Caledon Oxbridge Q&A for 2013-10-13

14:56 Marion Questi Greetings Dean J!
14:57 Elfbiter Skysmith (elfbiter) Greetings, Mr Järvinen
14:57 Wordsmith Jarvinen Good afternoon, Dean Q! :)
14:57 Wordsmith Jarvinen Hi Mr. Skysmith. wb.
15:01 Tali Rosca This seems to be a small crowd of the usual suspects. So I guess we don't need much of an introduction tonight.
15:01 Wordsmith Jarvinen Welcome Deans D and R.
15:01 Tali Rosca But it's 3pm, so we are officially open for business.
15:01 Elfbiter Skysmith (elfbiter) *does not see Kaiser Söze anywhere*
15:02 Gronk Seriman looks around. Wow! The Deans outnumber us! I don't like that!
15:02 Wordsmith Jarvinen Not that our usual suspects are so usual -- some are rather unusual.
15:02 Tali Rosca Do we have any questions tonight?
15:04 Tali Rosca It may be worth following up on a discussion from last week, about the land in Caledon.
15:04 Elfbiter Skysmith (elfbiter) Two areas shifted
15:05 Tali Rosca Given the time zones where Des usually makes his announcements, you may already be more in the loop than me.
15:05 Wordsmith Jarvinen Yes.
15:05 Rad Mills holds her hand up.
15:05 Wordsmith Jarvinen From Des: Immediate actions will be the closure of Connaught and Cape Wrath with Caledon Loch Avie moving north to fill in the impending Cape Wrath 'gap.' That should complete by early November
15:06 Tali Rosca Yes, Rad?
15:06 Georgemerlyn hello all people
15:06 Georgemerlyn Resident hallo alle Menschen
15:07 Tali Rosca Hello, George. Welcome to the QA. Have a seat, if you're curious about the going-ons in Caledon.
15:07 Rad Mills Ahem. Ummm just a silly question really. What sort of questions do you expect? (That's the question)
15:07 Tali Rosca Well, since we have a couple of new faces arriving, let me do the "official" introduction:
15:08 Tali Rosca Welcome to the weekly Q&A, where the deans of Oxbridge will do their best to answer question about Oxbridge, Caledon and Second Life in general.
15:08 Tali Rosca Each have their specialty and area of responsibility, which you can see here: http://www.caledonoxbridge.org/qna_index.php
15:08 Wordsmith Jarvinen About Oxbridge, specifically. About Caledon and then SL in general.
15:08 Tali Rosca …though each also have their opinions, which you can surely get them talking about here.
15:08 Rad Mills Thank you
15:09 Tali Rosca So this is your chance to pick the brains of the Deans of Oxbridge. We are not particularly privy to any more information than anybody else, but we do tend to have an ear to the ground.
15:09 Tali Rosca (And some years of experience in SL, but we do not talk about our age).
15:10 Zar (ozari) why cannot you talk about your age?
15:11 Zar (ozari) is there a rule of this?
15:11 Rad Mills Do you think there is a risk of losing customers, from SL, Oxbridge, and Caledon, to alternative environments such as Kitely?
15:11 Steadman Kondor hmmm i haven't heard of kitely, is it new?
15:11 Wordsmith Jarvinen No, it is merely like the elephant in the room.
15:11 Tali Rosca Well, you can probably ask Wordsmith about his age. But you do not ask a lady her age :-P
15:12 Martini Discovolante i have been to Kitely
15:12 Rad Mills Not new, but getting considerable press recently#
15:12 Martini Discovolante it feels very isolated
15:12 Rad Mills I agree
15:12 Martini Discovolante one's land is only rezzed if you are online in it, or if you pay to have it "open" all the time
15:13 Tali Rosca The other worlds have been there for a long while, and they are good for breathing LL down the neck, but like it or not, SL is where the people and the business is. I don't think that will shift dramatically any time soon.
15:13 Wordsmith Jarvinen A good start for info about other platforms is the Hypergrid Business blog. http://www.hypergridbusiness.com/
15:14 Tali Rosca They get a lot of publicity and threats of "everybody will move there" with each stupid thing LL does.
15:14 Tali Rosca But so far, nothing has been quite stupid enough to actually cause it.
15:15 Georgemerlyn I sorry disturb
15:15 Georgemerlyn Resident Es tut mir leid zu stören
15:15 Wordsmith Jarvinen Although there are times that LL seems to want that to happen.
15:15 Rad Mills I wonder. There are such things as opportunity costs, and LL have missed a lot of oportunities, sadly. But still, I agree
15:16 Tali Rosca Personally, I feel that the current ToS issue is one of the worst realistic threats, but I still don't think it's enough to tip the scales.
15:16 Rad Mills (Can't get a decent skin anywhere else)
15:17 Gronk Seriman That's true!
15:17 Rad Mills (And the choice of shoes is dreadful)
15:17 Wordsmith Jarvinen Ahh. Getting down to the priority things. ;)
15:18 Rad Mills shuts up and looks longingly into the distance at a shoe advert
15:18 Tali Rosca It's the catch-22. Not enough people to support a market presence, and not enough market to attract people.
15:18 Wordsmith Jarvinen Yes, both the diversity of creations and the opportunities to show them to others are much higher in SL.
15:19 Elfbiter Skysmith (elfbiter) There is also the matter of emotional investment, even if monetary does not count.
15:19 Tali Rosca And social, in particular.
15:19 Elfbiter Skysmith (elfbiter) Yes
15:21 Tali Rosca Any other elephants to discuss?
15:21 Wordsmith Jarvinen There was a time that Blue Mars looked up and coming ... and Caledon had a significant presence there as a backup world. Then they "repurposed.".
15:22 Rad Mills That is a particularly good elephant, but sadly at 34 prims too big for my parcel
15:22 Wordsmith Jarvinen Rather a size dependent cost., but not a finished product.
15:22 Steadman Kondor so no updates on the linden ToS issue?
15:23 Steadman Kondor and how is that linden ToS different from the facebook one?
15:23 Tali Rosca The last week has been fairly quiet in the front; no new major events since last week, though it is still brewing in the blogosphere.
15:23 Tali Rosca Still not a word from LL.
15:24 Zar (ozari) what is the issue that has occured?
15:24 Tali Rosca (The week before it saw the Linden Endowment for Art take some heavy hits)
15:24 Wordsmith Jarvinen I noticed that I had a notecard from the PrimGraph for a 1pm meeting today that included discussion of the TOS.
15:24 Wordsmith Jarvinen From that notecard: "Today we'll be joined by four of the leading mesh creators who'll be talking about mesh, materials, and the changes in the Linden Lab Terms of Service. How do they see it as affecting their work? How will it affect you?"
15:24 Marion Questi I saw Bryn Oh's resignation...were there others?
15:26 Tali Rosca I have not read Facebook's ToS in detail lately, so I can't say specifically what the difference is. I do not think Facebook claims actual license beyond "for the purpose of running the service". Their service is just explicitly pretty aggressive.
15:26 Tali Rosca As for the LEA, another artist left his work half-finished as the ToS cut him off from the resources he was planning to use.
15:26 Steadman Kondor ah i see, thanks for explaining the difference
15:26 Tali Rosca Faz, do you mean real-life colleges with an SL presence?
15:26 Zar (ozari) how is this happening? what is the tos and issue?
15:27 Zar (ozari) am i at risk to bring my turkish art here?
15:28 Wordsmith Jarvinen I believe the key phrase is that, by uploading, you license LL to using things for "any purpose".
15:28 Tali Rosca You will have to read the terms of service rather closely, and make your own judgment.
15:28 Zar (ozari) so, when i place my art here i am giving it to them?
15:28 Larkylurker (larkylouz) There are performing arts here, aswell, particularly music.
15:28 Wordsmith Jarvinen It used to read "for the purpose of providing the service".
15:28 Tali Rosca It is no secret that I consider the ToS *very* problematic, but there *are* divided opinions. I have dropped you a notecard with the issues as I see them.
15:29 Zar (ozari) it is very disappointing to finally come and hear of this.
15:29 Tali Rosca It *belongs*, yes, but by the ToS, LL has the *right* to use it.
15:29 Gronk Seriman Music streams here. LL is not involved and can't possibly grab that.
15:29 Elfbiter Skysmith (elfbiter) Live music does not count.
15:29 Tali Rosca Music streams likely do not fall under "user content", no.
15:30 Tali Rosca If you *upload* samples of your music, you give LL the right to use it.
15:30 Steadman Kondor so media players are different i suppose. they are not uploaded just streamed
15:30 Rad Mills Not if it's streamed. They'd be too slow to capture that
15:30 Zar (ozari) faz plays the tambur. all original works
15:31 Tali Rosca If you *stream* it directly to each listener, as you usually do with live performances here, it will probably not be considered "user content", since it is not persisted on the LL servers.
15:31 Wordsmith Jarvinen The change is problematic both for original creators and for those who had limited licenses to use things such as textures. In short, they do not have the permissions to grant and some providers have also not stated that the license does not include SL (because of the TOS change).
15:32 Tali Rosca You will never hear anybody say anything but "probably" and "in my opinion". We have no legal authority to interpret the meaning.
15:33 Elfbiter Skysmith (elfbiter) We'd need California lawyers for that.
15:33 Tali Rosca Or possibly international lawyers.
15:33 Zar (ozari) this is a land in confusion.
15:34 Steadman Kondor is there a n/c on the ToS issue passing round?
15:34 Steadman Kondor i would love one pls :)
15:34 Tali Rosca LL actively markets to other countries, with a translated service. That makes them fall under international law as well as their "home turf" California.
15:34 Gronk Seriman SL has never NOT been a Land of Confusion.
15:35 Zar (ozari) i have just arrived, my expectations were divergent from this reality.
15:35 Rad Mills Business as usual. Don't risk anything you can't afford to lose. When I think of all the no-copy stuff I've lost in sim resets... eeek
15:35 Tali Rosca The change is fairly new, and there is a fair bit of pressure for changing it back. I still hope LL will do that.
15:36 Elfbiter Skysmith (elfbiter) I don't think performers need to be that concerned.
15:36 Tali Rosca nods. "I agree with Elfbiter. I think it's pretty safe to use SL as a platform for promoting live music and streaming perfomances".
15:37 Wordsmith Jarvinen It is much more an issue of things parked on the inventory servers.
15:37 Tali Rosca And I'd recommend that you look at how other musicians are doing it. There's a quite active live scene in SL.
15:38 Tali Rosca Read the ToS, with particular attention to section 2.3 and make up your own mind.
15:38 Tali Rosca Again: We cannot give you actual legal advice, only our own opinion.
15:39 Tali Rosca (It is 2.3, right?)
15:39 Gronk Seriman Think about it. I don't know the process exactly, but the musician enters the address the audio stream comes from. Then he performs, and the only thing LL does is provide the software to connect to the stream. It never goes to their servers.
15:39 Zar (ozari) it is for the linden lab to make the explanation, not these good people.
15:40 Tali Rosca It would take the most insanely broad definition to claim that it's "SL user content because it was initiated through SL and shown in a client".
15:40 Tali Rosca And I really, really don't think LL will ever try that.
15:41 Tali Rosca The issue is the bits they store on their own server; they feel they need full usage right over those, so they do not get caught in a corner later.
15:41 Rad Mills good word
15:41 Zar (ozari) cautious or wary due to realistic suspicions.
15:42 Elfbiter Skysmith (elfbiter) wary
15:42 Elfbiter Skysmith (elfbiter) "Leery" would link to word "leering".
15:42 Zar (ozari) no, leery is the word defined above
15:43 Zar (ozari) leer·y (lîr)
adj. leer·i·er, leer·i·est
Suspicious or distrustful; wary: was leery of aggressive salespeople.
15:43 Tali Rosca In any case, we have no *news* on the ToS issue this week. But there's a lot written already. If needed, I can give you some links after the QA.
15:44 Tali Rosca So I think we should move on, even though it's my own personal dead horse to kick down the beach, or how the metaphor goes.
15:44 Gronk Seriman heehee!
15:45 Tali Rosca ...if we have anything to move on to.
15:46 Gronk Seriman raises her hand.
15:46 Wordsmith Jarvinen Yes, Miss Gronk?
15:47 Gronk Seriman You Deans are way to adherent to the rules. No selling here.
15:47 Gronk Seriman But I run into things you make and sell quite often.
15:47 Gronk Seriman Since it's OK I asked, what do you all mmake and sell?
15:48 Tali Rosca What we, the deans, sell?
15:49 Wordsmith Jarvinen At this time, nothing for me.
15:49 Wordsmith Jarvinen At least as to the sell part.
15:49 Gronk Seriman Yes! Because you never mention your commercial ventures here, I thought to ask about it.
15:49 Elfbiter Skysmith (elfbiter) THose who do sell something, do not do it as Deans,
15:49 Rad Mills What, no elephant? I like that one. Get it down to 3 prims and I'll take two
15:49 Wordsmith Jarvinen heh!
15:49 Tali Rosca I haven't updated my items for a long, long while, but I did sell some sculpted components.
15:50 Wordsmith Jarvinen With a smaller one, that could be possible.
15:50 Marion Questi I have things for sale...but that's not the same thing as selling things....:)
15:50 Martini Discovolante indeed
15:50 Gronk Seriman I understand.. This is their chance to advertise. Because I asked.
15:50 Martini Discovolante i make tiny things
15:50 Rad Mills hahahaha nice
15:50 Tali Rosca I did sell some scripts way back, but honestly, the support needed for that sort of products was just not worth it.
15:51 Gronk Seriman is trying to use up time and throw a bone to the hard working Deans.
15:51 Tali Rosca So I have by and large phased my SL work to just hobby; playing with tings because they are fun to do, and because I am curious.
15:52 Marion Questi I sell slide rules...and a lunar clock...you can find them on the Marketplace. And the Questi-Discovolante Mechancial Consortium sells kites and air kraken.
15:52 Skullphern is surprised that wasnt a pun directed at him
15:52 Larkylurker (larkylouz) People *buy* air kraken? Are there many in rescue?
15:53 Rad Mills ooops got to run. Good luck all. Hugggs
15:53 Marion Questi People who have an entire sim can install air kraken.
15:53 Larkylurker (larkylouz) thought, up til now, that pit bull rescue was dicey.
15:53 Wordsmith Jarvinen Thanks for coming, Miss Mills.
15:55 Gronk Seriman I was sas to see the disappearance of Club Dodo, Dean D.
15:55 Tali Rosca ...as long as it was not Club Baby Seal.
15:55 Gronk Seriman Ha!
15:56 Martini Discovolante well i had to cut expenses.
15:56 Gronk Seriman Understood.
15:56 Tali Rosca Any last questions or remarks in the last couple of minutes?
15:58 Tali Rosca If not, let us call it adjourned, then.
15:58 Tali Rosca You are free to dance on the tables.
15:59 Gronk Seriman Woohoo!