New World Notes

No, Making a Baby Yoda in Second Life Without Disney's Permission Isn't Actually Fair Use (Comment of the Week)

When I wrote about the sudden spike in Baby Yoda content on Second Life's marketplace last week, I ironically closed by saying they were on sale now "[u]nless or until Disney's lawyers deploy a totally uncool interpretation of fair use fan art". I.E., uncool in the sense that it would probably stand up in a court of law.  As reader Zoey explains:

This wouldn't be a fair use, it in no way is for a transformative purpose, such as to comment upon, criticize, or parody or even for educational use, The only purpose is for the creators to make money off a copyrighted item which is not fair use at all. This would fail in court in at least 2 of the 4 factors. Factor 1 Transformative: being the purpose and character of your use, being you are taking a copyrighted figure to make Money. and Factor 3 Substantial of the Portion Taken, its a 100% copy of the copyrighted material with no changes. It's not a totally uncool interpretation of fair use for Fan Art. The creators are profiting off or have the potential to profit by cashing out on a copyrighted character.

Fan Art is drawing your own interpretation of a character and posting it, not selling it for profit. IF I turn around and made my own Baby Yoda fan comic and sold it I would be sued to death by Disney and rightfully so. IN order to rightly create and sell a Baby Yoda product in any medium one has to get permission from the copyright holder period.

I am not a lawyer but that all sounds about right, except possibly the "sued to death" part -- a takedown request to Linden Lab (in the SL Baby Yoda case) or a stern letter from Disney's lawyers is way more likely. (Ask the creators of an SL community for Frank Herbert's Dune.) And in any event, Fair Use is not an instant bullet proof defense. As the lawyer for a major game company once told me, "If you want to end up in court, claim fair use."

Oh yeah, another slight demur to Zoey's comment: Even getting permission from the copyright holder might not protect you. Ask a YouTuber named Toos:

Yes, You Can Buy a Baby Yoda in Second Life (Until Disney Doesn't Buy Baby Yoda Even Being There)

Everyone wants a Baby Yoda from The Mandalorian for Christmas, but Disney won't sell them until next year. 

One possible solution: Second Life.

In keeping with the hoary virtual world's long tradition of instantly recreating the latest Internet-powered meme (potential copyright violations be damned), there are already over a dozen baby Yoda items in Second LIfe's official online Marketplace. (Albeit of highly varied quality.)

Best ones are probably those pictured above, thoughtfully enabling you to cart Baby Yoda's little green ass around Second Life like his au pair or maybe adoptive parent:

Was Second Life's Move to Mesh a Mistake? (Comment of the Week)

Pictured (via NPIRL): SL fashion from the pre-mesh era in 2008 created by Eshi Otawara -- which sold in a Relay for Life fundraiser for a $1700 donation 

Reader Madeline Blackbart made a point recently I've been wanting to bring up for quite awhile:

Remember when everyone cried that mesh would ruin Second Life, and we all laughed like they were just chicken little?

They were right, to be honest.

While mesh did help keep SL up with the times graphics-wise, somewhat, it is definitely the cause of its monopoly issues. The skill level required to create mesh just makes it damn near impossible for your average user to make marketable items.

And once mesh body monopolies (here's looking at you Maitreya) took over, the creative freedom, variety, and artistry of the masses, offered by the freely available and easy to learn building tools in SL, were a thing of the past.

Sure, also learning building tools is difficult -- but it's nowhere near as difficult to learn as 3D modeling. And your average user doesn't have time for that, let's be real.

So mesh was/is a double-edged sword: Needed to keep up with other modern games, but the cause of the death of a lot creativity in Second Life.

She made this observation around the same time a longtime reader (Patchouli Woollahra) reminded me of some SL fashion brilliance (above) before mesh was introduced in 2011. And while I've seen much mesh-based fashion made with great skill,  it rarely reaches that pre-mesh level of innovation -- and for that matter, rarely steps outside the standard fashion template you'd see in a real world shopping mall, or in a real world fashion magazine.

At the same time, whether or not mesh has improved or hurt Second Life as a creative platform, it definitely hasn't grown its userbase:

Readers Puzzle Over Linden Lab's SL Marketplace Commission Increase

Good conversation over the recent SL Marketplace commission increases and the developers who (mostly) worry about them. Readers Indyra Seigo and Petite Maison make this point in response to Linden Lab saying the price hike "remains significantly lower than most digital content commissions across the industry. Apple and Google charge a 30% commission on sales in their app stores..."

Not so fast, they retort:

It's a false equivalence that they are comparing themselves to Apple and Google in order to explain the doubling of their Marketplace commission. Apple and Google have hundreds of millions of individual users. SL has less than .1% of that. This increase can neither be justified by how many items there are for sale nor can content creators ever expect to make Google and Apple marketplace like profits on the SL Marketplace. The comparison is absurd. I predict sellers will simply pass the cost on to buyers in the form of higher prices.  

Then again, if sellers do pass on the prices, that means more SL consumers buying more Linden Dollars (making more money for Linden Lab).

Rather than do that, however, Clara Seller has a different proposal -- low commission for developers who are Premium subscribers/land owners:

Impact of SL Marketplace's Increased Commission Rates: Meh to Massively Catastrophic, Depending Which Developer You Ask

In case you missed it, Linden Lab recently introduced an increase in commission rates to the SL Marketplace, going from 5% to 10%:

On December 2, 2019, commission rates on Marketplace sales will become 10% of the item price. This will be the first commission increase since the Marketplace debuted a decade ago. This new rate remains significantly lower than most digital content commissions across the industry. Apple and Google charge a 30% commission on sales in their app stores, as do many other popular virtual worlds, VR and gaming platforms, such as Oculus and Sinespace. This fee change helps offset our costs as we invest heavily in new Marketplace features and improvements, which remains the Internet’s largest user-created virtual world Marketplace with more than 5 million items. 

From one point of view, that's just an increase in 5% -- from another, it's also a doubling of the commission rate.

What will the impact be on the SL economy and to individual content sellers? I asked several well-known owners of SL brands in recent weeks, and their answers ranged from meh to massively catastrophic on a personal/professional level.

In roughly that order, here's Daeberethwen Arbenlow of ANATOMY, Max Graf of Rustica, Anke Hatchuk of Dysfunctionaliry, and Froukje Hoorenbeek of Dutchie Furniture & Homes:

SLer Survey: Over 1 in 4 Willing to Pay Extra to Change Their Avatar Name

Here's the results of that pre-Thanksgiving survey on Linden Lab's new name change payment option, set to launch early next year. With 373 SLers responding -- a very large sample, relative to surveys like this! --  over 1 in 4 (i.e. 27%) say they will pay extra to change their avatar name. That includes 14.4% who are already paying for a monthly Premium subscriptions (a pre-requisite for the name change option), and are still willing to pay a bit more.

Of course there's alternate, prim-is-half-empty way to read these results:

SLer Survey: Will You Pay to Change Your Avatar Name?

At long last Linden Lab has announced plans to let SLers change their first and/or last avatar name -- but it comes with a revenue-generating catch:

We heard you loud and clear. Soon it will be possible to change the name of a Second Life account. This is one of our Residents’ most requested features and we’re working furiously to make it available by the end of January.  Name Changes will be exclusively for Premium members at an additional fee. Changing one or both of your First and Last Name will be available as a single transaction. Last Names will be picked from a list, which you can help us curate.

Hence this survey above -- please share with other SLers! Results posted right before Thanksgiving next week. 

Second Life Really Needs to Switch to a New 3D Engine (Rant of the Week)

Left and right: From August, bakes on mesh when using the updated SL viewer... and a 3rd party viewer at the time (as featured here, photos by Rhonda Huntress via this thread) 

Great discussion last week verging on a rant in this post about the gradual, imperfect efforts by Linden Lab and the community to adapt Bakes on Mesh to Second Life content. An anonymous reader suggests the fundamental problem is far larger that that patch:

This really always comes down to Linden not doing its job, just trying to push its work on others.

New engine
New engine
New engine

If their current employees can't do it, then... get people who can or lease an engine that works the best with your files. It's 2019 and you're trying to constantly stitch together a 2003 engine time and time again. I'm pretty sure when the engine was made in '03 they couldn't even think of ray tracing,GPU Power, virtual reality, peer to peer, or even blockchain. All we can keep doing is fighting 'cause the company is lazy, and keeps saying downgrade downgrade back to '03.

There is no incentive for mesh body creators and clothes makers to update in Second Life. They don't get monthly payments from their customers , so it's really just you don't like it, "thanks for the fish" mentality. It's said in the Slink group chat everyday.

BOM won't be truly a WTF moment till the next Bento update comes up and they have to update their bodies to "BOM versions that are downgrades" and they say, oh yeah we stopped supporting your body that you paid for and liked for system avatar 2.0.

There's definitely a sense where upgrades like Bakes on Mesh and Bento feel like welding Ferrari chassis parts on a car with a Model T motor. In any case, another reader argues that Anonymous' points "don't appreciate the difficulty of upgrading a system that has been in almost non-stop operation for sixteen years and where upgrades need to get it right on first or second bounce as rollbacks may cause bigger problems than they solve." Which is also true, but here's Anon's reply:

Philip Rosedale Supports Andrew Yang for President, Suggests Ways to Implement Yang's Freedom Dividend

Second Life/High Fidelity founder Philip Rosedale just published a really interesting blog post that brings his long experience with virtual economies and virtual currencies to the very real idea of a Universal Basic Income -- or what Presidential candidate Andrew Yang calls the Freedom Dividend.

"I think Yang is great and I'd love to see him get elected," Philip tells me. So his post delves into the challenges of putting Yang's plan to give $1000 to every American adult per month into practice. Rosedale's key idea -- eliminate the fiscal middle man of banks: 

Most people (who aren’t economists) naturally assume that [the Freedom Dividend] would be very hard because… who would cover the bill to give away all this money? It has to come from somewhere, right? The actual answer is more complicated: when an economy is growing (meaning people are making and selling more and more valuable goods and services over time), the government actually needs to print more money, so that the value of the dollar remains stable.

But where does this newly printed money go? Mostly in the USA it gets loaned to Big Banks, and is more generally a tool that governments can use to to their own advantage. But a more direct (and democratic) approach would be to simply give newly printed money out equally to all citizens, which can very substantially offset the cost of basic income.

"As US President," Philip expands to me in e-mail, "I'd work with the Federal Reserve to change monetary policy to redirect funds to citizens that were originally going to be loaned to banks... That alone is something like $1 trillion per year. Plus, any gains in real GDP can also go back directly to everyone in the same way. "

Philip's latest virtual world, High Fidelity, uses its own cryptocurrency, and Second Life with its Linden Dollars (exchangeable for real dollars) continues to maintain a thriving virtual economy -- so thriving, the grassroots content creators on the platform make as much money as the actual company. So as you'd expect, Philip's blog post has suggestions for implementing cryptocurrency to manage the Freedom Divided -- and points to Second Life's own use of a Universal Basic Income (so to speak) as a potential proof point:

Posts Critical of Second Life On Blogger Network OK, Says Linden Lab

From "Fighting the Front", New World Notes' story on a Second Life battle between real world fascists and anti-fascists

After announcing the official Second Life Blogger Network, Linden Lab posted an FAQ that attempts to address some questions SL bloggers have raised about it -- including mine, regarding this specific criterion on what user blog posts the company plans to promote:

"The blog post highlights a positive implementation of the Second Life experience, with well-written text and high-quality imagery."

Does this mean blog posts about non-positive uses of Second Life don't qualify for promotion? The FAQ says, "we’ll still consider posts from blogs that are often critical of Second Life". But would that include posts that report on bad or controversial community behavior -- for example, a blog post reporting on racist behavior or content in SL?