I’ve been trying to keep my mind open and my mouth shut on the latest kerfluffle over Linden Labs stepping into a content minefield, figuring I’d have to write a column about it sooner or later and wanting to know everything I could about it before I got started.
But intellectual property lawyer Benjamin Duranske beat me to it, and now if Wired demands a column from me on the subject, I can simply write “yeah, what he said” and link to this:
Policing Content is a Very Bad Idea
Linden Labs Daniel Linden recently posted a statement entitled Keeping Second Life Safe, Together on the Official Linden Blog. The post encourages Second Life residents to report broadly offensive content to Linden Lab, and promises that people promoting or providing such content will be swiftly met with a variety of sanctions, including termination of accounts, closure of groups, removal of content, and loss of land.[snip]
Ill add my voice to the growing chorus. This is a poorly considered, dangerously over-broad, and annoyingly opaque policy statement. It should be reversed for a number of reasons, not the least of which is that it potentially takes Linden Lab out from under the protection of Section 230 of the Communications Decency Act, and thereby exposes it to liability for Second Life users creations.
More on that later on. Theres this soapbox sitting here, you see, and one of the privileges of editing VB is that occasionally I get to climb up on it.
The soapbox is worth reading, but the legal points at the end are a must. Thanks Benjamin, and good luck with that novel.
4 responses so far ↓
1 dandellion // Jun 11, 2007 at 12:01 pm
Daniel’s blog post is a lesson in bad communication of company with its user base. I don’t know why he did it and why the rest of LL allowed such thing. Actually, he said nothing but caused mutiny. Lot of groups showed up protesting. At last, another Linden representative, Robin Linden, was caught in her inworld office hours to clarify things. As we expected, nothing became more clear, though her stance is that nothing is changing and that what Daniel said are just community standards that stood since begining of SL.
We shall see where this all goes……
2 Grey // Jun 13, 2007 at 7:01 pm
I think Second Life is at a very important crossroads.
During my time there I’ve seen the population increase dramatically. When I joined total pop was about 200k with a concurrent use of about 3500. Today we have a total pop of 7.2 million, with a peak use of easily 35,000. Most of those new residents are non-US in origin and I think that’s a very important fact.
I’m not the first to mention that Linden Lab has been talking about collocating servers in Europe, in an effort to combat every virtual world’s arch-nemesis Lag. But my (admittedly limited) understanding is that by doing so, they open up the contents of those servers to the laws of whatever land the servers reside. This is what many believe is the real reason behind the removal of age-play, since virtual representations of children engaged in sexual acts might be disgusting, but the Supreme Court had decided that they were not illegal. Europe, on the other hand, has made any image of such, real or not, against the law.
If this is true (and so far it hasn’t been denied, and the removal of even clearly marked PG areas and **anything** named Lolita seem to back it up) then what’s next? There’s a HUGE amount of German SL residents, so I guess any WW2 themed builds are out, since displaying any Nazi imagery is illegal there. Oh, and lets not forget the Furries and the Goreans….
My problem with all this is that it’s a rush to the lowest common denominator, and can eventually turn one of the most open and creative online worlds I’ve seen yet into one of the most restrictive. I can understand Linden Labs wanting to grow SL and improve it, but at what cost? Mr Duranske quoted the following line from Robin Linden:
Let me ask you all this. When faced with an opportunity to create a new world where things are supposed to be better, do you think there’s a place for slavery, forced sex, and the like?
As scary as that line is, I found these even more so:
That said, we may find there are times when behaviors that we have allowed in the past, e.g. ageplay, are viewed strongly enough by some jurisdictions that we have to decide, for the sake of the business that we aren’t going to allow them any more.
I doubt very much that ageplay is the last behavior that will come under this scrutiny.
Ultimately, the Lindens have to decide what is right for them. But sadly, if things keep going in this new direction, it may turn out that they are the only ones left using their world. This new direction has surely upset many people but it’s given the bigots ground to openly ban and harass people they don’t feel fit in I’ve been hearing stories of residents who have been hounded and discriminated against for having avatars that are slight of build, accusing them of being ’sick child-fuckers’ and so on.
Hopefully, this gets realized for the misstep that it is, but I have a feeling that this is only the first of what will be many. Lets just hope that they don’t take it beyond repair I have made a lot of very good friends in SL and I’d hate to lose any of them.
Grey
3 dandellion // Jun 14, 2007 at 6:29 am
When Robin said: “Let me ask you all this. When faced with an opportunity to create a new world where things are supposed to be better, do you think theres a place for slavery, forced sex, and the like?” she got the immidiate answer: yes!
There cannot be forced sex, slavery and alike in second life if all the participants do not consent about it. And if they wants to play forced sex and/or slavery who am I to forbid them? It may sound paradoxical but we cannot (and shouldn’t try to) stop somebody’s freedom to be a slave.
4 Grey // Jun 14, 2007 at 9:42 am
Oh, I agree, totally. The thing I love most about SL is that, with very, very few exceptions — nothing can happen to you that you don’t, in some way, agree to.
I don’t even agree that the age-players should have been stopped. I mean, as queasy as even the tame, pure RP age-play makes me — and trust me, I’d bet my avatar had big question marks swirling around his head followed by a large, blinking “WTF?!?” the first time I saw it — it’s still not my place to say it can or can’t happen. As long as it’s between two consenting adults and no one is at risk, as far as I’m concerned it’s not mine, nor anyone else’s, place to step in.