Linden Lab is attempting to revise its contentious Terms of Service to satisfy the concerns of SL content creators, spokesperson Peter Gray confirmed to me last Friday. "It would be premature to offer any sort of timetable" as to when those revisions will go into the ToS, Gray added, "because as the message notes, 'we are currently reviewing what changes could be made.'" Gray is referring to an e-mail he sent last week to Kylie Sabra, head of the United Content Creators of Second Life, which has since been made public. Whoever uploaded it to Google Docs accidentally dated the message 2003, as opposed to this year, but Gray confirmed that the body of e-mail is indeed from him. (I've included a copy below.)
Also notable in his e-mail: As some have suggested, the reason the new Terms of Service claimed "all or any portion of your User Content (and derivative works thereof), for any purpose whatsoever in all formats" is not to deviously steal users' content. Instead (according to Gray, at least) it's to give them more markets to make more money from their own content:
"[T]he revision to our Terms of Service was made in order to further extend the ability for content creators to commercially exploit their intellectual property through user-to-user transactions across Linden Lab’s other products and services (including our distribution platform, Desura), not just within Second Life." (Emphasis mine.)
Let the irony sink in. If Linden Lab had publicly said something like that when making the changes to the ToS, it's likely little or none of this controversy would have kicked in. And as SL Bar Association member Agenda Faromet suggested to me, an additional 10 words to the ToS would have probably prevented a lot of agita too.
Anyway, full text after the break:
