f13.net

http://news.bbc.co.uk/2/hi/technology/6638331.stm (http://news.bbc.co.uk/2/hi/technology/6638331.stm)

http://www.cbc.ca/technology/story/2007/05/09/tech-secondlifechildporngermany-20070509.html (http://www.cbc.ca/technology/story/2007/05/09/tech-secondlifechildporngermany-20070509.html)

Now, I'm all for them nailing the people offering up real kiddie porn, but I'm kind of wary of arresting adults pretending to be children, or having virtual sex with with children  Seems like it's crossing into thought crime territory.

*.jpg,*.mpg etc. is what this law is about as far as I know.

Linden let this go on forever. And it was hardly any secret, it was insanely open. There were people who owned multiple sims devoted to "ageplay" prostitution and made a living off of it.

I think this one really hit a new legal point because people got caught trading real child pornography. I also remember seeing something that Germany now surpasses the US in number of active accounts. A few months ago Second Life made it against the rules top openly advertise child sex places and casinos. Last week they announced they're going to force "adult" places to be limited to people who've done an real life age validation thing (not just a credit card either). That doesn't mean that they're not still there, but they're at least it's not being implied that these are approved activities. The problem is they have let a huge community build up. Also, this is about pedophilia. There's been a lot of stuff implying that it's BDSM ageplay, but it's not, it's commercial activity appealing to pedophiles, pure and simple.

I'd like to think Linden is cleaning this stuff up because it's illegal, immoral, and/or stupid. However, I suspect they're cleaning up for an IPO or sale.

There's also this huge community of roleplayer kids who aren't doing the sex thing. My partner and I own land next to a bunch of them who roleplay The Goonies (you can actually see our treehouse in one of the Second Life Safari episodes). They're really cute in a Dennis the Menace sort of way and they've been protesting the pedos for years now and are horrified because they are probably going to end up getting shut down because of the pervs.

Issue the first: Trying to get laid in Second Life is stupid.  The avatars can only move with pre-scripted animations, so at best they look little better than a kid rubbing a GI Joe figure against a Barbie.
Issue the second: Swapping kiddie porn in Second Life is really fucking stupid.  If someone wants to be running around with a short avatar and be all 'Tee hee, I'm 7!' while having their marionette-sex with someone else, that's just their own thing, I don't really care.  But throwing real kiddie porn around a place is just begging for lawsuits and arrests.  I mean lawsuits and arrests against the innocent people running the place, which is bad, not arrests on the people selling kiddie porn, which is good.

OMG SL players are fucking weirdo deviants?!!?one2!@!11  FUCK AND THE SKY IS STILL BLUE OMFGXHAXX!!!


I say leave this dumbass non-news on /. where it belongs.

I listened to a fairly in-depth interview with the German journalist who did the investigation on BBC WorldNews yesterday (I  :heart: satellite radio) and the issue is not only the 'child' avatar interactions (although that's enough in Germany apparently). The journalist was also approached in game by 2 characters that offered to sell real child porn for Linden dollars. The journalist bought and was sent several images of real kids under the age of 12 being abused. IMO that's the real story, that this virtual marketplace is being utilized for the commercial distribution of child porn. To their credit a Linden representative interviewed on the BBC was very open and adamant that they were co-operating fully with the german press and government and were 100% committed to eliminating not only the activity but the people involved. Time will tell.

Which is not really news either. Porn is always an early adopter of new media distribution schemes which means child porn is as well.

The interesting issue is whether Linden Lab's current "we're a service provider" argument will play well in Bonn.  They do their best to insulate themselves from U.S. law that way, but I wonder how that will play out overseas.  Personally, I think their current ID-verification scheme is entirely in response to these things.  The virtual kiddy porn/age play stuff is legal in the U.S., but not so much in Germany.  Even their "we protect minors from naughty content" argument in favor of their ID verification scheme falls apart when the non-kiddy porn content is verbotten in another country.  If they can make it forbidden to advertise age play content, then they certainly can police it -- which really vitiates their service provider argument. 

The ID scheme is just a bandaid that won't really do much.  And the company that will be handling the verification just adds a layer of complexity when it comes to privacy policy compliance -- their only visible privacy policy is rather weak, quite honestly.

Agreed. I was just commenting that the "OMG Second Life has seksual deviants?!" wasn't really the important bit of the story.

I know Second Life is trendy in an "omfg neuromancer" sort of way, but it really is just a small shitty sandbox full of perverts.  "Someday everything will use avatars!" is what "Eventually everything will be virtual reality for some reason!" was fifteen years ago.

(http://i8.photobucket.com/albums/a28/nofx1981/loli2.jpg)

I'm sure there's a story behind that picture. Right? There's a story, you know what it is, RIGHT?

MUCH more "omfg Snowcrash" than "omfg Neuromancer".  I recently read both of those for the first time, and I was STUNNED by how similar the virtual world in Snowcrash is to Second Life.  Like, DAMN.  Right down to the Biff and Barbie avatars.

I won't even comment on the original story.  I can't believe anyone would be surprised that something that's been happening in newsgroups, the Web, IRC, et cetera would also happen in Second Life.

What's the story behind that picture?

There's no story to speak of behind the picture.  It's been floating around the chans, likely originated over in 2chan.  Some people thought that there was actually a giant schoolgirl statue in Japan 'cause of it, but it's just a photoshop inserting one of those Japanese resin models into a real scene.

From my "gangsta" casino connections, a cyber-escort session could earn you 1,000 to 30,000 Linden dollars depending on how low you'll go, not just for this stuff.  They pay the pimp and he pays you a portion of the take.  I like openness and creativity of the game, but Second Life has a cesspool side like this.

...and the game has way to many Casinos.

Second life is such a scam from one end to the other. Their killer PR firm has jumped their mass market exposure up a few orders of magnitude. I swear if I see another media outlet talking about how new and innovative Second Life is, or that it is the next Myspace, or that it is a industry leading MMORPG, I'll kill myself with a cardboard spoon.

It isn't a game, and it isn't anything more innovative than any of half a dozen virtual worlds from the mid 90s.

It stuns me that the majority of the press it gets sounds like it was written by SL staff and not journalists. The fact that anyone is exposing the kiddie porn and other crap going on is a good thing, but I fear that the Lindens are too far ahead of the ball to see any crash. It wouldn't surprise me if they are trying to shoot for an IPO so they can cash out before the house of cards tumbles.

Second Life makes me wish for the direct neural implant form of interface, if only so we could use it as a honeypot to gather all the pedophiles, furries, and assorted other deviants and just send the "braindeath" signal in one fell swoop.  It would be glorious.

Then we'll get the guys who listen to Bowie, they are mostly fags.  Hell I bet Angry.bob can suggest a few more groups for the great brain purge!

It's going to get MUCH MUCH WORSE. Advertising agencies are starting to recommend it to their clients as part of marketing to the younger/hipper/more tech-savvy demographics. I only wish I was kidding.

We'll all be sorry when the furries are the only informed economic and political base because everyone has moved to Second Life.

Meh.  Get used to it.  MTV has its VW shit already running, several bigger corps have a presence in SL, etc.  It's only "worse" if you still think there's any shred of any kind of magic circle that remains around the MMO domain.  IMO, the magic circle has long since been turned into a circle jerk, but hey, to each his own.

I say it'll get worse because the ad agencies really don't understand what they are getting themselves into. Brand-owners hate having their products used to produce giant cock monoliths for all to see.

We here at the Acme Vibrator company are just fine with it.

Thing is that it'd be pretty tough to build a cock monolith with someone else's product.  If you mean that brand-owners don't want their stuff associated with places wherein you can build a big cock monolith, I'd agree to some extent, although the practice of using sex to sell products ain't exactly new.

Sex sells is an ok advertising idea when you can be coy with it. When it's an actual flight of giant flying cocks, it's not so much. Second Life advertisers who are not trying to actually sell adult, pr0n-oriented products or sex toys would do quite well to eschew any form of "sex sells" advertising in Second Life.

The biggest problem with "guerilla marketing" (vile vomitous shite) and the kind of things you need to do to take advantage of Second Life is that without an absolutely stellar relationship with the target demographic, a relationship of staunch loyalty wherein the demographic doesn't immediately distrust you because you are a corporation, the brand owner WILL lose control of the message. That scares the piss out of brand owners, and it should.

The thing is that Second Life (and other VWs like There) does have a pretty good marketing potential for clothing vendors, etc.  People spend a LOT of their cash on that junk.  Most of the people I know who run successful businesses in SL are clothing, hair, skin and body shape designers.  I'm not even talking furry and ageplay shit, I'm talking just simple "make me look better than I can figure out on my own" stuff.  There are already people who buy clothes online, so having companies like American Apparel, [insert shoe vendor], etc. selling models of their clothes in SL does make sense.  If there was a way to use your Linden dollars to buy real products and have them sent to you, that'd be even better from a marketing perspective. 

At least one auto manufacturer also has their cars for sale in SL, which at very least is an interesting way to get people to buy cars based on looks as opposed to practical considerations like mileage, etc. 

I won't deny that there's a ton of porn and porn-related content in SL, but there's a lot of it on the internet too.  As far as the sex sells thing goes, I'm pretty sure that American Apparel has had some seriously racy catalogues in the past, so it's not entirely far-fetched to see companies not worried about these kind of things.  Heck, even the flying penis thing was done my some SA goons who were specifically there to disrupt a retarded press conference.  I don't think that SL is going to be the one VW to rule them all or anything, but I do think that these kind of VW spaces will be bigger over time.  They're not designed for all the gamers out there, but I do think they're getting some serious traction.  The biggest issues are things like legal liability for copyright/trademark infringement and stuff like the ageplay/kiddie porn set.  Once those folks are purged or there's a better way to handle them than "we're a service provider, we're not responsible," I think there'll be a lot more of them and a lot more outside investment from real corps that want to try to capitalize on having their products visible in yet another forum.

Anyone know a reasonably recent peak concurrency number for SL?  I can't quite shake the notion of companies employing a whole bunch of high-concept virtual marketing techniques just to reach an audience of 50k disinterested perverts.

They broke 35K in the beginning of May:

http://blog.secondlife.com/2007/05/04/update-1145am-pdt-experiencing-network-issues/

It hit 42,000 last weekend with a minimum of 21k. It's legitimately growing and growing quickly. The German contingent is now larger than the US one.

Concurrent with that growth, their infrastructure is falling apart. Stuff disappears. The system doesn't work half the time.

I was challenged by a friend to check out SL when I was badmouthing it in December and I have been pleasantly surprised. While the majority of SL is still smut, there's actually a lot of interesting stuff going on there--the kind of stuff they always claimed was going on but wasn't really. It looks like a lot of the heavy roleplay stuff (not sexplay) that you used to find in MUDS or tiny games like Underlight is moving there.

It was always going on, there just wasn't enough population to have it going on reliably at all times.  Also, a lot of the cool junk was simply people building stuff, hosting one to three hour events, etc.  Now with higher concurrency numbers, there's more virtual assess to fill virtual seats.

But yeah, there were things I checked out in early 2005 that seemed dead....but the sex areas were always busy. 

My wife is actually making money building houses, clubs and other buildings for folks in Second Life, so if any of you who play need something, let me know by PM and I'll let her know.

Mostly people didn't notice, but gambling was banned along with "ageplay" last month. And last night they added simulated rape, violent sexual content, extreme violence, and the vague "other broadly offensive content" to the list along with a 24/7 facility to take content complaints.

Given that "broadly offensive content" is pretty much SL's base, people are flipping out.

I suspect they're cleaning things up for a sale.

You're probably right, but wouldn't it be a bad idea to drop their concurrent numbers right before trying to sell?  Unless it is part of a deal already in the works.

Didn't the client also go open source a little while ago? (Not the sever source)

Arguably the first trademark lawsuit in SL and it involves a brand of sex toys.

Rad. (http://news.tbo.com/news/metro/MGB9B6AZO3F.html)

Woo, tbo.com! And I thought it was only a POS site that told me of movie times and things that were going on in the Tampa Bay area.


Anyway, I think that unless this guy registered a copyright, he is straight out of luck. On the surface he looks like he is trying to cry monopoly and the courts won't give a rat's ass. However, if the other guy is simply jacking his idea and slapping a new label on it, he might have a case.

I'll never understand some of the VW stuff that occurs in something like SL. I'm not talking about the perv shit. I mean, why would you pay Rea, Actual money, for a shirt that doesn't even exist? It's bit of data sitting on a server somewhere.

Heh. You're actual money is usually just bits sitting on a server somewhere these days. Things have value because people believe they do. Everybody believes the bits on their bank computer are valuable. A few people  believe the bits on the Linden computers are valuable. Its the same principle though.

He may actually have a valid trademark claim. The thing here, if I read the article correctly, is that someone else is selling stuff with the "SexGen" name. It's not a matter of re-selling (which may not be possible depending on how the guy sets the object permissions), it's a matter of using the trade name/mark to sell a competing product. Just because it's in SL and not in the real world doesn't really change that.

It'll be interesting to follow if the press keeps up with it enough.

It looks like the person has used some kind of exploit to copy the bed. You can set things for no-transfer and no-copy, but there have been exploits to get through that. If that's the case, he has a perfect case because the scripting code and textures will be copyrightable. Probably also the animations inside.

Ah yep.  Looks like technically it could be a trademark and copyright case...or perhaps the article is wrong is saying "trademark." Now I'm curious as to whether the guy has a registered trademark or not. Time to hit up the USPTO website, I guess.

Sigh. I wish I had time to do crap like this in my free time or at work. Retail sucks. Why can't I be doing something more fulfilling?

Imagine if the courts decided to not to uphold the copyright, stating that the items are really in possession of LL. o.O

Then he turns around and files a civil suit against LL's.  My guess is he didn't patent or copyright it and the courts will decide due to that rather then have to set some sort of precedent.

Simply creating it generates copyright. All the "file it with the Library of Congress" stuff isn't really necessary unless you want to get all particular about specific aspects of the copyright act. For the purposes of anyone using SL, simply creating is enough. Also, since the LL TOS allows the user to retain rights, there's not much room for an argument that the items belong to LL. Unless you mean, "neither party really has claim to the stuff, so there's no true copying."

Given past precedents about copyright (stuff like "Loading an OS creates a copy sufficient to infringe copyright...when it loads into RAM), I'm willing to guess that there's enough copying to do something.

Oh yeah, so I checked with TESS (the USPTO database) and found this (http://tess2.uspto.gov/bin/showfield?f=doc&state=oj1k2u.2.1). So, basically, the guy DID register a trademark....back in June, likely in preparation for this lawsuit.  Woot.

ETA -- Also, this ain't a patent case since there's really nothing to patent here....unless he somehow came up with a software invention...and I doubt that. Fuck, I think software patents are weak sauce anyway.

And so it begins. Strange that what will probably be the landmark virtual property rights case is in Second Life, and could have been completely avoided had Linden Labs set up some kind of SL Court to handle disputes of this type.

Doing that further jeopardizes their service provider status. Not to mention that if I was their general counsel, I'd be really afraid of running afoul of all kinds of practice of law issues, not to mention impartiality issues -- it behooves LL to slob the collective knob of its best content creators. They *might* be able to set up an arbitration panel, but that would be similarly problematic from a fairness standpoint.

Personally, I love all of these lawsuits, because they justify a series of papers I wrote for various classes in my LL.M. program. At the time, it was just academic wankery for grades, but now I feel vaguely prescient. Or something.

Actually there's nothing about virtual property or anything new here. The author can claim copyright on the programming code in the device and the textures. As well as the trademark. No need to go anywhere near virtual property.

People will call it virtual property-related because it involves crap in a VW and, well, the media BJ that SL received a few months ago has to be worth SOMETHING.

Well also the cheater cheer squad wants everything to be about virtual property as well. They've totally misrepresented SL's intellectual property rights in that respect to use it as an example of their "right" to cheat in other games.

Are you talking about RMT here? I keep forgetting that there are still people who think it's cheating. I gave up on the idea of the magic circle years ago.

Yes. I understand the number of memory leaks is dropping very fast as people review the code.

I thought this was interesting:
 

2007 June                            2007 July - MTD Description              Sinks (L$)        Sources (L$)        Sinks (L$)        Sources ($L) Classified Charges    23,859,671    0                         4,959,979           0 Group Creation Fees  2,270,200         0                              467,400          0 Land                      1,322,901        10                            31                  0 Supply Linden Sales    0              161,836,659               0                     52,574,702 Parcel Directory Fees    3,417,030      0                        895,080           0 Referral Bonus                0                  2,356,000             0                 608,000 Stipends              6,750         135,688,850         2,000             34,676,800 Upload Charges          21,158,530    0                       4,543,050            0 Other                      65,920,454    9,115,214               9,667,071           1,427,505 TOTAL                    117,955,536   308,996,733          20,534,611     89,287,007

So - there are ~75,000 people who get a monthly supply of money ($9.95 per subscriber=~$750,000) and it looks like people bought $600,000 USD worth of currency. Maybe they are not looking to sell - maybe they are looking for bigger moneyhats and hotter hookers.... The only problem I see is the sink of $118K is grossly smaller then the faucet of $309K.

Can you [ code ] that please?

http://secondlife.com/whatis/economy_stats.php (http://secondlife.com/whatis/economy_stats.php) I'll just link to it as the formating is a pain.