News Second Life splattered by Grey Goo

http://www.bit-tech.net/news/2006/11/20/Second_Life_splattered_by_Grey_Goo/

 

eh....

Get a real life ?

 

I never understood why so many people like that game, maybe that's because I'm too wrapped up in WoW to care lol

 

Check out SomethingAwful.coms Second Life Safari...they are doing a lot of this sort of thing...

 

Two Points:

1. I'm not Grey.
2. I didn't lay a finger on Second Life.

That is all.

 

I've not checked that site out for a while, just reading through the Babywolfie emails, hilarity

i seriously think that signing up to their forums is a task long overdue

 

Maybe these people should get real jobs. Honestly, dont any of these people have a real life.

*logs on to city of villains (mmorpg)*

 

Amazing how pissy people get when their business model is challenged, especially when their business is entirely in IP.

Guess what, folks, you don not have a right to be in business. Get over it.

 

Second life products can include new textures, models, animations and programming code made by said people.

 

That's true. Fundamentally all those "products" are intellectual, rather than physical items. They consist not of actual materials but rather of digital information, literally ones and zeros.

Much of the "value" of the commerece in trade today is in the form of digital data, be it music, software, movies or whatever. Unfortunatly the law has not kept up and so theoretically this virtual product is legally equivelant to a physical product. The reality is of course very different. If I have a piece of digital "property" and I give you a copy I have not lost anything.

There neeeds to be a significant change in the way intellectual property is regarded under the law and a more realistic model of it's value.

 

The price represents what the creator considers a fair price for your use of the item which they spent time and money creating, they are under no obligation to share it with you, regardless of wether it is an item of data or a physical object. Nobody is forced to buy it from them, at the same time nobody has a right to take it from them.

I see that as every right to "be in business" and to be less than happy when someone comes along and takes there work without any permission or recompense.

If you were talking about specific instances of intelectual property maybe I could even be persuaded that they were simply fleecing people for money compared to what went into them, but in this case you issued a blanket statement, which read as "ha stupid programmers/artists/animators they shouldn't be making money and I think its funny now that these people I dont know are being denied it" - I have to object to that, because I believe work should equal money and also blanket generalizations to be a very dangerous slope to begin sliding down.

 

THat's generally true, however, if the market determines that they dont want your product, or aren't willing to pay your price for it, then you go out of business. People may not have a right to copy IP, but they certainly have that ability and there is little incentive not to. It may not be right, or fair, but it is the reality. It is also a reality that most people would prefer to pay for somthing they feel has value. The trick in the modern economy is to set a price point where the creator still makes a profit but thatis not so high that people choose to either go without their product or else to obtain it by alternative means. This is the nature of an IP based market.

The problem is that many in the IP market want it to be more like the "hard goods" market in which physical items are traded and in which a items value is linked to that physical item. Unlike IP, if I give you my item I no longer have it.

The statement was intended to mean "Just because you made money doing thid yesterday doesn't mean that you are gaurenteed a profit tomorrow".

As for work equalling money, sure, if someone considers your work to have value and considers it worth what you charge. I can go out and dig a hole in my back yard, which is unquestionably work, but that doesn't automatically mean that I should be paid money for my work. Likewise, even if someone does want to pay me for my work, that is no assurance that someone else won't show up with a backhoe tomorrow and put me out of business. If the produce of my work is IP, then I have to factor in that my work can be stolen by anyone and that if in order to succeed I have to set my pricing to take that into account and to add value to my work in such a way that without me, my work isn't as valuable (such as custom design, etc)

 

You mean these sad people with no lives are annoyed they cant sell there virtual items to these so called tourists. Yeah these people sign up for free and dont spend anything because they were curious and joined due the hype. They then realised that they can spend their hard earned money on real objects and not virtual rubbish.