Ever since I can remember the home page of Second Life’s web site has said the same thing:
“Second Life is a 3D online digital world imagined, created and owned by its residents”
Then suddenly – it changed to this:
“Second Life is a 3D online digital world imagined and created by its residents”
So, no longer owned by Residents then?
Now I’ve always had issues both with the notion of ‘resident’ and ownership of ‘Second Life’ (in that if this were both true and believe to be true by Linden then they would have no legitimate basis to govern in any way and would not do so – which of course they do all the time). And of course individuals owning IP rights in virtual objects is not the same as some notional corporate whole owing the virtual world.
So it seems to me that either there are a few options here.
1) This is a typo which might now be corrected
2) There is some kind of potentially significant change that seems to have gone un-announced (at least I cannot find anything in Linden Press releases or Blog – happy to be corrected) - as there are apparently a gazzlion 'residents' that once meaningfully 'owned' Second Life and now do not - I would have assumed a big splash about this
3) Maybe the word ‘owned’ on the front page never had any meaning beyond PR flim-flam.
It would be handy if someone could point me to where Linden explain the actual difference between the old and new wording to Residents - given that it's on the front page of their site you would imagine this would be important for them to communicate and clarify - it would be good to know what rights suddenly changed etc.
Or if it was just PR - how about an apology for being disingenuous all these years?
The irony is that as Linden edge closer to the quite amazing things that they are doing with Open Sourcing the closer we get to a functional notion Second Life actually being owned by its residents.
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