The Alphaville Herald

11 Responses to “Ho Hum… Grid Crashed Again…Yawn”

1. 

   Marsellus Wallace
   

   Nov 11th, 2005
   

   I wonder if they are switching to a system similar to some IRC chat programs. Basically, it would prevent you from sending a certain number of messages within a certain time period. Which is cool, but if you type fast and hit enter a lot it sucks, half the time the message isn’t sent because you “responded too fast”.

   The system going down cost me roughly $37,000L last night due to a deal not being able to happen. Can I sue the Lindens in Metaverse Court since this should have been something they thought of a long time ago that could happen? lol This is basic stuff. Time to hire some griefers over at LL so they can show them all the possibilities of attacks on the servers becuase it seems LL beleives this is something they don’t have to worry about.

   Marsellus Wallace
   Phil, it’s not too late to offer me a job still! hahaha
2. 

   Prokofy Neva
   

   Nov 11th, 2005
   

   Yes! This sounds like a job for the Aimee Weber (C) Anti-Push Slider! Demand one on your UI now! Hey, kids, collect them all!
3. 

   Urizenus
   

   Nov 11th, 2005
   

   Mars, there is arguably precedent for suing the Lindens in the Metaverse Superior Court, given the Chinese court decision on the guy who lost his virtual nukes due to a hack. Court held the game company responsible. Write up a brief explaining why these are flaws that the Lindens should have dealt with long ago and send it to one of the Judges and let them decide if they want to take it. If they don’t want to hear the case they don’t want to hear it. What have you got to lose?
4. 

   Marsellus Wallace
   

   Nov 11th, 2005
   

   Uri, I will have Raymond Polonsky (my in-game lawyer) handle that. However, are the Lindens willing to be sued in the Metaverse Court? I thought their stance was good idea, but they don’t want any part of it. Furthermore, who do you sue? Philip Linden? You still have to name defendents when you sue a company I thought.

   Marsellus Wallace
   http://www.thesimmafia.com (Site will be complete this weekend!)
5. 

   Urizenus
   

   Nov 11th, 2005
   

   Don’t know for sure, Mars, but I would think you would sue Linden Lab, which is a person for legal purposes, and or one of the avatars running the show — Phillip, for example. The Lindens may or may not heed the ruling of the court, but that doesn’t matter. Court rulings are often ignored (like when The World Court rules against the United States). The issue will be whether the judges are able to come up with a judgment based on legal principle and precedent that will come to be recognized as principled to the SL community, and, in the fullness of time, whether the rulings of the court are given authoritative status by the community.
6. 

   One Song
   

   Nov 11th, 2005
   

   Marsellus Wallace AKA JC Soprano, you gotta be kidding right?

   I mean honestly, do you really think that the “Metaverse Court” in SL can act legally in anyway whatsoever? In real life or in second life grow up kiddo. The only way Courts would become legal in SL would be if Linden Lab where to give control and design new policy liberating and stating rules on giving away that control and if they were sucessiful in forming a constitution, parlament and or political parties that we could “legally” (within SL) vote for.
7. 

   Marsellus Wallace
   

   Nov 11th, 2005
   

   Let me rephrase my question. Will LL even go to court, I mean show up? Or can they be sued with no defense or presence similar to a default judgment?

   Marsellus Wallace
   The judges even play anymore?? lol
8. 

   Urizenus
   

   Nov 11th, 2005
   

   Perhaps the following excerpt from chapter 16 of _Only a Game_ will be illuminating here:

   “In the autumn of 2005, an institution sprang up in Second Life that held a certain amount of promise that the citizens of the metaverse might be able to find a way through the impasse between code and law. The institution was established by a pair of avatars named Judge Mason and Judge Churchill, law students at Pepperdine University in real life, and was known at first as the Second Life Superior Court–though after the Lindens stepped in and insisted it change its name it became the Metaverse Superior Court.

   “The court’s sole function is to pass and record judgments in civil cases brought by avatars. But with no real enforcement powers, the court simply asks those involved to agree to abide by its judgments. On its face, it seems an exercise in futility. But when Walker’s typist discussed the Metaverse Superior Court with real-world scholars of law and the Internet, people like David Post of Temple University and David R. Johnson of the New York Law School, he found their take on the virtual court was surprisingly optimistic.

   “According to Post, the court could achieve some powers of enforcement simply by becoming a trusted source of information about the cases that had been brought before it. It would be an uphill slog and would take some time, but it seemed that eventually the weight of experience might be able to stand in the place of software tools like ratings systems or whatever punitive measures a company might cook up. The job of a court, after all, was not to take on the task of punishing people itself, but merely to pass judgment. Once cases began to be brought before the court, a body of judgments would be accumulated. In time, if all went well, avatars would come to rely on the judgments passed by the court, and a kind of self-enforcement mechanism would spring up. If you were thinking of doing business with a particular avatar, you might go to the court and check the public records to see if any actions had been brought against him or her in the past. If you found too many judgments on file against your potential business partner, you might want to think twice about the deal.

   “To Walker and Uri, the emergence of institutions like the Metaverse Superior Court, regardless of whether they took hold at first, was an important moment for the society being built in Second Life. Here was a real measure of self-governance that avatars could take up without relying on Linden Lab, on futuristic interpretations of real-world laws or on complicated parliamentary structures and cooperative ownership schemes. Whether it succeeded or not, the Metaverse Superior Court was a bright light in the murk that bubbled up whenever issues of governance in cyberspace were discussed. Here was a real tool people could use; all it took was the kind of social glue that holds any society together. Whether Second Life had enough of that–well, only time would tell.”
9. 

   TrannyPet Barmy
   

   Nov 11th, 2005
   

   You’d have thought they learnt their lesson after the DBomber incident.

   LMAO

   TrannyPet Barmy
10. 

    Prokofy Neva
    

    Nov 12th, 2005
    

    I totally agree with what you’re writing here, Uri. The U.S. hasn’t even signed treaties like the Rome Statute for the ICC but gradually over time, if the court isn’t subject to biased and frivolous cases, which it does not appear to be so far, the weight of deliberation and decisions can and do produce a solid body of opinion that serves as rhetorical force. Russia doesn’t obey the decisions of the European Court on Chechnya, but it helps solidify the international opinion.

    On the other hand, we have the Yugoslav courts and the specter of Milosevic and the huge amount of money spent on trying him and other world-class rogues and their ability to impudently manipulate the system. There isn’t anything good in and of itself about world courts — they are noble ideas, but they can break down. Or look at what’s happening in Iraq, where a hybrid local court with international expertise was deployed — leading to lawyerly delays regarding a known criminal like Saddam, and then the killing and intimidation of lawyers and others associated with the court proceedings. If this can happen in the real world, it can happen even more so in the virtual world.

    In our little pond of SL, however, I do think that clear moral statements based on impartial judgements are absolutely golden, given the horrid bias that the bad-faith forums have established as the law of the land in place of a real rule of law. But for this to happen, we need this court to actually function and not just buff up their resume with news articles about themselves. Where are they?

    The judges’ profiles are always dark, unrated, unpictured, and undescribed — like they came in for a weekend to do a school essay then bolted back to the paper chase. Are law students really the best people for this exercise? Don’t we have any retired lawyers or judges, or even just people who worked in the DOJ fraud department or something in SL? I do think RL legal expertise is probably a boon in sorting through they myriad bodies of “law” in the virtual world — though not an absolute requirement.

    My one communication with these judges led me to believe they’d be very cautious about any case against the Lindens. I have other milders ones to give them if they’d just wake up and put out their shingle visible ingame.

    Meanwhile, SL Mediators, which remains a secretive and neuralgically defensive group, has nothing public they can show us in terms of any body of resolutions of conflict.

    I’ve also been trying a very big crash and burn consumer rights type of action on a shoddy TV. You can read about it at http://secondthoughts.typepad.com Anybody who takes on consumer advocacy against the creator-fascists of SL is in for a very rough ride. I guess I’m thinking that civic action is the only way to go, however, given that these law students who started the court are obviously too busy in RL.

    We need justice! And I don’t care if it is pixel justice that the Lindens ignore and mafio kings laugh at.

    I’m going to hold several repeat meetings called CLASS ACTION SUIT ON IMPEACH BUSH to try to get a petition going to take action against Lazarus Divine, who has peppered and salted the entire SL landscape with giant, spinning IMPEACH BUSH signs that he has put on land he has set to sale at absolutely exhorbitant prices like $3000 for a 64m2 etc. He is an impudent and pernicious force as many of us who have tried to engage him have found. He thinks that appealing to a liberal sensibility banking on anti-Bush sentiment in game he can get away with being a 16m micro-baron. he’s also appealing to that age-old FICian notion of “I can do the fuck what I want on my land regardless of what people think.” These twin engines of the SL ethic — leftist and liberal politics of both RL and SL — are unbeatable. But many people are falling for the ruse and paying off this extortionist, even with guilty feelings, to preserve their value and enjoyment of their land. There is a clause in the TOS about not substantially interfering with the enjoyment of other’s games, and we can invoke this with the Lindens, or with this Superior Court if it wakes up.
11. 

    TrannyPet Barmy
    

    Nov 15th, 2005
    

    Cool, when you get it sorted Prok, make sure they take it up with Cyanide Levathian(if thats how it’s spelt) to. Then they can take away one of the bad marks next to my name over all the shit that Cyanide caused by planting a fully working missile silo right in the middle of my mall at the time – complete with missiles that quite often launched themselves RIGHT INTO THE MALL, and yet, this was all my fault apparently, and despite his idiocy, i still HAD TO ensure he had access to his land !!!!!

    Would be good to see the justice sorted out in SL. Perhaps when that time comes, LindenLabs will give me back my accounts and assets that i still maintain were wrongfully taken from me due to rough/manipulated justice(mainly due to a poor ill informed and under investigated abuse reporting system)

    TrannyPet Barmy
    http://www.secondcentral.com

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