Drunk CorpoHippies at the Helm of the Ship

Never in my whole time in Second Life, have I felt as demoralised about the Company as I feel right now. Content creation is the backbone that allows the land model to thrive in Second Life, yet I see that the service provider is hopelessly blinkered by their overconfidence in their overarching “vision” for corporations and education. Like the White Star Line’s hubris when they caused the sinking of the Titanic, the captain is encouraged to plow their “unsinkable” flagship luxury cruise liner full speed ahead into a field of randomly floating icebergs.

It is now trivial to copy avatars and items in Second Life, for any average resident who wishes to do it, with an opensource viewer. It is no longer something that requires any significant technical experience to do. This development was inevitable, and it is here today. This genie is not going back in the bottle. But it does not have to be all doom and gloom.

Nobody seems to understand at Linden Lab, that unfettered copying is only feasable if there is no unfettered selling and mass distribution capabilities. This is how the real World Wide Web works, because it works with Real Money Transactions regulated by governments and banks concerned with a maze of laws and the real need to limit their risk. File sharing sites are cracked down upon. Many attempts at microtransaction economies have been tried, but all microtransactions with “token” currency, are equal to the chips received in a casino, and are high risk ventures due to lack of oversight. Sometimes, the market doesn’t work like you’d want.

MMOs are games worlds and not sandbox worlds like Second Life. They limit their risk by not making the currency officially tradeable, not allowing user-generated content, or any actual rights to the graphics in the game. Rather a subscription fee is paid. Works for Blizzard with Worlds of Warcraft, and a host of others to keep the Feds and Interpol away from their office doors. Sure third-parties trade it, that’s not the point. The point is keeping their business running and their core customers, the gamers, happy.

Merchant accounts on the net are dear and hard to acquire, and not everyone trusts Paypal. (with good reason)

The microtransaction tokens model, in combination with good distribution paths for all content in Second LIfe, regardless if its legitimate or copied, allows even the casual user to turn copying into cold hard cash with ease. The fact that legitimate content cannot be differentiated from copied content, that likely reputable merchants cannot be told apart on first glance from likely dodgy ones, is also hurting Second Life content business, with confusion of goods.

Linden Lab apparantly has no idea how the token money in their economy is actually changing hands. I sat in horror watching the Metanomics webcast about virtual goods, as CorpoHippies described their inworld money transactions as happening in a fog. I bet it was just a drunken Gaussian stupor. Yeah, I am sure the Secret Service and Interpol will enjoy hearing *that*! Great way to provide opportunity for money laundering and profit opportunities for organized crime and terror organisations. This can prove to be more fun than the ageplay, gambling and banking bans, and more damaging than the adult content fiasco ever was.

Wait, what?

Yes, losing the whole microtransactions model in Second Life is possibly at stake, here.

No individual content creator can stand up to the current level of wholesale content theft in Second Life. We neither have the support of the company, nor the tools of the platform to maximise our gains and limit our losses like any normal retail business would do, and the game is drunkenly rigged in favor of wholesale corruption. The only option is to form “media companies” to protect our rights via lawsuits under the DMCA, and we all know how those go in Real Life. I’m rooting for Stroker Serpentine and Munchflower Zaius, but I know this road will be deeply difficult for them. Long term, it’s not a solution for virtual worlds to go this route: I’m sure they agree. We need something better than class action lawsuits. But it’s all the merchants can do, who rely on Second Life for their income, to limit their losses. It’s impossible for most of them; too expensive and time consuming.

A good example. Walt Disney formed his own company and invented Mickey Mouse, after his character “Oswald the Lucky Rabbit” was legally stolen from him by another media company he was working with,

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Walt_Disney#Oswald_the_Lucky_Rabbit

Now Walt’s company uses contracts that can harm individual artists rights with work-for-hire agreements, slanted in favor of the corporation. The artist trades a bit of job security for trading in all their copyright interests. Disney actively lobbies  for laws that will keep Mickey Mouse under the company copyright forever.

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Copyright_Term_Extension_Act

Which has a twist, because the heirs of the artist can eventually file to reclaim these copyrights.

http://mediadecoder.blogs.nytimes.com/2009/09/20/in-wake-of-disney-marvel-deal-cartoonists-heirs-seek-to-reclaim-rights/

The artists during their lifetimes have given up all copyrights to their work to the corporations through the work for hire agreements. But after they are dead, heirs can eventually sue the company for the control of the rights that the artists never got to enjoy. Oddly enough, letting the copyright expire fairly to the public domain in a reasonable period of time would have benefitted the corporation more, as trademark law can cover the business rights in these properties. Trademarks expire when they are not used, unlike copyrights.

While Walt Disney may have done well for himself by founding a corporation, this path hasn’t improved the situation of artists. This casino is rigged for the house. Even if you play the “found a company to protect myself” game to win for yourself, the house still wins every time. IANAL – I am not a lawyer, but I feel reasonably sure-footed, that laws slanted in corporations favor are of no real use to the little guy. And that’s trying to use the DMCA in Second Life – useless for artists unless they have unlimited money for lawyers and courts. They do not have the time or the cash.

I’m also reminded of how I felt when Metacreations imploded their key product offerings, selling all its real products, such as Poser, Bryce, and Painter, opting instead for restructuring into a “dot com” biz. Their products are relegated to the dustbin of spyware filters, while their original products are still selling and developed by other companies. This is Linden Lab ignoring the backbone of their business to “restructure” to appeal to corporate and educational customers playing “office” in virtual worlds. Someone else will take their original business.

Ask Fujitsu how well virtual corporate office went, Linden Lab! The corps and edus for the most part, didn’t go for playing “office” in Worldsaway, because better and far cheaper tools existed for offices even in 1996, comparatively speaking. Second Life is not *that much better* than Worldsaway was in this area, to change the majority of those conservative minds. They think that employees are playing a game on company time.

Meanwhile, we content creators are thrown to the thieves and crooks who take advantage of the platform for whatever nefarious srs bzns they are doing. What original content might have been sold at a living wage, is quickly devalued by these people to nearly free, sometimes in the space of hours after release.

Reading Interpol’s Intellectual Property Crimes description was something of a wakeup call, a final one in a series of wakeup calls.

http://www.interpol.int/Public/FinancialCrime/IntellectualProperty/Default.asp

“There is general agreement that IP crime is a high-profit, low-risk crime, which inevitably motivates criminals to engage in this type of activity. It is clear paramilitary terrorist organizations have traded in counterfeit and pirated goods to maintain their organizations and fund their activities. In light of this, INTERPOL remains concerned about the possibility that some other terrorist groups would seize the opportunity to finance their activities through IP crime.”

I can’t protect myself against these people by suing them under the DMCA. The DMCA gives them my personal information if I file, so they can come and make my life miserable both online and off. This is why I don’t file DMCA’s. If its organised crime, and I suspect a good deal of the endemic content theft to resale market is related to real-life crime. Given the stories I hear from many other content creators, it’s only a matter of time before the Feds and Interpol show up in Second Life, demanding where the L$ money trail goes.

L$ IN THE FOG!

Second Life content creators, the more they do for this platform, the more they benefit the corrupt users who may be engaging in other crimes in real life, various sorts of organised crime such as drugs, terrorism and money laundering. Lately “Protection” seems to be getting added to the list. Shut up about our rip bzns or they’ll grief and bot you to poverty. These are chilling effects on the Second Life economy, and no self-respecting corporation will want that kind of embarrassing blowout anywhere near their branding.

Linden Lab merrily skims off the transactions and enjoys the tier paid by these illicit businesses, in flagrant disregard for the fact that they can lose their safe harbor defence by profiting from sales of pirated content. Plus it destabilises the backbone of the legitimate businesses on Second Life, just like they did with “investment banking”, “securities trading”, gambling and ageplay, while satisfying their desire to have limitless “almost free” content to lure in corporate business, and a constant flow of people to rent sims at exhorbitant prices. The piece de resistance is that the hardware has gotten exponentially better, yet LL is not passing the savings on to the customers in the form of tier savings. No, they just lower and raise the “setup fees” in ways that harm those who have bought the sims already. But that goes back to my other rant on CorpoHippies blundering around with the Mainland.

Now, this might seem like a conspiracy, but I believe deeply it’s not a conspiracy at all. Never explain by conspiracy what is better ascribed to sheer stupidity.

I believe this is all unintentional random blundering around by a company with no compass for its corporate direction. Without good leadership at the helm, their blunders take the form of the drunkards walk — many people may be familiar with Brownian motion from statistics or physics classes. Linden Lab is actually just treading water with no idea where they are going, and that’s how they think the money is behaving, too. CorpoHippies drunk at the helm of the ship, floating seemingly nowhere fast.

Real Life doesn’t actually operate this way. Drunks do not just sail around in circles, heading for nowhere. That’s a computer simulation.

Drunks eventually crash the ship into something else.

Yet, they refuse to stop steering the ship while intoxicated. They are going to crash into a random iceberg, eventually. Or run this ship ashore like the Exxon Valdez, ruining Second Life for everyone.

Thinking about my own, existing Second Life content. It’s not really worth doing anything about the content I have made already. I’ll keep selling to benefit those golden souls who understand what doing the right thing means. But I can do more to legally protect the content I have not released yet. I am sure to do so, Linden Lab. I must protect myself from CorpoHippie blundering drunk habits, because you are drunkenly bumping into me too, and I’m afraid you are going to run me over with your ship. CorpoHippies all might wander around in what they perceive as a drunken fog, but I don’t. I want to achieve enough distance to be out of danger of CorpoHippie blundering drunk habits.

I don’t work for Linden Lab, and I am done doing things for Linden Lab for free, right now. Since when was I supposed to work for free in Second Life, when I am certain to have little to show for it but heartache and abuse? I’ve been down this road already: No thanks, LL.

Did it ever occur to these CorpoHippies, that average corporations and serious educational institutions don’t like IP theft, and have a serious attitude about trademarks? Because they have their own investments and content in this area to protect? That they want to buy content that also respects these laws? Not only that, they want to import their own content and they expect to be protected by these laws and by the platform sold to them?

So the LL CorpoHippies cynically took the easy way out. They devised a system that protects corporate customers like Fort Freaking Knox, while leaving the little guy out in the cold? But it doesn’t really help the corps or edus who may find a virtual world useful, because what most of them want is a multiuser immersive simulation (think 3d WEB SITE) that allows an audience that can scale (SITE VISITORS, LL!) over the Internet, and they want people to come visit, minus the phallus rezzing griefers and copybotters, and secure enough to keep out sim defacing hackers.

So instead of dealing with that problem, it was easier to simply not allow a regular Second Life audience to come visit with all their stuff securely tucked in their own inventories, believing the corps and edus would be happy shivering out on their cold and lonely standalone Second Life inna OfficeBox? Shutting out the mass audience, just to be free of a few hackers, griefers and copybotters? How about devising tools to deal with hacking, griefing and copying across the whole platform instead?

Nor can these corporate clients buy content from the majority of Second Life content creators either? Only from “approved sellers” who sell a certain volume and then hand over stuff “opensource” with just a license? Which is fine if they wanted to buy fully licensed content, but it doesn’t address the need for an audience, who will want to wear *their* stuff that they bought, and their content rightly won’t have a license for the corporate customer to use.

Was it too difficult to devise an asset server system that allowed an avatar to still be connected to the LL Inventory system, without transferring assets over to the Corporate Grid they are visiting? Did it ever occur to devise a system that simply made the issue of copying largely irrelevant?

Didn’t anyone tell LL CorpoHippies that selling a certain amount of merchandise does nothing to guarantee quality of content? It only insures that its inexpensive? So corporate customers can still really, only go through “authorised developers” to get custom content, or use their inhouse people? Why can’t corporations make their own choices on who to buy from?

How not to be forked as the Content Creator Chicken Main Course

I feel for the decent working Joes and Janes who work for Linden Lab, the many talented developers whose work has also gone into creating this platform. My screeds aren’t aimed at them. I have much love for all of these talented people. They’re just “doing a job” and they love the company that they work for, and want to see it thrive and prosper. Actually, so do I.

I’m talking straight to the CorpoHippie suits who pay their salaries. I’ve made some suggestions to these CorpoHippies on the JIRA to avert their course as they sail the Second Life luxury cruise liner into the icebergs, and the steering wheel is in their drunk hands.

Here’s a short list that summarizes how the plan against the copying of content should be reading. I call it:

“The Four Prongs in Forking Copied Content.”

Making the copying issue irrelevant is the answer to the problem.

1. Make it easy to buy high quality legitimate content.

2. Make it easy to find infringing content and remove it

3. Limit the ability to widely distribute copied content

4. Make it difficult to profit from copied content

1. Make it easy to buy high quality legitimate content.

Currently there are not easily recognisable channels in SL in which to buy good legitimate content. Search sucks, Xstreet is a corrupt pile of dodgy crap mainly lifted from other 3d content communities, the Web, and other Second Life residents. People mainly rely on word of mouth for good content creators, or use inworld groups.

Make it clearly obvious the difference between legitimate content and that which isn’t. When I talk about making it clear about legitimate content, I want to see it clear not just for high end content creators like myself, but also for full perms resellers, so they have confidence in their products getting sold to and used by legitimate users. Legitimate users of their products can benefit a lot by having some way of making it clear that they are.

So this should really trickle down to the bottom, to the average seller of derivative goods made from items created by other merchants. (the ubiquitous seller of 50 linden “screw me” heels). They need a way to mark themselves as legitimate and derivative goods, to differentiate themselves as better than the copies competing with them.

Quite frankly, its this user who drives the land market the most, and if they close down shop because they feel like they can’t continue easily in the face of others who just rip content to compete with them, we are all losers.

I have suggested other ideas on the JIRA, such as my ratings system, which in conjunction with content authentication can go a long way to creating a profitable trade in legitimate goods, giving corporate customers a tool to filter content coming into their sims, both on the Main Grid and off. This is the carrot, without which none of the sticks one uses against content theft will ever work. Linden Lab must outconvenience piracy and instill trust at all levels of the content creation selling and creation process.

Mesh import and other advanced Second Life tools that allow industry standard programs will help a lot for the corporate customers and high end Second Life users alike, and mesh building supplies will certainly be a trade once it appears in Second Life. It can overall improve content quality, if implemented well. But in order to have good results, and not a gianormous clusterfuck of uploading existing meshes from all over the Internet, Linden Lab needs to take an overarching approach to the issue of unauthorised resale and distribution of copied content.

2. Make it easy to find infringing content and remove it

This one’s important too, especially to drive home to retards that buying, selling, and distributing copied content doesn’t pay. Authentication can help with this one, too. Efficient processes to deal with those who try to slip through the cracks of the legitimate content trade have to be dealt with.

3. Limit the ability to widely distribute copied content

Important, but not working by itself, it needs support from the other prongs of this fork in order to work well. I suggested limiting transfer on unverified accounts, that will halt a good bit of the casual distribution of copied assets inworld. If one was to translate this to Opensim, just devise an inventory system which doesn’t transfer assets to the sim you are visiting, but remains either the property of the user or even of an online store. Sure users on a sim other than yours, can copy what you rez on your body, but as long as it sits in your inventory, they can’t touch it. Your avatar should behave as if it were a sim. “The Theatre of the Avatar”, but that is a topic for another discussion.

4. Make it difficult to profit from copied content

By limiting transfer on unverifieds, can end brutally reselling them through microtransactions by those accounts. Content control with legitimate goods will erect barriers against copied content as well. Opensim can simply do this by adopting the iTunes type model. The store is the ultimate arbiter of uploaded content. Works for the 3d communities, too.

This might even save the Second Life microtransactions model, before law enforcement agencies start to wonder about what other illegal purposes its getting used for. When or if that happens, and its more likely a when than an if, we can all call Second Life, “game over”.

But I think all my suggestions are a pipedream, that Linden Lab will never act upon anything I have suggested. However, its a plan for those who have walled garden grids, many on OpenSim already have similar models to Second Life, and I write my ideas for them, too.

I hope developers still have a job after the ethics-free CorpoHippies are done wrecking Second Life, and sadly this is something I doubt longterm too. Because CorpoHippies will just as happily crash into the developers and other employees to the wall as they smile vapidly in their brainfog, same as they do the rest of us unwashed “residents”.

Try calling the residents CUSTOMERS for a change!

The damage to some people could be great; those who are dependent on the money to pay their bills, those who are highly invested in land in some aspect of their business, or work for the company directly. The “end of the world” will likely *not* come to pass anytime soon. The LL CorpoHippies cynically know this much as they stumble around trying to steer the ship in their mental FOG, but I am doing my duty from the lighthouse, and warning people that there’s danger in these waters.

Icebergs ahead! Watch out for the shore! Pay attention to the lights and the foghorns!

I feel deeply for my fellow creators, honest estate owners, LL employees and the responsible customers of Second Life businesses who find themselves caught in the middle with no good options. For myself personally, I find that I actually do have a few options, all of which I can do simultaneously, and I will detail the list here.

1. Keep on having fun in Second Life, and don’t do Second Life content creation as srs bzns.

Priority no. 1! Support the content creators and estate owners you care about, anyway. Some of them don’t have the luxury to leave Second Life srs bzns content creation or estate rental biz, and deserve support and empathy. The ball is out of our court here. I will simply not make more stuff as srs bzns in Second Life, however. Not unless I see srs chng (and I doubt I will ever see it). I am taking my chickens to sell through other venues, to other 3d communities with me. If I make anything else for Second Life, its because I wanted to have fun with a few friends. That’s payment enough. I might sell a bit, I might not.

2. Concentrate on Blue Mars content creation. (only suitable for those going after the mid-high end)

Avatar Reality is far more enlightened about the image many corps and edus want to be associated with, and the need for easy access of an audience to their worlds while maintaining security for these clients. No CorpoHippies running the place at AR, I like that. Corporate through and through, just like many of the customers they aim to reach. Still early days yet for the platform, but I feel optimistic. It will *not* be a replacement for Second Life, nor is it even intended to be this, but I find it exciting in its own unique way. Long time ago (1996 when I was just playing Worldsaway on Compuserve), I predicted first person shooter game engines would be used to create virtual worlds; I am delighted to be part of this seachange in their usage. If you are a talented 3d artist, you should be checking out Blue Mars. Keep the suggestions for improvements to it coming. It will only get better.

3. Help Opensim turn into viable competition to Second Life at the low and midrange, by donating and selling worktime to create real business opportunity for myself and others, with basic graphic assets for others to use in its content creation.

OpenSim is a failsafe place for hardcore Second Life folks to go. Even more so if Linden Lab finally commits a suicide of a thousand self-inflicted paper cuts while drunk on the spiked Kool-aid. Longterm, if Opensim is turned towards a real money transaction model, it could be a good platform for serious 3d artists, much the same as Turbosquid, Renderosity, and DAZ3d are for the many programs that 3d content is made for and with. This trade will trickle down to those who have less technical skill in 3d, just as it does on those sites. On 3d content sites, there are many divisions of labor of content creators – some texture artists, some modellers, some animators, some programmers, some folks just making renders for fun, etc. This needs more fostering. Fostering it will sell lots of inexpensive Opensims.

OpenSim and Second Life are really like a 3d rendering program where you can pose and animate your virtual dolls and build 3d environments, similar in most ways to a 3d rendering program such as Poser and DAZ Studio, while at the same time you can invite all your friends, in a giant Sim sketchpad to do anything you want to do. It is clear that content creation drives the rental of Opensims, which are far cheaper than Second Life Sims. If a viable economy emerges, there may be something approaching a thriving 3d web.

Christmas Feast Day at CorpoHippie Farms

At some point, the Second Life Chickens will become cruelly aware of the reality of CorpoHippie Farms. Eventually, all of the Chickens, including the Estate Owning Chickens and the Employee Chickens, will join their cousins, the Content Creator Chickens, at the CorpoHippie Farm. The sim will be Damage Enabled. Rotisserie Chicken is the main course and all will be chased down in a drunken attempt by the CorpoHippies to skewer all the Chickens to the Rotisserie grill for the massive, one time ever CorpoHippie Christmas Chicken Feast. Only CorpoHippies have a good chance of getting out of the farm, alive.

The site of the feast is high atop the Golden Feed Silos. All the CorpoHippies shall be force teleported to the Silver Lining Chicken Cage Restaurant for the final Christmas Feast Bacchanalia. Then merriment, drunken antics and loose women will prevail for a time, dressed in botted Nomine outfits bouncing on copied Sexgen beds.

The only way down is to swandive from the top of the silo towers, after copying to inventory with full permissions, exquisite golden parachutes embroidered with ivory chickens. All textures uploaded from Deviant Art, naturally, and the parachutes genuinely copybotted from Cubey Terra’s Aerodrome using a freebie opensource script.

The glide down to Earth may be quite dangerous for those suffering from foggy vision. Some of the CorpoHippies are sure to drop with an unopened parachute, too drunk from spiked Kool-aid to pull the release string. Others may nab greedily more than one parachute to ensure a safer sail to the terrain below. And some may have simply eaten too much Chicken while Intoxicated, puking into the parachute all the way down.

Watch your Dixie cups.

No CorpoHippies or Chickens were harmed in the Reenactment, as they were safely Teleported out of Second Life upon Time of Death.

This work is licenced under a Creative Commons Licence.

Postscript.

This article is Parrhesiastic, sometimes engaging in Black Dry Humor, Sarcastic throughout, and meant to be so. For an Epicurean has failed her friends truly, if she does not offer frank criticism. Still, there is a sense of the absurd, as anything I try to do for my fellow Second Lifers, is all in the end, utterly pointless.

Be excellent to each other.