What is rent?

[Rowan Amore]

2 minutes ago, Benka Ravenhurst said:

rent the estate

Yep, anything not purchased directly from LL means you're paying rent.  Glad you understand now.  You have a parcel on your estate for rent.  

[Solar Legion]

Again, that's nice.

There is no confusion here.

It has been explained to you, repeatedly.

As above, we're done here.

Further responses will get the only response they deserve.

[Rolig Loon]

Land is defined in the SL TOS (Sect 3.4) as virtual space in their servers.  From Linden Lab's perspective, the owner is simply the account that pays Linden Lab to use that space. That account has the ultimate responsibility for (and control of) what happens on the land. That is, "You may permit or deny other users to access your Virtual Land on terms determined by you. Any agreement you make with other users relating to use or access to your Virtual Land must be consistent with the Agreements, and no such agreement can abrogate, nullify, void or modify the Agreements." 

You may allow other people to live on the land, subject to whatever rules you may declare.  You may charge them to use the land if you wish.  You may kick them out without warning or explanation.  As far as Linden Lab is concerned, you are the owner and may do anything you like as long as you don't violate the TOS.  All they care about is that you pay the regular fees for the land.  Nobody else has any rights to the land or responsibility to Linden Lab for it.  Whether they pay you or not, they are tenants, not owners.

[Benka Ravenhurst]

1 minute ago, Rowan Amore said:

Yep, anything not purchased directly from LL means you're paying rent.  Glad you understand now.  You have a parcel on your estate for rent.  

Good, you are beginning to understand. An estate owner can rent a region as opposed to selling it. In this instance, the one renting the region is given domain over the lands of that estate.

Do not gaslight yourself by believing that one who rents the region is renting the lands of that region, he or she is not. All land within that region will have an owner's name attached; at all times.

 

[Benka Ravenhurst]

4 minutes ago, Rolig Loon said:

You may allow other people to live on the land, subject to whatever rules you may declare.  You may charge them to use the land if you wish.  You may kick them out without warning or explanation.  As far as Linden Lab is concerned, you are the owner and may do anything you like as long as you don't violate the TOS.  All they care about is that you pay the regular fees for the land.  Nobody else has any rights to the land or responsibility to Linden Lab for it.  Whether they pay you or not, they are tenants, not owners.

An estate owner is accountable for what the land owners and the tenants of those land owners do, this is correct. However, This cut and paste is not written to explain too you the Pyramid of Accountability, even though it's essence is splattered on the pages. Land owners likewise inherit a degree of accountability with how they use the land they own as well. You can find this in other areas of the TOS.

[Rowan Amore]

2 minutes ago, Benka Ravenhurst said:

Good, you are beginning to understand. An estate owner can rent a region as opposed to selling it. In this instance, the one renting the region is given domain over the lands of that estate.

Do not gaslight yourself by believing that one who rents the region is renting the lands of that region, he or she is not. All land within that region will have an owner's name attached; at all times.

 

This entire debate started when I told you your ad for your available parcel for sale belonged in the Rental section.  You proceeded to tell me it wasn't a rental.  It still is and always will be a rental.

You also never answered my question.  Did you purchase you private estate directly from LL?  If not, you are a renter and any land you 'sell' is a rental.

 

As @Solar Legionsaid, I'm done. 

 

[Bree Giffen]

Correct me if I am wrong but this is my understanding of owners and renters in Second Life.

1. Private estate owner - Paid initial region setup fee to LL. Paying monthly maintenance fee to LL. Able to resell the region.

2. Private estate owner - Paid region price set by prior estate owner. Paying monthly maintenance fee to LL. Able to resell the region.

3. Private land owner - Paid parcel price set by estate owner. Paying fee to estate owner. Allowed to resell parcel by estate owner.

3a. Private land owner - Paid parcel price set by prior land owner. Paying fee to estate owner. Allowed to resell parcel by estate owner.

4. Private land renter - Paying monthly fee to estate owner. Not allowed to resell parcel by estate owner.

5. Public land owner - Paid parcel price set by LL. Paying monthly tier fee to LL. Able to resell the parcel.

6. Public land owner - Paid parcel price set by prior land owner. Paying monthly tier fee to LL. Able to resell parcel.

7. Public land renter - Paying monthly fee to land owner. Not able to resell parcel.

Estate = 1 or more Regions
Region = 65,536 sq m. land simulation (sim) run on a virtual server which exists in on the AWS cloud which exists on AWS hardware servers
Parcel = fraction of a region
AWS = Amazon Web Services

Edited March 17, 2022 by Bree Giffen

[Solar Legion]

2 minutes ago, Bree Giffen said:

Correct me if I am wrong but this is my understanding of owners and renters in Second Life.

1. Private estate owner - Paid initial region setup fee to LL. Paying monthly maintenance fee to LL. Able to resell the region.

2. Private estate owner - Paid region price set by prior estate owner. Paying monthly maintenance fee to LL. Able to resell the region.

3. Private land owner - Paid parcel price set by estate owner. Paying fee to estate owner. Allowed to resell parcel by estate owner.

4. Private land renter - Paying monthly fee to estate owner. Not allowed to resell parcel by estate owner.

5. Public land owner - Paid parcel price set by LL. Paying monthly tier fee to LL. Able to resell the parcel.

6. Public land owner - Paid parcel price set by prior land owner. Paying monthly tier fee to LL. Able to resell parcel.

7. Public land renter - Paying monthly fee to land owner. Not able to resell parcel.

Estate = 1 or more Regions
Region = 65,536 sq m. land simulation (sim) run on a virtual server which exists in on the AWS cloud which exists on AWS hardware servers
Parcel = fraction of a region
AWS = Amazon Web Services

Semi-correct. The reality however is that the one that owns the parcels for a private Region is more or less irrelevant - the Estate Owner actually owns the entire thing. You are simply paying rent (more or less analogous to paying a Bank a Mortgage, in perpetuity) and allowed by the system to have your name as parcel "owner".

[WereBeast Alpha]

I see renting land as renting an apartment. You pay the monthly rent just like in real life and just able to do more but within rules of your landowner / Landlord.

If you don't pay on time you lose the place and get evicted.

If something happened that the landlord didn't like and evicted you that can happen in real life as well.

Just what I see it as might be silly or just me. 

[Rolig Loon]

40 minutes ago, Bree Giffen said:

3. Private land owner - Paid parcel price set by estate owner. Paying fee to estate owner. Allowed to resell parcel by estate owner.

4. Private land renter - Paying monthly fee to estate owner. Not allowed to resell parcel by estate owner.

There's no distinction between those two, as far as Linden Lab is concerned. All that counts is who pays Linden Lab for the land. They give that person total control over it.

Even if About Land has your name on a parcel on a private estate, you are not allowed to sell it to anyone else. All you can do is abandon it to the estate owner.  The estate owner may decide to charge a monthly fee, whether your name is on the parcel or not, because the land still belongs to the estate owner and he alone is responsible for paying the fees to Linden Lab.  If you don't like the estate owner's terms, he can evict you and reclaim your parcel at any time, without warning.

Edited March 17, 2022 by Rolig Loon

[So Whimsy]

Answer me one question. If you don't think you are renting your land...why did you post it in the RENT section? Clearly part of you understands what is the right way given the context.

[Solar Legion]

5 minutes ago, So Whimsy said:

Answer me one question. If you don't think you are renting your land...why did you post it in the RENT section? Clearly part of you understands what is the right way given the context.

As noted by Rowan - it was moved to that section and not by the OP.

The OP placed it elsewhere.

[Benka Ravenhurst]

15 minutes ago, So Whimsy said:

Answer me one question. If you don't think you are renting your land...why did you post it in the RENT section? Clearly part of you understands what is the right way given the context.

I was put there without my consent.

[Theresa Tennyson]

You know, there are threads on this forum that make me think the OP lost a bet and is required to make themselves look silly to pay it off.

Not referring to any specific thread, of course; just sort of musing.

[Rowan Amore]

17 minutes ago, So Whimsy said:

Answer me one question. If you don't think you are renting your land...why did you post it in the RENT section? Clearly part of you understands what is the right way given the context.

The moderators looked at the content and placed it where it belonged.  In the Private Estate Rental Section. 

 

[So Whimsy]

Thanks for clearing that up.

[Benka Ravenhurst]

37 minutes ago, xxVi3perxx said:

I see renting land as renting an apartment. You pay the monthly rent just like in real life and just able to do more but within rules of your landowner / Landlord.

If you don't pay on time you lose the place and get evicted.

If something happened that the landlord didn't like and evicted you that can happen in real life as well.

That is true; and a well observable fact. Of course, if a land owner fails to pay taxes, then the land is reclaimed, just as would be in Second Life.

What folks here struggle with is the concept of accountability. In our real world, owning a home as opposed to renting brings a potential of great rewards as well as investment, but it can be just as much of a curse as it is a blessing; you can't simply cleans yourself of responsibility by just walking away as you could in a rental.

[Prokofy Neva]

14 hours ago, Benka Ravenhurst said:

In the context of the game, to rent means that you are a tenant to the owner; you can discover this fact in any dictionary. If I buy land, either on the mainland or on a private island, then that would disqualify me as a renter because my NAME is right there on the TITLE of said land in the about land tab.

I think it's silly when certain people 'think' that an estate owner and land owner are one in the same; this is not true. Owning the estate doesn't mean you're always the land owner. For example, you can rent an island estate from the owner that grants you estate powers in return for money, then turn around and literately SELL all the land on that estate. Just because the estate is being rented does NOT always mean that the land is likewise being rented.

 

 

 

 

 

 

This is one of the reasons some of us opposed the Lindens' change to island properties years ago, which enabled them to be "sold" to others.

They also enabled them to be put in the search list with the status of "land for sale". We thought this misled consumers.

What I'm trying to understand from this thread: have the Lindens' changed their policy and insisted all land nominally for "sale" on islands now be put in the category "land for rent"? If so, that would indicate a paradigm shift historically.

I'm not sure a nominal "estate owner" given that status by the true island owner when he flips a homestead or "sells" parcels on an island can re-sell those parcels on the open marked UNLESS the actual owner has included that option. I know on group land on the Mainland, you can give powers to people short of them being able to sell land you paid for. Likely estate ownership confers that ability, but then if you paid that island owner a nominal price for the land (these prices are very low now or they are given away for free), you should expect the power to resell at any price or no price. Tier is the real cost month after month and you still have to pay that either to a landlord or directly to LL.

All land in SL is for rent; those of us who bought Mainland sims are merely Governor Linden's tenants. "For any reasons or no reason" LL can terminate your account for real or imagined offenses and seize your land. I suppose a few lawsuits in the past which ended in settlements with the Lab might stay their hand from too much arbitrariness, but the fact remains, you do not possess your pixels. You can't take the island you bought to another virtual world.

Mainland came first in SL, and there were only a few islands put near the Mainland (one of the "big 7" developers nurtured by the Lab was one of them, with the prototype of a virtual store for a RL client). Gradually, LL added islands, but people who bought them complained bitterly of their poor performance.

I don't understand the technical reasons for why a server with unnavigable void sims around it, or the pixel illusion of a sea, is harder to make run well that contiguous regions that are four to a server (or whatever the number is now). Sims adjacent to each other inworld are not necessarily on the same server, another fact I've never fully understood, but I believe it relates to load balance. Unlike Kitely, the Lindens don't have "servers on demand" that stay invisible and inoperable until you log into them; they must keep all these sims spinning all the time because of the concept of contiguous land. You never know when someone might suddenly get a notion to TP into the Sea of Omidyar, and therefore it has to be waiting and visible for when that notion arises. But it might be possible to make sims no one goes to or get few visits statistically to go into a "sleep" state where they are awoken directly or into the distant view when you come on the scene, like the yellow brick road rising up before Dorothy. And for that reason they must constantly mix up the sims on servers.

Eventually, the Lindens got the islands working better -- and then there were the void sims, and then the huge uproar over how they were misused, and then homesteads created as the product to sell to land dealers, but with the stipulation that you first had to buy a private island and keep paying tier on it. And I think that's reasonable because otherwise, what happened then, until it was stopped, and would happen now, is that land dealers would buy 100 homesteads, flip them to renters who would get "estate owner" status to enable them to control the land and get service from the Lindens, and never log into SL. LL didn't want that burden. Forcing people to buy the island slows the exploitation down.

So historically, driving this development of land for "sale" on islands, and the insistence on being able to flip void sims, were land dealers who resented the success Mainland dealers had renting and selling land (mainly Anshe Chung and several other big land barons). They didn't think it was fair that customers of Governor Linden (people who "bought" land but rented from LL and paid LL tier) could get more of the economic pie than people who bought higher-priced islands. Of course, they could just have people rent and do CS like we do on the Mainland, you know? But the dream of an LL business is to set up an automatic system and then go play World of Warcraft while the cash register kachings all day.

We Mainland dealers and rentals agencies thought it was misleading to consumers to have land for "sale" that in fact wasn't that. Because you still had to go on paying tier, and you would have to pay that tier to the island owner, not directly to LL who didn't want a zillion customers now appearing who would put a burden on their CS systems. And because all too often, then and now, the island owner would disappear, leaving all his customers who "bought" the land up a creek.

But since we were perceived as interested parties because we would compete with these island dealers, we were not heeded by the Lab. They wanted to sell more islands. The way to do that was to encourage more island owners who could then "sell" their land or rent it out with a profit. They wanted to flip the homesteads and make the new "owner" have the ability to seek customer support from the land directly, so eventually LL made it possible for essentially renters to be added to an estate owner status to be able to perform certain functions themselves or contact the Lindens.

Of course the obvious point here is that island dealers were never victims of unfairness because of course their offerings would be more in demand -- they could control the builds and the view on their properties, and control what happened in the next sim by the fact that you couldn't enter it physically. They developed off-sim landscaping to make it less of a void. With 25,000 or so islands today, some with rentals, some closed to the public (private individuals, universities etc), and with Mainland sims only about 6,000 or so (more every day with Bellisseria growing), clearly island dealers had a huge advantage, although they do have to pay higher tier. Originally, the island sims were made to perform better and justify that extra costs. Today, I don't know if that is really the case any more. I think my ancient "grandfathered" homestead and island work as well as somebody's newly-baked island. But I haven't scientifically tested it.

 

 

 

 

Edited March 17, 2022 by Prokofy Neva

[kali Wylder]

So, to recap:

Rent is is the periodic payment paid to anyone other than Linden Lab for your land in SL. You may have rights (to terraform, to sublet, etc.) granted to you by the owner or you might not, depending on the agreement you make with them.

Tier is the periodic payment paid to Linden Lab for land in SL. Somebody pays the tier to Linden Lab for any land in SL; if it's not you then you don't own it.

[Benka Ravenhurst]

47 minutes ago, Solar Legion said:

Semi-correct. The reality however is that the one that owns the parcels for a private Region is more or less irrelevant - the Estate Owner actually owns the entire thing. You are simply paying rent (more or less analogous to paying a Bank a Mortgage, in perpetuity) and allowed by the system to have your name as parcel "owner".

A car seat is not the car; I'm sure this is incontestable; nor is the car itself the car seat. It's inclusive of a car seat, but the two are entirely different things.  In fact, you can own the car but not the seat installed, seeing how a friend put it in there temporarily just to get the piece of junk out of the way.

Truth be told, there is not one piece of a car that is the car itself, meaning that the concept of a car is a transcendence aspect of all the combined parts, not all of which need not belong to the car owner. Moreover, you can be the legal owner of a car that doesn't even exist.

An estate is a domain that is owned, a domain that is inclusive of land certainly, but it is not physically the land itself, they are two different things.

[Rowan Amore]

5 minutes ago, kali Wylder said:

So, to recap:

Rent is is the periodic payment paid to anyone other than Linden Lab for your land in SL. You may have rights (to terraform, to sublet, etc.) granted to you by the owner or you might not, depending on the agreement you make with them.

Tier is the periodic payment paid to Linden Lab for land in SL. Somebody pays the tier to Linden Lab for any land in SL; if it's not you then you don't own it.

Tier is actually your right to own mainland. Land fees are what are paid to LL.  Tier is often confused with the payment.  

Per the Knowledge base...

Land tier (often simply referred to as "tier) is a key concept of Second Life land ownership.  "Tier" refers to the maximum amount of land you can own on the mainland, measured in square meters (m2).  A premium account includes 1024m2 of tier, which can be used for a free Linden Home. Thus, the minimum tier that anyone can have is 1024m2. 

Note: Tier is not the land itself. It represents the maximum amount of land you can own before advancing to the next pricing tier.

Tier is connected to but not the same as land use fees. You pay land use fees for tier. Tier is not a currency like Linden dollars. This is especially important for new landowners to understand, as some experienced Residents use the term inaccurately. It's accurate to say "I pay for tier," or "I pay tier fees," but not "I pay tier."

Edited March 17, 2022 by Rowan Amore

[Benka Ravenhurst]

9 minutes ago, Prokofy Neva said:

This is one of the reasons some of us opposed the Lindens' change to island properties years ago, which enabled them to be "sold" to others.

They also enabled them to be put in the search list with the status of "land for sale". We thought this misled consumers.

What I'm trying to understand from this thread: have the Lindens' changed their policy and insisted all land nominally for "sale" on islands now be put in the category "land for rent"? If so, that would indicate a paradigm shift historically.

I'm not sure a nominal "estate owner" given that status by the true island owner when he flips a homestead or "sells" parcels on an island can re-sell those parcels on the open marked UNLESS the actual owner has included that option. I know on group land on the Mainland, you can give powers to people short of them being able to sell land you paid for. Likely estate ownership confers that ability, but then if you paid that island owner a nominal price for the land (these prices are very low now or they are given away for free), you should expect the power to resell at any price or no price. Tier is the real cost month after month and you still have to pay that either to a landlord or directly to LL.

All land in SL is for rent; those of us who bought Mainland sims are merely Governor Linden's tenants. "For any reasons or no reason" LL can terminate your account for real or imagined offenses and seize your land. I suppose a few lawsuits in the past which ended in settlements with the Lab might stay their hand from too much arbitrariness, but the fact remains, you do not possess your pixels. You can't take the island you bought to another virtual world.

Mainland came first in SL, and there were only a few islands put near the Mainland (one of the "big 7" developers nurtured by the Lab was one of them, with the prototype of a virtual store for a RL client). Gradually, LL added islands, but people who bought them complained bitterly of their poor performance.

I don't understand the technical reasons for why a server with unnavigable void sims around it, or the pixel illusion of a sea, is harder to make run well that contiguous regions that are four to a server (or whatever the number is now). Sims adjacent to each other inworld are not necessarily on the same server, another fact I've never fully understood, but I believe it relates to load balance. Unlike Kitely, the Lindens don't have "servers on demand" that stay invisible and inoperable until you log into them; they must keep all these sims spinning all the time because of the concept of contiguous land. You never know when someone might suddenly get a notion to TP into the Sea of Omidyar, and therefore it has to be waiting and visible for when that notion arises. But it might be possible to make sims no one goes to or get few visits statistically to go into a "sleep" state where they are awoken directly or into the distant view when you come on the scene, like the yellow brick road rising up before Dorothy. And for that reason they must constantly mix up the sims on servers.

Eventually, the Lindens got the islands working better -- and then there were the void sims, and then the huge uproar over how they were misused, and then homesteads created as the product to sell to land dealers, but with the stipulation that you first had to buy a private island and keep paying tier on it. And I think that's reasonable because otherwise, what happened then, until it was stopped, and would happen now, is that land dealers would buy 100 homesteads, flip them to renters who would get "estate owner" status to enable them to control the land and get service from the Lindens, and never log into SL. LL didn't want that burden. Forcing people to buy the island slows the exploitation down.

So historically, driving this development of land for "sale" on islands, and the insistence on being able to flip void sims, were land dealers who resented the success Mainland dealers had renting and selling land (mainly Anshe Chung and several other big land barons). They didn't think it was fair that customers of Governor Linden (people who "bought" land but rented from LL and paid LL tier) could get more of the economic pie than people who bought higher-priced islands. Of course, they could just have people rent and do CS like we do on the Mainland, you know? But the dream of an LL business is to set up an automatic system and then go play World of Warcraft while the cash register kachings all day.

We Mainland dealers and rentals agencies thought it was misleading to consumers to have land for "sale" that in fact wasn't that. Because you still had to go on paying tier, and you would have to pay that tier to the island owner, not directly to LL who didn't want a zillion customers now appearing who would put a burden on their CS systems. And because all too often, then and now, the island owner would disappear, leaving all his customers who "bought" the land up a creek.

But since we were perceived as interested parties because we would compete with these island dealers, we were not heeded by the Lab. They wanted to sell more islands. The way to do that was to encourage more island owners who could then "sell" their land or rent it out with a profit. They wanted to flip the homesteads and make the new "owner" have the ability to seek customer support from the land directly, so eventually LL made it possible for essentially renters to be added to an estate owner status to be able to perform certain functions themselves or contact the Lindens.

Of course the obvious point here is that island dealers were never victims of unfairness because of course their offerings would be more in demand -- they could control the builds and the view on their properties, and control what happened in the next sim by the fact that you couldn't enter it physically. They developed off-sim landscaping to make it less of a void. With 25,000 or so islands today, some with rentals, some closed to the public (private individuals, universities etc), and with Mainland sims only about 6,000 or so (more every day with Bellisseria growing), clearly island dealers had a huge advantage, although they do have to pay higher tier. Originally, the island sims were made to perform better and justify that extra costs. Today, I don't know if that is really the case any more. I think my ancient "grandfathered" homestead and island work as well as somebody's newly-baked island. But I haven't scientifically tested it.

When dealing with virtual land, the idea that you are selling anything apart from accountability only exists in fantasy land. The only reason why Linden Labs even choose to align virtual properties in this fashion is to mitigate the impact of their liabilities; not to divert them. This is where the Pyramid of Accountability comes into play, as it serves as the means of that mitigating factor.  

[Theresa Tennyson]

 

7 minutes ago, Benka Ravenhurst said:

A car seat is not the car; I'm sure this is incontestable; nor is the car itself the car seat. It's inclusive of a car seat, but the two are entirely different things.  In fact, you can own the car but not the seat installed, seeing how a friend put it in there temporarily just to get the piece of junk out of the way.

Truth be told, there is not one piece of a car that is the car itself, meaning that the concept of a car is a transcendence aspect of all the combined parts, not all of which need not belong to the car owner. Moreover, you can be the legal owner of a car that doesn't even exist.

An estate is a domain that is owned, a domain that is inclusive of land certainly, but it is not physically the land itself, they are two different things.

Theresa Tennyson murmurs, "Must have been quite the bet..."

[Benka Ravenhurst]

26 minutes ago, Rowan Amore said:

Tier is actually your right to own mainland. Land fees are what are paid to LL.  Tier is often confused with the payment.

No, according to TOS, nobody has a RIGHT to receive that title, even if tier is granted in advance. All services provided are at the discretion of Linden Labs, as such, they reserve the right to terminate said service at anytime and for any reason.

I believe these ingrained concepts are getting in the way of your understanding of these agreements, an issue that I sadly find all too common in my conversations.

Tier is not a form of payment, it is a RESULT of a of payment. All Premium account users pay for membership that comes with a land teir.   When you by land on the mainland, the tier is what determines how much land you are allowed to possess; it is not what you pay.

When you make your membership payments, you are paying for privileges that comes with a land tier, tier meaning a degree of rank or position; look it up. Unfortunate to say that ignorance of the concept has led to a misuse of the word with in-world residences, often associating a tier as a form of payment or amount.

Edited March 17, 2022 by Benka Ravenhurst

[Prokofy Neva]

29 minutes ago, Benka Ravenhurst said:

A car seat is not the car; I'm sure this is incontestable; nor is the car itself the car seat. It's inclusive of a car seat, but the two are entirely different things.  In fact, you can own the car but not the seat installed, seeing how a friend put it in there temporarily just to get the piece of junk out of the way.

Truth be told, there is not one piece of a car that is the car itself, meaning that the concept of a car is a transcendence aspect of all the combined parts, not all of which need not belong to the car owner. Moreover, you can be the legal owner of a car that doesn't even exist.

An estate is a domain that is owned, a domain that is inclusive of land certainly, but it is not physically the land itself, they are two different things.

In real life, if you are a land owner, and you die, you no longer exist and you don't own land land. Either it becomes abandoned, as in SL, but God or Nature gets it, like Linden Lab.

Or you pass it to your heirs with a will. But despite humankind's legality, Nature or God or Vladimir Putin can still take that land away from you; your land is not really "yours" in the ultimate sense.

If LL defaults on their server bills to Amazon, then Amazon will seize their "land" and hence "our land".  But to live in real life with common sense means not to heed all the hypotheticals and "whatabouts" and "whatifs" but to live "as if" you are an owner and use various laws and customs to manage this fictitious property. So in SL.