The “second source” for this quote below from my first story about the infamous CopyBot was Jesse Malthus:

“I think nothing of it…until a *second* source contacts me a few days later and says something very similar. That is, on Friday, I have my usual discussion at the Sutherland Dam about Land & Economy, and there are more new W-Hat/v-5 alts than usual, and I’m clicking and ejecting them, when one who has long been around them and in libsecondlife as well, IM’s me complaining that I ejected him for event griefing (he’s been a frequent flyer) and he says,

“Well, then I won’t tell you about the wonderful new prim copying technology in libsl. That’s cool.”

He was very excited about the cool new technology and bursting to tell me about it.

Later, he chastised me on my blog for not crediting him as the “second source”.
http://secondthoughts.typepad.com/second_thoughts/2006/11/where_is_jauani.html

Indeed, I could hardly endorse something that is communist ideology delivered by Bolshevik means.

Yes, it will have an impact on RL.

Sooner or later, people do have to pay. People amazingly find ways to value and pay each other even within communist systems that constantly steal their labour and products and constantly dehumanize them. They dig a little plot of land separate from the state collective farm where everything is free, where “we pretend to work and they pretend to pay us,” and lo and behold, they produce more crops than the impoverished state farm where everyone steals, the state steals, and nobody works (that’s where free culture leads you).

That little bit of potato and cabbage they produce on their little kitchen garden plot then goes on to become an estimated 30 percent of their food supply — it’s amazing what people will do when they have to, and they need to find a way.

People will go on finding ways to value land, value each others time and products, and conduct commerce outside the Lindens communistic clutches.

At the same time, as always communism will reward oligarchs first and foremost. So these big corporations that can pay $30,000 US for a press conference consisting of a cement stadium and a texture with a logo on a flat island will keep afloat a band of artists and programmers and hangers on and maybe even supply welfare in the form of homes or land just to keep the traffic up.

History has also shown that when socialism and communism devalue labour and products and people in this way, it isn’t long before life itself becomes worthless and mass numbers of people are murdered. It is a historical pattern.

In a few words, anything that you can see and hear in SL can, and will, be duplicated. This is inevitable.

Now, what people generally think when they hear that “anything in SL can be stolen ZOMFG!” is that no one will be able to make money off work in SL.

I call utter bullshit on this.

What happens is that prims, textures, sounds, animations and videos in SL are becoming public domain, sooner or later. It doesn’t mean that work in SL has lost “value”. In fact, I think that this value so far was usurped. Artificial scarcity of information has no justification outside of flawed utilitarist arguments. Besides, scripting isn’t threatened in any way by this, and nor is land business.

When I started tooling around, building and scripting in SL, I had to face the fact that I would not be able to change the way things were. So I started making open source scripts, but everything else I made had to be set either no copy, or no transfer, because of the very reasons that make me want to set them full perm: preventing further restriction of rights down the distribution chain.

Imagine if everyone can take full perm copies of everything they stumble upon in SL. It destroys a form of business, but also destroys any hope of profiting from “stealing”, so firstly, it solves my problem; secondly, it allows new forms of content business. For example, I can easily move to a “pull” model where people who know my works can evaluate my capabilities and “bet” on future realisations. Let’s say Goreans pool some of their L$ so I make a public domain Sleen: I get paid up to an amount that exceeds how much I value my time spent making the Sleen, while everyone else gets a Sleen for less than what they value having it. As a bonus, anyone else can also get one. There you have it: work in SL still has value.

Prok is right here when stating that this is the future: for one, this is already happening in the immaterial business. The move to open source software that even Microsoft has given up fighting against is nothing more than the transition to the model I have detailed above. But it might also be coming in the material world when more and more commodities become cheaper than what finding a customer for it would cost. But that’s more speculation than economics.

1. Stroker Serpentine leads the Second Life Sellers group, and certainly gave them a clear and lengthy briefing of how they are supposed to accept the copy-bot.

2. Which was, after all, made by his “close friend” Baba Yamamoto.

3. It is their view that, rather than keeping such discoveries as a copying bot to themselves, it is better to go ahead and offer it for free to everyone because

4. locks only keep honest people out anyway. (an absurd notion)

5. To combat this, content creators ought to just put that item on sale for $1 and come out with a NEW item.

Lindens are apparently sanctioning this group (and I think Lindens are actually in it).

God forbid Baba or Stroker should ever think there might be anything besides code as law, such as ACTUAL law which would make it against the rules to freely distribute a cheat mechanism in the first place.

coco

Prok, why do you make everything sound like a conspiracy against you?