The University of Aveiro is probably Portugal’s most active university in Second Life®, with a large SL campus and quite a lot of activities and events for students and visitors — both in SL, in RL, and mixed-media! Besides the annual cef^SL, Portugal’s largest RL conference on Second Life® and its use in education, media, and business, they also launch other kinds of workshops in-world.

This next Wednesday, April 2, at 2 PM SLT, they will have a workshop on their island (teleport to Universidade de Aveiro) for machinima, with DivX Award Winner machinima director Halden Beaumont as the teacher. Attendance is free, as most of their events are, but you need to be fluent in Portuguese to understand the class

WordPress 2.5 just came officially out, and having tested it on other blogs I’ve successfully upgraded, the transition should be painless enough. Still, this blog of mine is known to break a lot of things since it’s so intensely ‘hacked’

I beg your patience while I try to do a smooth transition to the new version.

[UPDATE: Polls seem to have gone away, but the rest seems to be working fine. I also like the phpBB-ish look of the backoffice! Guys, upgrade to WP 2.5, you'll love the automatic plugin upgrades, they're so cool!]

[UPDATE #2: WP-Polls has a new version, still in Beta, which seems to work well with WP 2.5]

Dear Linden Lab®,

Your recent change of policy regarding the usage of your trademarks — Second Life®, Linden Lab®, and others registered by Linden Research Inc. — will effectively prevent the operation of the very vibrant community of bloggers, forum posters, websites, community portals, and even 3rd party services, that have provided Linden Lab® with links and driving traffic to your blog, and raising brand awareness for free for your product Second Life®.

Probably thousands — if not dozens of thousands — of sites include (now illegitimately) the name “Second Life®” or “SL®” somewhere in their names. From sites like Reuters (which has a Second Life® channel) to whole companies that have a “Second Life® Division” (and promotes your product by the explicit naming of it), a plethora of online communities, products, and services — some free, other commercial, many in the limbo between both extremes — include, in some way, your registered trademarks.

Your previous policy, established in May 2004 (”Second Life® Fansite Tolkit”), and later reinforced with referral programmes like “Viva La Evolution”, positively encouraged the widespread use of your trademarks, so long as it was quite clearly displayed that no infringement was intended. To requote your own terms of agreement for the usage of your trademarks:

USE OF SECOND LIFE MARKS

While you are in full compliance with the usage guidelines described here, you may use the “Second Life” name on your website, as well as the related logos and graphics available at Toolkit, solely in the form described there. Additionally, you may use screenshots from Second Life to the extent that Linden Lab has the right to authorize use of the content within such screenshot, including screenshots of Linden in-world objects and Linden avatars, subject to these usage guidelines.

Under those very friendly terms, a plethora of fansites of all sorts popped up, driving traffic to Second Life®’s main website, its blogs, forums, and other related sites — making SL®’s own ranking quite high on Google, Alexa, and other systems — while at the same time, in a period of a little less than four years, allowing the number of registered users to skyrocket from 10,000 to 13 million.

Fansites, blogs, 3rd party sites, Second Life®-related online communities, 3rd party sites that create products and services related to Second Life® are the “off-world” counterpart of the dynamic and enthusiastic community that made Second Life®, as a brand, get world-wide recognition — without the need for Linden Lab® to spend millions in advertising and campaigns on the media. We worked for free on the promotion, brand awareness, and market recognition of your products — while, at the same time, we also worked for free creating the fantastic content of the 3D environment that makes Second Life® a place worth to visit, to enjoy, to chat, to socially connect, to do business, and launch the pillars of the upcoming metaverse — fulfilling Philip ‘Linden®’ Rosedale’s dream of having more users in Second Life® than on the Web.

We’ve been the ones ultimately promoting that vision, spreading it around, and making sure that the world noticed your product and your brand. We were very successful — thanks to your gentle and encouraging former policies.

And for four years, you have been thankful enough to allow us to do that promotion, by establishing very reasonable and clear guidelines of the terms of usage of your trademarks.

Your sudden reversal of position — effectively limiting the display of the name “Second Life®” on most sites, domain names, products, and services, through a mechanism of explicit approval that you fully admit “can take long and might never finish” and will only be available to a very limited number of sites — means that suddenly all the off-world promotion of Second Life® will necessarily have to stop; or face a lawsuit in court; or, at the very least, receive a Cease & Desist letter from your lawyers and be forced to shut down.

The current terms can be aggressively enforced or not. According to your blog, we are supposed to have a 90-day grace period to remove all mentioning of Second Life® and its logo from our fansites, blogs, forums, or 3rd party sites offering products and services related to Second Life®. In fact, what this means is that we are forced not to talk about Second Life® any more — or, if we do, we cannot explicitly name the product at all.

This is, obviously, absurd.

The compromise between Linden Research Inc. (owners of the registered trademarks) and the community of volunteers that have so faithfully promoted your product, Second Life®, was quite clear for the past four years. We had clear guidelines of what we could do and what we couldn’t. Abuses could still be effectively dealt with by your legal department; to the world’s knowledge, these cases were few and scattered, if any. They were not significative to prevent a vast number of dozens of thousands of sites of all sorts to draw traffic to your own site; to reach out the huge audience on the Internet; and to drive new users to register. The numbers fortunately speak for themselves: with almost zero promotional costs, you managed to grow a thousand times in four years, thanks to crowdsourcing the promotion of Second Life®.

The “inSL” programme is definitely interesting, but a small new logo, worthless to an audience of hundreds of millions of users that are familiar with the eye-on-hand logo, without a massive campaign of promotion behind it to reflect the logo change, is not enough. “inSL” doesn’t say much, and it cannot be expanded to talk and promote Second Life® directly. And, anyway, the same restrictions apply to the usage of “inSL” as with all your other trademarks. We appreciate the grant to use that new logo, but we also feel it will be unable to gather the same support and promotional effort as the old logo and the product name did in the past four years.

We would thus kindly request that you clarify your position regarding the usage of the trademarks Second Life® and the logo on all fansites, blogs, forums, or other 3rd party websites offering products and services related to Second Life®. This clarification should be as easy to follow as your previous policies on the usage of those trademarks. They should make clear that all people intending to promote your product and raise your brand awareness are not facing lawsuits because they have faithfully used your trademarks using the old policy, and wish to continue to do so in the future.

We consider that an appropriate response should be forthcoming in the next few days, or we will be forced to shut down our own blogs, websites, forums, community portals, and other 3rd party sites to avoid litigation — and thus deprieving Linden Lab® from the traffic generated by millions of direct links and millions of viewers that learn first about Second Life® through all those sites.

Personal note: This blog will enter on strike on April 15th, 2008, for a period of 3 days, if no clarification by Linden Lab is published before that date.

Permission is granted by the author to fully copy & adapt the text above if you wish.

The T-shirt is available from PalUP Ling. Thanks, PalUP!

More links to the same topic.

Apologies if you are unable to add any more comments. It seems that the WordPress software is entering a strike on its own accord, but this time it’s not my fault!!!

Updates

Second Life Left Unity have published their own Open Letter to Linden Lab®.

A small “task force” is currently getting together to draft a better document. The purpose: not to push Linden Lab® to give a “yes”/”no” answer (which they very likely will answer with “no”) but a list of very reasonable claims and some questions that can individually be compromised upon.

You had to be very distracted to have missed the recent massive cry-out against content theft in Second Life. As the world grows, and as griefers and similar people commit misdemeanours all the time and get away with it, the situation can not improve by itself, as more and more petty residents find out that the best way to make money in SL — sometimes a cartful of money — is by illegitimate means.

Cons, content theft, extortion (when you happen upon someone’s sensitive data) — all these are part of the dark side of Second Life, and have been so since at least 2004. A broken permission system sometimes allow people to copy what they shouldn’t. Naive content creators leave “freebies” around that are later re-sold for a profit. Exploits allow people under certain circumstances to block others out of their own plots (and demand payment to get back what you rightfully own). Ad farmers block the view to extort money out of their neighbours to make the ads disappear. The list is endless as people’s creativity to illegitimately part innocents from their L$.

Recently, however, the situation seems to be getting out of hand, and this time, like so often in the past, the content creators and the digital law advocates have risen (sometimes backed up with real life lawyers), organised themselves once more, and launched all sorts of campaigns against content theft — aggressively.

But will they actually be successful?

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Thanks to Jade Lily, there was an event on “Immersionism vs. Augmentism” on SL’s Orange Island, moderated by Tom Bukowski, our “resident anthropologist”. The discussion was lively — even if necessarily “short”, a lot remained to be said about the subject, as always But several bloggers (many of which attended the event) talked about the issue all over again; it’s clear that Henrik Bennetsen’s essay on the subject is still being read and discussed and that there is still a lot to be said about the two philosophies.

I used to be an “Immersionist” way before I knew what that meant. There were good reasons for me not to reveal my real identity back in 2004 (I had been stalked in RL through the Internet before, as people looked me up on blogs and forums I participated). I wished to continue the joy of participating on a vibrant online community that allowed me both to elude eventual stalkers, and a place where I could have some freedom of expression without fear. Second Life allowed all that — nay, back in 2004, it was even mandatory to keep quiet about your RL! — so I was immediately attracted to it. More to the point, I found out several hundreds (or thousands perhaps) of residents that had the same view. These were collectively labeled “Immersionists” later on.

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The good news is that we now have HTML-on-a-prim, with LL’s recent introduction of the Release Candidate for 1.19.1. It’s a long-awaited release — four years of waiting for Havok 4, and three years of waiting for HTML-on-a-prim — but last Friday LL rolled out a server upgrade that even allows the Early Adopters to have both things on the same sim! (the picture is from one of those Havok&HTML sims).

This is a “first release”… but it’s already amazing. Sure, the scrollbars don’t work yet — the Web page replaces a texture, like Quicktime streaming, and that texture is placed on a normal prim. You can’t click on links either. Still, Javascript and animated GIFs work well (or reasonably well), and although Flash is as yet unsupported, standard HTML as rendered by the Gecko/Mozilla engine (used by Firefox, Flock, Camino, and a plethora of other web browsers) works quite well.

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First impressions on the newly released mega-feature in Second Life: HTML-On-A-Prim.

Well, of course this is for me personally the cream on the top. I’ve just returned from several sessions of using SL as a classroom for university students. The last conversation I had with one of the students (doing a mastership) was about a complaint regarding the cost of uploading textures. Well, “spending” L$400-1000 or so for a class is definitely cheap in “preparation materials”… but I see the point: after all, putting it all on a Web page is cheaper

Enough talking! By following the links to LL’s official blog, you’ll see Torley’s videos on how to set things up properly from the SL viewer. The techies among you might prefer to do it from inside LSL. It’s pretty easy, just use the following snippet of code as inspiration — go to a parcel where you are the owner or have permissions to change the media, drop a media texture on a prim, make sure it’s set to the same media texture on About Land >Media, and with this script you can type an URL and see it displayed on the texture.

Thanks, Linden Lab You made your faithful fan even more happy today!

(script below) (more…)

Also an exercise for my LSL scripting classes, this one is a simple llSetPos teleporting script. The final location is written as <X,Y,Z> on the object’s description.

Tired of taking ages to set script targets? Well, this one should make things easy for you: just put the vector for positioning and the rotation in angles, separated by commas, and the object will reset the SitTarget for you. Then just shout die on public chat, and the script will remove itself; SitTargets are an object property, and you don’t need to have a script inside the prim to keep the SitTarget working.

This is also part of my series of LSL training courses.

You’ve guessed it — this is also part of my list of exercises for the LSL training courses.

This device gives all the inventory inside it in a folder, named as the object itself, and checks to avoid giving the script name instead. Dropping/removing further items inside the device will reset it to re-read the inventory again.