Shava Nerad: Dear Linden Lab — you really blew it

Linden Lab, Second Life and their creators by +Shava Nerad:

You agree that the license includes the right to copy, analyze and use any of your Content as Linden Lab may deem necessary or desirable for purposes of debugging, testing, or providing support or development services in connection with the Service and future improvements to the Service.

“This means that not only +Tuna Oddfellow’s art, but the way we present it and the methods of the Odd Ball and the Cathedral Effect that we present as entertainment and therapeutics in Second Life are conceivably Linden Labs’ property if we present them in Second Life. We didn’t see this until today, and it wasn’t presented to users in any prominent way. Please consider any presentations we’ve done since the change in TOS as lacking due notice.

This is heinous and contrary to every aspect of creator centered culture that#lindenlab and #secondlife has promoted, and if you don’t pull back on this policy I’m going to actively encourage creators in SL to pull out.Tuna just had his eighth rezday, and I’m coming up on mine. Back in the day we were both key performers at SLCCs, and represented the community at academic and research conferences and confabs of various sorts, too, often alongside Pathfinder/John Lester in the Boston medical and university communities.

We’ve seen this project through a lot of ups and downs and continued to stick with it. But you have to support our rights as creators to our own material, or we can’t continue here. It makes no sense. It’s hostile, and clueless on your part.I know Rodvic came out of the gaming community but this is a serious game for us — we aren’t here to throw our time away — we want to retain value. We aren’t some young Elvis types who don’t know how to read a contract and will throw our talent and time down the hole in a privy because we were raised in a barn.

Even if we trusted you (which, frankly, LL has given us reason to not hold perfect trust over the years — I’ll remember the purge that lost us Pathfinder and many other of the Lindens, for example, and gutted support), the company could be sold with our assets as part of the deal and you would have no control over it.

What in the world are you thinking, taking my stuff like this?

We should be dumping tea in your harbor.

No, never, mind. We should just pick up our toys, and leave. It’s not worth it any more. So sad.

FIX IT OR BE DONE.

Oddfellow Studios has gone pitch dark, with nothing but a notecard giver with this essay on it.

I encourage other creators to turn their sims dark too, nothing but black and a notecard giver explaining the new TOS and why we have left nothing behind but a protest.

You really blew it

continues in Google+

Other interesting blogs on this subject:

NEW Mona Eberhardt nov 2013: http://monaeberhardt.wordpress.com/2013/11/06/revisiting-the-announcements-of-cgtextures-and-renderosity-re-lls-new-tos/

Andromeda Media Group: http://cityofnidus.blogspot.se/2013/09/your-world-your-imagination.html

Who the hell owns Second Life anyway? http://metaverse-traveller.blogspot.se/2013/09/who-hell-owns-second-life-anyway.html

Update, what happened to Tuna Oddfellow, Shava and their work?: http://nwn.blogs.com/nwn/2013/09/second-life-protest-over-tos.html

Mona Eberhardt 1: http://monaeberhardt.wordpress.com/2013/10/03/a-scrutiny-of-the-recent-changes-to-sl-tos/

Mona Eberhardt 2: http://monaeberhardt.wordpress.com/2013/10/05/lls-new-tos-changes-and-their-impact/

Do not compare Second Life and Cloud Party

I read a really good summary from Nika Talaj, from SLU, I want to share with you:

“I think SL folks may be looking for CP to be something they’re not aiming to be. Let’s look at their marketing video:

It’s a little deceiving that they do spend some time emphasizing features that improve on SL. (Browser-based, etc.) But they are aiming at a different market space. They don’t position CP as a place where you can live a complete “Second Life”. Instead, it is a platform where you can click in a browser and quickly visit a cool place. A single cool place. This cool place can be beautiful, or perhaps not, but it is expected to be a place where you can party. 

So. Get a CP island. Build a cool place, and put together some cool tunes. Invite part of your social network to join you there for 3D chat. 
Make your avatar look better, or get better tunes, or retheme your place, and do it again. Encourage your friends to bring friends. Rinse, repeat.

This is a more targeted use of VW technology. It’s smart, and it’s a terrific adjunct to other social network tools. I’m sure they’re hoping to some day be acquired by FB or some newer social network. That was never a natural path for SL.

Let’s not quibble about specific features or tools. These two companies are starting in a similar place, but going to different market spaces. It is always exciting to see an emerging market like Virtual Worlds grow big enough to spawn more than one successful company. I hope this is that moment, I hope CP succeeds and that SL survives.” ~ Nika Talaj

http://www.sluniverse.com/php/vb/cloud-party/85858-cloud-party-picking-up-all-4.html#post1806184

I so do agree with her, brilliant!

Visit me in Suburbia, easy, just click on the link, choose a random name and u are in!:  https://www.cloudparty.com/went/SfWznxzhi

Virtual Reality makes us happy or unhappy?

This is so sweet:

“Virtual social connection can even provide a buffer against stress and pain: in a 2009 study, Lieberman and his colleagues demonstrated that a painful stimulus hurt less when a woman either held her boyfriend’s hand or looked at his picture; the pain-dulling effects of the picture were, in fact, twice as powerful as physical contact. ….”

Read on and have a wonderful weekend:

http://www.newyorker.com/online/blogs/elements/2013/09/the-real-reason-facebook-makes-us-unhappy.html

Second Lifes gets a second chance?

It may finally be ready for the rest of the world

“Linden Lab will soon introduce a version of SL that runs on Oculus Rift, the widely admired virtual reality headset (which just secured $15 million in funding). This move echoes a prediction made by original Second Life investor Mitch Kapor, who insisted to me back in 2009 – after SL’s major hype had cooled – that it would still become a mass-market product.

“I think it’s all a question of what’s the appropriate time frame,” Kapor said then. “The interaction metaphor is not going to be a mouse and keyboard.” Based on the growing buzz over the Rift, the right metaphor may finally be here.”

If you havent read this already, read On: http://gigaom.com/2013/06/23/second-life-turns-10-what-it-did-wrong-and-why-it-will-have-its-own-second-life/

Drax Files confirms: The world should stop believing that Second Life residents are sad and socially inept!

I reblog this because I very much approve of what she says and I dont agree with how the public makes prejudgments about worlds like this. Of course there are socially inept and socially challenged ppl in Second life but Iv seen a lot of them in real life too… Especially in Facebook – inventing a dreamlife for themselves. Ppl are just afraid of things they dont understand and have tried themselves, that´s why worlds like these have to take so much sh-t I think. There is no more s-x and violence in SL than on the internet as a whole, quite the opposite I would say. 

slum magazine

By Cat Boccaccio.

I love fashion and dress up In Second Life (and I know you do too), so I was looking forward to the final cut of Draxtor Despres’ interview with Elie Spot, co-founder and proprietor of the Mayfair shops, Mon Tissu and Celoe. While it is fascinating to take a peek behind the scenes of one of Second Life’s most successful fashion houses, a main takeaway for me from Draxtor’s latest World Maker machinima is the observation of its subject, Elie Spot, who is puzzled at the popular misconception that virtual world denizens are “hiding” and somehow socially inept. She finds it strange and disconcerting that such generalizations are projected onto a “whole culture of people” who happen to converse and interact online.

Fashion diva Elie Spot’s RL avatar, Tiffany Mitchell, has a robust, active and creative life in Lexington, Kentucky. She is a beautiful and successful business…

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