Collective Property versus Un-Gated Community

[Danton Sideways]

Dnate –

First: okay, my mistake. I thought if you took say a 5 USD purchase price and multiplied by say 100 plots (I'm making up the numbers), to get a total of 500 USD, that it would come to much less than the initial price of a sim. My calculation in this particular case might be wrong. But everyone does seem to agree that the "purchase" is a fiction, and that we are in fact just renting the plots.

Second: with respect to LL, only one person owns the sim. But nothing prevents us from drawing up an internal contract between us, to divide up the ownership officially and legally. We might have trouble getting the contract respected in a court of law, but there *have* been a few real life cases recognising "virtual" law.

Third: did you read carefully everything I wrote above? I know you've tried to build a self-governing community, but there is a worm in fruit. The worm is that the property is collectively owned but the community is un-gated. The universal principle at work here is called "the tragedy of the commons": whatever belongs to everyone in fact belongs to no one. I might add that whatever belongs to no one eventually gets hoisted away from those who made it by someone stronger, craftier or just more ruthless. I'm trying to convince you guys to protect yourselves. I'm quite prepared to go unheeded.

[Sonja Strom]

So, are you saying that you think there is a danger Rudeen could be taken over by someone who would not work in the best interest of the citizens, and therefore we should have a more legally-binding description of ownership in the CDS sims than we now have?

[Aliasi Stonebender]

Dnate –

First: okay, my mistake. I thought if you took say a 5 USD purchase price and multiplied by say 100 plots (I'm making up the numbers), to get a total of 500 USD, that it would come to much less than the initial price of a sim. My calculation in this particular case might be wrong. But everyone does seem to agree that the "purchase" is a fiction, and that we are in fact just renting the plots.

Second: with respect to LL, only one person owns the sim. But nothing prevents us from drawing up an internal contract between us, to divide up the ownership officially and legally. We might have trouble getting the contract respected in a court of law, but there *have* been a few real life cases recognising "virtual" law.

Third: did you read carefully everything I wrote above? I know you've tried to build a self-governing community, but there is a worm in fruit. The worm is that the property is collectively owned but the community is un-gated. The universal principle at work here is called "the tragedy of the commons": whatever belongs to everyone in fact belongs to no one. I might add that whatever belongs to no one eventually gets hoisted away from those who made it by someone stronger, craftier or just more ruthless. I'm trying to convince you guys to protect yourselves. I'm quite prepared to go unheeded.

Danton, you aren't really saying anything NEW, nor anything we haven't already considered.

The weakness in the CDS has been and always will be the Estate Owner.

[Danton Sideways]

Aliasi -

The Estate Owner is necessary to represent CDS to Linden Lab. But what does the Estate Owner represent? At present the Estate Owner represents a collective group that holds all property in common, since the "purchase" of plots is a fiction. The Estate Owner could alternatively represent a group of individuals who have contractually defined how they will divide up the property. Do you see the difference?

And has anyone in the past proposed drawing up such a private-ownership contract? That interests me - can you give me a reference?

[Aliasi Stonebender]

Aliasi -

The Estate Owner is necessary to represent CDS to Linden Lab. But what does the Estate Owner represent? At present the Estate Owner represents a collective group that holds all property in common, since the "purchase" of plots is a fiction. The Estate Owner could alternatively represent a group of individuals who have contractually defined how they will divide up the property. Do you see the difference?

And has anyone in the past proposed drawing up such a private-ownership contract? That interests me - can you give me a reference?

Except in either case, what the Estate Owner REALLY is, is a single individual who 'owns' the estate. Without some kind of legally binding real-world contract, what we decide doesn't, in point of fact, matter.

[Pelanor Eldrich]

Danton,

I find your idea interesting. As Aliasi mentioned, we've looked into this issue before. Prokofy Neva, for example, tells us we roleplay democracy because the land is is fact held by a single estate owner. I've proposed in the past having a single Estate Manager per sim equivalent with escrowed funds (sim purchase price equivalent) held by (in equal portion) heads of government. I also wanted to make sure that sucession is in place.

In terms of your proposal there are problems with the real-world legally binding contract. First is that of jurisdiction, as many of our residents are not US citizens. Second is that of avatar anonymity. Unless we're talking about in world/virtual law, we'd have to name RL names.

In terms of my old proposal, it's difficult to coordinate multiple estate owners and redistribute escrows every 6 months. It's a matter of complexity and multiple points of smaller failure vs. one single large point of failure (our current model). Caledon successfully uses a single stable and trustworthy estate owner (for 25+ sims) as do we. Rudeen Edo is a fiscal intermediary alt controlled by Sudane Erato. Sudane is our Estate Owner, a senior civil service position working for the Chancellor. The Chancellor is elected by members of the people's Representative Assembly.

Because of our history and the history of Caledon, this may be a case of "if it ain't broke, don't fix it". Sudane has always performed these duties exceptionally well. Desmond has shown that this scales well to 30+ sims. Does it scale well to 30 democratic sims? Time will tell. We've really wracked our brain over this question in the past and haven't found anything that works better than what we currently do. That may change, but probably not unless Sudane or someone as trustworthy and competent as Sudane cannot be found to do the job.

By the way, these are my own views and don't represent the policy or thought of the SC as a collective.

PS: Strong individual (IP and land) property rights are important to this project IMO. I'd be interested in discussing these ideas and proposals.

[Danton Sideways]

Pelanor -

Thank you for this useful information.

Someone must explain to me why the proposed contractual relationship has to involve real world identities, or even real world courts. Imagine this as a totally *in-world* contract. If someone defaults on it, too bad, but at least the consequences of one person defaulting is minimized by the risk being shared amongst all of the others. The situation is significantly different from highly risky one-on-one financial contracts or the setup of (now banned) in-world banks.

Note also that the individual risk is at an absolute maximum under the present scheme, since with all of the property being collectively owned, the individual members have no claim whatsoever to any part of it. Establishing some private ownership by even a weak contract would at least be better than that.

[Flyingroc Chung]

Hm, so please explain why our current system is not a system of private property with collective builds already?

[Danton Sideways]

Flyingroc -

I thought I explained that well enough already above, but I'll try to add more. The "purchase" of plots is a fiction, because there is no contractual document with the name of my avatar in it, saying that I actually own a piece of the CDS pie. Everything owned by CDS, including the sims, the collective builds (not the private ones of course) and the cash reserves, is owned by the collective, rather than by individuals.

The best proof of this is the cash reserves: who do they belong to? Everyone, and hence no one. There is no contractual document that says the cash reserves will, if necessary (for instance, in case of liquidation), be divided among the current members of the group. In fact, there is no precise contractual definition of who is even a member of the group. It changes from moment to moment depending on who "purchases" (fictionally) their first plot or "sells" their last. The notion of "private" property within CDS is so vague as to be virtually inexistent.

[Flyingroc Chung]

Hm, it's been so long since I've bought land in the CDS. Last time I did, I was given a "deed" and a "covenant" which I "signed" in a fairly complicated manner involving putting things into objects. so I've always thought of my land in NFS as "mine" as much as I think of my small mainland plot as "mine". So CDS historically, I think considers your land private property (except the gov't imposes zoning laws, e.g. at that time no open air hot tubs were allowed).

We could return to a similar system, but use the notary thing instead, or some other piece of software. We could use some scripted object to manage group information rather than use LL groups (the nebulousness of who is a citizen is actually disconcerting to me, and I'm not too big of a fan of land being owned by a group of avatars instead of a single avatar).

I'm not quite sure what you mean by cash reserves, though.

[Beathan]

In point of fact, the CDS version of private property is not unlike RL possession of private property. In law, we use the "bundle of sticks" theory of property rights. There are various and distinct rights with regard to property ownership. In the beginning, all land is owned with all rights by the initial land owner (which is usually a government of some kind). The government then allows individuals to own property privately -- but not without reserving and withholding to itself some rights. For instance, governments typically retain condemnation powers -- allowing the government to take the property back if public need requires. Also, the government retains certain other rights -- airspace; the right to prevent public and private nuisance uses; etc.

One theory is that all land has layered ownership. At bottom, all land is owned absolutely by the state -- and the state gives various people use rights in that land (more or less longterm and exclusive use rights). Given this real life model of property, the CDS model is not that foreign.

Further, it is critical that the CDS retain these rights or else our sims will become adladen disasters like the SL mainland. The problem with SL mainland is that there is no underlying government interest that reserves rights and restricts uses. Thus, there is no (or very little) prevention of nuisance uses of land. In fact, people on the mainland make a lot of money creating nuisances and then extorting money from their neighbors. It is absolutely critical to avoid this problem -- and the only way to avoid this problem is to have something less than absolute private property in the CDS.

The critical discussion should not b the public/collective/private distinction, in which we pick one category to the exclusion of the others. Rather, it should be a determination of the rights and limits of each category. What can a cDS citizen do on his or her land? What can the CDS government, or the person's neighbors, reasonably expect the person not to do on his or her land? How are those rights and limits on rights enforced and protected?

Frankly, I think that we have done an admirable job balancing these interests, and I see no pressing need for any radical reform in this regard. The SC and RA has and will define these things as needed.

There is an additional issue, however, and that is the need for us to have RL protections from potential harm from SL actions. We have had the Ulrikaquake. Sudane/Rudeen is no Ulrika -- and it is nuts to think that she would do anything similar. However, I think that RL protections exist both to protect citizens from officeholders and to protect the officeholders themselves by defining proper action. Therefore, I think some RL contract can and would help. Better, some RL entity, such as a nonprofit, governed by RL laws for regulation of nonprofits and the property of nonprofits would help. I have floated this idea in the past -- I renew it here.

Beathan

[Danton Sideways]

Beathan –

You are all trying hard to avoid seeing something obvious. Consider this quote from the Wikipedia article on "Property":

"Public property is any property that is controlled by a state or by a whole community. Private property is any property that is not public property."

Thus private property is by definition NOT public property. You claim on the contrary that private property is at the bottom a form of public property, in that all property is ultimately owned by the state. But the state can exercise sovereign power over private property without having to "own" it. What you ARE describing is the situation in CDS, where all property IS owned collectively. This also corresponds to Ashcroft Burnham's initial vision of the Metaverse Republic, where those joined were to put their property into group custody. Ashcroft seems to have since refined his "tools", since what he talks about mostly in a recent post is collectively agreeing to ban misbehaving avatars.

But please, the question is more simple than that. All CDS property is collectively owned, and I suggest that some of it should be privatised. This could be implemented by in-world legal contracts involving the avatars (similar to what Flyingroc refers to, but more far-reaching), without necessarily having to involve any real-world identities. And none of this has to subvert CDS government, laws, or zoning regulations.

All this talk of "bundling theory," real world identities, and so on just diverts attention from the basic issue: collective property versus private property.

[Flyingroc Chung]

Beathan –
All CDS property is collectively owned, and I suggest that some of it should be privatised.

I'm still not getting it, how is my Neufreistadt property (my plot near the SW corner) not private property?

I can build whatever I want on it ( within the zoning regulations, and often a little bit outside of it ). I can set it so nobody else can build on it other than me. I can ban people from it. I can sell it to somebody else. If the CDS take it over arbitrarily, I can sue the government through the SC. It's true that if I do not pay my monthly fees, CDS can take it from me... however this is the same case if I "owned" private propery on the mainland, except it is LL who will take my land from me.

So how is my property actually collectively owned?

[Sonja Strom]

Perhaps we should draw a distinction between the cost of purchasing land and the cost of ongoing land fees.

In the Second Life world, land and its ability to support things (prims) uses server space (part of a sim). The more land in a sim that someone purchases, the more space on the server they purchase. While Linden Lab does ultimately own this server in RL, within the Second Life world hosted by Linden Lab the purchaser owns their *part* of the server. This ownership exists as some form of contract between the purchaser of the land and the sim owner. Whether the sim owner is Linden Lab itself (as in the case of the Mainland), another private owner (as in the case of Caledon), or a collective owner such as Rudeen (as in the case of the CDS), a purchaser of some land on a sim actually becomes the owner of that part of the sim to the extent this is recognised by the sim owner.

Whether or not this ownership is legally defensible probably depends on the level one is talking about. In the CDS, if land is taken away from someone this can be appealed to the CDS government -- certainly the Scientific Council as Flyingroc said, although probably also the Chancellor and Representative Assembly. However, if Linden Lab were to file for bankruptcy and sell its servers to World of Warcraft, probably none of us would have an ability to keep our virtual democratic state from being unplugged. Then we could only appeal in RL courts to try to get some of our "ownership" in these servers recognised. I believe the Terms of Service we signed in order to participate in this SL world would make such legal action difficult for us to take easily, but I can imagine we would not be the only ones concerned about it.

In addition to this purchase of server space, there are also ongoing costs that come from running the servers, maintaining them, and hosting them. Linden Lab pays for its buildings, electricity, IT support staff, development staff, equipment, insurance, legal fees, advertising and administrative costs. These costs are passed on to the sim/server owners as monthly tier, which in turn is passed down to the individual land owners as land fees.

*Renting* land in SL is a little bit different from *Owning* land in SL, in that an owner has more control over the land than a renter (for example, being able to sell it), even if not complete control. To me this seems very similar to renting land vs. owning it in RL. Personally I can not think of any place in RL where the government cannot take land away from its owners if it decides to do so. I also can not think of any place in RL where there are no ongoing land fees, normally expressed as taxes. If these fees are not paid by the landowner, this can result in loss of ownership of the land, even being sent to prison. For one reference to this, see:
http://www.cardiff.gov.uk/content.asp?n ... =&sortkey=

[Jon Seattle]

For a fully built-out themed sim (NFS, and CN in particular) the cost of design and development is far higher than that of the land itself. As I understand it, at current market prices, paying someone to build a sim like NFS or CN costs more than 35+ times the cost of the land purchase price. By far the largest asset in the CDS is the collective artwork, that is what we have built.

The question I think Danton is asking is, if that collective artwork is used for personal projects or commercial exploitation, is anything at all owed back to the creators? The design and building was donated on a volunteer basis, but it was donated to a specific kind of project. Was the project that the creators donated to, when they did, the same as a later radically changed CDS? If not, then the creators took a big risk and that risk did not pay off. Their loss, I suppose.

However, the important point is that both creative assets and a cash account are, if we expand rapidly, a free resource that can be used by any group with a plan that can recruit from outside to fill plots. This is the "tragedy of the commons". And it is not limited to current constituencies.

I have now seen at least three waves of groups come to the CDS with the idea of building their new Jerusalem here. The better examples are the ones who tried to get the existing citizens on board, not rejecting all those who might have reservations with an eye towards replacing them with new supporters. Unfortunatly our system is wide open to a strategy of replacement rather than working with existing citizens to convince them that the new design is a better idea. A new group can always shove the current citizens off the island, and so on.

The ironic thing is, if someone does bring their grand design in the CDS, that project too is open to the next incoming group, and this is not conducive to stability. I take this to be a systemic more than a moral problem. We cannot depend on every group in SL to respect what others have built here. If Nu/CARE completes its revolution, it will be in the same boat with the next wave. And why close the door just then?