Poll: Has Linden Lab Terms of Service affected you?

Daniel Voyager

Please vote Yes or No if the latest change in Linden Lab Terms of Service has effected you in anyway in Second Life. This poll open is to all and comments are most welcome.

Thanks for voting and please spread the word. Results will be reviewed and published next week.

  • New Update > Designing Worlds announced today that there will be a special recorded show featuring panel guests talking about Linden Lab Terms of Service on Tuesday 29th October 2013. Don’t miss this!!!

Thanks! 🙂

24 thoughts on “Poll: Has Linden Lab Terms of Service affected you?”

  1. All new content projects in SL have come to a halt for the time being (for my involvement). I have no desire to acquiesce to a ToS that is hostile to my content rights and strong arm liberties I am not looking to grant automatically by default.

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  2. Mostly these new TOS have broken my heart. When Fleep moved beyond SL a year ago with her grand post (http://www.fleeptuque.com/blog/2012/08/why-anyone-who-cares-about-the-metaverse-needs-to-move-beyond-second-life-now-not-later/), in reply I wrote a reassuring Love Letter to Linden Lab http://baysweetwater.com/a-love-letter-to-linden-lab-what-again/).But these new TOS, and especially LL’s lukewarm response to the outcry against them, has me thinki Fleep might have been right all along. I used to do all my writing in Second Life; last week I removed every piece of my writing from SL — every notecard, media prim, the dress someone made with my Gone Autumn poem on it, the picture over the fireplace where another had inscribed my Castle Rising poem. It broke my heart to do this, and I don’t know that I will recover.

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  3. I have not been affected, and have seen continued releases from the stores/designers I shop from most often. I am purely a consumer, I don’t make anything. I did not and still don’t expect quick turn around, nor do I expect in depth comments from the lab while they decide how to change terms. Some corporations might have more transparency into how these things work, but I don’t think those organizations are the norm. My hope is that LL will limit the scope of the terms to what is needed to operate the service. We will wait and see, I don’t suppose I will go anywhere in the mean time.

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  4. It hasn’t affected me directly, not yet. But I find that I’m no longer motivated to create content (not that I ever was, just a build now and then that I put a little extra effort into to get it ready for public consumption.) But my admittedly low level of creation has just dropped to almost zero these days.

    I notice, too, that today’s newcomers to SL are almost exclusively gamers. I’m constantly asked “how do you play this game?” Nobody comes to SL any more with the idea that they’ll make a life and a business here. In the long run, that will cause stagnation and death.

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  5. As I never considered my creations (very few actually, except for photography) as being “mine”, this really does not affect me. However I can understand that some content creators are worried about what LL is going to do with their works/creations.
    Still I don’t think deleting everything from your inventory will be of any good, they have backups and the practical result is you not having access to your own stuff. Of course you can always sue LL for using your things after you have deleted them, but if it was after you signed the new terms (which for sure was) they can always say that the things were there and you agreed they “own” them. I am no legal expert or anything, but that seems common sense to me 🙂

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  6. The new TOS is hostile. Allowing anyone to assume unlimited rights, in any form, to what you have created in effect reduces its value. Our only hope is to create a strong alliance as the UCCSL and as Guilds and convince them to alter the TOS.

    While I don’t sell a lot of what I create I do create a lot of content and I don’t appreciate being forced to comply with a greedy TOS. A lot of large corporations have already changed their TOS to have similar wording. There is a movement in the US to strip consumers rights by forcing arbitration. Most aren’t even aware they have waived their rights away. They just sign or click accept and continue with their lives. At some point these changes will affect everyone.

    According to the new TOS we have to approach LL as individuals. One attorney stated that in California that would cost about $100,000US! Since that is where LL is located that is where your case will be heard. Who is going to spend that kind of money to protect an item that cost just pennies to upload to a game?

    Imagine if the US Patent Office decided that beginning tomorrow, all submissions for patents are yours AND THE PROPERTY OF THE US GOVERNMENT to administer as we please, in perpetuity and without providing you with compensation and this policy is retroactive to extend to all past submissions. You also agree to waive your right to enter any class-action lawsuit against this office or the US government but agree to arbitration.

    Could this happen. Not likely as most patents are owned by powerful corporations with the time and money to fight such actions. The individual content creator lacks the clout and finances necessary to pursue their interests through any legal system.

    We have to unite!

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  7. I stopped creating and uploading as soon asI was aware of the infamous 2.3 article of the TOS. I won’t resume creating and uploading if the TOS is not changed. I’m not the best creator in SL and my business is a small one but I enjoyed creating and playing with my creation. Not being able to create really affect me since creating was a great part of the fun I had in SL.

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  8. The new TOS has not directly affected me at this point as far as any of my RL artwork and photography being used by anyone who who hasn’t purchased it. Though I am debating seriously about uploading any new RL works of art, paintings, drawings, or digital paintings, and photography. I sell most of those items in RL to live consumers. Those items that I sell in SL to avatars are copies (photographic prints or scans) of my original artwork.. So the SL TOS definitely affects those items. I find it unrealistic for LL to have an all encompassing right to my art.
    It would have been nice to know that this was coming prior to logging on and having to accept the agreement in order to log on. If I had been made that option, I would have deleted all my artwork from Second Life.
    The TOS has affected the way I look at Second Life and the way I will interact in second life. If they want this to be just a game,instead of a second life, then I will play it as just a game. I soon become bored with simple games and quit playing them.As an example I have several electronic game systems in my house just gathering dust. If this TOS isn’t resolved to an acceptable agreement, I shall give up my mainland, and my gallery, and move to another platform that isn’t so greedy! I know, I will be starting over from scratch, but I have done that in RL before so starting over won’t be that bad.
    Where is the Second Life attitude as shown in the Quote of Philip Rosedale AKA Phillip Linden “I’m not building a game. I’m building a new country.”
    Thank you for the URL Bay Sweetwater. I have been reading them and everyone should read it in it’s entirety and if not at least the following section:
    http://www.fleeptuque.com/blog/2012/08/why-anyone-who-cares-about-the-metaverse-needs-to-move-beyond-second-life-now-not-later/
    The Metaverse Will Not Come From Linden Lab or Second Life
    There is so much of the way I feel in this post.

    When I came to SL and that isn’t all that long ago, September of 2010. We were still free to create and bring our artwork to sL. We still felt that it was relatively safe to do that. I was so enthralled, for lack of a better word, with that knowledge. I fell in Love with the concept of a metaverse. One of the first people I met in SL was an educator. He showed me the possibilities here in SL. Then Linden Lab decided to make Universities pay full price for land no discount. Well how many of the Universities cut their budgets and are not as large of a presence here in SL. Make a buck and lose a Million! Gaming mentality, I have always said I am not playing a game that I am experiencing a virtual Life. Now it seems I am playing a game, my views of Second Life have changed within the last couple of months. I actually called second life a game for the first time 2 weeks ago.
    We have to Unite and get Second Life back on a course to the Metaverse, A place where we can create with all of our brilliance, and not worry that we don’t own our art or that it is owned and sold and bartered with by Linden Lab.

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  9. I removed all my vendors and stopped making things in SL as I have no desire to participate in giving my IP to LL uncompensated. It’s a free life for me in SL from now on, neither buying things nor selling them. I would demand that LL remove all my assets and be done with it, but I do not wish to leave the people, who legitimately bought my products, in the lurch. It would be unfair to them. This is the part that really sucks, that for me to be ethical about the things I made and sold to others in good faith, I now have all of that content I made ripped off quite unethically by Linden Lab itself.

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  11. While this issue does not really affect me, I do see some folx, in various places, promote other grids as an alternative where they think their content is “protected”.

    In reality, only by running your own opensim regions, and either enabling hypergating, or just for those you invite, is it all really “yours”. In this all assets are stored on your own computer or on your own servers and grid settings. done by you only.

    Any other option is an exercise in illusions.

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  12. 1. To LL we are just customers. Do customers need IP rights? If they saw us as artists and sculptors would they willingly utilize wording that marginalizes our content? The TOS is equivalent to eminent domain except there was no compensation.

    2. Without the hair, clothes, shoes, animations and sculpts we would just be our Ruth selves standing on tinted boxes dancing Mis Privi Dance. (Wait, who created that dance?) LL would have to employ content creators to help meet demands for a better in-world experience. Currently, although not exclusively, content creators satisfy those demands. LL has benefited financially.

    3. Our rights are an illusion within SL. This does not need to be true in other virtual worlds. I’m all for staying in SL. It is like a second home. But as a customer I want a satisfactory legal arrangement. If I have to I will take my money elsewhere.

    4. SL lets you be you. So does InWorldz. So does Kitely. Both for a significantly lower cost. What is currently available in SL will eventually become old, boring and outdated.

    5. I dare say that where the content creators go the masses will follow…eventually.

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