In the case you haven't noticed, there was a three days SLbloggers strike that ended today. It was provoked by Linden Lab's new trademark lunacy which, have you ever doubt, had all kind of reactions, mostly negative ones. Strike itself, have you ever doubt, was controversal too. One of the posts, published during the strike was Galatea Gynoid's:
Now, normally LL can't say anything without legions of self-styled critics going out of their way to bend every possible word in the worst possible way to make it sound like something bad is occurring, and acting all alarmist to see who they can get fired up about nothing much. It is the path of the drama queen, and I got sick of it while I was still in high school, so I tend to just ignore it.
While I haven't seen anything good coming from the strike, my high school days made me staying silent during those three days. Yes, my high school thought me lazyness and not breaking the protests if I am not explicitly against them.
Trademark usage shouldn't be a problem at all. Point of it is protection of both the company and the customers/users/residents. It is supposed to protect us all from cases like SLart trademarking or interesting sites like www.second-life.com. What is the problem here is the realization of the more serious acting upon Linden Lab's trademarks. Like many times before, Linden Lab is doing a good thing in a bad way. Waking from too loose policy Linden Lab is now making a system that tends to be ridiculous. Yes, we all know (I hope we do) that nobody will go to the court because of typing LL's name without TM, but then, why it is in the new rules? That approach just makes it all pointless.
And then, there is that ToS over law issue. Harsh rules that can but maybe will not be forced, combined with banning possibility stated in the ToS are great way to establish rule of randomness and hybris. That is "we can but we are good and reasonable so we won't" logic that leaves Lindens to decide from case to case if something is OK or not. Situation like that can leave many of us thinking about freedom of speech, security and the rights of the users and the way our lovely little world is organized. That is "benevalent dictator" system being officially established. Humanity is playing with that idea since the days of Plato but for those 2400 years we know that it just doesn't work. At least, not for enough time to make it a really good idea. Even if you have one good dictator the next one probably won't be. And SL is not just a game or application you get bored with and leave it or start using the competitor's product. Too many people invested too much time, money and whatnot to feel fine with the possibility of being banned because one morning somebody decided to read the rules differently. More than that, if we are making a new, important and useful part of the Internet, then it is not one company's ToS and randomness of reading trademark policy we need to set the rules and customs.
After all that, there is LL's usual way of handling hot issues: close the comments on the official blog, skip own office hours, repeat what you've already said until everybody stop paying attention and wait for the dust to settle down and things get forgotten. It worked in the crises much worse than this one.
Strike itself brought us some other questions. There are thousands of bloggers that write about Second Life™ and second life. Guess is that at least half of them is supporting the appeal for trademark policy clarification. But, list of bloggers that participate in the strike published on Rheta Shan's blog counts only 33 links. What happened to the rest?
Some bloggers were not feeling that the strike is a good way to deal with the situation. But still, number is intriguingly low. Once again, we have to face the fact that we, the residents, lack some communication. Which is funny, we use bleeding edge Internet technology that so many people in the world haven't heard of yet. We use all the rest of the Internet services around, we are communication junkies making our modems burning with enormous amounts of data. So what happened? Or better, what is happening? We cannot set a simple three days strike. We cannot set the base of a system that will inform the residents of which products are original artwork and which are stolen nor protect our own selves from crazy market that allows reselling with prices so high that can be considered a fraud. And so on…
It is hard to expect that one day all of the residents will be united over one idea. Grid stability may be the only exception. But having comminication level so low as we have and community that is not a community at all is surely no way to go. It seems that our benevalent dictator is already going with divide and conquer.
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