Prokofy Neva

Hi, Others have answered your basic questions, i.e. you don't lose control of your estate just by selling parcels to others, but let me add a few things: o You don't have to have parcels for sale and deal with the confusion of sales that some people sometimes experience and the reclaiming of deadbeats. You can have a rentals system by grouping the land and giving people gradations of powers within the group depending on whether they are paying tenants or visitors. That's how I do it. It's not for everybody. But I have a combination of mainland and islands so I want to have one group where I can accept tier donations for discounts of rent as well. o Don't turn on terraform -- you should have some landscaping of mountains or hills or trees to give some privacy, and people always flatten and ruin this. Just offer to turn it on temporarily for them to get earth out of their house, or offer to do it for them. o Make a teleporter/landing place and put a landmark giver with information so that people don't fly all over the island interrupting existing tenants. Put landmarks or parcel numbers on the notecard. o You can maximize your business if you have refundable rent and a cancellation fee for early refunds. I have a free rental script with the refund feature if you want it. o Don't jam 16 4096 on an island, people start moving out when they feel crowded by others, leave some space around parcels. o Don't imagine that you have to provide a clubhouse, pool, picnic area, etc. for tenants, however. They seldom use them and unless you have lots of sims to spread this out on and make it really interesting, don't compete with all the other big venues that have all this already in clubs, parks, stores, etc. Focus on making residential living nice. o Draw up your covenant and put it on the land menu on the tab for regions, and put a copy in the rental box. Remember to include a machinima policy. o I have a rule that security orbs have to be deployed only 250 meters or above because having them on the ground can be hellish to others, especially new tenants or prospective tenants. o Specify grace period policy and pet policy, and if people miss rent contact them first especially about pets, which can be killed or set back if returned to inventory.

It will be fanboi stuff. But that's ok. It's their game. Write on your own blog about your own game. The Lindens have a problem: they can't get refreshed content on their blog. Rodvik hasn't written for ages, none of them have. They are too busy just running the platform and doing their thing. It's hard. And expensive. They can't justify hiring another Hamlet again or having Wallace Lindens, er, "curate the conversation" or whatever it was that...Wallace did. They have to use/exploit the resident fanbase, and that's ok. It's a great idea. The Linden who has to edit the stuff will have enough work but at least it will be passionate.

I think truth is actually my brand. But I can understand if traffic infusers don't like my truths.

Oh, sure, actually I'd be glad to blog for the Lindens for free! Because I get that it would be a huge boon for me for my own personal blog and even my inworld business to get my brand out there. But excuse me while I first earn a living writing content for other people who will pay me a pittance and/or strip my name of the content, because that is life in the big city LOL. And in my spare time, sure I will blog on my SL blog and even write for the Lindens. My only question to LL is: what's the word count? They failed to supply the word count limit. 500 words maybe? I don't think we can expect to get paid for something like this because the editors are doing you a favour, unfortunately, real life works that way. They have gadzillion traffic; I have little by comparison. They don't have to pay me simply because content is devauled and they can find takers for $0. And you get the recognition. I doubt the Lindens would publish me or want to be linked to my controversial blog, but I will try a few pieces -- like I said, when I'm done earning a living first.

Medhue, you don't realize that in the real world of real publications and blogging online, a world I've worked in for as long as the Internet has existed, publications take ownership of your work. You supply "a work for hire" and they get the copyright. And that's only fair, as they *pay you* or if they don't they give you visibility that you lack on your blogspot. I can't think of a single real-life web site with paid content where the editors grant you copyright so that you can copy and publish the same thing they just paid you for, somewhere else. Indeed, when my work is copied all over the world, sometimes without credit to me, the most the owners of sites can do is complain that i should be credited, if that's their rule visible on their site as a condition of re-publication, and if there is a fee involved, they pocket it, not me. That's because running publications costs money, and there isn't enough to allow the precious snowflakes the ability to keep undermining the unique value of a piece by reprinting it for pay elsewhere. This is standard throughout the publishing industry and I don't know where you're getting the idea it isn't. As for being paid, well, blogging is dirt cheap. $50 a post is a treasure; try $5 a post. The Internet has driven the cost of content to zero because programmers made it that way. It's their fault. Not editors' fault. This is war. You no doubt supported the anti-SOPA campaign. Ok, well, then you made the Internet free for piracy and rip-offs of content and driving it to cost $0. You should have supported it then. It's great to be paid, but it's also very standard these days all over the place, from Huffington Post to various niche foreign policy sites NOT to pay. That's why Huffington bloggers "went on strike" when they were sold to AOL and didn't get a penny. And I support that by not commenting for a long time on Huffington so as not to add to the traffic. But it's a harsh reality of our times on the Internet -- no pay, and see your work eviscerated. There's always your own blog. And that's exactly where I go. secondthoughts.typepad.com -- see my article on this subject for further thoughts

I agree that it's worrisome that they are going to introduce new "featuers and policies" to "help" businesses. Uh-oh. Policies? About what? Features? Like putting rentals into the viewer so that Linden can take a cut of each transaction the way it does of Marketplace sales? As for "the VAT problem," that's not Linden Lab's problem. We've been over this many, many times. It's the problem of the peoples of the EU, and their vote for socialist policies. If they don't want to be taxed so high, they need to change their government and its policies. If those policies make it harder for them to compete with American merchants, then they need to get their governments -- not Linden Lab -- to change their policies. Linden Lab cannot give discounts and remove VAT because then it isn't fair to Americans -- who have to pay more in RL for health care and education, for example, because they aren't taxed as much and don't have those goods for free. This argument has played out so m any zillions of times that it really is pointless to keep flogging it. As for lowering tier, LL has no incentive to lower tier. They make their revenue from tier. There are plenty of people around to pay tier. The land isn't being abandoned and the estates aren't shrinking at the rate you imagine -- go and study Tyche Shepherd's reports.

It's never a bad idea to cash out when you feel it's time to cash out.

This is not good. It stratifies the world further, and creates an even more remote and privileged dev class that gets special access and tools. That privileges them in the economy. The building tools as originally conceived were open to anybody to learn. Sculpties took one layer away of that accessibility as it became harder to make things. Mesh of course went even further -- the user can't edit or modify the object as he could even a sculpty. The creative of amateurs was always a key feature of the openness of the world. Now that window is shutting, and slamming the fingers of the half of the 20 percent who create things for others as amateurs. The skilled 10 percent then turn the rest of us into passive consumers. It's no good saying snarkily "Learn the skills." It's not about that. Anyone can rez and texture a prim and somewhat modify their world. They can modify others' creations. When the world becomes made not of building blocks and textures and scripts but mesh and now these specialized dev tools, SL is not that different than World of Warcraft -- only without the game.

Quite a piece of ignorant propaganda. Many falsehoods have been spread by the Google lobbyists with videos like this. There is nothing in the law that involves shutting down entire websites over one person's content. There are narrow definitions, remedies, and defenses in this law that make is clearly designed for targeting actual pirate sites with large volumes of pirated content, not your Tumblr blog. The judicial system of the United States doesn't permit you to just randomly block and shut down sites. The one edge case that is being bruited by TechDirt about one site held for a year fails to mention that it has bunches of infringing content on it. It also doesn't "break the Internet" to block sites. Geeks block malware sites all the time without "breaking the Internet". There is no prior restraint or prior censorship or First Amendment violation in this law, that's absurd. Pirated content and illegal drug ads aren't protected speech.

You can rez boats at the docks in Ravenglass. There is also rezzing in nearby Carlisle at the Yacht club and longer-term parking for $1/prim/wk.

Alisha, SOPA has definitions and defense remedies written within the bill. Read it closely. Why all this hypothetical hysteria about "abuse" instead of focusing on the need to fight the billions of loss from piracy? It's truly nuts. I was talking the other night to a prominent and wealthy media owner. I thought because of his lefty politics on many things that he'd oppose SOPA. To my surprise, he didn't. We talked about it in detail, and I told him my theory of technocommunism. He was more blunt -- and said it's worse than that, it's techno-suicide -- content owners gi ing away their content. Insane. There are normal legal checks and balances -- it's called "our entire legal system" that functions in just this way. Many of the people in this thread responding to this query just spout other people's ideas. They paste links and youtubes of other people and call it a day. They aren't thinking for themsel es. This is sheeplehood, truly. I took on Chris Parillo (notorious in SL circles) and Brian Rowe, the expect lawyer he called in (I would call him law-farer). I http://3dblogger.typepad.com/wired_state/2011/11/copyleftist-law-farer-opposes-sopa.html BTW, once again, let me pre-empt the snarks that say that if I put a blog link in, I'm only shamelessly dri ing traffic to my blog. Um, that's ridiculous. My blog is no high-traffic wonder, and such traffic as it has, it has on its own without me ha ing to go around and hype it. It's simply not significant. So spare your nastiness for some other more worthy fight. The idea that because you don't know people's identities and RL politics you can't really tell what the body politic thinks is silly, as you don't hae to gi e a real name in order to identify your politics. SLuni erse.com for example is filled with lefties and progs and such, hardly any Fox watchers there, and you can see that without knowing a single RL name. I don't know why people pretend this is rocket science. SL is a perfect example of a protyping world for the entire Internet that has re ealed exactly how SOPA could work, and work well.

Gorgeous, unique snow mountain parcel, roadside and waterfront, flat on top to build. Great for combination store and home. Skyboxes and pets welcome. $2700 a week for 8016 m2 with 1834 prims. With 10 percent discount for 4 weeks, that's just $9720 or about US $36 a month. Contrast with what you are paying for 8192/1875 elsewhere -- and here you have the flexibility to refund and leave any time for a small fee.

There's no need to make this Mainland-wide when you're concerned with just a few sims. No matter what you would put up, it could be intrusive in some areas. So why not first try to get those landowners who are adjacent to the Linden waterways to put up buoys? And then if that doesn't work, ask Moles to put them just on those few sims.

No, I'm not asking for a thing to be changed, nor am I asking for technical solutions to moral issues. I'm asking what is technically feasible, and whether the answer given 7 years ago to oldbies was that no, we don't feel like doing this because we don't believe in it (ideological) or whether it was based on technological exigencies, i.e. the impossibility of attaching a "for sale" status, i.e. a check-off box with a number in the for sale box, with the resell function.

Billions of dollars of piracy every year *is* crime. It's not a civil matter.

DMCA is a fool's errand as we know. It's better than nothing. But what this does is institutionalize DMCA and take it out of the hands of dilatory platform providers. Good!

The special interest groups are Google, EFF, Facebook, and all of their Silicon Valley pals. You show shocking disregard for their big power grab. Common law and the torts system needs a law to invoke for the modern time -- and this is it. Otherwise, it faulters among very diverse interpretations, and we in SL get only this -- too bad, so sad, unconscionable TOS, goombye.

Ann, I hope you will go read the laws, and think about this some more. All these years you've been screaming about the need to get the FTC, the FCC, the Secret Service, the IRS, and, I dunno, the Bureau of Land Management, to "do something" about all the crime and theft in SL. The minute we have a uniform bill to start to do this without leaving it to the discretion of executive agencies only, you scream. What, you want Obama's executive agencies to run everything?

Well, if you are worried about privacy, go back to your friend Tim Berners-Lee, who designed the WWW precisely with no privacy in mind. It was a profound design flaw. You imagine that the government will be trawling everyone's accounts in search of infringing content? That's silly, and you've been led to think that by scarifying hysterical propaganda from EFF and Google. It will work like it works now -- in response to complaints. There will have to be probably cause. The police will still have to get search warrants. It's not like the criminal justice system with its defenses and checks goes away because we get a better law. It's not about RIAA, that's another kneejerk reactionary leftwing meme. The AFL-CIO backs this because it's about people's livelihoods and work and labour rights. It's about the little guy in SL, not just those big record companies. Oh, the other hilarious thing about this entire debate is the idea that the Internet is "so technologically complex" that only nerds with their hacker open source culture can understand it, and everybody else can't, and hands off. What's so refreshing about this legislation is that it puts paid to that era of nerds running things without accountability and democratic participation from the rest of us. The senator I voted for in my state is voting for this legislation and I couldn't be more pleased. I feel as if for the first time in 7 years since I began battling hacker culture that we're turning a corner. If the mailman didn't deliver a package of toxic chemicals into your mailbox, you wouldn't start screaming "censorship". Nor would you deman "mailbox neutrality" if he delivered 6 magazines out of 10 because 4 wouldn't fit, and made you pick them up later at the post office. The Internet is just a big pipe, hooked up to some trucks.

No, it would affect search engines that turn up the results for illegal pill mills and pirate sites. Already Google just had to pay a $500 million fine even without this law for churning up clickers for the pill mills with its search. Crime is crime.

No, it's not vaguely worded, it has very, very precise conditions and defenses, as I've outlined here: http://3dblogger.typepad.com/wired_state/2011/11/geeks-screaming-about-internet-censorship-ought-to-be-ashamed-of-themselves-and-ought-to-actually-re.html "overbroad" is merely what the kneejerk lefty ACLU is saying, and of course the notorious copyleftist Electronic Frontier Foundation -- it's not defensible as a critique given the language of the bill. No, the intent -- and language defining the acts -- in the bill would not touch you as you would have to be distributing infrinting content worth more than $1000, you would have to be operating for commercial purposes, and more than once every 180 days. So none of those tests would be met in your typical teaching situation, and it's silly to invoke specious edge cases. If by some exception you were served notice, you'd have two defenses: economic hardship and technical infeasibility, either of which would get you pretty far. Saying that the US can't block piracy because China uses technology to block dissent is like saying that the US can't put armed robbers in jail because China puts dissenters in jail. It acts as if there is something special and magical about technology. One minute geeks are telling us that technology is only a tool; in situations like this they make it seem as if it adapts properties of human will. I actually lean more to that latter position, so it would be defensible for me to say that, but they don't. The bill is intended to curb the billions of dollars lost to the US economy particularly from China, by the way. I find that in reviewing these issues, people are too literalist and lacking in a sense of how precedent law works. There isn't a law or a case where someone was prosecuted for lying about their weight on an Internet site. There won't be one under even that law that was struck down. Putatively, THAT law might be overbroad, but that doesn't mean this more precise one is. I'm happy to have Congress, the DOJ, and the courts begin to take back control over the sources of our livelihoods and pry it away from unconscionable hackers and coders, whether in the form of pirates and Anonymous or in the form of Google, which makes its ad revenue precisely on this California Business Model of enabling infringement to get users, then getting them to click on ads, then forcing the content owners to chase them with DMCA takedowns. Remind you of anything else? At least in SL the Lindens have in a sense already instilled SOPA with their third-party viewer policy, and thank God for it. I elected Congress people, I didn't elect Mitch Kapor at the Electronic Frontier Foundation who is the ideology czar for this stuff behind the scenes. He should look inside Second Life and realize humanity is not served with these collectivist notions of the last century.

I'm happy to kill most streaming media in SL. Pay a subscription to media sites and work it out with them. Pretty silly to demand copyright protection on your dresses in a mall where the stream is pirated. There's a lot of grey area around this, as some websites provide free streams and don't care. But there are less and less of them.

Do you realize that companies are ALREADY judges and juries! And that's what's wrong! This law would make it possible to get around the problem of having signed a TOS in a place like Second Life, where you have to wait for the company to do something, and makes it possible to litigate in a court of law on the merits of a law against piracy. Lawsuits against copybotters in SL so far have revolved around trying to track individuals through nicknames and trying even to charge LL with culpability for being the platform, which it has been able to deflect on "save haven" grounds. But now under SOPA and related legislation, if a platform provider is negligent and inactive in defending IP and doesn't mvoe through some kind of process reasonably to deal with complaints, you will have more remedies to challenge them. That's a good thing for content providers.

For all you smarties pointing out that this is merely an American bill in Congress and therefore has no relevance to the rest of the world, and make it seem as if raising the question of why SLers don't support it is some kind of ethno-centric crime, again, I suggest you go read the bill. It's about FOREIGN piracy. That means it will affect YOUR COUNTRY -- particularly if you are in Europe, Russia, China and some other high pirating areas.

I think you have several premises here that aren't necessarily tested well with a broader set of data. In fact, the only number to watch on the SL economy, for my money, is "number of people who spent more than one dollar this month inworld". And that figure, after dipping, is now steadily climbing toward the half million mark, and that's what you're dealing with: half a million people, quite a few of them alts/mules, who are willing to spend on your business. So plan accordingly. You don't have millions. You have half a million. Before, we used to get this figure disaggregated. The lion's share of them spent the equivalent of less than US $10 inworld per month; only a tiny cadre of 300 or something would spend US $2000 or more (big landowners). The demographic that you as a rentals agent or a content maker would have to aim for is those people in the US $40-80 a month bracket with disposable income, not free accounts, not large businesses that might not even buy content anymore (or make their own) but consumers. And that figure was something like less than 100,000 people. So there's your reality -- a very small pie, with a lot of people fighting for it. A pie that's growing, but not fast enough given the pent-up creation and especially freebies and Linden offerings competing in the market. Rather than tell everybody to buy more, you'd be better off to lobby against freebies or start reselling transferable freebies to get people to stop glutting the market with them. So -- as for your premises. First, is this idea that "the big businesses aren't advertising" in search. Search is still broken and not working, i.e. the old concept of a data table with search working well for this small world (as distinct for the wide Internet) is no longer used, the Lindens use the Google Search Appliance and it's not really well adapted. People used to search easily in search/places. Now they can't. That means that people like me don't put in search/places ads at $30 a week as much because it's so pointless, the content can't surface easily and well. Second, you note that traffic is low. But no one has any incentive to have high traffic anymore, now that traffic is basically removed as a relevance factor in search. Before, people like me who reject bots as a method would at least put in things like events or sales or whatever to get higher traffic. Now, there's no point. Traffic doesn't make sales; sales make sales. To make a sale, you need people inworld in a circle who buy from you, or you need to be visible in search. The SL Marketplace has started to kill off some of the inworld store traffic and sales. Every time you get an impression that SL is "winding down like an old grandfather clock" you have to remember that it is only winding down for old grandfathers. New sons and grandsons come into the world, start businesses like pets or low-prim furniture or mesh stuff and sell up a storm. The rapidity and nastiness with which this happens, given that people's livelihoods are at stake, is of course disturbing, but it's usually the case that when one person feels like SL is dying, it's only dying *for him* and someone else has taken away his business. There isn't enough of a customer base to go around, and that sort of becomes a vicious circle -- in one respect, if people felt they had a steady flow of customers or more customers coming in the door as new signups they might do more to attract them, but it's difficult for them to first innovate and have a better mousetrap and then get that visibility to the outside world of new signups -- Destination is state-controlled by the Lindens; and even their state control (or especially their state control) can't give visibility to more than a keyhole's worth of people. You can't just exhort everybody to support creators and buy stuff, they won't. They're in a recession and cutting back. But there are 10 things that have to be done at once -- search has to do more for people, advertising capacity has to be built up; the ability to land newbies on your properties has to improve, and much more.