I tried calling direct number and your direct extension Philip Linden: Fair question Lewis Nerd: Why is it so difficult to find out why I received a warning? Philip Linden: I’m sorry we haven’t responded faster. We’re hiring as fast as we can. Only thing in our defense…appreciate there are 75k people in Second Life each day, and 100 Lindens. Philip Linden: We are definitely providing CS, but need to prioritize. Forum warnings are lower priority. Higher priority are things like bad credit card issues, preventing people from buying land. Philip Linden: I apologize, and I think there are CS instances we are handling well. We are definitely doing our best Jesse Linden: Text question from Idril Zhukovsky: 1) If you are a paid resident, why can’t you have one free alt; 2) Are there plans to make the SEARCH function more sophisticated so that one can search by multiple keywords; and 3) Is it possible to make personal landmarks a dropdown menu item? Philip Linden: You got me there. I’m not sure about our alt policy. Second question…plans for making search via multiple keywords. Broadly searching is something we are focusing on limited by our personnel. Philip Linden: Searching into where people are, multiple keywords, searching into descriptions of objects, spaces you cannot see, those are things we need to do Philip Linden: So…yes, yes, yes, we’re going to make search better. I think people leave Second Life because they are unable to find things personally interesting Philip Linden: Personal landmarks a dropdown menu item….I think landmarks are available as a dropdown on the map. We’re not taking advantage of user picks. We need to use that data. It’s interesting. We need to make search work in that. Off topic, but I think it’s relevant Philip Linden: I know people have done cool back buttons for places as HUDS Jesse Linden: Text question from Ryozu Kojima: Is there a timeline for the update to the physics engine to Havok2? Philip Linden: At the risk of being burned at the stake, I’m not going to give an update on that. We are working on improving physics to improve performance I can’t give a time deadline. It is on our plate Jesse Linden: Text question from Khepera Menoptra: Given that you need people and this is a virtual project, will you allow telecommuting to work for Linden? Philip Linden: Yes, in some cases, depending what you’re working on. It’s a factor, but there are people who frequently or solely telecommute today. If you are passionate about working at Linden Lab, don’t let the concern about telecomm stop you from applying Question: does LL have timetable/goal for open-sourcing platform Philip Linden: I’m not going to comment cause I have no specific timetables. Question: what will LL be giving us faster turnaround on abuse reports? Second Life: Tommy Erde has left this session. Philip Linden: abuse reporting is something we have overcommitted to doing. there are things that need to be resolved regarding dispute resolution Philip Linden: LL should not be in our opinion in the middle of arbritration. We need to open up and provide better systems for the community Philip Linden: abuse resolution is something we need to do less of, not more. our challenge is in communicating what we can resolve well, and identify some things we should not be dealing with Philip Linden: we going to have to reduce the scope of what we can do Question: What is being done to make mainland more attractive than islands? Philip Linden: the work we’ve done with group controls and allowing people too group together like the islands have. We’ll continue to make the tools better. it is still possible very possible to make money buying islands and providing services on those islands Question: Could you consider long term community contract or alternatively contracts with island owners to lock in terms with higher transfer rates if they choose to sell. your move has been out of wack in terms of pricing… Philip Linden: would we offer people rate cap a year out. Second Life is changing so quickly. If some competitor comes on scene and doesn’t do rate cap, if you have a system that is really stable, you can do things like that… but it will not give us ability to change as rapidly as we need to if we have to…i.e.: someone comes out w new piece of equipment Philip Linden: I hear you but I don’t think doing rent control on land is way to go because future is so uncertain relative to changes we need to make to system Question: with 50% increase it is hard to budget. A range of increase would give us opportunity to budget and worry about content we are bringing to world Jesse Linden: Text question from Raven Welesa: Can the property sales area have the private islands removed, especially since those you cannot buy and sell like regular mainland real estate? Philip Linden: You can purchase and resell land in the islands Daaneth Kivioq (on Skype): question about infrastructure improvements….I suggest you place moratorium on dev of new features until infra. is stable and catch up CS Philip Linden: Without having you able to see what all devs are working on today, if we had more, question is for how long? One month? 6 months? 6 years? Daaneth Kivioq: 1 month, Second Life running with no missing inventory, random sim crashes, fix bugs, improve performance Daaneth Kivioq: Tell gridmonkeys let’s run faster, stronger. Philip Linden: We’ve got central systems challenges. Taken in isolation not super complicated. We have multiple people working on them now. so I don’t think we’d gain advantage. But I can tell you we’d lose people. 1000s of APIs, millions of lines of code, built by on average 10 people. Staggering amount of work per person. What I believe from inside linden walls, we empower people to make people to make their own decisions about what to do…that’s why we are that good. We would lose a lot more by that than what we’d gain… Daaneth Kivioq: I understand where you are coming from. it just seems to me anytime you are adding new features you are adding risks and potential for huge problems. Philip Linden: if we need to improve groups feature as a way of reducing lag, would you call bug fix or feature? Classifying these is not so easy. We are highly responsive on what to focus on : fixing boat or adding new features. very focused on fixing boat right now Jesse Linden: Text question from Soda Domela: We do not pay to look at websites and PAY to be here. How are you protecting out rights when your slogan is “Imagined, created and owned by residents”? Philip Linden: What people pay for in Second Life is like paying for on web. Free to be here, pay for land which is like paying for website Philip Linden: We’ve done a number of things to make our system more secure relative to problems we had. moved 3rd party soft off to external hosting, done work on internal system. Philip Linden: We cannot check files against previously uploaded ones… humans have to be in the loop there Zerodog Witt (via Skype): Would there be a way to rewrite the rendering engine, in stead of rendering primatives, rendering the polygon itself? Philip Linden: There’s just not enough bandwidth to do it, if bandwidth becomes infinitely more powerful… it might make sense… it will probably move more slowly than the speed of processors. Thank you very much for calling Jesse Linden: Text Question from Little Ball: Once Open Source Second Life Clients are widespread, will it be possible to host your own island? Philip Linden: The server is legally within the confines of our company… what we have to do so people can host servers, add layers of security for that to happen… but I don’t have a time line for that. Right now there’s a difference between an open client and open server. Jesse Linden: Text Question from Bibi Book: Is there a solution for the packet loss on horizon? Philip Linden: We do not yet know what’s causing it.. We do have some helpful repro cases. Philip Linden: I hope this was helpful… We’ll get this all put up as a transcript. If you are looking for a job, particularly in software development, please apply!
November 16th, 2006 at 5:29 PM
Well.. not bad, better and more productive than I thought it would be.. guess were just gonna have to trust it up to luck to make sure our stuff doesnt get copied though.. fun, but, can’t wait much longer, and the only other option is quitting SL, which I’m not ready to do just at the moment. Well see how the next month goes I suppose.
November 16th, 2006 at 5:34 PM
WTF, nice job, Chadrick
!
November 16th, 2006 at 5:49 PM
I did however forget to add my comment on Phillip’s comments about clothing sales.. Well, copybot cant do any harm to those, because apparently when you log off, the catch is cleared and off go the textures of those to nowhere. That is what ive heard and read at least on the libsl website and from many people on here. Who knows exactly whats going on anymore @.=.@
November 16th, 2006 at 5:53 PM
Very informative… glad there was a transcript, as I missed the meeting itself. ^_^
November 16th, 2006 at 5:56 PM
Holidays are here!!
The kid’s are bored in school!
Holiday’s are always when bored junior high, high scool and
college students have nothin’ bettre to do….
P.S. Why is my first name and last name not spaced?
Is it ‘cos I chose my last name first?
Decembre212012Aster
November 16th, 2006 at 5:58 PM
Regarding differentiating between mainland and private island land sales…
There’s got to be some way to differentiate between mainland and private sim land added into the Land Sales sarch results. Sure, you can “buy” land from an island owner and rent it from them, just like you’d buy land on the mainland and pay LL Land Use Fees. Big…HUGE difference is that if I spend my money on land on an island and the Island owner (the person who’s actually paying LL for the island and not the people renting land there) decides to shut down the island, I’ve now blown my money to “buy ” his land, paid x months rent to him and now have nothing to show for it. On the mainland, I can be fairly certain that if I buy a plot of land, that I will be able to keep that land as long as I continue paying my Land Use Fees to LL.
Before the Private Sim land for sale was added into the Land Sale search results often with no way to tell between them except to waste my time clicking “Show on Map” then waiting for the map to actually load (sometimes fast, sometimes not so much), I used to scan the Land Sales several times a week most weeks. I think I’ve done it maybe three times since the Private Sim land sales started showing up mixed among the mainland land sales. I’m sure the private sim owners will object since folks like me will just skip over their listings, but folks like me don’t want to buy island land anyhow so you’re not doing anything but frustrating me by making me waste my time sifting through them to the point that I only bother to look maybe once per month now instead of several times a week, thus I buy far less land and, therefore, buy far fewer Linden Dollars now than I have in the past. I’m sure people who only want land on private sims would also enjoy having a way to quickly filter the private sim listings from the mainland listings just as much as I would be elated to be able to do the same! It’s a simple column added to the search results. No rocket science involved, but you know that already.
Please make Land Sales search results useful again. I rather enjoy trying to find nice mainland plots to develop but it’s too frustrating to bother now.
November 16th, 2006 at 6:02 PM
I didn’t go, I had class at the time, but I am still wondering
WHY does LL sell Lindens when they are reducing stipends because there are too many in world. If there are too many Lindens in world why are they creating them to sell. You are adding to the problem not helping it. Please stop selling lindens first, then reduce stipends!
November 16th, 2006 at 6:05 PM
…or to put it simpler, imagine you’re trying to find a place to live in San Francisco.
You’d like to buy a house, so you go to craigslist and the only category for housing is just that…”Housing”, which frustratingly includes no way to tell the difference between the listings of apartments and houses and acreages other than to contact the person who placed the listing or to bring up Google Maps and try to determine from an overhead satellite image if it’s a house or an apartment you’re looking at.
November 16th, 2006 at 6:05 PM
Nice. Greatly appreciative of this, even I can’t spend much time in SL any more. Gives me reassurance that when I (eventually) return, things might just be stable again…
November 16th, 2006 at 6:18 PM
LL should not open source the client.
It would be the ultimate phishing scam: run my SL client, which needs your password…
Also: if the client is reverse-engineered fully and/or open sourced, it is only a matter of time before someone creates a server — as was done with Ultima Online. Then LL has no business model: anyone can host a server.
You can’t stop reverse engineering, but you can slow it down, and that is the same as stopping it. You can’t ultimately stop people making copybots, but you can make it difficult enought to deter people from doing so. I’m not sure why people say it isn’t feasible, or it is inevitable, it is neither.
And in either case: don’t leave the cookie jar in plain site, with a big sign…
November 16th, 2006 at 6:22 PM
I did not see anything in the transcript about the Mafias in SL. These groups are very threatening and frustrating to deal with. They took over the SoulMates dance club and ran every AV off except mine. I stayed and played, but, eight against one was no match…permanently ban mobs, gangstas, and mafias!
November 16th, 2006 at 6:42 PM
Well, it’s something anyway. I really WANT to believe in LL and their desire to make SL better for it’s residents. One can hope that economic pressure and technology changes will let them.
In re: copybot
It’s really hard to believe that it can’t be controlled at login via a small change to the official client/server handshake.
I noticed that PL was quick to get off that topic.
As I see it, the real issue is not copybot itself, which turned out to be fairly benign (please don’t flame me, think how much worse it could have been if scripts were stealable), but our trust that the LL really listens to the “people” and will take their virutal world where the residents want to go.
The TH seems to reaffirm that they do indeed want the world to be by the people and for the people, but I’m not a semanticist, I can’t do a real analysis of what was said.
And frankly, it may be just me, but I would MUCH rather hear LL say, “we’re not sure how were going to fix (insert problem of the moment here), but we’ll keep trying, please be patient”, than the deafening silence we got the last two days.
I want to know that they know, and that there is hope, be it a ways down the road. And that they do actually read our posts, and hear our voices. So to speak.
I’m not in pefect agreement with what was said at the TH, but I’m much realived that the issue of copybot and making our creations more secure from theft wasn’t blown off as not something that needed work, and soon.
Although, as I understand it, those attribution additions that PL was talking about are still slated for 1st Q 2007, which means they could be as late as then very end of March, IF they keep on schedule. NOT very encouraging.
And a second thought: If you’ve read some of the alleged IRC chats between libsl members that have been posted, which I find horrifying, you have to wonder why LL hasn’t taken a strong stance for chasing down the bad apples in that group. They’ve made themselves VERY prominent, and promiscuous. It shouldn’t be too terribly difficult to at least make it harder for them to gain access to SL. Even if they manage to make alt accts without using any “real life” data that points to them, they should be easy to spot: they will always behave in the same manner.
As good ol’ Spock said, “A civilized man may act like a barbarian, but a barbarian cannot act like a civilized man.”
November 16th, 2006 at 6:50 PM
Fia, I’m in agreement re: phishing.
It would be great for AOL users to have the “AOL:SL” client and be able to get AIM and email in-game, or the “Coca-Cola Edition SL” and get “cokerewards” points for using it, or see some wickedly cool indie SL clients, but ulitmately: phishing. “Download our extra-special client and get L$1,000 FREE just for trying it!” You download said client, log on, and it crashes. But that’s ok, because the creator now has your login info. And they weren’t going to give CS anyway.
Normally, I’m all for open source, it’s a great way to tap talent that otherwise might never pop up it’s head, but yikes! LL, please! Take AOL as a model, do NOT reinvent the wheel, here. How long do you think AOL would have lasted if they had gone open-source? And even they are subject to phising.
If you really feel you must go open-source, for heaven’s sakes, put the people creating it under some sort of accountablility! Get their names, addresses, driver’s license, blood type, something!
Every time you think about going open, just say to yourself “Copybot” or “Giant Prims”. That should cool you off a bit.
November 16th, 2006 at 6:51 PM
I listened to the first 2/3rds of the podcast, and I was very disappointed to hear that Philip apparently shares the views of many scriptors and coders in SL as evidenced in the blog entry below, announcing the Town Hall meeting, that scripts are what’s mainly important.
Philip assures us rather overmuchly that it’s not anything IN the items, or in the “backend,” that is being copied - just the prims.
Philip, please. Look around the world. Do you think this is all about scripting? Is it the script that primarily brings joy to the eye? Were the scripts what so wonderful about Burning Life? Do people live in their scripts? Must you devalue your artists so much?
Yes, scripts are good. I love them, myself. But scripts without the “shells,” as they are so disparagingly called, are simply meaningless signals in an empty world.
Houses, furniture, decorations, gifts, trees and plants, avatars - so many things - are not valuable because they are scripts that just happen to be contained in prims, any prims, put together any which way.
Tell Starax (were he still here), not to worry about his work being copied, because “they can’t get to what’s inside.”
You need to come down strongly on the side of the content creators. I realize you are saying that there is no way, technically, to prevent these thefts. But there is a PR, company policy way to do it: A strong, zero-tolerance message from LL can restore the confidence of the content creators, and deter would-be thieves.
The blog entry below this, while not an ideal solution, at least sounded firm. The Town Hall talk did not.
coco
November 16th, 2006 at 6:53 PM
Perhaps the best idea in helping with the understanding of ‘open source client’ is that this hopeful version of SL client/server has a different name. I get the impression that when people hear it, they think it involves the existing SL + grid.
Shoutcast servers might not be the best example, but there are companies that provide streaming media services and they run Shoutcast servers. You pay them, get a log in, and connect to theirs.
Shoutcast server software is also available to be downloaded and used on your own server or computer. I can run it on a machine at home. Use it for my use only. People connect, if I want them to…
For the time being, there’s no way I can have my own sim on my own hardware that no one connects to but me, maybe a couple people. I could start a SL-like service myself, or just use it as software. Educational institutions could run an SL Server in their own infrastructure and it’s open to who they say it is. Same with companies. In the spirit of an intranet.
That’s at least the idea in my head– and the official SL client could be used to connect to the Second Life Main Grids or my own grids, much like I can use a web browser to access anyone’s website or my companies private, secure, protected web site.
Some folks might not want a grid, they want the grid software to use as a canvas. Can I have a server/client package that limits users to like 12? If I want a bigger one, I have to pay? Or pay more to have LL handle it all?
WordPress, the blog software is open source; you can make it work the way you want it to; they also have a free hosted service; they also have a pro level hosted service. The model has been around for a while. The basic stuff is free, the stuff someone else runs for you or the stuff with more features, costs money.
Not really an good example, but an example of free vs. pay: Microsoft makes a lot of money, and they also have free software in addition to their numerous bazillion dollar apps.
I guess it can be had both ways?
November 16th, 2006 at 6:56 PM
I dunno if this made it through when I was rambling about client software, but I can connect to eBay’s website, or Amazon or my bank’s website using a variety of clients: Internet Explorer, Netscape, Opera, Safari, or Firefox depending on my preference or operating system (I use Firefox on Windows/sometimes IE 7 but 100% Safari on the Mac)… it all works the same.
Differences?
November 16th, 2006 at 7:15 PM
Thanks, Eric, that clears up a lot for me. Why aren’t the Lindens telling us this stuff? Or if they have, where is it? I can’t seem to find it.
November 16th, 2006 at 7:18 PM
This whole notion that LL can’t stop CopyBot from working by protocol chages, seems a bit disingenuous to me. When people say that encryption schemes can always be broken that’s correct, but if the algorithm keeps changing, it gets a whole lot harder and for SL it’s probably irrelevant anyway.
Unlike things like music, there is no value at all to breaking the protocol that was previously in use if it’s changed. If the protocol were changed in very minor ways every week, it would permanently break all existing CopyBot versions. The changes wouldn’t even have to be encryption as such, just changes like moving fields around, or changing the formats slightly.
For things like music, the encryption scheme can’t be changed since there are a large number of existing CD players, etc. already in the world that can’t be updated to keep up with the changes.
SL is completely different, the client is updated weekly, so the encryption algorithm can also be changed weekly. While this could then be reverse engineered, it would have to be redone every week which would be extremely tedious to do, and would require customers to keep buying new versions of CopyBot.
November 16th, 2006 at 7:23 PM
I wanted to see better stats and this one is great:
“The number of people using Second Life daily in the last 3 months from 40k
to 75k.” - Philip
So with an average concurrency of 15K residents, we have the equivalent of 75K people spending 4 hours/day inworld to use 20 hrs/day of total SL hrs/day and the other four hr/day gets used by all the other users - 3-a-weeks, weeklies, weekenders, two-a-monthers, and your once-a-monthers fading out of steady usage.
And a current doubling rate of less than four months. Interesting times ahead. But this increased
transparency will help.
ps I do not speak for Lewis nor anyone else.
November 16th, 2006 at 7:24 PM
Random: I have no idea why… or maybe they have but the noise is deafening all around. In all the thousands of posts I’ve been reading across forums, chat rooms, blog comments, there have been many who made great points, and are drowned in the roar of the unhappy; the defense of the accused; the hijinks of the trolls; and finally, those that have just flat out wrong information. It’s ALL been covered from every angle.
Parsing it, well that’s the fun part.
November 16th, 2006 at 7:54 PM
Maybe I am wrong, but as I see it, Phillip said something much bigger here. They (LL) are turning the world over to us. They are going to concentrate on techie stuff, the social stuff is up to us to fix and take care of. If we want controls and “government/police”… we have to create that, and be responsible for that. Not LL.
Is not the basket of goods they sold us, but, it has some real possibilities when you think about it. We just have to re-think what we thought we knew. And start again.
Just some thoughts
Sam
November 16th, 2006 at 7:54 PM
[...] As Second Life becomes larger, the capability for these Town Halls to be broadcast without drops in the audio becomes increasingly harder. If there are resident run radio stations that would like to assist in broadcasting the next Town Hall with us, please email radio@secondlife.com and let us know. The transcript follows at the base of this post and will be up on ITunes early next week. Thanks again to everyone for tuning in, see you next month. (more…
[...]
November 16th, 2006 at 8:28 PM
“This whole notion that LL can’t stop CopyBot from working by protocol chages, seems a bit disingenuous to me. When people say that encryption schemes can always be broken that’s correct, but if the algorithm keeps changing, it gets a whole lot harder…”
Apple’s been using this approach with iTunes. It was so successful, it actually took several *hours* from the release of iTunes 7.0 before the DRM was bypassed.
It’s a hell of a lot more tedious for SL to change things every week than it is for hackers to work around it. Your client has to be able to display stuff onscreen, so no matter what LL does on their end, they MUST send complete and accurate information on how to decode it to all their users in the form of the client program. They can encrypt all they want, but they must give you the ability to decrypt in order for you to be able to play the game. If they hand over the tools to decrypt (and they must), it doesn’t matter how much work they put into the encryption.
The only solutions to this are social/legal. There is no possible technical solution to prevent it, and there’s no feasible technical solution to make it very difficult. If you think otherwise, your really don’t understand the problem. You can’t simultaneously hand out the decryption algorithm and keys to every user without handing out the decryption algorithm and keys to every user, and some of the users are going to be technically savvy enough to read it, even if it’s only supplied in object code form.
So, it’s not disingenuous, it’s honest and factual. There are plenty of companies out there that try to provide DRM schemes, THEY are the snake-oil merchants. Honest companies admit it’s not possible to stop and not practical to even slow down to any worthwhile degree.
November 16th, 2006 at 9:33 PM
Gaius - I’m not going to get into a flame war, but I strongly disagree.
November 16th, 2006 at 9:40 PM
Well, I’m softening here already. I’ve decided maybe Philip was just tired.
(But the points I made still stand.)
coco
November 16th, 2006 at 9:44 PM
Reply to Sam:
You make a great point and I agree mostly, but I don’t think LL will be “turning the world over” quite yet. This move toward putting powers of social control into the hands of residents seems reminiscent of what happened at LambdaMoo (one of the first MUD’s) after the “Rape in Cyberspace” (Julian Dibble’s article in The Village Voice, 1993). The Wizards were tired of dealing with complaints about social deviance, so they created a somewhat-democratic system of petitions and ballots that was used to enact major changes in the world (including the deletion of user accounts).
Like the Wizards of LambdaMoo, LL is creating tools for residents to shape the social landscape of the world. However, in the case of the copybot, the actions being deterred are illegal. The interesting issue raised at LambdaMoo was how to deal with a virtual-crime that was not illegal in RL but was harmful. In a way, SL has reduced the gap between the real and the virtual, allowing for real world institutions (i.e., copyright law) to govern actions in the virtual world (though we are still waiting for some court rulings to confirm this). While LL has empowered residents by creating a tool that makes it easier to see who is stealing (and thereby provide a disincentive to such action), they are redirecting the responsibility of governance toward another institution that is better suited to handle these types of complaints.
Hence, I do not think LL is “turning the world over” in any political sense, though I do agree with Random Blankes that the interesting issue is whether LL listens to its residents. Perhaps SL could use a formalized system of resident representation in “political” issues …just another step toward SL being more like RL. Has anyone proposed this?
(I’m a relatively new resident, though I’ve been reading about SL for months and cyberpunk for longer. Also, I’m currently writing a paper for a class on SL policies as they relate to governance and economics. Feel free to email me at raratan at gmail if you want to share any stories/opinions about these issues).
Thanks,
Robby
November 16th, 2006 at 10:22 PM
No philip is a puppet havent you figured that out there all puppet riding the hands of corporations, why do you think, we as citizens are constantly put down and robbed of stipends etc while they still sell sell sell, be it lindens or land fees, its all about the dollar and only the dollar in their pockets, ive always known LL was pocketing the big money from all their corporate contacts this just proves it for me. LL is no better than ENRON, they dummy up their online numbers to make themselves look good so big money buys in then we as the consumer are left screwed and blue in the end. LL has no one on their mind but themselves, im willing to bet there putting together an exit stategy right now. Wake Up its all about the Dollar not the consumer, there belief like all big business is that we are cattle if one goes another idiot will come along
November 16th, 2006 at 10:23 PM
ah nice to see there also censoring comments way to go,
November 16th, 2006 at 10:30 PM
That actually did a lot to reassure me, and put the whole copybot thing into perspective. Thanks everyone for the transcript!
Random Question: is there any way that we could get some kind of a toteboard that was visible to all visitors, that showed what projects were currently being worked on, and what was planned for future? You could do it in techspeak if you like.. but kind of like the “known issues” page, we could at least know that things like “sim border crossing issues” was either being worked on, or was at least being considered. That might not be practical, and might just lead to people complaining that you’re not working on it fast enough… but a little “transparency” (what a buzzword, eh?) in terms of the constant effort to improve SL.. would probably help quell a lot of the complaining out there.
I know if I could see the laundry list of hundreds of projects you guys are working on, or plan to work on.. I’d be a lot more respectful of your needs when getting itchy about no answers from live help, or some broken road someplace. I think a lot of others would too.
November 16th, 2006 at 10:43 PM
When I read the transcript and herd P.L. say that there is no evedence that copybot hurt the economy i went ROFLOL. Either he is compleatly out of touch or his metrics are useless. To be fair much of the damage is subtle and is the result of loss of trust and confidence in LL comitmitment to any form of drm. As a example the other night I downgraded my only Alt with premium acount but they charged me a onetime fee to do so that will offset the premium this month, so it will only showup next month. I mentioned copybot in their downgrade survey but apparently no one at LL has time to read them. When i go inworld i intend to give away or remove from sale some small items i made made to test the market watters. I will continue to play SL but it will be just that a game, not a economic platform. In the next few days I intend to download the blender offline building module in beta so i dont have to log onto your laggy world so much to build.
November 16th, 2006 at 11:18 PM
Did PL just say that a lot of the problems that SL is facing is due to a growth rate that is too rapid for LL to handle right now?
Might it be that this rapid growth spurt was self induced via the major course adjustment of suddenly accepting unverified accounts? (timing wise, it certainly coincides)
And might it be that this so called GROWTH is not actually healthy and constructive growth that benefits SL overall, but actually just non-constructive (or even destructive) ACTIVITY that leads to a growing frustration and a shrinking confidence. If LL waits till they see a drop in spending before they correct things, it may very well be too late to reverse the slide.
I think we all hate to see LL “stumbling” and having a “difficult” time of it, and thousands of us show our support through the money we pour into the economy every month, but I also believe that LL has ignored much good advice for which we are now suffering.
I hope LL is successful in hiring enough of the professional help it needs to keep it on it’s feet. Skilled developers and employees who offer true customer service and wise leadership in each of their respective roles.
November 17th, 2006 at 12:03 AM
Has anyone ever been in the position to have someone absolutely NEVER happy with ANYTHING you do no matter what? Just askin’…
Linden Lab will always be damned if they do, damned if they don’t.
With the frequency of posts and the intensity of passions flying around, it’s almost possible to write the blog comments for various people. Serious, the next time LL announces someone, everyone take a stab at writing the comments. When the comments come in, compare.
Perhaps tech arguments can best be solved by doing, then, yourselves. Go build a new SL. I’m only being part facetious. That’s how we got things like Firefox–people being mad as hell, and taking matters into their own hands. If everyone has suddenly become an expert on SL’s infrastructure, software development practices, copyright and intellectual property law (cuz we are all lawyers, right? We know lawyers, some of our best friends are lawyers, heh), then how about proving it?
It might be fair to say that some folks won’t ever ever EVER believe any answer they are given.
“What’s the meaning of X?”
“X”
“LIES!”
How do you have a conversation with that kind of person?
Oh, and Winter– re: the toteboard: can you imagine if they made that toteboard, and there was a priority ranking (like bugs usually get)… Every update to it would be complemented with 1000 blog comments complaining about the ordering of priority. Then people might read into what is a top priority and tell everyone what they are doing, “See they are doing X, Y, and Z, and that’s going to lead to this ‘zomg they hate us!’ thing. Or call out favoritism, or any of the laundry list of textbook answers on why it’s bad, why they are evil, why they hate their customers, etc etc etc.
I kinda wish I was joking about that but, uh, yeah, sadly, I think it’s totally plausible.
And they are looking to US to govern? /me backs up slowwwwwwwwwly with no sudden movements.
November 17th, 2006 at 12:16 AM
Well, after reading the transcript I view the situation slightly different too. As I understand, it would be way too much effort to create a working DRM solution (working for a week or a month, before it has to be changed again, i.e. constant work for LL). LL doesn’t have the time and the ressources to handle that. If someone should attempt to create such a platform without those ressources and if a new system (3D web) shouldn’t be better and more secure than an old one (2D web) are interesting questions, but don’t change anything about the status quo: textures and prim shapes are just as insecure and easy to copy as a JPEG image on the internet. We have to live with that it seems. At least the new stance on the legality (I mean inworld legality, as in TOS compliant) of copy tools is great help to discourage from using them, I really appreciate that.
As for inworld prosecution of griefers or copyright violators: I understand that we will have to help ourselves in the long run. The right tools for banning, governance and policy response that Philip spoke of are needed as soon as possible. Right now, banning a person couldn’t be more ineffective due to the open registration (yes, I can see that the open registration is needed too or rather that there’s no way for us residents to do anything about it). When I ban a person, I want to be able to ban all alts of this person as well. Also unverified alt accounts of course. The only verifyable identity information is the machine hash or hardware hash of a client. I would like to see… no… we really urgently need the ban functions to operate based on this hardware hash. I know that many persons use multiple computers. Of course, the account info needs to contain a list of all hash IDs ever used with this account, i.e. the identity of all machines a person ever used to log in an account. Otherwise banning, as the only tool of self-protection we have right now, is absolutely pointless.
I would think, if Linden Lab bans someone from the platform as a whole, this bans a certain hardware hash completely too. Or not? How else would you keep known offenders off the grid? This leads to an interesting question: will open source clients transmit a hardware hash to the server too, as the only real identity information of unverified accounts? And how can be checked that this ID is valid, since open source code could be manipulated to change it?
November 17th, 2006 at 1:55 AM
Ishtara, that’s the thing, banning by hash isn’t very effective.
This is the same reason why they can’t keep the copybot from the grid. The server can’t enforce anything on the client, it can only make requests, and check whether the right stuff comes back. So things go like this:
SERVER: Submit hardware checksum
CLIENT: Submits just a random number that passes for a checksum
SERVER: That’s not in the ban list, you’re welcome!
The only way to effectively ban somebody is to ban them by something outside their control. People control their hardware very easily, so that’s not reliable. People control their IP address less easily (it could be dynamic, but it’s going to be within a fixed interval anyway). Most people can’t easily get new credit card numbers. So the most reliable way of banning people would be removing unverified accounts, and banning by card number.
November 17th, 2006 at 2:23 AM
Well there was some useful information in the transcript. I can also understand why Philip tread lightly on CopyBot: its not really his area. He’s the big guy but from what I know of him he’s not a lawyer.
It was nice to hear him say scripts couldn’t be copied (yeah it doesn’t protect textures) as that limits the economic impact Copybot could have. Outisde of skins and clothing most expensive items (and therefore what most with Copybot would go after) is expensive due to the scripts in it. My question though is other contents of the prims copyable? Sexgen objects are expensive not so much for the scripts but the animations put into them. If the animations could be copied and made full-perm that would be a target since those are arguably harder to create than any texture and skin.
What I have seen as far as the economic impact of CopyBot hasn’t been in its use, but in the reaction to its existence. Stores have closed up and most that stayed open have put in ‘anti-Copybot’ scripts that spam shoppers and create lag (sorry people but constantly running sensors do create lag on a sim). Of the ten people or so I chatted with in SL today 7 of them said they were not going to shop anymore as long as the anti-copybot scripts were around due to the spam and lag. I’m with them on this, even without that many malls/shops are laggy already due to scripts, texture sizes, and the underlying SL performance issues.
As for textures and skins, those could be grabbed without Copybot already, by using generic (as in not SL specific) software used to sniff video memory (and I’ve seen textures uploaded to SL that come from various video games and was likely grabbed in just such a manner).
I know content creators are upset and worried. But if you’re worried about you’re content do the only thing you can to ensure it stays saffe: don’t put it on the internet/SL. If you’re worried about lost revenue then what’s costing you more? A very small percentage of users who MAY single you out to copy your stuff, or the large percentage of users who can’t get to your shop because its closed or your ’security’ scripts cause too much lag to be able to shop reasonably? Also look at your pricing, in SL you don’t have to pay for every unit sold so price for volume sales, a lower price per unit may result in more units sold in the same amount of time and overall more lindens.
November 17th, 2006 at 2:45 AM
@ Grazel:
As novel an idea as you’ve presented will probably fall on deaf ears and blind eyes.
As true as your statements may be, it isn’t what many want to hear. I hope you’ve brought your fire suit ….
Want mine?
November 17th, 2006 at 3:50 AM
@grazel
@just a thought
I build and I script. Neither particularly well. BUT, the true art is in the building, not the scripting. The scripting comes after the concept, after the build… is crucial, yes…. but is NOT the main ingredient. And most of us are upset because we were misled by LL… most of us have NO clue about all the techno-gabble. We were told to come here and create our own world, our own reality, that our creations belonged to us. And now… all the tech/geeks are laughing at us, making fun of us, including LL. Sheesh.
I am not blind, nor deaf… I saw this coming… just not from the direction it came in… and there is NO excuse for hurting so many people, and then turning around and laughing at them for being naive.
I stand by my earlier post a few comments up… we need to all work together (residents) or just call it toast.
November 17th, 2006 at 4:03 AM
Dale Glass Says:
November 17th, 2006 at 1:55 am
“Ishtara, that’s the thing, banning by hash isn’t very effective.
This is the same reason why they can’t keep the copybot from the grid. The server can’t enforce anything on the client, it can only make requests, and check whether the right stuff comes back. So things go like this:
SERVER: Submit hardware checksum
CLIENT: Submits just a random number that passes for a checksum
SERVER: That’s not in the ban list, you’re welcome!
The only way to effectively ban somebody is to ban them by something outside their control. People control their hardware very easily, so that’s not reliable. People control their IP address less easily (it could be dynamic, but it’s going to be within a fixed interval anyway). Most people can’t easily get new credit card numbers. So the most reliable way of banning people would be removing unverified accounts, and banning by card number.”
—————————————————————————————————
Hm. So the hash ID doesn’t work. My IP address changes each time I disconnect and reconnect, so that’s no real identification method too. And the open registration is needed, according to Philip. As I understood it, LL won’t ever do anything that renders SL useless to a certain amount of people outside the USA.
What use are any tools for banning, governance and policy in this case? A land owner would need full GM permissions, and need to monitor their land 24 hours a day. I won’t ever be able to effectively ban a person, and I won’t likely be able to identify the real identidy of a content thief.
November 17th, 2006 at 4:11 AM
Sam - I’m NOT laughing at you and for you to say that ……
Well let’s just say taking potshots at the people that TRIED to be voices of reason and TRIED to tell you how much the response to this HURTS the community ….
Is not the best way to go about it.
November 17th, 2006 at 4:14 AM
While I am impressed with Phil’s confidence in the situation, I am dissapointed that he sees no need to do anythng about copybot. It’s probably true that they didn’t get many abuse reports directly related to copybot. I blame taht on apathy. I personally have witnessed 6 different avatars acting with the hallmarks of copybot, but I’ve lost all faith in the abuse report system; I stopped doing ARs ages ago. I wonder how many others have done so. The AR numbers are meaningless these days.
As for the bot not affecting the economy; it’s a little early to say for sure. There’s still a huge number of stores closed. Mine will remain closed for the foreseable future at least.
November 17th, 2006 at 4:16 AM
@just a thought
Most of us had NO clue… I did, but just expected the usual griefer stuff. Not a widespread “grab what you can” thing. Heck, I have had so called friends take stuff I have given them and try to sell it. Human nature ain’t the greatest thing :p
November 17th, 2006 at 4:20 AM
@just a thought
And no, I didnt close my stores… or start screaming… but I am very upset nonetheless. I see hurt people everywhere, and that bothers me greatly.
November 17th, 2006 at 4:20 AM
True Sam. But it’s Human Nature and really the griefers WILL be the ones using it the most.
November 17th, 2006 at 4:57 AM
Personally I was impressed with how Philip handled the TH… They are in the sad position (as someone said) of being dammed either way. No matter what they do someone is going to complain, loudly. I only hope that the constant complaining doesn’t wear them down over time
And SL mimicks RL even more- as Grazel said many of the anti-copybot measures make shopping an unfriendly experience. Same thing IRL, you have DRM on music, and a lot of bigger stores are built like prisons with security guys following you around, impossible to find exits and can’t even get into a dressing room without help lest you steal stuff. (I like shopping online for clothes…
The sad bit is many of these sellers will see their numbers go down, and will blame the existance of copybot or people selling their copied goods, rather than that they are making an unfriendly sales environment…
November 17th, 2006 at 5:09 AM
You know, after much thought it occured to me to say this:
No matter the servide there will ALWAYS be at kleat one person screaming for it to be free.
When it is made free or availible to the public there will ALWAYS be at least one person screaming to take it back - make people pay for it - which brings about at least one person screaming for it to remain free.
There are those of us not motivated by greed (wanting to be oaid in truly worthless bits of paper and metal), and there are those of us that because of the base nature of mankind are motivated by greed, among other things.
When did the creation of art become so twisted as to make others demand payment for it? I am one of those that doesn’t really allow greed in - I have never charged for my help and service to others. I have actually had people INSIST and all but FORCE me to take payment just for helping them in real life!
Call me overly kind and naieve all you’d like: I do not for one minute believe that art of any sort needs to be something you’d charge another being for. And if you MUST sell it. sell it for something OTHER than cash.
The Bartering system worked for a good, long time before money was introduced - and really if we ever have a cataclysm it will be back again - at the least until someone decides to make money again.
Owning a SIM isn’t a requirement - it’s just something you’d like to have.
Owning LAND isn’t a requirement ….. I don’t know how many times I …. and on occasion my mate ….. have said we’d be perfectly happy living in a shack, just so long as we have each other.
Now granted that’d mean no electricity, no computer or Second Life … it’d also be hard because of the way people view those without homes or land of their own.
But you know soemthing? even if free or unverified accounts COULD own land …. It’s still not a requirement. And if it WAS mandatory I’d settle for something big enough for said shack.
November 17th, 2006 at 5:47 AM
@just a thought-
I agree with that. IP (intellectual property) and the idea of paying for an idea are relatively new things, which arguably we could do better without. I also believe that art doesn’t need to be charged for, and much of it isn’t.
The problem is- the world isn’t free. In an ideal society, an artist would be supported by the society in exchange for his contributions to it. Sadly, we don’t have an ideal society, and both IRL and in SL artists need money. Which gives them two choices- get a ‘real job’ and then make art as a hobby or side project, or find some way of using their art to support their lives.
Now this same concept applies IRL or in SL. IRL you must pay rent/insurance/food/fuel/electricity/etc, although in SL you only have to pay your account fee (if you have a premium acct) and your tier/rent. But if someone wants to display their art or distribute it to others (for free or for money), having a gallery space of some kind is quite useful, and that isn’t free. And this is not even getting into people who use SL income to supplement RL income.
But anyway my point is if you are a full time artist you need to make your art pay the bills, somehow. And sadly, selling it is all we (as a society) have come up with. That’s why I don’t mind paying for art, because I know somebody’s passion went into making it and due to the sad reality of our society if people DON’T pay for it, that artist will either stop making art or make much less of it, and will not be able to spend their time doing what they love.
Going a bit deeper though, you do have a good point that we place a very high value on money and property, as a society; and that isn’t necessarily a good thing. We often do value material goods far more than each other or the good of our world as a whole, which is quite sad.
If you take the artist and redefine them as a person who’s only drive or motivation or happiness is to make art, then yeah he probably could live in a shack and get by begging for tips or whatever and be happy doing it. Some artists are like that, and IMHO it’s a beautiful thing to love something that much that you can dedicate your life to it. Sadly though not all artists are willing to make that trade. I don’t view it as a flaw in the artists, rather a sad fact of our society. While the first artist may not care as long as he can make art, most people (artist or not) want to live in relative comfort, good neighborhood, etc. Which IMHO isn’t a bad thing. And that takes money
November 17th, 2006 at 6:01 AM
I’d love to know how many hours a week certain Lindens spend logged in to Second Life - either as themselves or an alt - so they actually understand what is going on in-world. It seemed clear to me that Philip was less than informed on the ‘copybot’ issue, and many other things got an ‘I don’t know’ answer - which I’m sure that as a resident I wasn’t alone in thinking ‘but I know that answer’.
Broccoli
November 17th, 2006 at 6:57 AM
All righty then …
1} Islands are *not* the same as Mainland Land. I don’t *care* who you are, they simply aren’t the same! Therefore, they should be {a} listed differently and {b} cost differently. Anyone who feels differently on either of these points should consider that Islands are high end Condiminiums and Mainland is generally the slums. Oddly, there appears to be no competition between slums and condiminiums, now, does there? Otherwise, the Condo Owners would be bitching that they’re US$5,000.00 per month condos cost *much* more than those little US$300.00 per month slums!
2} People who wish to argue with point {1} should consider advocating making island sims as full featured mainland sims. That is {a} limited landscaping abilities, {b} no ability to “sell” land to people in the sim {while retaining true ownership of said land}, and {c} loss of the land charter thingy that tells people how they can use the land. There’s much I’m sure I’m missing, but you get the idea. Strip the island owners of their land tools so their fancy condos are no longer any different from the slums!
3} Money money money money money. I hate to tell you guys this, but if Linden Labs hadn’t been dumping money in to the economy in the first place, the value of the Linden Dollar would probably be pretty close to the US Dollar. Consider all the people who hop in, buy money, play around a bit, and sign off - without selling every last L$. That’s a helluva drain.
Consider the number of people who have come on to buy money. That’s a helluva demand increase. Yup. LL should stop adding money to the system, so the value of the L$ can skyrocket overnight and make lots of greedy little money bags very very very very very rich, prices can rapidly deflate in SL, and the economy quickly grind to a halt.
Hmmm. That might be a good idea after all.
Lynn Kukulcan
November 17th, 2006 at 7:03 AM
All I will say on this is:
COPYBOT SECURITY SYSTEM (ignore this msg): !quit
No wonder why I stopped playing months ago — SL is more annoying than my first life.
November 17th, 2006 at 7:09 AM
RE: People disappointed Linden isn’t doing much of anything about Copybot.
The problem isn’t that Linden see Copybot as a non-issue, not-a-problem. They do, that’s why they’re enforcing the TOS when a Copybot abuse is reported and will be providing tools to identify the true creator and time of creation of any texture/prim.
The problem is that there’s nothing else they really CAN do. Even if they loathed Copybot (which does have some legit uses; I’d love to back up my work to disk, for instance) they’re limited by the practical nature of the technology involved.
Modify the login system so Copybot can’t log in? Works until five minutes later, when someone recompiles a copybot to match the new login.
Add DRM, encryption, and other means of lockdown? Works until five minutes later, when someone recompiles a copybot to use the new encryption (see Apple’s DRM woes).
Use hashes or other identifiers to specify who’s behind the dummy account the copybot’s using? Again, the copybot gets modified and recompiled to provide fake hashes and identifiers.
In short, it becomes an arms race… LL gets the onus of designing a newfangled protection scheme every week or two, while the hackers trump the schemes again and again. And no, LL can’t just make an “unbreakable” scheme… if they could, they could ditch this virtual world business and go make MILLIONS selling to Apple, Vivendi, Sony, AOL/Time Warner, etc.
who have been looking for that for years.
So, rather than get into an arms race, Linden’s deciding to stay out and just do what they can to empower US to determine what’s legit goods and what’s not. Feasibly, it’s about all they can do.
November 17th, 2006 at 8:20 AM
I don’t agree with the arguments comparing copybot with being able to snatch stuff off the web. This also fits in with my question in blog comments on why they don’t tweak the protocol to kill off the existing round of copybots.
When people make a decision on whether to steal something, speaking in very general terms here, they weigh their morals, the benefit of the theft, the risk of the theft and the ease of the theft. As the ease of the theft increases, something copybot enables, the perceived risk and the weight of the benefit get less important. Does it really matter if you need that house (or clothes, skin, whatever) when it takes close to zero energy to steal a copy?
As the ease decreases - the copybot user has to find and download a new version or the website viewer has to actually do work to use the picture they saw on the web – things like risk/benefit and morals start to gain weight again.
Again, as I’ve said in other blog comments, I understand why they don’t want to start an arms race and why doing that wouldn’t really work. Also understand that nothing on the internet is 100% secure. That said, they could (and IMO should) have done a relatively small amount of work to keep things not-*that*-easy…
Also, I would have liked to hear more metrics on SL’s recent growth and LL’s view on the economic impact of copybot. He said the big sellers are making more money than last few days than the few days before that. Okay, that’s good but he also said that the number of people that use SL *every day* is growing by around 1000 per week. I think a whole curve would be better here instead of just a couple points on it…
November 17th, 2006 at 8:34 AM
I agree with Maczter Oddfellow. Having recently upgraded my account to premium, I’ve started searching for land for sale. I am *not* interested in *renting* land, but the land search is polluted with those listings, and no way to distinguish them easily. Seems like there needs to be a way to search for land rentals separately from land sales, and possibly a way to separate land with covenants from land without.
I probably need to ask a Linden directly if there is going to be any more first land. The current price of land is not encouraging for a first-time buyer.