ToS

Second Life TOS News 2013-43

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There is a post in the SL Forum by Toysoldier Thor about a letter Linden Lab® sent in response to the United Content Creators of SL. See: PeterGray @ LL Responds to UCCSL RE: LL TOS Concerns.

There is a point that is obvious to users, which the letter now suggests is the official policy of the Lab. It is the idea they are not going to be debating the merits of the change. They, the Lindens, have been very silent on the subject. You may have noticed that Lindens in general will not discuss the TOS change. I think we can safely speculate that it is official policy for staff to keep silent in regard to TOS.

Peter gray, the PR person for Linden lab, leaves little if any about whether or not the Lab will discuss this issue with users or user groups.

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Cloud Party TOS

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Cloud Party hasn’t said much about their Terms of Service (ToS) lately. That changed as they pointed out the major difference between CP’s and LL’s ToS’s.

See: A quick review of our Terms of Service

This dramatically illustrates what is needed to operate a virtual world service and what a company thinks they can get away with. The free market allows competition. There is usually someone that will cater to people’s desires. In a free system they can do that. In this case CP is hungry for users. So, we ‘users’ get treated better.

I see it as the difference between big established companies verses small start ups. Management has different concerns.

Second Life TOS Update 2013-42

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Update: See Strawberry’s Monday Mime.

Last Saturday the United Content Creators of Second Life™ (UCCSL) sponsored a meeting to discuss the Terms of Service (ToS) changes made in August. They put together a panel of attorneys to answer questions. I think it was the Second Life™ Bar Association that provided RL attorneys to form an answer panel. I was able to attend only part of the meeting, but there are audio recordings and Machinima of the entire 3-hour meeting.

A full three-hour audio recording was captured by Toysoldier Thor. You can listen to it from a link on Toy’s blog: Recap & Audio – Inworld Legal Panel Talk on LL TOS. Toy’s opinion is that people should listen to the audio and make up their own minds about opinions provided by the UCCSL panel. I’ll go a bit further and add some opinion.

Inara has a summary of the meeting up. See: ToS changes: Legal panel discussion – audio recordings and notes. She has images of the slides used in the meeting. Plus lots of time marks in the summary. 

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Another Second Life ToS Victum

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Ziki Questi just blogged about another artist stopping work in Second Life™. This artist is Johnas Merlin. In the middle of an LEA project (Linden Endowment for the Arts) Johnas has stopped work. The reason given is the textures Johnas was planning on using can no longer be used in Second Life. So, this piece of art is going to remain unfinished.

You can see Ziki’s article here: Quantum Reflections, Victim of the ToS.

More ToS Information

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Hamlet Au ran a poll on New World Notes asking if creative types had stopped creating and uploading to second life. Of the 266 poll participants 121 answered they have. There were 32 others that selected the other option. That gives us a total of 153 or about 57% that stopped uploading content to Second Life™.

You can see the poll result here: Linden Lab ToS Survey Results: Majority of Respondents Have Stopped Created/Selling Second Life Content.

As family points out, this TOS change has gone far beyond just drama. We are seeing a change in resident behavior. I have to wonder if this is starting to show up in the stats Linden Lab tracks. This would be a good question for people to be asking of the user group meetings.