Category: Second Life

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Tax Cliffhanger – The Conclusion

Recap : Yesterday I blogged about the confusion users were facing with trying to fill in forms to comply with Linden Lab’s new tax and account requirements. At the end of that post I had to leave matters on a cliffhanger, Kat Fetisov was hanging on the telephone with the IRS whilst trying to find out whether she could obtain an Employer ID Number (EIN), which rumour has it can be obtained during a phone call, rather than having to get an Individual Taxpayer Identification Number (ITIN), which can take several weeks to obtain and would therefore mean missing the Linden Lab deadline of 30 days …..

The result, Kat got an EIN! However, there have been more twists to this plot and they may or may not be good, on the face of it they are good. A user called Jerry commented on my original post and said:

“I tried to transfer some money and it did never arrive within 3 weeks. So I filed a support ticket. That is how I found out that there was an open ticket where they requested the tax form. I filled it out and I got my money, but as you said, I left the ITIN blank. Still, one month later I sent another payment and it worked.”

So Jerry didn’t need to fill in an EIN or an ITIN, and here is where a little guidance may have been useful. Kat has also discovered she didn’t need an EIN or ITIN , for the purposes of filling this form in for Linden Lab. However Kat was advised by Linden Lab that she should put her UK National Insurance number on the form. There is a section on the W8-BEN that has space for a foreign tax ID number.

Kat also has an excellent blog post with some helpful information for those who may be struggling with this : The plot thickens. Or possibly thins a little. However Kat is, rightly in my view, a little suspicious of the way Linden Lab are dealing with matters, it’s not that she thinks Linden Lab have got matters wrong, it’s just that the process is unusual when compared to other American based companies who ask you to fill in forms such as this.

I can see exactly where Kat is coming from on this matter because, as I’ve mentioned before, I’ve had to fill this form in for Amazon KDP and this is how my status there looks:

An Image Should Be Here
Tax Information Completed

As you can see, I have an applicable withholding rate of 30% and that is because I haven’t provided Amazon with an EIN or an ITIN, I’ve left that field blank. This means if I publish anything on Amazon and it sells to Amazon US customers, they will hold back 30% of my royalties. However it looks like, this isn’t the case with Second Life, which should be cheered.

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LL’s New Account Requirements Prove Taxing For Users

Whether it’s Required Account Documentation, or whether it’s Required Tax Documentation, SL users are getting into a tizzy with LL, the IRS and confusion about whether they need an ITIN or an EIN as people find themselves lost in acronym city.

There are posts on the official Second Life Forums:

ID and TAX ID Information Required by Linden Labs – Pending Processes Credits On Hold

Patriot Act Letter from LL?

LL needs more “Required Account Documentation” ?…..

The people starting these threads are not noobs, some of them have experience outside of Second Life of dealing with business issues, yet they are lost in a sea of fog as to exactly what’s required and why it’s required. Then over at SLUniverse there is a long standing thread where Kat Fetisov is currently hanging on the telephone with the IRS! Will the call be finished before this blog post is published? Hold tight readers, we may need to end with a cliffhanger …..

However there are some things that people need to know regarding these issues, one of them being that if you’ve been under the radar with your income from Second Life, you may be in for a bit of pain …. and really, it’s your own fault and you know it really, so concentrate and find out the proper options. Unfortunately, as I said earlier, the current options are shrouded in mist.

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Should The Second Life Website Have A Category For Podcasts And Inworld Media Shows?

As I said in my previous post, The Drax Files Radio hour isn’t the first of its kind, the popular MetaReality Podcast has been around for a while, Drax was part of that sometimes too! However in another way of making the point that talking is good, a discussion in the comments of the first Drax Files Radio Show episode related around other Second Life related podcasts and thanks to links from Crap Mariner of 100 words stories, I can see that there were many other podcasts in the past.

An example is the now defunct SecondCast, which was presented mainly by Johnny Ming and Torrid Midnight of Torridwear. However other people would also host the show, including Cristiano Midnight of SLUniverse and Snapzilla, Lordfly Digeridoo and Walker Spaight of 3pointD.com and the Second Life Herald, is this the same Walker who became a Linden as conversation manager? Thanks to the wayback machine we can find descriptions of the sort of content the show covered. Unfortunately we can’t hear the content.

23rd May 2006 – We recently posted an interview with Reuben Steiger, former Linden Lab Evangelist, who has recently launched a Metaverse professional services company called Millions of Us.

Millions Of Us went on to do plenty of work within Second Life, including work with corporations, here’s a video of the opening of te CNET HQ in Second Life back in November 2006:

July 5th 2006 – Johnny and the Secondcasters interview Philip Linden a.k.a. Philip Rosedale on the 3rd anniversary of Second Life and the 6 month anniversary of Secondcast. Topics range from the new open user registration to the changing culture on the grid and the “Get Philip In Your Pants” contest. Send your pants entries to Johnny Ming in-world (make sure they are transferrable).

Here we see an example of how the Lindens would engage with broadcasters, over the years the Lindens did engage with other broadcasters, they were interviewed on the Paisley Beebe chat show, for example.

July 16th 2006 – Johnny and the Secondcasters interview Randy Moss of the American Cancer Society and Second Life resident Jade Lily. The group discusses the 2nd Annual SL Relay for Life and fundraising in virtual worlds. Torrid describes her team’s fundraising strategies and Johnny ends the show explaining the source of the male Secondcasters tennis elbow. Don’t miss the Relay for Life this upcoming weekend!!

This makes one feel old, relay for life was only in its second year back then! There were many other podcasts, some of which are listed on the wiki.

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The Drax Files Radio Hour Extends The Conversation, Linden Lab Should Take Note

I was going to do a review of the second episode of The Drax Files Radio Hour but to be honest, Inara Pey has already done a smashing job there. I’ve also briefly talked of some of the issues in a previous blog post. Instead I’ll talk about the show in general and why Linden Lab should take note of how the conversation can be extended.

The show is worth listening to, so if you have a free hour of time, really, this is good stuff and this week’s show has a lot about that late Osprey Therian in it, interesting stuff too. The show starts with Strawberry Singh’s introduction, which I could listen to over and over and over again. Strawberry has a very charming voice, really really charming …. anyway! I’m pretty sure Strawberry pronounces Jo properly.

There are also interviews with Marianne McCann, the artist formerly known as Babbage Linden and clips from Philip Rosedale and Judy L Tyrer amongst others. We also should not forget the fact that Jo Yardley of 1920’s Berlin fame is the assistant.

These contributions, interviews and discussion topics make a show that extend the conversation. Draxtor is quick to point out that they are not the BBC, they are not investigative journalists, they have a small budget but the fact that people who listen to the show join in the conversation on other blogs and platforms shows the power of a show like this. This isn’t the first show of this type, more on that in another post. However Draxtor manages to get plenty of people to talk and is a very friendly host, as is Jo, although she does call Draxtor “A big girl’s blouse” at one point, there’s something very funny to me in hearing two continental Europeans engaging in a conversation like that.

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Did Andrea Linden Call Rod Humble A Fascist And Live To Tell The Story?

The Drax Files Radio Hour episode 2 is largely a wonderful tribute to Osprey Therian, I’ll review it properly over the weekend. However one or two other items caught my eye. There’s more news on former Linden Lab employee Judy L Tyrer’s Ever,Jane MMO, set in the world of Jane Austen. The creators of this must be kicking themselves that #VictorianFacebook is all the rage this evening on Twitter, instead of #GeorgianFacebook, maybe they will save that for launch hey 😉

However the really striking issue on this week’s Drax Files Radio hour is the claim that Andrea Linden called Rod Humble a fascist! The issue is tenuously linked to the NSA/GCHQ spying scandal whereby it was reported that spies had been in Second Life. The issue revolves around the off the record (OTR) messaging system that some third party viewers for Second Life have provided in the past and goes all the way back to 2011. The thing is, when The Guardian revealed the information around spying in Second Life, there was discussion about this feature in the comments. A user known as Ubermensch claimed:

“Second Life has its own internal OTR instant messaging system with its own encryption keys that ( allegedly ) not even the makers of Second Life are able to hack into. The keys are generated locally on the user PCs and ‘agreed’ on by those in an IM.”

There’s then some healthy discussion about whether this is true or not and the traditonal surprise that Second Life is still around. However it’s the OTR system that is the centre of the story, allegedly from Andrea Linden.

Continue reading “Did Andrea Linden Call Rod Humble A Fascist And Live To Tell The Story?”

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