November 2013 – Page 4

November 17, 2013November 17, 2013

Isle Of Dee Refugees Find New Home

Rather freakily, as I was getting this image of the Isle Of Dee before the storm caused by the tier monster sunk the island, “We’ll Meet Again” started playing on the stream from the machinima expo. Which is very fitting because for many of the evacuees from the old Isle Of Dee, they will indeed be meeting again.

The calm before the storm above was soon replaced by Dee sinking beneath the waves, even the Goblin King couldn’t escape the barrage:

The citizens fled, on ships, there are always ships involved. Tales of the adventures that took place on those ships may or may not be told:

Those ships took the hardy citizens to a halfway house but now I’m reliably informed they’ve also found a new place to call home.

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November 17, 2013

Linden Lab Issuing W9 Tax Information Requests To Some Customers

A thread over at SLUniverse brings to light the issue that Linden Lab have apparently started to issue W9 Tax Information requests to certain customers. The information is patchy but evidence of the form is posted there.

The purpose of this request does not seem to be visible anywhere on the Second Life website, but information regarding the law can be found on the Paypal Website :

“Internal Revenue Code (IRC) Section 6050W states that all US payment processors, including PayPal, are required by the Internal Revenue Service (IRS) to provide information to the IRS about certain customers who receive payments for the sale of goods or services through PayPal. PayPal is required to report gross payments received for sellers who receive over $20,000 in gross payment volume AND over 200 separate payments in a calendar year.”

Linden Lab must therefore fall into the category of being a payment processor for the purposes of this law and it seems they are now requesting the required information, but there’s confusion as to when a customer crosses the threshold to fall into this category for Linden Lab to issue the request. Some people are reporting that the threshold is much lower than the requirements stipulated by the IRS.

If this is true, Linden Lab would not be the first company to do this, back in 2011 ecommercebytes reported that payment providers were lowballing IRS thresholds for 1099-K Reporting. In response to a seller’s question asking why Amazon had thresholds as low as 50 transactions instead or the required 200 Amazon said:

“The IRS requires that Amazon aggregates sales of sellers with multiple accounts, each of which alone may not meet the reporting threshold. Under IRS rules, the only way to definitively know whether accounts are owned by the same seller is to ask for tax identity information. Thus, we are doing everything we can to meet IRS requirements while still asking the fewest sellers necessary for their tax identity. We have crafted our policy with the help of our tax advisors and the IRS.”

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November 15, 2013

The Herald Of A New Podcast

A few of the more dynamic, entertaining, gruesome and informative sites regarding Second Life seem to have fallen into a sort of slump of late. The excellent Gwyneth Llewellyn seems to have gone into hibernation for the winter, or maybe Gwyn’s just too excited about Cristiano Ronaldo’s exploits for Portugal.

The Alphaville Herald, which was apparently big in Japan around 1984, remains largely unbalanced but has largely left the virtual world of Second Life in its reporting and seems more interested in hackers, the NSA and the rather bizarre spectacle of Pixeleen Mistral interviewing Mark McCahill, actually that’s a really good read. The Herald has always had a bit of an unfair rap because of the vicious nature of some of its posts and comments below the post, but they have also covered a lot of important issues and the NSA issues are important.

MetaReality Podcast has been on vacation but has returned this very evening with an episode full of discussion, giggles and profanity … Gianna seems to have lost the bleep machine. However quite a large chunk of the content is unrelated to Second Life and the three people involved sound a little jaded by Second Life, well Qarl has had enough after the TOS debacle but Gianna sounds pretty fed up too, even more so than before. There’s still plenty of interesting content in the podcast, but they seem to be drifting.

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November 14, 2013

UCCSL Issue Response To Linden Lab Regarding TOS Changes

Over on the official forums there’s a thread which details the response letter from the UCCSL to Linden Lab:

NEW MAIL FROM THE UCCSL TO LINDEN LAB OFFICE AND PETER GRAY

I’ll post the contents of the letter below the cut. The letter is addressed to Linden Lab Office and Peter Gray. Poor Peter Gray, he’s public relations but he shouldn’t be being named like this, he’s more like the negotiator to broker peace talks. I still see him carrying a briefcase, wearing shades, a suit and looking like a character straight out of Resevoir dogs … actually he could be Mr Gray, although Mr Grey works better for me!

The letter makes suggestions regarding the limits or lack of them, in the new TOS, suggests that licences should not be perpetual, asks for limits on sublicences for third parties and suggests that purposes of use need to be limited. The UCCSL are not jumping up and down regarding all aspects of the new TOS and they seem to be focussed on section 2.3.

I still think the root problem is Linden Lab wanting a Linden Lab TOS for all their products, the problematic sections largely arise from the old Desura TOS and as Second Life and Desura are now under the same umbrella TOS, Linden Lab are trying to fit the Second Life square peg into the Desura round hole, which obviously isn’t a sensible fit.

However Linden Lab have suggested that they are moving towards opening more windows of opportunity for content creators across their range of products and this is really what Linden Lab should be discussing, rather than getting sidetracked with trying to right the new TOS, they should be explaining why they need these terms to open those windows.

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