Second Life, a world imagined, created, and owned by it’s residents no more.
September 21, 2007 8:16 am
I wonder when exactly it happened but secondlife.com does no longer show the ‘promises graphic’. Promises graphic? I figured it was as it said:
- Second Life is a 3D online digital world imaged, created, & owned by it’s residents.
- Own virtual land.
I’ve looked all over the site for a replacement. Something that says I’m still able to own land. To create. To imagine. Though luck. The best replacement graphics I could find say:
- Buy/sell Linden Dollars.
- Second Life is a 3D online digital world imaged and created by it’s residents. <-Where did ‘owned’ go?!!
- Get virtual land.
- And the famous tagline ‘your world, your imagination’.
If people now ask me what is Second Life about, do I now tell them ‘well, it used to be a 3D online virtual world imaged, created, and owned by it’s residents’? Although ‘your world’ still implies some ownership of it I assume it’s a mistake and they forgot to take that one down. But I do am curious. If you signed up to Second Life before the change of the site, with the promises graphic still there, do you still own your land? They said you did. And all those residents, that ‘imagined, created, & owned’ before Linden Labs took away ‘owned’ from it’s Second Life promotion sentence, do those still own their inventories? The rights to the content they have created? The stories and sims they have imagined? Or were those - just as the graphic - all replaced by the rights to buy/sell Linden Dollars and to ‘get’ land? Did with changing their front page, Linden Labs confiscate all we ever owned in this crazy virtual world called Second Life?
I know I should have read the updated ToS more carefully before clicking ‘ok’. Although, if I did not click OK, I could not play. *sobs* I know what I’ll be hugging today… It’s hard to let it go. :(
25 Responses to “Second Life, a world imagined, created, and owned by it’s residents no more.”
Amazing indeed, yet, I found the ‘owned’ word!
That part of the front page disappeared on September 5th. They needed some space to put the black part about SLgrid. Do I need to say more?
Congratulations, Barry. For if it would ever disappear, it says: ‘Second Life is a 3-D virtual world entirely built and owned by its Residents. Since opening to the public in 2003, it has grown explosively and today is inhabited by a total of 9,619,831 Residents from around the globe.’ Should we inform LL that they forgot about it?
Dandellion,
suredepends on what you want to say. Love declarations to Vint are a bit off topic, don’t you think? :pShould I now blame the black SLgrid.com box, bad web designers, … for ownership rights to disappear ? ;) I do see an empty sput under ‘open source’, maybe they can put ‘own your world’ there? ;)
Anyway, I still think SLgrid isn’t a bad thing an sich, and it has nothing to do with if we ‘own’ the stuff or not. They just ’smuggled’ it into all this? :/
@Vint: Yep. Though, I do hope my ISP fixes my current issues before the ISP manager’s house gets fixed up with bombs >.> .
P.S.: Vint, stop calling me Barry and call me Smiley, or i’ll call you Falken! Lol.
P.P.S.: How does Smiley Falken sound? It just occured to me it sounds awesome ‘^.^ When was your Rezday?
So I wasn’t the only one to notice.
Hey everyone, don’t be so hard on our loving dictators. Without them we would be nothing. I mean, come on, they give us all this great stuff to play with. This is russia for christ’s sake, why would anyone think to own ANYTHING? I’m sure they have a good reason for doing what they did, probably preparing for stalin’s birthday!
-Comrade Kitty
Do I have to follow smiley’s procedure if I want to declare my… ops, *blush* … to go offtopic? Speaking offtopics… Smiley, do you plan to propeos Vint when you trying those name combinations?
Back to topic: Me neither find SLgrid a bad idea (except the name), but somehow it happened in the same time. For sure, LL is in the problem now to distinct the platform form SL as one of the implementations of it. And part of the “solution” is well, let’s say, not insisting on resident’s ownership.
We can go about this until blue in the face, but we’ll get now2here. That is just one fragment of much bigger problem. And that one, called “(lack of) Linden’s strategy and PR”, is not a simple puzzle.
You never did really own it - you just rented a bit of it with a large non-refundable deposit.
Oh - and did you know you can no longer read/post on the SL forums without handing over Credit Card info? Just found that out today - doesn’t apply to those registered before Aug 2006, but pity the poor noobs who can’t get the help/info they need.
Dandellion, you’re an adult, so you pay more. Click two ads, at least! ;)) And maybe Smiley - see! I said it right! ;) - is trying to get me a TSL account for my rezday? ;)
And Gaynor, yes I know. I’m one of those noobs you’re talking about. It’s still the only reason why I have payment info on file. I just fed them paypal info, and they swallowed that, though.
Gaynor, if I create something, how can that be considered rented by me?
Hehe Vint, I got 2 alts rofl, Midian Streeter and Jake Flaman ‘^.^ . I was asking about when is it, so I could know if I could’ve chosen it when I was “born”! Rofl.
Oh Vint they’ll find some way to worm out of it, they always do. Our old pal the TOS is a miraculous entity that can be moulded and interpreted in a different way depending on the situation.
Come the end of the world there will be cockroaches and the Linden Labia TOS.
For better or worse, the explanation for this is the Bragg lawsuit. Here’s my rundown on the change:
http://virtuallyblind.com/2007/09/14/bragg-linden-lab-response-dismiss/
Analysis right after the bullet points.
For what it’s worth, the “own virtual land” language does still appear, here:
http://secondlife.com/whatis/land.php
At least for now.
*giggles
Presumably everybody else signed the new ‘terms” without reading it. I’ve always said that the title to land in this place is extremely dodgy. But equally my guess is that Linden Labs are in deep shit in this lawsuit and the new “terms” are a desperate attempt on the part of their lawyers to drag them out of it. I doubt theywould stand up retrospectively in any court of law. I’m going to enjoy watching them sinking into it. Fortunately I’m not one of those self-appointed land lords who’ve spent real money to perticipate in one of the most inequitable “land ownership” systems that I’ve ever seen. It’s like prostitution. You sell it, you’ve still got it. The judge will have fun with that. My exposure is a few tens of bucks.
@dandellion Kimban….
I was talking about the “land” - really just a bit of server space that you rent, and that you will never own.
I was thinking, if you compare it to an appartement: if you own an appartement you own the right to a part of the land it’s build upon, right? Then if you own all the appartements, you own the complete plot of land? Then if you own enough SL land that you fill up a whole server, do you own the server itself? :D
(Disclaimer: the owner did not have any coffee today.)
There are generally either federal, state, local, or complex tenant laws that prohibit that practice in RL.
I noticed this as well, and also followed around the links and saw the “owned” is still there, and also here, where it counts:
secondlife.com/whatis/land.php
On the front page it says “Get” virtual land, as if you can no longer “own” it. But inside, on this instructional page, it says “own virtual land”.
Benjamin Duranske, ever the legend in his own mind, is not performing any rocket science here. Many people, even not being “lawyers,” will have instantly grasped that it has to do with the Bragg case, and the challenge to the rhetoric about ownership. And it may be that the Lindens haven’t gotten around to fixing these inner pages yet, and they bear watching.
What’s more important than Bragg driving the new TOS drop-down and the removal of this rhetoric is the announcement about the new grid plan, open architecture, and open source. Because the Lindens want to make sure, when they go open source and devalue land and content completely, and disrupt the resident-created economy, that they will not have to face any significant lawsuits — lawsuits that will have a lot more community support and legitimacy than Bragg’s. They will both make it easy to pay off some smaller suits should they legitimately arise, and make it harder for those with larger holdings and creation to litigate without facing some losses.
You don’t own the right to land where an apartment is, that’s misguided. You own the access to your condo in that building complex. Owning a condo indeed is a lot like owning the server space in SL.
The Lindens aren’t at all in deep shit with Bragg. I’m quite sure they will prevail. They’re defense is correct.
No Vint, you never own the land in RL too. The state owns it, and gives it to you for permanent use. The atavisms of feudal system. King owns everything.
Cynical. I like it. I would say another way to analyze it is to assess as one of the contractual specifics of owning land is you owe taxes to the public service entity(ies) that have incorporated/acquired the land you are purchasing. Ownership changes hands. They can reclaim it under eminent domain, but only for public use, and they are required by law to give you fair recompense for said land.
And of course, this is the positive way to look at it.
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