The Metaverse Republic

Yes, peoplee can delegate to their legal woes to others, such as RL attorneys, but that takes money and time cause all the lawyers do is say, you have to write all this down, remember times and dates. convince witnesses to vouch for you and gather up all these receipts. By the time you’re done you’ve paid him/her 300 to 2500 bucks and you’ve consumed much more time than if you’d gathered with your friends and rallied around the offending party to shame them into doing the right thing. Nothing beats peer pressure. It is the coutnerpart to good or bad word of mouth.

Secondly, in two years I’ve never seen our Seller’s Guild, clamp down on an offender in error. Its pretty clear when someone has stolen skins or hair and I’ve never seen anon use a personal grudge against a fellow designer cause the protocol for going to a shop is that it has be using texture, or copying prim based product, prim by prim to be accused. They challenged the questioned artist to drop a copy of their product for comparison. If the original artist can slide their product on top of the other artist’s piece and it match like a glove, then you have a slam dunk. Not to hard to tell.They can deny it all they want but there is nothing like first hand sampling like this to break down their denials.

I think the legal system in fact complicates situations. Look at poor Grim Misfit. She’s making a deal to resell her stuffed animals as a RL toy, and to do that she’s having to record each and every prim’s nuisance … every cut, curl, dimple, texture, tint, shine and rotation. Why? if its even one prim off or one decimal off it’s considered a brand new object as a whole. So, technically any one could replicate the look of Grim’s toys as long as each part was twisted just a little differently. Is that just? Is that reasonable? Is that in the best interest of a community that is supposed to thrive on being original? NO! It only makes Grim hop through hoops only to have a product she still can’t protect effectively. That’s the idiotic stupidity of our legal system.

Our logic in here is, if it looks like my duck, quacks like my duck, swims like my duck and waddles like my duck, then its probably MY DUCK in YOUR NAME! Simple, clear logic.

The floor is yours Sir Ash *smiles smugly*

[…] Essay on Virtual Courts vs. Consumer Action - Second Life’s ‘Ashcroft Burnham’ has an essay up at metaverserepublic.org arguing that in-world courts are better than boycotts to control bad business practices; I think a virtual court system is generally a good idea, but this makes me wonder… aren’t you stuck with a boycott against a corrupt in-world court? […]

Tessa, thank you very much for taking time out of your demanding schedule to post on the Metaverse Republic ‘blog - it is good to see you write here

As to the issues, in one way, it is rather odd to see you take the stance that you do, since it was you who originally alerted me to the fact that disputes in SecondLife are often resolved by direct action, and that it is an extremely inefficient way of doing so: I remember when I first talked to you about the Metaverse Republic, you were very weary of all the times that you had had to spend hours (or have your staff or associates spend hours) camping in somebody’s shop with prim placards just to deal with a dispute, and you were most relieved when informed of the prospect of a legal system that could bindingly resolve issues of that nature in an orderly way. Might I ask - what has happened to change your mind?

As to the time and resources involved in litigation (as compared to direct action), much of what you write seems to be premised on using off-world litigation, rather than a legal system specifically designed for virtual worlds, such as the Metaverse Republic. Paying many hundreds of US$, for example, to legal professionals is only likely to be necessary where the market supports such fees: in SecondLife, where the economy is massively deflated, the overwhelming likelihood is that legal practitioners will charge SecondLife-scaled fees; indeed, some already do. Furthermore, you are, I imagine, thinking of the American system of costs, whereby, generally, legal fees are not recoverable by a successful party against an unsuccessful party in a case. Although no final decision has yet been reached because we have yet to get to that bit, the greater likelihood is that the Metaverse Republic will use the British system of court costs, which is that, generally, the successful party can recover all legal costs (including lawyers’ fees) from the unsuccessful party in the litigation, provided that those costs were reasonably incurred. The effect of that is twofold: (1) frivolous litigation is strongly discouraged, since the losing party is likely to face a bill for legal costs; and (2) those with well-founded claims achieve a more just result, since they do not ultimately lose money in consequence of another’s wrongdoing and their own rightful attempts to seek just redress for it.

As to “writing things down and gathering receipts”, that process is greatly more efficient when everything is done in-world (as to receipts, we are developing a software tool that will generate securely notarised receipts that can act as effective proof of payment), and it is not clear why you think that the simple act of writing our your side of the story is more time consuming than making prim placards then spending hours (or days) on end with your friends hanging around in somebody’s shop persuading potential customers not to buy anything.

In relation to Grim Misfit (I am not aware of her situation other than through what you have written here), the complexity there arises not out of the fact of having any legal system, but either out of (1) the fact that she is having to translate a 3d model into a physical object, which is complicated in itself; or (2) the rules of the specific first-life legal jurisdiction in question (from the information that you have provided, it is difficult to tell which it is). Assuming that it is the latter, there is no reason to believe that the Metaverse Republic will develop those same rules. In the first instance, rules of intellectual property (or whatever we’ll call it) will probably develop through the common law; if people do not like those rules, they can simply vote for people in elections to the Parliament to pass a piece of legislation changing the law on the topic, so that, even (taking your example) if the common law did develop rules similar to those that you criticise here, the Parliament could change those rules, and, for example, provide that trivial modifications to objects shall not render them sufficiently different in law to be considered distinct works. (In fact, your method of physically overlaying objects seems - at first glance at least - to be a very efficient and effective means of determining whether they are identical, or whether they are similar but independently designed, and I can see no reason at this stage why an in-world legal system could not receive in evidence - in a live demonstration in the courtroom if necessary - precisely that test).

The whole point of the Metaverse Republic is that the substantive laws are generated for and by the inhabitants of virtual worlds, and not imposed from outside by those who have no experience and understanding of them. All of the people who are forced to use contracts drafted by (expensive) off-world lawyers, with the intention of litigating them in off-world courts if the need arises, are having to subject themselves to a legal system that developed long before anybody imagined that such a thing as a virtual world could exist, let alone designed for one. Although the differences between such systems might at first seem subtle, the small things can make all the difference, and a system designed from the ground up to work in a virtual world is likely to be far more efficient at dealing with (at least most) disputes arising in that virtual world than an off-world system. If you are fed up with the idiotic stupidity of your (local, off-world) legal system, is that not a strong reason to want (and, indeed, get involved in helping to create) a new legal system that is less idiotic?

As to the point about the effectiveness of the Sellers’ Guild, the fact that the Guild only acts when things are “pretty clear” is precisely the point: the direct action model is wholly incapable of resolving disputes where the outcome is not immediately obvious or clear. In other words, the model only works for disputes that are very easy to resolve. As I wrote in the original article, the whole SecondLife economy is currently limited to very simple transactions precisely because people know that only where the position is blindingly obvious will anything be able to be done if things go wrong. It is, as you point out, quite easy to tell when somebody has stolen a texture or a model: it is far harder to work out whether a particular build has been built to the correct specification when the specification is itself complicated, or to work out all of the consequences of a highly sophisticated financial transaction (for example, a mortgage of a land parcel with the security of both the parcel and some, but not all, of the builds on it.)

Indeed, even in the realm of simple transactions, again as I pointed out above, there are still many disputes that are not effectively resolved by the direct action model: all the time, I hear of people who have been arbitrarily dispossessed of rental properties by landlords: when communities are broken up, builds decimated and goodwill dissipated, it is hardly an adequate solution simply to suggest that the dispossessed tenant not rent from that particular landlord again, and find another plot of land, and hope that he or she will be luckier the next time around.

What I perhaps could have made clearer in the original article, however, is that there are some situations in which direct action is the most effective way of doing things, such as where, for example, people strongly disapprove of the actions of a particular trader, but where those actions are not, and ought not be, unlawful. However, at present in SecondLife, and other virtual worlds, people have no option but to use direct action even when it is, for all the reasons given above (and probably more besides), wholly unsuitable and grossly inefficient. It is far better that people have the full range of choices as to how to deal with problems than that they are restricted to just one method which, whilst effective in some respects, is wholly ineffective in others, and very costly in terms of resources in many of the instances where it is effective.

ok … my eyes glazed over about halfway through there Ash. LOL I love your commentary skills and the command of the language, but you’re right up there with me in that we just simply talk too much. ((hugs)) Mean this is the best most possible way, love.

OK … the response and success time with the Sellers Guild … relaly only takes us about an hour to convince someone that its in their best interest not to keep selling stolen goods. Most, once discovered, are so embarrassed by their own choices and being so pathetically desperate as to steal someone else’s hard work to make a “living” in SL, that they apologize and take down the bad goods - err if that makes sense? So, as you can see, its really quite effective.

Now, addressing the legal bounds of a metaverse legal system.The thing is, the designers that make a living here, meaning a REAL LIFE living, are the ones more likely to seek out legal means. Its real money we’re talking about here and real value. If we can get order from chaos simply by bombarding a malcontent for a few hours with our friends, *ahem* and take a MUCH needed rest form our chores int he meantime, AND get some gossip and socializing in too? *smirks* Hey! what can I say! kills three birds with one stone.

pstt .. at Ash? ITS FUN!!! lol Nothing wrong with exhibiting a little wildeyed anger justifiably, huh? *ruffles Ash’s hair and sends him off to play in the dumpsters like a good boy.

*shakes head* I DO SO love a good debate *winks*

Tessa,

thank you for the response You still haven’t told me what happened to change your mind since I first spoke to you - I really am intrigued. Don’t you think that you were really more right the first time around? It was you, after all, who told me in the first place how difficult and time-consuming that it was protesting at people’s shops. Has all that really changed so drastically in the last few months?

In any case, if socialising at people’s shop can be fun, why not also at court? Note to self: install a tea room in our courthouse so that people can have a good gossip whilst waiting for their cases to be called on.

I notice that you no longer take issue with any of the other points that I raise, so I have evidently largely convinced you as to the substance

Any suggestions for the furniture for our couthouse tea rooms?