Literal interpretation of Virtual Worlds
This post in TerraNova recently called my attention. The summary is that Second Life is apparently getting rough on issues such as offensive content (namely, violent or child-related porn). The content of both the post and the comments is in the line of the political analysis of the role of Linden Labs in Second Life.
The actual spark that ignited the discussion is the statement on an official post that “our community has made it clear to us that certain types of content and activity are simply not acceptable in any form” and thus they are going to enforce the ban of some material. The main page of Second Life states that “Second Life is an online digital world imagined, created and owned by its residents”. And yet Linden Labs enforces some rules within that world. The post (along with the comments) is an amazing read, with the typical TerraNova level of maturity and depth in the analysis. As always, reading their posts is intellectually enriching, with highlights such as identifying the “our community” phrase as a Marxist reminiscence, or the analysis of SL as an Anarchist Utopia with self-organization through mutual agreement.
However, the topic and the comments entirely miss the point. Second Life might feel like a country with their own currency, politics or culture. A Virtual World with forms of government that may or may not be legitimate. But it is not. Beneath the marketing layer, Linden Labs is a corporation and Second Life is a service (even when you pay for it). The fact that you own Second Life is not true either. The TerraNova post sees a political speech where in fact there is just a sugar coating over an official announcement that they expected would cause some unrest in their politically-minded residents.
The question of what is the role of Linden Labs inside Second Life was brought in a talk I attended about a month ago. In words of Cory Ondrejka (Linden Labs CTO) during that talk, Linden Labs is a corporation and the content is stored in data centers that belong to them. As these servers are located in the US, they are subject to the US law. If there is any kind of illegal content in their servers, they are responsible for it and legally forced to remove it.
And when they do enforce policies, their marketing divisions uses expressions like “our community has made it clear to us”. You cannot interpret this literally and study them as a government because they are in fact a service provider that owns the data centers and they can (and must) enforce rules through their Terms of Service agreement.
