Sun 20 Aug 2006
Second Life: Are the Virtual Walls Crumbling?
Posted by John T. Mims, APR under second life| Trackback
On the surface, things appear to be going really well in Second Life. In addition to having an Altyris building there (I had to drop that in…), Adidas Reebok, Toyota and TELUS (a large Canadian telco) have all announced (or begun building) an upcoming presence in Second Life. Text100, a large public relations agency, has a build opening tomorrow. NOAA has a build that’s pretty cool. The American Cancer Society raised about $40k in the SL Relay for Life. Couple that with more media than the Mideast conflict, and you have a thriving environment.
But is there trouble brewing?
One of my favorite podcasts is SecondCast. Branded as the “#1 Second Life Podcast,” the every-couple-of-weeks show has five of the most influential members of Second Life as hosts. Most of them have been in SL since the program was in beta, and they have the pulse of the Second Life “establishment.” In listening to their podcasts, the people they interview and talking to other residents, there remains major discontent among “old-timers” – more specifically, developers.
While Second LIfe is enjoying the introduction of RL (real life) companies into the virtual world, developers who make their money selling product are fighting a losing battle. As Linden Labs works to make the world easier to navigate and use to entice more users, developers see the number one issue concerning them is the theft of their designs and builds. Content developers make their money on their creativity and ingenuity, but bugs and hacks have allowed unscrupulous residents to take their content and resell it. There is no real system of law in Second Life and copyrights for virtual brands do not yet exist.
Although virtual brands are unprotected, there has been a recent crack down on RL brands. Within the last 5 months or so, residents were getting warnings for selling products that carried company trademarks. It’s clear that the door is being opened for more businesses to find their way into Second Life.
Linden Labs recently made entrance into Second LIfe much easier by removing a credit card requirement. While this will bring a flood of new residents who were reticent to provide a company with a credit card even if they were not going to be billed, it will also bring residents who have no real method of being tracked. It is now possible for a “griefer” to create a new account, cause mischief and continue to inhabit the world using another account. (Linden Labs has put together some safeguards to track computes running the software, but some say that it’s not enough.) Again, for companies moving into Second Life, easier entrance is a good thing; developers would disagree.
The development cycle for Second Life has also raised some questions from residents. Nearly every Wednesday a new version of Second LIfe is released. Generally, it’s a good thing to get new functions to broaden the experience of the world. On the other hand, new releases sometimes mean bugs. Sometimes those bugs cause real havoc and can cause parts of the world to crash.
Where does that leave us? Is Altyris going to tear down our building and stop escorting clients into SL? Not a chance! Although i will concede that SL has some issues to resolve, it has a long way to go from being in real trouble. While developers are currently unprotected in the current system, I would venture that Linden Labs will work on ways to protect developed content. Also, developers certainly have much vested in SL. In a conversation with another resident, she said “SL has some problems, but I love it! Besides, there’s no where else that I would go.”
I like comparing SL to the early days of the World Wide Web. It’s still in the early days, and there are lots of bugs to be worked out. Johnny Ming of Second Cast reminded me of an old trick that Web developers would implement to keep other from downloading photos from their Web sites. Even then, content management was a big deal. Do you think the record companies see things from the developers’ point of view? As with the Internet, many of these issues will stabilize and some will simply go away as more people enter the world.
So Second LIfe is still the place to be….
August 20th, 2006 at 11:36 pm Eth
“As Linden Labs works to make the world easier to navigate and use to entice more users, developers see the number one issue concerning them is the theft of their designs and builds. Content developers make their money on their creativity and ingenuity, but bugs and hacks have allowed unscrupulous residents to take their content and resell it. There is no real system of law in Second Life and copyrights for virtual brands do not yet exist.”
They were warned. People like me fought an uphill battle convincing residents that their silent acceptance of RL trademark and copyright infringement would haunt them. They didn’t care. They wanted to use RL brands and pirate textures from videogames and anywhere they could find. In particular, after OGLE was released they realized just how vulnerable they were (even though people like me had documented prior to OGLE how pirating content from a videostream was possible).
I’m possibly the one that most opened LL’s eyes to the disconnect between their “look the other way” policy and their “SL is dependent on user content” initiative through a series of Hotline posts challenging LL’s trademark policies. It was pretty cut and dried to me, and when the answers started coming it was pretty clear the door was suddenly open for RL brands to enter. And still many didn’t pay attention to the possible ramifications.
The developers have only themselves to blame. There are business models that work. But like the music industry they’ve failed to find/develop them (or at least most haven’t).
Personally, I find the turnaround interesting. The same will occur in RL as rapid manufacturing lowers barriers to entry and the internet fuels the Long Tail. What’s happening now in SL will be repeated in RL imo.
August 21st, 2006 at 12:12 pm Est
>Content developers make their money on their creativity and ingenuity, but bugs and hacks have allowed unscrupulous residents to take their content and resell it.
I find this statement to be HUGELY overblown and hyped, and when you listen to Second Caste and take that even for the “establishment” you get a hugely skewed take on the world. Cristiano Midnight and Aimee Weber are two big content creators who have experienced these bugs/hacks first hand and lost some income but even their bad experiences are utterly dwarfed by the income and expose they’ve had through Second Life that has hugely benefited their businesses — and the thousands of other content creators, even those concerned by these issues, who are doing very successfully in SL can’t in fairness complain that this issue has really seriously harmed them.
*A few* content creators have suffered from hacking and thefts. But a LOT of what this very feted class of people are screaming about is very different than theft or hacking in any actual legal sense. They’re often merely bitching about the fact that freebies *they themselves elected to put on transfer/resale* are now matter-of-factly being legally — and justly — resold in yardsales.
They hate the tackiness of yardsales. They hate the “low class people” coming into SL that they view as “making money off their backs” as creators. This is silly. E-bay could never have gotten started and succeeded if this old guild artisan mentality prevailed. It’s just got to go.
So hey, they need to switch off transfer/resale if they don’t want people to sell freebies, or CHARGE FOR THEM, and stop expecting the world to just endlessly roll over and virally disseminate their brands for them, and let them expose their brands rent-free all over the place. People reselling provide a service. So a more robust admission of first-sale doctrine from this very clutchy bunch is very much in order.
The very unseemly and nasty threats made by big content-creator and SLCC speaker Stroker Serpentine against a woman who sold his bed at a yard sale *legally*, replete with fake legal notices and outrageous and false invocation of Linden’s legal counsel Ginsu Linden, is typical of the harassment techniques the oldbies are using to keep their purchase on this world. They need to let go. There will be more customers for them if they stop behaving badly like this.
There’s many, many MANY other issues from crime to bugs to urgently needed Linden policies outside the immediate and sectarian concerns of content-creation class. I’ve touched on them in my blog about civil society and Mitch Kapor’s speech
http://secondthoughts.typepad.com/second_thoughts/2006/08/mitch_kapor_fro.html
August 21st, 2006 at 12:40 pm Est
Thanks for your comments, Prokofy! I certainly didn’t mean to over hype the problem.
I think that we can agree that there is discontent with a group of residents that have a loud voice in Second Life. Are they right? In the end, it won’t matter. My concern is that discontent could spill into other parts of the social structure and make moving into Second Life more difficult. So far, that has not happened.
August 21st, 2006 at 12:50 pm Est
You didn’t mean to hype it; but they did! And it’s not discontent just from this one group; there are many groups with many different discontents on a score of issues. And it *does* matter. You might think they will simply be pushed aside by the influx of either big business or mass consumers. But the issues will be exactly the same: sim performance, Linden policy, quality of life on the grid; how to share CPU and FPS, etc.
Discontent has already spilled into lots of parts of SL and that’s why the trend of the last year has been to force people to spend more and move to private islands. So there’s a strange hybrid still of the old vision of the pluralistic and open Mainland which the Lindens appear to have abandoned to griefing and blight and their revised vision of “colonies” in mannered, filtered and content-rich continents. These extremes, however, are not a recipe for the society to grow or thrive.
August 21st, 2006 at 5:47 pm Est
I don’t know about “HUGELY” overblown, but Prok makes a valid point. There are those who seem genuinely surprised - and take serious offense - when the content they created and released into the SL wilds is used by other individuals to make a few Lindens.
“But it’s supposed to be free!”
Ha.
And this is why the whole virtual world doesn’t have a weekly love-in.
{Forgive me for finding their exasperation more than a little amusing}
September 13th, 2006 at 1:55 pm Eth
Though a bit behind on my reading, I wanted to say thanks for the plug of our podcast. I chose the crew for SecondCast based on the specific disciplines they each specialize in - architecture, programming, fashion, and press.
I am the only one that isn’t a beta user, ironically. My real life background is in business management and IT.
I just posted a blog post on some issues I found in the Terms of Service relating to intellectual property. Some of the points have been covered in past articles in the Second Life Herald but a few things are new. The article is at johnswords.com.
Thanks!
Johnny
June 4th, 2007 at 11:08 am Eth
“I like comparing SL to the early days of the World Wide Web.”
SL is nothing like the http://WWW. The WWW is an open system, accessible to all *for free*, while SL is under closed Linden dictatorship! Companies moving in to SL are surfing the hype and will be disappointed in the same way as when the .COM bubble bursted