Dartagan Shepherd
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Posts posted by Dartagan Shepherd
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Right, I keep my ordination license as well since I've left my denomination strictly for emergencies if there is absolutely no one else around.
It costs me time to fill out a form, and 50 bucks a year.
As to how I know this is an online ordination. I just do.
ETA: As far as ministers that do what I mentioned, I can take you to yearly conferences and point out 40,000 ministers and their families that do this and much more day after day. What do you think those ministers do when they're not preaching at you? At least the good ones.
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Thanks, didn't mean to "preach" there. But right, I'm a PK and then later a P for some years (those of you in the know, know what that means), but always in the shadow of the real deal. Some years of forced service, then not so forced and then willing and then 20 or so years of lost faith and finally coming to terms with my own path.
Big believer in mutual spiritual support, but in the leadership role you inevitably come across people that need serious relationship or suicide or grief or personal counseling. You just can't avoid it. You can't offer someone with a terminal illness proper guidance "as" a leader without having done time in hospitals or hospice and know something about medicine and pain management etc.
It takes years of knowledge and experience out there in the real world to do it online properly, especially because you don't have the indicators of body language, viewing the background of the person firsthand, knowing how to identify psychological characteristics, etc. You're operating partially blind here in SL, and that requires its own set of skills.
I've only shared some of that with Darrius a couple years ago, when we took some things private to reconsile some differences and he was err ... kind enough to blast some of my hypocrisy back at me with both barrels loaded with salt and buckshot. An odd way to pay it forward, but there it is, heheh.
Being a pro content creator on the other hand is a somewhat more forgiving path. I don't think any of us started out with professional experience in all areas of content creation. Learning by doing is a rewarding way to earn those battle scars.
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I'm not trying to trivialize the work or skills, it's hard stuff. Design and some graphics work doesn't come easy for me personally either.
And no, it doesn't take much to reach out a hand to someone that needs it. In that sense we're all humans and all ministers to each other.
The ministry itself, however, is a different thing entirely and not something that should be undertaken online until you've spent some years of face time in the real world to be able to minister to the people behind the avatars in a spiritual leadership role.
Sorry, but this one is rather personal for me. Unless you've got a background, training, been a follower before being a leader, slung some slop in soup kitchens, held the hands of the sick and dying in hospitals, left lots of bags of groceries on porches for people who couldn't afford it, know the ins and outs of running non profits, done grief counseling, visited disabled people, etc. ... you're not qualified quite yet as a spiritual leader to avatars.
SL has some people with serious needs, and while friends and acts of kindness are always hugely helpful, an untrained spiritual leader is not. Of course that depends on what title and role you assign to yourself. There are some RL ministers here with that kind of background.
And then there's Pastor John Doe with the online ordination and just enough knowledge to be harmful to people who need serious counseling..
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I know this is a different blend of topics than we're used to having here, although possibly blunt but truely in the spirt of helpfulness I'd offer the following advice since we're not talking hobbies here, but paid occupation.
Your local pastor would say to get your house in order before attempting the ministry. I'm not sure which faith you subscribe to and of course that's non of my business. In most however, where the practical meets the spiritual the ethic revolves around hard work. An occupation in SL is no different. Running your own venture requires more hard work than a 40 hour work week in many cases.
You say you have little SL skills and then say that most places don't pay what the time is worth.
Your choices are to develop those SL skills, or support your ministry with your work from elsewhere.
It may sound harsh, but you can't minister to others if your own life is not in order. You need a very well rounded skillset for either the ministry or a career as a content creator. I'd say that a ministry is far more demanding, because it not only involves a healthy dose of experience, a healthy dose of theology, an understanding of psychology and counseling and a deep understanding of people. The one doesn't leave much time for the other.
Find your own balance before you attempt to balance others, or you'll do more harm than good. Whatever your path, you need to work on the basics first and go from there.
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That bit is born from a universe where logic doesn't exist.
LL has perpetual rights to sell, sub license, etc. after your goods are deleted on copies they already have, which means it doesn't matter to LL if you delete it. They've already got rights to it forever whether you delete it or not.
Users have rights to continue to use it.
So basically it says if you delete your "copies", turning those goods into thin air, your granted licenses on that thin air poof as well, but your items which now have near full rights to LL and limited (or full perm) rights to users still exist.
Contractually speaking, it's a "duh" moment.
Practically speaking, it means nothing. LL could still theoretically do whatever they want with your content whether you delete it or not, including selling it anywhere they wish or turning it into any other derivative work and selling that. Or licensing the copies to someone else to sell.
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You can only make a point if you're willing to dodge semantics, obfuscation, the reversal, the passive-aggressive, and the inevitable righteous indignation.
It helps to have had a manipulative ex in your background.
However, I'm calling out LL for starting the ball rolling when they first demo'ed mesh a couple years before they implemented it with a model of the Hulk and then later allowed obvious rips in the mesh beta. These were their shining "do as I say, not as I do" moments. It doesn't work well with parenting either.
Then, to not only "not" put more sensible blockades to thieves, but to become even more vested in the goods financially and then ToS away all liability.
I do agree that apathy is the biggest problem, though.
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Exactly the point as it's becoming clearer. They're trying to fit these agreements to SL instead of fitting SL agreements to Desura.
Oddly, it's SL and our dollars that fund these acquisitions and so far as I know, SL is still the largest revenue.
Also, aside from the open source Desura client, the old Desura agreements were Australian legal verbage. That they couldn't fit those Australian agreements to U.S. language that SL has, is well ... comletely backwards unless they wanted the extra grab for rights.
Nothing here justifies the ToS changes. Desura doesn't need any more rights than SL had before the ToS changes.
I think the lack of response is basically because the argument just doesn't hold water that we need it to sell across LL products, and so what is there to say that doesn't seem like more nonsense than we've already gotten.
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Belated reply about the contributor agreement. Out of curiosity I wanted to see if the SL mailing lists were still active. Many are not, but the open source one still is.
Here's Oz's explanation of the change to the contributor agreement: https://lists.secondlife.com/pipermail/opensource-dev/2013-October/009729.htmlLike someone said on that thread, it's not likely that LL can change the agreement or the license without express permission from every contributor to the open source Desura client.
It does explain though as we've known that Desura is the primary root of the ToS and contributor agreement evil. It's an idiotic move to combine what they "claim" they need as far as rights with Desura with Second Life, but perhaps they're willing to at some point revert the SL ToS and dink around with Desura agreements at their leisure.
Dumb and dumber.
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Tried to suggest to them a partial solution before they implemented mesh and over the years which is to implement master accounts more rigidly.
Meaning all your alts (and bots) must be under one master account. perhaps even a master account for the household.
From there they could have established a way to punish for avatars not under the same account, or punished entire accounts in some way for infractions.
Also combined with more of a RL agreement, rather than their farce of a test (that pretty much gives you the answers on a platter) needed to upload mesh, gives more of a deterrent to thieves.
Also more of a waiting period or requirements for uploading external assets, short of an approval process.
It would certainly go a ways toward the problem and make enforcement much less costly.
They can't stop it, but there's a whole lot they "can" do if they were willing. They don't appear to be more interested in theft than the bare minimum and to cover themselves.
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True, but that's completely uneccessary with open source. I don't mean to disagree, because I agree that it's self serving, I just mean the practice in general on open source contributor agreements.
The open source licenses come with their own disclaimers, which have been sort of tested in court. The reasoning is kind of a farce in that they ask you to give them full rights and claim it's for your protection.
You're right, it's for their protection, but they only "need" protection if the person uploaded code that was not properly open sourced.
Protecting themselves from "that" can be done with other clauses, without asking for all those rights. It's another "trust me" document. Case in point, they've been able to turn the TPV viewer code from open source to a commercial product any time they wanted for years now. Those bits have been there that long in the contributor agreement.
Personally I avoid any open source that's based on company driven contributor agreements, because you can never trust that the code won't be re-licensed at any time. To me that's not open source. Yes I could continue to use any versions released as open source, but that doesn't give me any trust in future versions.
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Haven't asked any TPV devs, although this is strange wording to some extent. For one you'd have to know if they're going to continue to operate Desura in Australia, or whether they're going to re-base it in California. The agreement doesn't appear to be specific to TPV contributions.
The contribution agreement is going to be different in either jurisdiction and they can't rely on both. Some of the wording appears as if it tries to play off different sets of jurisdictions. It's also unclear what open source applies to now. It seems that they're trying to include open source contributions in Desura, whatever that may be.
"Ownership" is evil in itself.
It does violate open source licenses on code not owned by you, but the contribution agreement tries to make sure that you have enough ownership and control over the open source code that you can bascially give it to LL under their own terms. When you give it to LL, you're not contributing it to them as open source any longer. That they re-bundle it under an open source license of their choosing is kind of a bait and switch in licensing, but that's the purpose of contributor licenses generally. To get the code that would normally be open source, get near full rights and then to re-package it under their own open source. Not the most ethical practice, but plenty of open source people fall for the "this is to protect both of us" schtick on contributor agreements.
As I said earler, many open source licenses can no longer be used with LL on regular uploads and content, unless you have full rights and you're willing to license it to LL under their own terms. Technically you can't take an open source script in LL now, bring it out to an editor and re-upload it unless you wrote all the code. It makes many open source scripts contributed over the years partially useless
There's nothing stopping you from offering something as open source and then licensing it 50 different additional ways to 50 different people if you own all the code.
Still, it defeats the ethic of open source and yet again grabs for nearly full control, with no liability. They can re-license it and turn it into commercial code if they wanted to.
Don't know, perhaps someone should run it by the open source mailing list if that's still around or one of the TPV forums.
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No, it's actually very transparent, you may be overestimating your forum-fu. or underestimating the audience. Going to have to echo Darrius here and leave it at *click*.
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I just wish you'd arrive at a point, because all I get is that LL is bigger than us wannabe redneck creators and we shouldn't try and well ... everything is ok, because other people are doing it.
All of which are pretty unrealistic and on the silly side. LL is willing to work with us more than you're willing to concede that there is actually a real issue that does affect people personally.
Everything seems to by hyperbole with you. LL, lawyers, bloggers, merchants. If that's your point I think we got that the first couple dozen times.
We've got a problem with it. LL understands that it needs to be addressed where apparently you don't. If this is damage control for LL, I'm thinking it's not helping them very much.
If it's just for the trolling, you probably did come to the right topic, though. I imagine other topics are not so rewarding.
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Well, sometime when you're not so bored, or perhaps if you're bored enough ... give the GPL and more restrictive licenses another read. It fails on the attribution requirements alone.
Only the looser license such as BSD may actually work.
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I think you understood that I wasn't saying that it wasn't legally a contract. That bit is debatable in a court, if you can get past the arbitration bit. No, I'm not any more emotional now than when some other manipulative person tried to convince me that I was.
Let me bake your noodle a bit as you seem to be an open source guy.
The ToS really isn't compatible with open source now either.
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"Everything I read coming from LL is that they want to make more money - don't creators and producers of product for LL's platforms share this interest?"
Both of us already had the ability to profit together on any of their products without these ToS changes. All they need to do is to build the tools to let us upload, price and choose where we're selling to.
This isn't a contract, this is a "trust me" document. We don't.
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Drongle McMahon wrote:Furthermore, the mechanisms used in software, including those used for breedable pets etc., can be patented independently of the language used. Section 2.3 of the ToS talks about IP, not just copyright. As the lawyers pointed out the "sell and resell" in that section is meaningless for copyright, but is not meaningless for patents. Patents are IP. Scripts get uploaded from the editor in the viewer. Discuss...
Replying to this and some things Medhue and Rex said.
Not trying to belittle scripts and programming. Those are in fact the most exploitable of the bunch in a way. Scripts and the applications made with them can fall under either copyright, or patent or both. Software licenses are basically copyright, the unique solution or invention can be patented.
There are also writings in the form of storylines, poetry, music and audio clips that fall under IP that are important to their creators. The musical works in particular LL may get bitten by, because there's plenty of case history in that industry.
Breedables are already a can of breedable worms. There's Ozimals vs Amaretto and you have Phil Rosedale and some ex-Lindens invested in some breedables in SL. Combine some of this with the new ToS and you have a royal mess.
But right, there's much more to this, and scripts are still up for potential abuse by this ToS as well.
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Exactly. Trying to use one blanket ToS across multiple products has run other companies into investigation and dispute.
Even if they were trying to do this, there isn't a single product in their lineup that needs these kind of blanket rights to operate. Not SL, not Desura, Patterns, etc.
I don't think anyone is really falling for the "one ToS fits all" thing any longer after presenting some legal facts. That they refuse to revert the wording even at this stage is telling in itself.
If they're hoping for a longer term plan of chipping away at rights first and then implementing the plans later, I don't think that's going to help them much. The thing holding back a more serious level of protest and potential legal action at this point is that they haven't done anything "with" our content yet.
If they tried it would mean that we have even more grounds on which to act, which would actually be to our benefit if they go down that road.
But this little vague dance of theirs in the meantime... not working. And there's certainly nothing difficult about a ToS saying that the use of the content will not extend beyond the platform or application that it was uploaded to, other than to allow LL to advertise their products as a whole.
Treating customers like idiots is not a good idea. Neither is treating the business plans of a small company with a couple hundred employees as if they were national secrets. It makes "your world" look like a complete and utter lie, rather than a marketing slogan.
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It would mean "full perm" for Desura users, sure. And not only full perm but also in a format that can be exported and downloaded to the game developers computer. This is because Desura games can use any game engine and tools and the developers would get raw models, textures, etc.
Scripts are less likely because Desura developers use their own development tools with their own programming or scripting languages.
There is one other element that they're allowing with Desura which is crowdfunding. If they're going to use our content with Desura in some way, not only would Desura developers have to get models and textures full perm off of LL's systems, they would also be able to accept money from others (possibly also in L$) to fund their game as an investment.
They won't have to beg, borrow or steal (or pay for) content when they have us ... just hold our world and rights hostage and boil any contractual agreements down to the click of a button even though this hasn't been tested in court. I tend to think of this as legalized piracy.
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Well, to add to what others are calling a conspiracy theory, what it does appear to be on the surface is that they want to produce games themselves. Going by some of the clues dropped at interviews, the hiring of more game (and unity) developers at LL, etc.
This would be a new low for LL, to create their own standalone games with our content (rather than creator apps) and to attempt to give us pennies on the dollar for that content, but given that the conspiracy theories have turned out to be wholly or partially correct so far, it does make sense to me.
To do that, they would need near complete rights and to act as our agent, as they would to sell our content to other game developers, without needing our express permission or our participation by willing uploads to game developers on Desura.
I think so far we've successfully shown that it isn't just protectionism. Which means that no matter how you slice it they're grabbing for our rights first without telling us what they're going to do with them.
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Cincia Singh wrote:It seems the most profitable concession would be selling tinfoil hats to SL creators/merchants who spend way more time anguishing about their intellectual property rights than producing intellectual property.
Actually we both anguish and produce, just like artists in the entertainment industry, musicians, artists, architects, writers and a host of other people who value their IP. Or companies like LL that anquishes over how to gain those IP rights over others works for no upfront costs.
Either way, it's still more productive than casual trolling. If you search the marketplace though, you'll find that we already produce and sell tinfoil hats.
We have plenty of products available for the apathetic and bored as well. It's a fairly large market, as you can imagine.
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Seems to be a thing. When the focus starts getting onto the people instead of the issue, it gets off topic. Just smile and nod, smile and nod.
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I'm reading exploit as "sell". Which is fine, that LL wants to give us ways to sell to game developers. At least they did make their intent known in a roundabout way.
Note to LL: This never had to be a secret and in fact batting around the possible plans would have been received positively. You think too much of yourselves and too little of us with the hush-hush act and that shows.
No conspiracy theory after all.
As far as acting as our agent, that's precisely what we don't want you to do.
If you want (you as well as us) to profit from joint content, then just give us options to upload to Desura. Many of us would. Put that under a separate TOS that we're sure limits game developers from exploiting our content beyond their games.
Don't merge the marketplace or in-world content in one mixed bag. First, the marketplace is still too buggy for your reputation and us to rely on for a mega market.
Secondly unless you're willing to change land impact in SL, it's not "very" compatible with game modeling where simpler rules apply ... low poly with good UV's is well, low poly with good UV's. Land impact requires more mesh hoops and unknown calculations than standard low poly game modelling.
Keep them separate and under our upload control, so that we choose to which LL product we participate in and upload to. I think we're willing to support you in this, but not the path you're trying to choose for us. You do not need blanket rights or to act as our agent and you know this.
Keeping us out of this loop is what lost you some customers in the first place.
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Storm Clarence wrote:Dartagan Shepherd wrote:None of which really has much to do with the fact that the ToS is indeed perceived as an overbearing agreement. So say most aware users, most lawyers and consumers of various companies and products that do try to pull this kind of thing on their users. Thankfully there are resources to help combat just this kind of thing.
Dartagan, I have never seen a ToS or contract that wasn't perceived as an overbearing document. Never! Not one. And as contributor to 'open source' software I have exposure to many.PS You're welcome.Well, that turned into something fruitful. I agree with this partially but the thing is ... it's only this much of a problem online. I actually have dealt quite a bit with contracts, corporate filings and bylaws, etc. (No, I'm not a lawyer).
RL contracts tend to be nothing at all like online agreements. There will always be the sharks, but RL agreements tend to be very predictable, limited and standardized from industry to industry. If you compare for instance, the typical agreements in the art or music industries to the SL ToS, you'll find they're nothing alike unless it's an employee or work for hire situation.
So it's not "just" an SL problem, it's an online problem ... but it's particularly bad here because of the liability clauses, the fake money, the lack of consumer protection you'd have in RL and legal recourse and the fact that it's billed as "your world", your copyright, your goods ... and yet the only rights SL doesn't take are exclusivity and ownership now.
Many online agreements may be seen to be overbearing, but I don't think generally to this extent and no, RL contracts are not like this. When they are, they're either signed by suckers, paid for their work outright or they're re-negotiated into something more balanced for both parties. The fact alone that in RL many contracts for IP are negotiable is a huge difference. Personally I don't think online companies and especially ones that make their living selling other peoples goods should be exempt from the equal power that "creators" in RL have.
There's just no excuse for this ToS.
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LL: Are you even aware of this???
in Merchants
Posted
Agree, it's something, as long as they haven't changed PIOF. Assuming there's enforcement and that links PIOF info regardless of avatar.