I’ve had a busy week off the field, so have had my Second Life time severely curtailed this week, which was a shame as I had a lot planned, and all the more disappointing as I intended to put my day on Strike on Wednesday to good effect in Second Life to make me feel better about losing a day’s pay!
However, I’ve been glancing around the forum and blogsphere and notice a little introduction to the SL Marketplace, which I spotted on this forum thread over at SLUniverse, started by Voodoo Radek. There’s a new licensing feature: “User Licensed” which looks like it’s designed for full perms items, when the system permissions are not the permissions you’re intending to sell the item as, for example textures need to be sold full perms so builders can apply them to their builds, but texture makers don’t want people reselling or giving away their textures and often don’t want the builds those textures are applied to being sold full perms, which is where this new permission comes into play.
So rather than the standard copy/Modify/No Transfer permissions you’ll now see on listings, things like this:
If a merchant had ticked User Licensed as an option, there wouldn’t be a cross through User Licensed, if a merchant has ticked to see the product description for permissions, it would look like this:
I’m sure I’m not alone in thinking there may be some confusion between User Licensed and see product description for details!
Now if you’re a merchant, you add these permissions where you’d normally add permissions, which would be on this screen:
The details of all this can be found in the release notes for this week, which you can read in full here. The release notes say of the new licensing feature:
“User Licensed (for Merchants who sell full perm items and the buyer is required to abide by a user licensing agreement) is now an option for permissions on listings. Merchants will be responsible for providing the licensing terms on the listing.”
This sounds like a good idea in theory, it needs some tweaking and it would be really nice if purchasers had to agree to the terms and conditions of user licensed or see product description for details before purchasing but what it needs most of all is for the word to be got out to merchants that this feature is available and what it is, merchants will notice it as they edit their listings but a little more discussion from the commerce team would be helpful here.
There’s another interesting feature added this week too, this is with relation to new accounts, accounts that aren’t five days old won’t be able to create stores:
“Resident accounts must have a minimum age of 5 days to create a store (become a Merchant). ”
This is I’d imagine partially to do with throwaway accounts causing mayhem, how effective this will be remains to be seen but at least they’ve done something and will see how it goes.
These changes look decent to me, nothing earth shattering, but decent all the same. I do wish however that all these release notes were listed in one single container, such as server, marketplace, client etc. all under one forum post of release notes with links to the latest release notes, it would be easier to keep track of them that way.
Regarding the User Licensing feature. It already has a JIRA on it because the new permission makes little sense if it does not directly tie to a NOTE that gets forced generated in front of the potential customer to read prior to agreeing. If the merchant is responsible to place the EULA somewhere on the listing, who is to say the customer read what was being agreed to.
This feature had a good intent but as per LL usual, poorly thought out execution.
I’ll look the Jira up, as it stands I don’t really see how it’s different from seeing product listing for licence terms, if it’s the first step towards getting the sort of implementation you state, then it’s in the right direction, but I agree that as it stands it’s a bit confusing and a little toothless.