Tag Archives: copyright

Paying content creators with micropayments

A few years ago, I wrote about models to pay for content creators in this age where everybody wants to share content for free — except for the entertainment industry, of course, that seems to look upon 2012 as the year to come down with a legal jackhammer on top of anyone doing something that can be remotely called “piracy” or “content theft”, even if the Internet is destroyed in the process. Back then, I left the question open on how exactly to achieve that.

Two years later, I pursued this same topic, by showing how Second Life®’s economy model, based on micropayments, might provide an alternative source of income for content creators. Not because I “speculated” that it might be possible, but by just looking at the extraordinary amount of evidence from a virtual world whose economic furnace is driven by the Linden dollar, possibly one of the most successful model of micropayments ever devised. Two years ago, I challenged Linden Lab to extend the Linden dollar towards other non-SL services — not only allowing it to be used on OpenSimulator-based grids, but also to allow micropayments on webpages.

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Identity crisis!

Fun days are ahead of us, as Linden Lab rolls out a much-awaited feature: the ability to change one’s avatar name at will, just like on every other platform, and to decouple the username (which is unique in the system) from the Display Name (which is what other users will see displayed on the screen), as announced by Jack Linden on the Official Second Life Blogs last week. Interestingly enough, the amount of drama it generated was almost as bad as the one surrounding the merger of the Teen Grid with the Main Grid — over a thousand angry comments were made on that article.

And not by the same people, either, so, no, it’s not a resident conspiracy attacking Linden Lab’s latest projects. This time, the biggest complains come mostly from all sorts of content creators. And this is where the issue is: avatar names, so far, have been unique, and that meant for the content creators (remember, live music and performing weddings are content too!) that one’s reputation is closely tied to a name that is unique. Remove that uniqueness, and all of the sudden the avatar name loses value.

To explore this further, we have to see some analogies on other platforms.

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Step UP! day is today

step-upAfter the huge launch by Linden Lab yesterday, addressing the real life business market, it’s time to get back in-world, and make sure that content theft doesn’t get more widespread, by making sure that everybody knows what it’s all about — including, of course, our dear Lindens 🙂

For that, a group of residents (which has quite grown lately!!) has been promoting November 5th as the Step UP! day. It’s very simple: on this day, content creators refuse to upload any textures to SL (thus avoiding that LL gets all these hundreds of  thousands of daily L$10 transactions), wears a ribbon, places a kiosk on their land/shop, and tries to get a huge orange ribbon to be placed on the sky, where it ought to get picked up by the Linden Map “sweeper”. At the very least, this should show some nice effects on the map, and make people ask why suddenly there are so many orange ribbons floating around in SL!

You can get a bit of more information on their official blog or join the Ning community. I’m adding here some of the information that has been circulating around the grid in notecards, available on any Step UP! kiosk you can see.

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