Remember remember the fifth of November

Gunpowder, treason and plot.

I see no reason why gunpowder, treason

Should ever be forgot…

I don’t know if 1605 conspiracy to kill King James I of England and some members of aristocracy has anything to do with this and if there will be any gunpowder barrels and fires on Linden’s sims, but the call is here and we should talk about content theft before we start the particle scripts.

While I wholehartedly support the action and the idea behind it, I’d like to chit-chat a bit about it with you.What always bugs me when content creators ask Lindens to protect the rights of the creators is how to effectively do it. First thing that comes to mind in the digital realm is to protect the data by tech means. But if I knew a way to protect digital data from copying and not to cripple it in the process, I would be hellishly rich by now. Many people are banging their heads about the case, and it doesn’t give much results. Actually, Second Life™ is one of the safer places to publish your digital stuff. Just compare it to good ol’ web where you have no protection at all. But, it’s far from good and satisfying.

Other way of protection, one that is usually applied, is protection by the law, which is how modern societies are supposed to work. But there is just one slight problem. It doesn’t work. Not in the publishing and media industries, let alone in the second life. While the big corporations can sue somebody’s ass for unauthorized duplication of digital material, that won’t be so easy in our world. Not only that the copyright laws are made to protect the monopoly of big corporations and not the artists and creators, but also because, in the case of big corporations, there is a huge amount of money involved. Even if you are big in second life, you are still working for L$ peanuts that hardly covers lawyers fee.

Sure, one can say that amounts of money in SL are not big anyway so the loses of creators, and profits of the thieves are not big either, so the whole case is not worth the fuss. But that’s not true. Loses of the creators are big. Maybe they are not big in terms of real currency but count the time invested in the process of making things, count the expenses. Last but not the least, count the right to get compensation for own work and creativity, no matter if that compensation is small or big. Other thing is, thieves do make a considerable amounts, especially if you consider the effort invested. Yes, they steal things that, in real currency scope, doesn’t cost much. They sell it for even less. But they steal large amounts of items from all over the grid and they sell it many times. Small price * many sales * many items = considerable profit. And then, that kind of behaviour seriously damages the economy of the grid. It’s not just creator’s loss. In the long run, it’s yours and mine as well.

One of the ways of fighting the content theft menace is educating the customers. It has been done before. Creators appealed to all of us not to buy stolen things. And it seams that kind of action gave some results. But there are two problems. First, you can’t get everybody in. I will join the cause, and as I know that buying stolen goods is wrong and even damaging to all of us, I won’t buy from the thieves. I guess you won’t as well. But you and me are the minority here. Because, there is a huge amount of people that are just quickly passing through second life, most of them came just recently. They don’t know about the content theft, nor about the bad things that happen because of it. Nor they would care if they know. They just came, they are short on money and they don’t know if they are going to stay. It’s just a game, after all. They will more likely beg for money and bitch about the freebies than to support creator’s rights. And then, even you and me and people who do care, do we always know if the item we’re buying is from the vendor of the real creator? I don’t think so. We avoid bad looking malls with full permission things sold too cheap, but there is no way to know if something we bought is an original.

SO, I’d like to hear from you. Is there some way I missed and that would end all this, bring some order and make both creators and shoppers happy?

And now, even before I say the spooky word ‘copybot’, I hear some of you screaming about stealing and theft and copyrights and about the world crumbling down into hell.

And some of those screams and concerns are understandable although, IMHO, exaggerated. Yes, it is possible to use BuilderBot to steal someone’s work. But, how likely is that that is going to happen? We are talking about the whole sims here. And copying the whole sim is not the same as stealing a skin or hair here and there. You know, sims are pretty big. Hardly that copying the entire sim will go unnoticed and that there will be any doubt about the copyright infringement when the case comes to Lindens or the court of law.

On the other side, we get the great backup tool for free. And if you ever did some significant building, you know how desperately needed that tool might be. Not to mention the possibility of making the whole region on local sim (installed on your own computer and working off-line) then uploading it to the grid of your choice.

It’s the building tool against the stealing tool case. But it’s not up to the software developers to do the job of lawyers. And lawyers should not interfere in the job of software developers. You know that a knife, a simple kitchen knife can be used to kill somebody. That happens quite often. But that doesn’t mean that knife shouldn’t have been invented nor that we should stop using them for good purposes. If and when it is used for murder, there is law to deal with the case.

But let’s leave the knives and talk a bit more about digital tools. You know, digital stuff is terribly easy to be copied, multiplied and distributed around. It’s not only second life stuff, it’s text, music, movies… everything. And our society is spending enormous amounts of money to get some control over the process. Most of the time, those efforts are fruitless attempts made in the completely wrong direction. Instead of software protections that get broken the day after they are released, we need better system that will cover both creators and the consumers. So far, if one wants to be 100% sure that their item won’t be copied, they should make them of wood or stone, not bits and pixels.

So we don’t need the anger against the tool, we need better system to protect our intellectual rights. Or you disagree?

Yes, the main grid is reserved for people older than 18, but that doesn’t make the whole world adult. And yes, that is good. Frankly, when I heard that for the first time I couldn’t believe it. I still can’t. There are so many things in second life that are perfectly acceptable no matter how old are you and whichever your stance towards sex and violence is. Otherwise you would never hear a story about SL avatar being dressed up by her young daughter. Nor you would enjoy amazing builds, exhibitions, learning events… You wouldn’t even be able to go to a cafe for a cup of nice harmless gossiping. And if you can’t imagine the world like that, go to Red Light Center and see if that’s the world you want to live in. What makes second life so great is the opportunity to play Mario Bros AND to have sex on the pool table AND to choose which of those (or both) you will do tonight (many thanks and kisses to Isle Lunasea and Raven Haalan for the pic). But not only that PG content is good on its own, it’s a significant part of our cybersex lives. 

I already wrote why sex content in second life is not just porn. Not only that there are many other things to do in-world beside cybersex stuff, but cybersex gets a completely new dimension thanks to all the "side" activities. If you have ever encountered an avatar that is here just for cybersex and nothing else, you know what I mean. And whether we engage in "adult" activities or not, second life is also a place where we make friends, create, learn and experience many other things, things that are not reserved for the adults nor for those who are fond of exchanging sexual fantasies in the virtual world. Negating that is the same type of violence as it would be to negate the existence of the adult content.

Other thing that’s been talked about is the percent of content that counts as adult. It probably started by Linden Lab’s estimation of 5% which caused lots of laughs in certain circles. And it caused counter-estimations going as high as 85%. But both numbers are pointless. How can we say how much adult content there is when nobody don’t know what "adult" is? Both numbers are just silly figures. My guess is that Lindens fired that up to fight against the mainstream media stories of Second Life as 3D porn world. Why, for the grid’s sake, some people have the urge to counter that? Like that saying that 85% of second life is related to sex would make it better. It won’t. It only might attract more noob-looking freaks with prim genitals and bad spelling and cut the amount of the other content in the future. We should know better than that. Or maybe the urge for drama is stronger than common sense and common interest?

And that urge is impressively strong in this case. We hear calls for protests, ranting all over the blogosphere, swears and insults… like Lindens personaly want to get rid of everything adult and take a candy from us. Which is far from truth. Think for a second and you’ll see that Linden Lab has no interest in shoting down one of the strongest industries of the world. And if you’ve ever talked with any of them you know they are far from puritan freaks. So stop whining and behave like an adult. Second life will keep it’s naughty content, and it will keep its PG side as well. And that’s for the best of the both, if it makes any sense to talk about two sides. After all, it’s just one world with huge diversity as it’s best feature. Please keep it that way.

Which is reasonable, after all. Linden lab has no direct interest in you giving your data to Aristotle. But they are interested in you pulling out your credit card. That’s the first step for you to buy some L$ which makes the Linden biz running. We all know that, we all enjoy that. Only problem is that they don’t scream that verification-via-payment-info loud enough. Nobody needs more drama than we have already.

One thing that is striking me is that so many residents feels like Lindens are working against them. Which I might find understandable. There were some bad and not so tactful moves in the past. But in this case… it’s not about Lindens. They want all this less than we do. It cost them money and makes them additional work. But they have to do it. Sure they don’t want to be sued. Nor do we. But there are some freaks in this world that don’t find nakedness natural and never find sex beautiful and divine. And those poor sick bastards will use any force of law to ruin other people’s fun if they can’t have some themselves. So please, know your enemy.

The biggest problem about all this will be the definition of what "adult" is. Sure, sims aimed for explicit sexual role-play, Xcite! stores and similar are the easy case. They will be on the new continent and flagged as adult. And they will be free from prudes and "ur hawt, let’s sex" noobs. They’ll most probably profit from that because of the targeted surroundings. It will be bad for creators and resellers of low-quality content, as the competition will be in the walking distance. But I can’t shed a tear for the bankruptcy of resellers of freebie cocks. But what will happen with "gray areas"?

One thing that is mentioned in Linden’s F.A.Q. as adult is photorealistic nudity? What everybody is interested in is whether that includes skins? It would be simply dumb to have all the skin stores on Pornsylvania. That would completely counter the idea of having designated adult area, right? Solution might be to blur or cover some bits of skin photos on the vendors, but does anybody buys the skin without checking those bits? I doubt. And hopefully Lindens know that too.

One more question that is often heard is how nudity in own home will be treated? Will people will be allowed to be naked in their own homes or have erotic art hanging on their walls? Will having sex on own bed in own home will be considered abuse of the ToS? I don’t know. Probably nobody knows. But, if somebody fills abuse report against me because of that, be sure I’ll do the same because of breaking my privacy. And I want you to do the same. Sorting the content geographicaly is one thing, peeking through the curtains to enforce one’s ideas over the whole world is another. I love my world to be free.

Of course that we all have strong feelings about this, but our reactions vary. From disgust to agreeing that all the involved are consenting adults. Some people escape the trap by saying it’s the ToS matter and hurry up to call for banning. But that’s just coward’s way. Way not to deal with the real problem. The real problem is not in the existence of forced fantasy sims, nor in the cloth layers that depict beaten, tortured or raped person. Those are simply props and stages for role-play. Anybody with a bit of imagination and RP experience can do the rape and violence scene without them, even without second life. And those props and stages might be used for many other things than the rape RP. Some of those sims are great for for urban environment photos. As you see, perfectly clean PG sim can be used for rape role-playing and violence RP sim can be used for something completely different.

But let’s discuss rape and violence in art. Try to compare the rape scene in Irreversible with the rape in some porn movie. See the difference? Sure, you can bet there are people in the world who found Irreversible quite arousing and rewinded that scene many times and spilled lots of bodily fluids watching it. But you can’t say that the movie should be forbidden because of it. Art was never meant to show you only the easy things you enjoy.

What this has to do with role-playing? Well, RP is some form of art. And, same as with the other art-forms, RP can have different motives and different effect to the participants and spectators. Using those skins or walking the streets of violent RP sims might be somebody’s way to overcome fears or unpleasant experiences, as it is used in psycho-drama. Or it might be a save outlet to a fantasy that is more common than we like to think. Yes, it can also be, and often is, a game of people with IMHO sick and deviant sexual drive, but…

Will banning the skins, devices and sims do anything about it? No, it won’t. It’s just an attempt to put the dirt under the carpet, to hide the symptom instead of curing the real problem. And that’s why I called it coward’s approach. Problem is not in the skins, toys or sims. Problem is not even in some individuals, though it manifests there. Problem is mainly in our society and culture.

I cannot but to think that something went very wrong with the world, seeing all the kinks around. Not only in second life. Web, TV and bedrooms are also playgrounds for many things one might find deviant. Researching what went wrong and who’s to blame would take a blog of it’s own, but, somehow, so often it traces back to the same organizations that preach "virtue" and are so loud against all the "deviances". Those same that are first to tell us how to behave and what is good or not. Those that find themselves clean enough to point their fingers and cry for banishing and forbidding of something.

But once we start "cleaning" hell will break lose. As somebody recently said, arguments for banning things are the same that were used for burning the books. And we all know where burning the books led and what were the consequences. For what it’s worth I’ll keep standing for the freedom of consenting adults to do whatever their will is. Even if I don’t like it or maybe even find it deviant.

And there is one other thing that interests me: Who fuckin’ cares about all that?

I mean, aren’t we all tired of the subject? We don’t need help of an oracle to know what will happen in the next days: 

• there will be a lot of noise in the SL blogosphere and large part of the second life population that cares about what’s going on out of their parcel will be pissed
• LL will spend some time discussing what is adult content
• then they will post another article on the blog with new policy defined and put official
• there will be more buzz in the blogosphere
• then we’ll all happily forget about it. Because nothing important will happen.

Linden Lab has better things to do than to check if anybody’s poseballs are around. But they have to show up in public. Good thing is that this time they really made that post good. I really mean it! It addresses benefit of the whole community and calls for public opinion and discussion. And the policy doesn’t sound fascistic as it was the case when they made their first attempt of age and identity verification.

Only thing that might come out as problematic is that flagging thing. Do they really expect that world will be divided to the part where private sex bed is allowed and the one where everybody is in celibacy? I don’t think so, but maybe I am wrong. But I am sure that hard and strict policy like that is not going to work. Hopefully, they know it too. We’ll all just lose time and nerves about it and nothing will be solved. From all we could read (check NWN’s post with a bit more clarifications from Cyn Linden), Lindens are not in the mood to ban everything sex related from the new formed ghetto, just to concentrate genital shops and huge brothels.

We’ll see…. if we care…

Then you hear it:

~~*-HOOOOOOOOOOO-*~~

Dammit! Idiot is in the house. Problem is, HOOOOOO never goes alone. It's always followed by an another one, and another… and another… And then comes that giggle in retarded kid's voice, yeeeeehaaaaaa, woooot and probably something else. Have I mentioned the beloved ~!!!AIRHORN!!!~?  The retarded idiot is inspiring more idiots. Out of nothing, what promised to be a good party turned out to be cacophony of cheap sound effects. What was the great audience is now a hideplace for a few immature gesture-jerking freaks. They think they are adding to the atmosphere. They think their gestures are cool, hose cheap sounds they got in their noob days.Those same people would rather die than wear freebie shoes from their noob days. Whyd they think freebie sounds are ok then?

OK, you think, you know better than them. You know how to mute them. They are not saying anything interesting anyway. Sure if you mute them, they'll turn to gray shadows so you'll have to watch if you're trying to make some photos of the party. Or you can go the other way and mute the sounds in the mixer. That will do.

But it won't do. Club is full and we all look good. Primcount of all the attachments is hitting the ceiling, new animation is being loaded every few seconds. Bandwidth line is peaking most of the time. And you know, audio stream is the last in the stack of the things to be downloaded. So each time somebody fires up a sound gesture, your stream drops to make some room for the stupid sound. You don't hear the effect because you muted them all, but you don't hear the music either. 

After all, you use your friendship with club manager of DJ to get the stream's URL, logout and continue listening the show from the desktop player. Shared experience, eh? Well, you have to watch who you share your experiences with.

Unfortunately for him, I was not in gaming mood, busy, a bit bitchy that night and usually prefer introductions before encounters… so I simply offered to end his immortality with a couple of chosen bullets. But it happened again, just ten minutes later, from another guy. Tonight, I've learned there is much more than a simple game here.

The game in question is The Thirst: Bloodlines (reviewed by Vidal Tripsa at NWN). In essence, it's a vampire RPG, with HUD. To survive in the game, one has to get some blood every now and then, as expected from a decent vampire. Here comes the trick: that blood doesn't need to come from another player, any avatar's blood is fine, even if they have never heard about the game.

Which is, on one hand, great. The game is not isolated on one set of sims, in an enclosed circle of players. It's not some isolated place with people stop playing as soon as they teleport anywhere else. On the other hand, some people already get irritated by bite requests. If you've ever heard about spampires, that's it. 

Now, to be honest, this is not the first time we are hearing similar accusations. There are more "games" like this one, that stretch on unlimited amount of sims and might encounter people that doesn't care about it. Most infamous and most popular is probably sex. It was a couple of months ago, when one resident was accused of hitting on everybody that moves and oversexing every environment. While those accusations and drama that followed were based on jalousy and too much of territorial-macho instincts of a certain boyfriend, the problem remains:

How to make games, RPG's, lifestyles and activities as broad as possible (because that's one of the essential treasures of second life) and still keep all of us safe and participating only in those we like?

There is an idea of setting up the servers that would enable working of the HUD in some areas. DCS comes to mind. Still, there is still limitation over the area, though the area can be enlarged significantly. What these systems lack is possibility of recruiting. One have to get the HUD first to get into the game. There is also possibility (for some games) to connect to Linden's life-meter. You know, that little heart with percents on the top of your screen. That way parcel owners would have a nice control over the basic possibility of doing damage over the present avatars, and lots of games would have common, and very large, playground. 

Sure, those are all technical solutions. The best one is supposed to work right now with good players and well-mannered avatars. If you want to bite my neck hon, do a good foreplay to get me into the game before you try to get my blood. And understand that no means no. Or be ready to instantly join my game which includes me shooting you into the orbit. But I'd prefer that you do it better way. That is the point, right?

It's about keeping your avatar, your internet presence and your off-line life unconnectable. It doesn't matter if your avatar is different sex than your human, nor about how old are you or if you don't look as a 22-y-o super-sex-bomb. It's about where you go and what you do, what you read, think and speak. It's not what your friends and acquaintances will know about you in the meatspace. It's what is deductible from the trails we leave with every step we make in the cyberspace.

As you know, these bloody computers we are so fond of using, are very capable of storing large amounts of useless data, keeping logs of anything and everything. And we're not the only ones who like to use them. There are people whose fetish is surveillance and others who make huge amounts of money and power out of knowing who is doing what at any time. And they are not RP-ing. They play it for real. And they have just started their game.

Safe. Sanitized. Quiet — where the only content is made by businesses for their own use, or for display or conferences. A sober place of business, events and advertising (if they can entice people to come and visit — which doubtless, some will). And none of those embarrassing users native to the Agni grid.

It would be the fourth of Linden Lab's grids. So far we have Agni (the main one), Teen and Beta Grid. While Beta grid is understandably on its own and Teen grid is a matter of discussions, CorpGrid sounds as a weird idea.

Why don't they just make another continent? Set of sims that will be dedicated to business use, with adequate buildings, neighbourhoods, even shops that will target the residents there. Even different physics can be implemented, though hardly that business use needs that. But, of course there are different reasons why Lindens want biz people to be on different grid not just on different continent.

Sure, a main-grid resident has to teleport to visit your CorpGrid simulator – if you even allow them, but they have to do that anyway on the regular grid, and here as a CorpGrid non-native they turn up without their appearance and content. Maybe a native of the Agni grid doesn't even have permissions to create or upload content onto the CorpGrid.

Old story about kinky content is rolling again. What if somebody teleports there with a pair of poseballs in their inventory, let alone wearing silks or mini-skirt? What if that business girl is wearing garters, stockings  and a skin with brazilian shave under skirt? Will the stock market collapse?

I'd rather ask how many residents will find that teleporting somewhere and being stripped to Ruth with an empty inventory is too much of a compromise? Without appereance and content, I don't need teleport, I can simply open another account and log on a different grid just the same as I do that now with OpenSim. Don't bother making all that software.

Sure, if business people wants it that way, that's OK, let them have it. They can have their secluded space but CorpGrid will hardly have advertising use, because very few of the consumer residents will come there. That is the price of the clean world. 

It will be interesting to see how Linden Lab will handle the sacrifice of what is second life's main value. In the last five years (and that is a lot of time on the Internet) people are working on their virtual selves. Virtual identity, all those stories manifested in the appearances and content of our inventories is what makes second life an environment that is so valuable. Now, they want to experiment if those are not that important. Maybe it's the crappy 3D graphics and spatial voice? Well, I wouldn't place my bets on that. 

What do you think? Will Lindens try their luck in getting a piece of corporate cake with another separate grid? How that experiment will turn out?