Adult Content And TOS – Which Way Will The Wind Blow?

I think it’s fair to say that Ebbe Altberg has made a positive start to his Linden Lab leadership. Ebbe has helped return the Jira to a semblance of sensibility and made positive strides to addressing the Marketplace and communications issues.

Ebbe hasn’t said anything about tier yet, but as that’s a long standing issue I’ll leave that aside for now. However two areas where Ebbe has been a little more uncomfortable shall we say, are the TOS and adult content.

On the TOS, Ebbe has said :

I’m still getting up to speed on that topic. I’ve had several discussions about it. It’s not a simple topic. 

Trust me. It’s not becuase we have an intent to arbitrarily profit from your stuff without your permission. That would be very bad for us as we’re all about user to user. We could seriously harm ourselves if we started doing that.

But, the edge cases and the potential cost to us in certain scenarios are quite substantial.

Making the spirit and the language match up seems to be very difficult. I’ll learn more over time but for now I can’t promise anything other than what I said above.

What these edge cases are remain a mystery and obviously it may be difficult for Linden Lab to discuss edge cases because it may cause problems. However from a standpoint of transparency, it would be better if Linden Lab would at least enter into a dialogue with content creators because the TOS remains content creator unfriendly. I absolutely believe Ebbe when he says Linden Lab have no intent to steal content and yes, it would seriously harm Linden Lab if they did. However the question remains as to why it’s so difficult to change the wording to reflect that.

I know some people have tried to address the Lab over the TOS changes, and as far as I know, they haven’t got far, but this is an issue that needs to be addressed.

The other issue is adult content and what will happen with it going forward.

Ebbe has experience of adult content, as he explained in a forum post:

I’m supportive and I have experience. If Adult is the RL perception of SL then we’re not going to be as big as we want to be. I’ve been in businesses where Adult (and Psychics) were key customers. Keen.com Niteflirt.com Ingenio.com were all brands that I helped build. It started as Keen.com but when Psychics “took over” there was no way to combine that with what you see on Ingenio etc. today. So we chose to become multiple brands…some separation is important if you want to appeal to a broad market. Thanks!

The part about multiple brands is a tad troubling. Second Life has long taken a largely grown up attitude to adult content within its virtual world. They brought in the adult rating to help people avoid adult content, which was a controversial move at the time and I still think they should have built a PG rated continent at the same time. However there is a separation of conent inworld and it’s even easier to avoid adult content in Second Life today due to the three maturity ratings settings.

However it’s the mention of perceptions that troubles me. Draxtor Despres does a good job of challenging perceptions and for Second Life, I think that’s the way to go. However I can’t help but wonder if Linden Lab would like to introduce an adult grid at some point, or a grid where adult content is far harder to stumble across. One does have to wonder if Linden Lab would like some further separation of adult content and the main grid.

I’ve always felt that the adult content issue in Second Life was blown out of all proportion, but there’s no doubt that it can be troublesome. Many moons ago I gave up a PG rated parcel because the neighbouring parcel was in a mature rated sim and had mature rated themes, back then there was no adult. This is one of the main reasons I favoured a PG rated continent.

Another issue in my early Second Life days was walking around a mall where adult items were being sold, I did not expect to see that. Naive as I was back then. However both of these incidents were before the adult rating arrived.

However in terms of branding, it may be that the stigma of adult content is still hounding Second Life and it might be that Linden Lab decide to make a further separation. I am probably reading too much between the lines of Ebbe’s comment, but I found his comment interesting and refreshingly honest.

Which way the wind blows on these issues, we’ll find out in the next few months, in terms of the TOS, let’s hope there is a positive change.

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