Topamax.

My avatar my be controlled by me, but it is not actually me. There is no sense in which ‘I’ am having sex on SL. Neither is any partner actually having sex with ‘me’. If you leave out things like phone sex and other more RL aspects, and bear in mind that anyone can pretend to be playing with themselves, it is entirely possible to ‘have sex’ on SL while fully clothed and munching a bowl of cornflakes for breakfast…..and I’m quite sure sitting at my PC with a bowl of cornflakes is not illegal.

So where, exactly, would any illegality lie ? Consider this :

In the UK it is illegal to smoke in a public place. Now if I go into a public place in SL and smoke a virtual cigarette….have I broken the law ? If someone hands me some virtual heroin in SL and I use it…..have I broken the RL drugs laws ? Here you have examples of the absurdity of RL laws being applied to a virtual world.

So if someone wants to give me L$xxx to watch their avatar engage in up and down motions with mine….while I sit there fully clothed and munch on my cornflakes for breakfast…..can someone please tell me where is the ‘prostitute’ in all this ?

The internet is full of *real* prostitution and solicitation, and even this gets only limited law enforcement attention because, to be honest, unless there are substantial amounts of money involved (as in the case of Heidi Fleiss or the more recent case of Pamela Martin in DC), law enforcement doesn’t care much about independent (i.e., smalltime) call girls in the real world, never mind the virtual call girls in SL who are making less money per hour than they would working for McDonald’s in the material world. In an internet with sites like Craigslist and eros, which are clearly platforms for RL solicitation and yet persist and are not shut down, frankly I don’t see prosecutors getting all antsy about text sex in Second Life. Again, it’s different from ageplay in that it doesn’t involve something that could be viewed in some ways as being close to child pornography (which as I note is highly regulated), and it’s not like gambling in that online gambling is, again, specifically regulated by some detailed federal statutes. I just don’t read the risk the way you do, not for “generic” strippers and escorts operating in SL.

Now, I do think there is some risk for some areas of the “edgier” sexually-tinged roleplaying communities, like the Goreans for example. I can imagine someone in the material world getting much more upset about virtual human slave trading than they would about text sex on the internet, to be honest.

And finally don’t shout down the lawyers here. If you don’t know the law, don’t go speculating about it and trying to shout down the lawyers who are giving their opinion and judgment about the application of law in this area. Lawyers are trained experts not only in explaining what the law is, but in judging what a more likely (or less likely) legal interpretation and/or potential prosecutorial intervention might be. It’s what they do for a living. They’re far more qualified to make such judgments than you are, and your continuing insistence on shouting them down only serves to undermine severely everything you write about the legal situation relating to these issues, frankly.

“Holyoke: While I’m not personally whoring, I do promote and support the legal adult industry in Second Life through my writing and through SexyWorks. (And preemptively, Prokofy, you can’t prove that the industry is illegal.)

Neva:I have no certification that it *is* legal, and I think radicals trying to legalize sex work can do their thing, but one of those things then might be that they can’t expect to pass the bar in their state, nor be accepted in good company. That’s not my doing nor my problem.” http://secondthoughts.typepad.com/second_thoughts/2007/08/virtual-law-is-.html#comment-78667182 (Last names added for clarity)

Over on SecondThoughts, Prokofy also posted a good bit about me questioning whether or not I have the requisites to be a lawyer because I engaged in illegal activity. The direct quote relates as to why my being an escort places my character in doubt, but Anshe Chung’s time as an escort does not affect her reputation. Prok’s response was “Anshe isn’t trying to pass the bar in any state; real estate doesn’t have the same high regard for morals and legality as the bar.” http://secondthoughts.typepad.com/second_thoughts/2007/08/virtual-law-is-.html#comment-78772820

So in Prokofy’s own posts he suggest, but doesn’t prove, that SL escorting is illegal, and then he attempts to distance himself from that statement in this forum. Or else he’s trying to create a third option from legal and illegal.

Prokofy tries to link escorting and obscenity, but forgets to mention that if escorting is obscene, which he hasn’t proven that it could be, then all SL sex is obscene.

And yes, we can’t expect Robin to give perpetual carte blanche because the Labs can change its mind, similar to the ageplay situation. But the panic I saw going on was because commentators, like Prokofy, were specifically saying that Prostitution (which I believe he means to apply to SL escorting, the two aren’t the same act) is the next to go in the wake of the gambling ban. And he doesn’t state the facts to back that up.

Now, and this is important, there is one way that escorting, and all sexual activity, could be banned based on what happened with the gambling ban. I only thought of this after hearing SL under the radar yesterday. IF the gambling ban was due to pressure from credit card companies for their compliance with the gambling law and IF PayPal would care that residents could use Lindens purchased for “digital sexual goods” against PayPal’s own policy and then applied pressure to the Lindens to halt that activity, then yes the Lindens could ban sexual activity. But PayPal is not under legal pressue to make their “digital sexual goods” policy like the credit card companies are for the gambling policy and PayPal may not be as concerned about what else the Lindens purchased could be used for. And if PayPal did apply pressure to Linden Labs for “digital sexual goods” to be halted, then there would be no more Stroker Serpentine,no more pleasure kajira, no more sex at all in SL.

Prokofy also stated that Second Life is being blocked on workplace networks and that it was the sexuality that was the reason for it. How about people shouldn’t be on Second Life at work at all? If the business that you are working for is not on Second Life, why should you be on it during working hours?

Also, while many European countries may have harsher laws relating to ageplay, those same countries have legal, or at least non-prosecuted, prostitution. So I have a harder time believing that SL escorting would be illegal under either a content or behavior theory in a country where you can actually hire a RL prostitute legally.

Jessica is just nattering and nattering about proving that I claimed that escorting is “illegal”. I’m saying that given all the factors of LL’s behaviour, it must be proved that it’s legal. And I’d like to hear this not from a law student, or others with vested interest in being right and being glorious in SL, but some disinterested party. I definitely do not have any stake in criminalizing prostitution. If anything, just the opposite, as I have an adult hotel and I don’t want to see any of my tenants anywhere face any interference with their privacy over some zealous attempt to regulate what some may find immoral.

But I think if you’re going to run an article like this, you need a direct transcript quote; you need also to admit that Robin didn’t give any carte blanche; she’s not in the business of doing this. She will default to protecting Linden Lab every time, not people’s desire to indemnify themselves.

“The other point is that child pornography can be considered obscene material if not child pornography itself. If it can be found to violate the Miller test under US law, then it would still be illegal. This would be if roleplay can be considered content. Also because it is mostly about a pruient interest, it could fall under anti-obscenity laws.”

http://virtuallyblind.com/2007/05/09/ageplay-second-life-worldwide/#comment-430

One assumes you meant “virtual” child pornography at the beginning of the first sentence, as it would make the most sense.

Jessica Holyoke wrote:
“One thing though, if the content is considered obscene, its still illegal.”

In a virtual child pornography context.
“http://www.secondlifeherald.com/slh/2007/07/child-porn-raid.html#comment-75939314

Jessica Holyoke, so while I don’t know if “always” is necessarily the right word because I do see obscenity references in those previous comments, I do see now that those they were made presupposing content, not behavior. So that specific seeming contradiction was explainable after all.

In either furtherance of the behavior theory or a Linden Lab non-liability for distribution theory, possibly consider the thread this is part of:
http://virtuallyblind.com/2007/08/09/virtual-world-sex-work-legal/#comment-4656

“Of course the moral to the story: have erudite, literate cybersex! It’s both more fun and more protected under the Constitution!”
haha

Been reading some interesting articles today about escorts in Second Life, how its legal since its mostly like phone sex, how much money they make, what types there are, etc. The first stop here is the Second Life Herald where Jessica Hol…

It’s the way I read the law as well: child-related sexual images and depictions are much more strictly controlled and regulated than those pertaining to adults. Leaving the constitutionality of the federal statute aside, it makes some intuitive sense for the law to be so, in my view.

On the general “obscenity” issue, my view is the same as yours, namely: cybersex text with the accompanying animation use (if any) is not being “produced to distribute to others”, if anything it is a collaborative work of interactive erotica that is to be enjoyed by those creating it. Now if people were performing cyber in front of a crowd for money (sort of a cybersex “show” in text), or selling the text log of their cybersex encounters for money, that could be closer to what could be considered “obscene material” — but that isn’t escorting, because SL escorting is typically done in private. And as we all know, the appetite for prosecutors pursuing people for textual erotica is nearly zero (it would in most cases pass the literary merits test, and a prosecutor would have a very hard time surmounting that, I think), I just don’t see much of a risk here.

Of course the moral to the story: have erudite, literate cybersex! It’s both more fun and more protected under the Constitution!