Doing academic research on Second Life. Any veterans willing to be interviewed?

[Katherine Heartsong]

Thank you for clarifying. As other have pointed out this will be a very small sample size of the most die-hard/vocal forum users but here you fgo ...

1. How long have you participated in Second Life?
2. How many hours per week (on average) do you participate in SL?
3. How much time have you invested in your avatar?
4. Do you make your real identity known, or do you remain pseudonymous?
5. What is the worst thing a person can do in SL?

1. Three years continuous now, but I had tried a few other times over the past decade, but for never longer than a week or so.

2. Somewhere between 20–25.

3. The first year I'd be making a major change to my avatar's looks at least once/week. Always the same body brand, but different shapes, heads, skins, hair styles etc. In the last two years I've done nothing to my body shape, have narrowed my hair choices to only 3 (I wear one 90% of the time), and have settled on one skin and head shape. Except for maybe a minor slider tweak, hardly any changes so no time in the past two years.

4. People know I'm a RL artist and many know roughly where I live. 99% of the people who meet me in world and certainly here on the forums know I'm male in RL versus female in SL. Beyond that, anonymous. Not that my RL feeling/emotions are separate, just who I am really needs to be mostly private for my peace of mind.

5. Excluding the obvious ToS violations, especially as they relate to s3x and ag3play, I suppose the worst for me personally is simply lying and the deception that goes on, even by omission. I'd prefer someone says "Not saying" or "None of your business" if I ask a question too close to home, than lie to me. We're (largely) anonymized avatars, why lie?

Edited September 29, 2023 by Katherine Heartsong

[TechLawProf]

On 9/27/2023 at 9:04 PM, animats said:

First, some suggested reading: "Making a Metaverse that Matters", by Wagner James Au, is a recent book by someone who spent much time in Second Life. That's a good overview.

Second, the issues of digital property were at one time addressed by the Second Life Bar Association. There was a group of real-world lawyers in Second Life, and they had their own little "legal village" in Second Life, and discussed dispute resolution and property in virtual worlds.The organization, and its "legal village" of offices, is gone. Faye Blackheart, one of the officers of that organization, still has a law office in world, in the SYZM Tower in NTBI.

Third, a point I bring up now and then is that Second Life manages to operate without a huge number of "moderators". Almost everybody else in this space, such as Facebook/Meta/Horizon and Roblox, has an army of outsourced minimum wage moderator goons armed with ban hammers and qualified immunity. Second Life has a small and famously slow-responding governance department. Why does that work? (Hint: it has to do with how property rights work in Second Life.)

Feel free to contact me.

This is fantastic information. Thank you so much, @animats. I'll DM you shortly.

[TechLawProf]

On 9/27/2023 at 9:18 PM, Rowan Amore said:

I would assume as a law professor, you read the Terms of Service before joining SL.  We all should but most probably don't.  Specifically, this part...

5.1 You or we may terminate your Account(s) at any time.

You may terminate this Agreement by closing your Account(s) at any time for any reason. Linden Lab may suspend or terminate your Account at any time for any reason. In such event, Linden Lab shall have no further obligation or liability to you under this Agreement or otherwise, and you shall be entitled to no compensation or other payment, remedy, recourse or refund.

The case you cited above was quite possibly the reason for some additions to those terms over the years.  LL is under no obligation to compensate anyone for anything and can terminate your account for any reason or no reason.  They could shut down tomorrow and we'd have no recourse since we agreed to the ToS.  Could someone take them to court again?  Sure.  You, as the lawyer, would be better able to gauge whether it would be a winnable case.

Thank you, @Rowan Amore. Yes, I read the terms. They're similar to other website terms of service. And it seems beyond dispute that websites can terminate accounts for (mostly) any reason without liability. The only wrinkle is that users might have a claim for certain digital entitlements they purchased with real money that have not yet been exercised (e.g., access to an online event that has not yet transpired). But my project isn't so much to assemble any kind of case under current law as it is to analyze the theoretical implications of the lack of property on the internet more broadly. Appreciate the input.

[TechLawProf]

11 hours ago, Sid Nagy said:

My guess: This is only to get a better general idea about SL or to select people they want to talk further with.

That's correct. And it has been very educational to read all of these replies. I only regret that I can't respond more fully to all of them. Thanks, @Sid Nagy

[Marianne Little]

A good blog that you should at least skim through: https://modemworld.me/

Category: Transcripts gives you a lot of information. https://modemworld.me/category/linden-lab/transcripts/

It is a lot of SL covered here,  in addition to transcripts of Lab Gab meetings and information about new developments, it is Art in Second Life, Exploring Second Life and Events.

 

[Katherine Heartsong]

13 hours ago, TechLawProf said:

But my project isn't so much to assemble any kind of case under current law as it is to analyze the theoretical implications of the lack of property on the internet more broadly.

This to me is an interesting point and really the crux of what the word "metaverse" even means. What I'd envision is a series of "worlds" if you will (SL being one, Roblox another, etc) that are vaguely equivalent to websites, and a system where I can move my avatar from one to the other seemlessly along with my personal goods/clothings/etc, if the core/common attributes the world user set up their world with allow that. Basically, anyone could host a world with a provider and allow whatever access they wish.

I own, and can pass along or transfer or sell or inherit the things I buy (vendors another standardized piece of the infrastructure, as is a common currency), just like the real world (sans the current laws around thing like iTunes libraries which I think are flawed).

There'd need to be be a standardized language/tagging/attributes for clothing and even worlds much like approved HTML tags like "H1", "td", "p", "em" etc, objects, currency, environments, standardized physics types etc.

Land "owned" might be unique to each world and without equivalency between worlds, but if I have bought a cyberpunk outfit here in SL, it should be available to me to wear in Roblox or the world you are paying to host somewhere (another piece of the infrastructure), unless you strictly set up your world to be a fantasy late 19th century agricultural world where anything tagged "sci-fi" or "furry" isn't permitted.

Anyway, the whole realm of owning digital assets right now is such a mess and goes against millenia of ownership of something you buy and the ingrained mental model of how we have transacted for the entirety of recent history in the West ... are we even buying a song from iTunes, or is Apple simply allowing the original purchaser only to use it until they die, then it goes away? I still use a garden hoe I inherited from my grandfather, and it seems there is no such equivalence with a digital asset, which is seemingly what corporations want anyway.

The conflict is partly the walled garden syndrome and how we could create a large scale metaverse without the major players not playing nice with each other, or being far too corporate in their thinking.

HTML democratized the world so that (most) anyone could participate and create a website or see other people's websites (for good or bad), that's what we need for worlds in a metaverse too. It's a pipe dream given the current entrenched systems, but still something to try for.

Edited September 29, 2023 by Katherine Heartsong

[Arielle Popstar]

@TechLawProf to expand on what Katherine already mentioned, Secondlife opensourced it's viewer code which allowed some enterprising programmers to create their own opensourced server platform at opensimulator.org and is easily accessible using the Third Party Secondlife viewers. At one point in 2008 Secondlife even tested being able to teleport from here to another independent Opensim grid that technically allowed wearable content to transfer over. They did close that due to the ramifications of content and avatars having access to a basically free world where they would not have control of such content and couldn't charge for the land there which is the basis of a large part of their income here.

Up until the ToS change of May 2010, content made here with full Copy, Mod and Transfer permissions was allowed to be exported by the viewers and subsequently imported into Opensim and other viewer compatible grids and worlds. They changed it after May 2010 to disallow that, though as far as I know there was no actual legal change in the DMCA that prompted that, it was simply a business/ToS change on the Lab's part, possibly to protect themselves from a potential competitor being able to have ready access to content made here.

Some of us have digital ID's on both platforms and as such there is some question as to whether the owner of the digital ID Arielle Popstar as an example, who has bought content in Secondlife shouldn't have rights to that same content in Opensim grids, as there is of course some of the SL content having been transferred over there regardless of the permission systems, either by third parties or the original creators themselves. It all gets a bit legally murky as to what rights one has to digital property that exists in multiple places when the owner of the digital ID's is in different worlds.

[Qie Niangao]

22 minutes ago, Arielle Popstar said:

Some of us have digital ID's on both platforms and as such there is some question as to whether the owner of the digital ID Arielle Popstar as an example, who has bought content in Secondlife shouldn't have rights to that same content in Opensim grids, as there is of course some of the SL content having been transferred over there regardless of the permission systems, either by third parties or the original creators themselves. It all gets a bit legally murky as to what rights one has to digital property that exists in multiple places when the owner of the digital ID's is in different worlds.

This illustrates a dichotomy that seems important to the thread. Besides the question here regarding the rights of a digital property owner, there's a complementary question of the rights of the intellectual property owner. For example, an IP owner may license content without constraining permissions on one platform but reserve some permissions on another, particularly when those platforms differ in the enforcement or semantics of permissions.

A simple hypothetical example: In SL, a "full perm" object does not permit download, derivative works, etc., of textures used on that object, but such restrictions aren't necessarily enforced on all possible grids. For a metaverse that's supposed to somehow support passing of objects among grids, that becomes a messy problem of digital property DRM even though the licensing of the content's intellectual property may be clear.

In the case of IP that's legitimately available (with whatever DRM) on multiple platforms/grids of the metaverse, I believe it's pretty settled that the IP owner can offer distinct licenses on those different grids, and a digital property buyer may choose a different permission offering on each grid rather than always needing to pay for the same permission level on all possible grids.

[Arielle Popstar]

16 minutes ago, Qie Niangao said:

A simple hypothetical example: In SL, a "full perm" object does not permit download, derivative works, etc., of textures used on that object, but such restrictions aren't necessarily enforced on all possible grids. For a metaverse that's supposed to somehow support passing of objects among grids, that becomes a messy problem of digital property DRM even though the licensing of the content's intellectual property may be clear.

Just to clarify though that simply teleporting/hypergridding to a different grid does not suddenly allow one to download or rip an object in whole or part as the first line of defense is the viewer, not variations in the server code. The permissions set on the hypothetical object, are sticky regardless of location. The viewer used can of course circumvent those permissions but then at least in some of the larger independent Opensim grids, those sorts of viewers are blocked from logins unlike SL where such viewers are given full access in spite of the ToS that theoretically disallows downloads and exports of such content.

[BillFletcher]

On 9/26/2023 at 5:51 PM, TechLawProf said:

 

1. How long have you participated in Second Life?
2. How many hours per week (on average) do you participate in SL?
3. How much time have you invested in your avatar?
4. Do you make your real identity known, or do you remain pseudonymous?
5. What is the worst thing a person can do in SL?

1. Since July of 2015

2. About 15, calculating 3 hours a day Monday through Friday, weekends aren't so good for me to get online.

3. This is hard to estimate since it is always a work in progress, so in a sense every moment is a moment spent considering how to improve it. As for the initial time to create an avatar its very brief, I get in get going and improve as I go.

4. This depends, some people know a lot, others know a little. 

5. Expecting others to be here for the same reasons they are and to do SL the same way they do.

Edited September 29, 2023 by BillFletcher

[Love Zhaoying]

If the questions included how much time we spend "engaged with Second Life" (for example, in the Forums) - I would probably have to put "during waking hours".

[Marianne Little]

4 hours ago, Love Zhaoying said:

If the questions included how much time we spend "engaged with Second Life" (for example, in the Forums) - I would probably have to put "during waking hours".

That... is accurate, at least some days in the week for me. 🤣

[kisket]

On 9/26/2023 at 2:51 PM, TechLawProf said:

If anyone regularly participates in Second Life and has a good handle on the platform and community norms, I'd love to talk to you.

1. How long have you participated in Second Life?
2. How many hours per week (on average) do you participate in SL?
3. How much time have you invested in your avatar?
4. Do you make your real identity known, or do you remain pseudonymous?
5. What is the worst thing a person can do in SL?

Norms differ between groups, aside from following the TOS, the community norm is a sandbox.
1. Since 2005, 3 or 4 months at a time, then do something else and come back after a few years.
2. Lately a few hours per day.
3. Unclear, I'll go with investing time in creating. Creating takes minutes by buying, or creating a previous shape. My current main took me 3 weeks on & off creating. The time was worth being OCD & writing down all the Shape settings so I can pop a new avatar copy up in minutes. Personally, I'm satisfied having a small collection of my all-time favorite outfits. It's good to have both an avatar name and clothes you really like. One can always start a new account or delete junk.
4. Anonymous identity but real personality as most people do outside of RP.
5. There's a real person behind the keyboard. Beyond physical harm, the question's the same as could happen in RL.
That was fun like wearing a sticker. Hello my name is Kisket. Hope that helped. 😄

[animats]

On 9/29/2023 at 4:48 AM, Katherine Heartsong said:

What I'd envision is a series of "worlds" if you will (SL being one, Roblox another, etc) that are vaguely equivalent to websites, and a system where I can move my avatar from one to the other seemlessly along with my personal goods/clothings/etc, if the core/common attributes the world user set up their world with allow that. Basically, anyone could host a world with a provider and allow whatever access they wish.

There are still groups working on that. Unclear how it will work out. That metaverse standards organization has most of the companies who do anything in graphics. They're trying to firm things up from the bottom. glTF (Graphics Language Transmission Format, for moving textures and meshes from one program to another) is the starting point. Second Life is moving towards using that, in place of Collada. This is generally agreed by people who have dealt with both formats to be forward progress. More and more tools speak glTF now. Blender and Maya do, and SL speaks glTF textures. Meshes in 2024, we hope.

There is a Interoperable Character/Avatar Working Group. They're not trying to standardize avatars. They're trying to figure out how to translate between different avatar formats. Like the various import filters in Blender that let you bring in .obj or .3ds files. This group focuses on the mechanics of doing it, not whether you're allowed to do it. A separate group is working on exploring Digital Asset Management, the parts of the system which limit what you're allowed to copy, transfer, import, and export. That's more of a talk shop right now.

That's a good division of labor. The group working on the mechanics of avatar import/export can get that working, while the other group argues over NFTs, DRM, and business issues.

I'm wondering how much time to spend on this. Animats (my RL business name) is a member of this organization. They have some events coming up in October, and I want to see how real this is.

[MissSweetViolet]

On 9/26/2023 at 5:51 PM, TechLawProf said:

I'm currently researching for an article related to digital identities. I'd like to better understand how people interact with Second Life and what community norms are around avatars. 

If anyone regularly participates in Second Life and has a good handle on the platform and community norms, I'd love to talk to you.

In addition, I'll post some questions to this forum for anyone to answer:

1. How long have you participated in Second Life?
2. How many hours per week (on average) do you participate in SL?
3. How much time have you invested in your avatar?
4. Do you make your real identity known, or do you remain pseudonymous?
5. What is the worst thing a person can do in SL?

Thank you,

TLP

1. 5 years in November.

2. Way to many probably, on average about 40.

3. A lot. I've spent hours getting shapes, skins and associated layers just where I want them. Then there's hanging out in the communities I'm part of, parcel decorating, dressing my avatar and hunting/shopping for new things.

4. I prefer to mostly keep it anonymous, I will talk about some aspects of my life, and I think I've may have mentioned my real first name once or twice in the past to people I trusted, but nothing that would be identifying.

5. There are are lot of things that could go on this list, but I think the worst would be something that could hurt someone in real life, [stalking, harassment, information disclosing]. At the end of the day I can log out of SL, but something that can cross over to harm someone in real life is a lot harder to escape from.

[Persephone Emerald]

On 9/29/2023 at 4:48 AM, Katherine Heartsong said:

This to me is an interesting point and really the crux of what the word "metaverse" even means. What I'd envision is a series of "worlds" if you will (SL being one, Roblox another, etc) that are vaguely equivalent to websites, and a system where I can move my avatar from one to the other seemlessly along with my personal goods/clothings/etc, if the core/common attributes the world user set up their world with allow that. Basically, anyone could host a world with a provider and allow whatever access they wish.

I own, and can pass along or transfer or sell or inherit the things I buy (vendors another standardized piece of the infrastructure, as is a common currency), just like the real world (sans the current laws around thing like iTunes libraries which I think are flawed).

There'd need to be be a standardized language/tagging/attributes for clothing and even worlds much like approved HTML tags like "H1", "td", "p", "em" etc, objects, currency, environments, standardized physics types etc.

Land "owned" might be unique to each world and without equivalency between worlds, but if I have bought a cyberpunk outfit here in SL, it should be available to me to wear in Roblox or the world you are paying to host somewhere (another piece of the infrastructure), unless you strictly set up your world to be a fantasy late 19th century agricultural world where anything tagged "sci-fi" or "furry" isn't permitted.

Anyway, the whole realm of owning digital assets right now is such a mess and goes against millenia of ownership of something you buy and the ingrained mental model of how we have transacted for the entirety of recent history in the West ... are we even buying a song from iTunes, or is Apple simply allowing the original purchaser only to use it until they die, then it goes away? I still use a garden hoe I inherited from my grandfather, and it seems there is no such equivalence with a digital asset, which is seemingly what corporations want anyway.

The conflict is partly the walled garden syndrome and how we could create a large scale metaverse without the major players not playing nice with each other, or being far too corporate in their thinking.

HTML democratized the world so that (most) anyone could participate and create a website or see other people's websites (for good or bad), that's what we need for worlds in a metaverse too. It's a pipe dream given the current entrenched systems, but still something to try for.

The word "Metaverse" was first coined in Neal Stephenson's book Snow Crash, and Philip Rosedale took part of his inspiration for SL from that idea of a virtual digital world. That virtual world was a single platform on which individuals could create and sell their own virtual products, including a kind of "grey market" free trade that could cross over into RL items.

The "Metaverse" portrayed in Ready Player One is more *based on* Second Life, but is also a single platform, developed by a single company, that allowed people to create and sell their own simulations and virtual products. In that story, the platform became so popular (because of worsening RL conditions) that it was eventually opened up to include free public education simulations as well as entertainment ones.

In Real Life, we've got a multitude of different virtual world platforms, partially connected to a mostly 2 dimensional interconnected internet. Connecting all these separate virtual worlds is probably not going to be possible, in part because their creators and owners don't want them to be connected. There can be crossover between Open Sim grids, because they share the same open source software, but there has been copying and theft of people's creations between these grids too. (I'm thinking mostly of Second Life creations being exported to InWorldz and sold there, some of which were stolen.)

The inherent property restrictions on SL created items limit the possibility of theft. (Items can be set to No Copy, No Transfer, and/ or No Modify if their creator wishes.) These restrictions don't always work perfectly. Textures can be photographed. Other tools can be use to copy items. Mesh files, textures, scripts and notecards can either be created on one's own computer or copied to it and then used on other platforms. Virtual objects and avatars can't actually leave SL to be used on other grids or platforms, however. 

As Katherine Heartsong alluded to, what is real property is hard to define and regulate in virtual systems. I bought a music album through Amazon that I couldn't even listen to when they changed their Amazon Music functionality a while back. I certainly don't expect to be able to access my virtual goods or currency indefinitely from the Second Life platform.

Maybe going into SL is more like being able to go to a favorite restaurant in RL. We can choose virtual experiences the way we might order and eat favorite meals, but we know these are ephemeral experiences. The menu might change. The restaurant might change ownership. It might even be closed down someday.