Questions about taxes and justice in CDS

[Aleks Burner]

Hello everybody,

I'm a law student from Belgium and I'm currently writing a paper about democracy in the virtual universes, and I couldn't do it without speaking of the CDS, which seems to be the most advanced self-governance system in Second Life.

I've gather lots of informations about it thanks to the portal, the constitution and the SL wiki, but I still have a few unanswered questions, maybe you could help me with these.

First I wanted to know if the citizens have to pay taxes and imposition to the government? I've read that the administration was paid by the public treasury, but what is it made of?

Second I've read that the SC was a court of appeal too, but I haven't understand how it functions. What is the process of justice in CDS?

Thank you

Aleks Burner

PS: English is not my primary language so I apologize for all the possible mistakes

[Sudane Erato]

First I wanted to know if the citizens have to pay taxes and imposition to the government? I've read that the administration was paid by the public treasury, but what is it made of?

Well, I can answer about taxes. I'll let someone else explain how the SC works.

CDS citizens pay monthly "tier" for the land they use, in the same way that all other residents of SL who own land pay monthly tier for their land. Some SL residents who own land on the Second Life "mainland" areas pay their tier to Linden Labs directly (the owners of SL). But many other SL residents own land on what are called "private islands", which are separate sims each owned by a resident "Estate Owner" who has bought it from Linden Labs. The Estate Owner pays Linden Labs a monthly tier, and the Estate Owner then sells parcels of land on their sim to residents, who pay their tier to the Estate Owner. This is the way the CDS works.

The four sims of the CDS are owned by Rudeen Edo, who is one of my alts. Unlike other "non-democratic" areas of SL, Rudeen simply holds the estate ownership on behalf of the citizens of the CDS, and, should those citizens so decide, they would transfer that ownership to another alt account. Rudeen's function is to collect tier from the resident citizens and to pay tier to Linden Labs for the monthly cost of the sims.

In fact, Rudeen is like a bank account. The CDS has always taken a conservative financial approach of collecting more tier... (what you can readily see is in fact "property taxes")... than it pays to Linden Labs each month. With that extra money the expenses of administration are paid. They include exchange fees, nominal administrative stipends, and promotional and event expenses. Since Rudeen is my alt, I am designated the Treasurer, and I pay these expenses based on instructions from our executive, who together with our representative assembly carries out the will of the community. Each term a budget is prepared on which the expenditures are based.

One final note. Most citizens own at least a small bit of land, and its this land which determines the amount of their taxes (their tier). But we have made provision for citizenship for those who decide not to own land. These people can belong to a group which owns land, and then contribute at least a small share of the taxes which that group pays for its land.

I hope that helps .

Sudane...................

[Aleks Burner]

Thank you very much, that's really well explained and understandable

I just need now some information about the functioning of justice in CDS and it'll be complete.

I have to say that I'm really amazed by this government, it's really well organized.
For a jurist like me it is stimulating to study projects like yours (me and a group of other students are going to make a theory of democratic governance which could be apply to all the virtual universe)

[Aleks Burner]

Nobody for helping me with my question?

No need for a long description, I just need some basic information about how justice is made in the CDS.

It would help me very much

Thanks

Aleks

[Justice Soothsayer]

Alex,

It's a very long story. We had a very brief-lived experiment with a judicial system that the RA ultimately concluded was too complex. (IMHO, it led to the founding of the "Simplicity" party) Millions of words can be found on the topic under the archived Commission on the Judiciary forum. So what we are left with is the Scientific Council which is empowered to sit as a constitutional court (resolving disputes about the constitution and acting as a brake on perceived legislative overreaching) and as a court of general jurisdiction to resolve disputes between citizens. SC hasn't had much reason to act recently, as not many of either kind of disputes have come before it.

[Claude Desmoulins]

Justice has given you the condensed version. I apologize, particularly given my roll as current head of the SC, for not responding myself and at greater length. Unfortunately, my real life in the academy is placing many demands on my time at the moment, given that it's nearly end of term.

[Aleks Burner]

Thank you for your answer, I'll scan the Commission of the Judiciary forum to see if I can find something interesting for my work.

Just a last question, at the moment if there's a litigation between citizens you said the SC is going to resolve it, but how? Will the SC pronounce an "arbitrary judgement" or is the solution going to be find through a mediation mechanism?

Thank you again

[Cindy Ecksol]

Thank you for your answer, I'll scan the Commission of the Judiciary forum to see if I can find something interesting for my work.

Just a last question, at the moment if there's a litigation between citizens you said the SC is going to resolve it, but how? Will the SC pronounce an "arbitrary judgement" or is the solution going to be find through a mediation mechanism?

Thank you again

As the third member of the current SC, I'll take a stab at this one.

The SC is essentially a constitutional court. Its job is to resolve questions about the application of the constitution to situations that arise. Here's what happened, for example, when a citizen perceived that the SC had improperly certified the most recent election results:

http://forums.slcds.info/viewtopic.php?f=3&t=1982
http://forums.slcds.info/viewtopic.php?f=3&t=1986
http://forums.slcds.info/viewtopic.php?f=3&t=1988
http://forums.slcds.info/viewtopic.php?f=3&t=1985
http://forums.slcds.info/viewtopic.php?f=3&t=1994
http://forums.slcds.info/viewtopic.php?f=3&t=1995

As you can see, we're not always too great at this -- we lack procedures that would help us take testimony, allow questioning of witnesses, and issue decisions in a consistent fashion. We have the best intentions of fixing this lack, but so far we haven't gotten around to it so we just do the best we can.

But most of the time disputes brought to the SC aren't really for the SC to "resolve." That's essentially what happened with the election issue: we ruled that there was a simple misunderstanding of something that had been said rather than any real problem with the election certification. And more often, issues brought to the SC are essentially turned away because they aren't really "constitutional." Although there's provision in the constitution for the SC to provide mediation for individual disputes, that isn't really happening at this point. Of course we don't have too many individual disputes that need outside resolution. The closest we've come in the year that I've been around was when one citizen built a hot tub on her property on the Forum in CN (hot tubs are prohibited in the land covenant) and several of us objected. When the Chancellor at the time refused to take action, some friends and I built a wall on public property to hide it from view and appealed to the Chancellor to reconsider his decision. As it happened, he did reconsider, and the hot tub was removed. But this was never appealed to the SC, and in fact the next step would have been an appeal to the RA. More here: http://forums.slcds.info/viewtopic.php?f=21&t=1860

So in answer to your question, I guess I'd say that we don't really expect individual disputes to come to the SC, in most cases we would not accept them for review because they do not relate to constitutional issues, and if we WERE asked to mediate it would be a private matter, not a public one.

Cindy