Yes, bloggers won round one. Not a huge victory but we got the much needed clarifications. As someone with a lifelong tradition of activism, having gone on several strikes (especially student ones), small victories are big victories when it comes to support our troops. Yes, we may not be happy about the content of those clarifications, but that’s what we asked for, and we got it. We can only congratulate ourselves, we did the impossible: make the Lindens listen to us. Now, forward to the next step in the battle.
As much as I’m a Linden fangirl, I’m also a very active SL socialite. I can see popular support for Linden Lab declining, following a few of their legal decisions in the last year.

I am still not going to comply to that policy until I get a letter from the Lindens. I’m not that much affected by the policy itself. But I still feel much for bloggers that must make their domain name comply.

One of the best roundup about the case IMOHO is by lurvely Cuddlefish Jacek Antonelli, speaking about it here. Many bloggers are rightfully angry about the Linden’s vague threat of banhammer for those who would ultimately not comply. As Jacek stated tho, they cannot substitute to the law.

I think to add to the ambient climate of anger is that since about 2 months, the grid is down not only everyday, but several times a day. We now have 3 waves of peak concurrency a day instead of 1, and the poor asset servers are suffering much strain.
Lindens, I ♥♥♥ you guys. But you seriously need to get your game together, get better legal counseling and maybe stabilize this grid we ♥♥♥ so much. You may be calling yourself a gaming company, but as Phil said, you guys are building a country. You are no ordinary service provider, despite what some thinks about it.

We create this world. We populate it. We are no ordinary customers, we are residents. More than that, we are citizens. We support you for making this world possible. But remember who makes you grow, and don’t bite the hands that feeds you. That means, us all.

For the next 3 days I won’t be publishing any blog post, in protest to the lack of clarity of new Linden Lab trademark enforcement policy (that is despite their actual last round of “clarifications”), and their reversal of decision toward their trademark policy in general, after promoting fan art and fair use of their trademarks for years. Enough has already be said on the subject. This strike is symbolic and there to raise awareness about how it would be without the same people that gave Linden Lab free promotion of Second Life through this huge network of fan websites.

I will not be hiding my actual content, but I will hold my breath until at least friday. Until then, write to Linden Lab asking them more clarification about their policies. Maybe if they get a couple thousand emails, their PR department may wake up and realize that this is another resident communication fiasco.

Read up their FAQ here for more info about their trademark policy and contact information.

Until then, ♥♥♥ you sweeties, and sayonara!

The opening was a very great success and an absolute delight to me, despite the Lindens having DB issues, overall that was probably the best event I have ever thrown at Code Red. Everyone was delightful and so sweet. This is a party I will always remember. Thanks to everyone that made this event possible. The sim was jam packed full all the time of the event, for the first 4 hours it was very hard to get in, my sim being a Mainland sim, we had 40 avatars in most of the time. The contest went awesome too, apart asset servers not collaborating at the beginning and preventing me from wearing other props, for the remaining time it went okay.

I would ♥♥♥ to thank Amanda for playing the insane tunes, you girl rawked! I would like to thank Anna Tretiak again for providing the Photostage system for the contest. I want to thank Tesla so much too for providing an extra 2000L I will give out to a 4th photo contest winner and she also gave a free pair of shooz to every invitee. I would also like to thanks Bettina Tizzy of NPIRL very warmly for featuring me on a very elogious article and for spamming her group.

Also, a very special thank you to Roxette Wise, who blew my mind by giving me a copy of a new lingerie set she made and named after my humble self! That totally blew my mind because not only she’s the first to design an outfit inspired of me and named after me, but it is also of an amazing detail and quality, it is outstanding. I saw that set and it’s an instant favourite, and it is so much me! She made it in 2 colors, Red/white and Red/black and you can get it SLURL here.

Here’s a back picture of the outfit, borrowed from Amanda’s submissions for the contest:

The contest is still accepting submissions to my Flickr fan group until tomorrow night at 9PM. Here is a lovely shot by Elease Graves that submitted this picture for the Boudoir Rouge photo contest:

Another key moment of my night was to have the rare occasion to see and chat with my dear Vint Falken, who was not in a very good mood to start with. But that filled my heart with joy when she told me that she was smiling before going to bed. I’m just so glad I could cheer her up a little, I felt really touched I could be helpful to her, her that is so dear to me. Vint, extra big huggles to you sweetheart. I’m always there if you need me. Much ♥♥♥ to you.

That was so sweet, and heartwarming to see you all there, I’m speechless of the turnout, and of the honor you all made me. You people prove to me every time how deeply caring, admirable, and good friends you are. Thanks for supporting me and my work, especially in the worse times. I feel so deeply honored to know and be cared for by people of your quality. I highly appreciate, and humbly bow to your greatness. All of you talented and lovely friends, you mean everything to me. Forever, I shall cherish you all.

♥♥♥. Much ♥♥♥.
Codie

One of the most panicking idea about the new Linden Labs guidelines is that thousands of bloggers may now have to remove infringing contents from their blog. But if you own a Wordpress self-hosted blog (maybe even a Wordpress.Com blog), NO NOT PANIC! Ubernyms is a very slick way of mass rewriting your blog without sweat.

Legal things better left to lawyers as far as I’m concerned, this article is NOT about HOW to make your blog compliant to the new policy. IANAL and I have no idea yet of all the legal implications. This article will focus on the technical aspect of installing Ubernyms and not on the legal aspects. For that you will have to read Linden Lab’s policies throughly, personally I don’t even know how it will affect bloggers. LL ain’t very good at communicating important decisions like that anyways, but that is another subject completely.

NOTE: Ubernyms may not be compatible with all Wordpress plugins. I heard it conflicted with other plugins. I CANNOT offer support for any aspect of it, as I do not develop Ubernyms. Consider this a primer to the matter, no more.

STEP 1 : Installing Ubernyms

This is the most tricky part, since the installation can be different on one host or another. So I cannot explain all of it, but will try to give it a shot.

Basically installation consists of:

1. Download Ubernyms for the right version of Wordpress
2. Put that .ZIP file into your /wp-content/plugins directory and unzip it on the server OR unzip the file locally and put the folder and all of it’s content in the /wp-content/plugins/ directory through FTP
3. Activate the plugin in your Plugins section of your Wordpress blog administration panel
4. INSTALL SignpostMarv Ubernym patch that fixes a bug with the HTML characters and UTF-8/accented characters. Go there and download the ubernyms-2.7.php.txt file and rename it to ubernyms.php. Then upload it via FTP in the Ubernyms plugin directory, and overwrite the old one.

STEP 2 : Configuring Ubernyms

Once installed, Ubernyms is delicious cake. And you must eat it.

1. Go into the Plugins section, and click on Ubernyms Configuration
2. Leave the upper configuration as is, it is usually defaulting a decent configuration
3. What is of utter interest for this case is the Replace Text option. Take a free slot under “Add new acronyms” and select Replace Text.
4. Enter a term in the Text field, and the replacement term in Definition

For example, let’s say that you want to replace the acronym “SL” for “SL ™”, you would have to put “SL” in the Text field and “SL â„¢” in the Description field (you should use the HTML code for the trademark sign in this case). SignpostMarv issued a patch fixing a problem with this, thanks to him for the leet patchage!

This plugin can replace any expression in your entire blog in a second, not only for replacements, you can link to internal or external URLs, replace acronyms by full length expressions, and so on. It’s the blogger’s best friend, you can take my word on that.

Hope this will calm down some lovely people I know that got very stressed up with their blog infringing on Linden Labs trademarks, thinking it would be required to correct every article posted by hand. This plugin removes much of the job. It still needs to be proven if it is really necessary. <3

Theres a lot of rambling going on about the Lindens enforcing their trademarks. I won’t get in the hype before having all the details, but let’s say it’s nearly impossible to enforce now that it’s spread everywhere. I won’t do like my crazy adorable GF Rheta Shan and purge my blog of every mention of the trademarks. Tho, that was insanely funny, I will wait for a Cease & Desist letter to put on my wall before I do that.

To add more humorous flavor to the debate, let me give you a tweaked up version of my favorite song, by Crass. The original is called “Do they owe us a living?” and my version is called “Do they owe us a SL?”. So put the pitchforks down and cheer up for a bit.

Original song here.

Original lyrics here.

DO THEY OWE US A SL?

Fuck the corporate minded, here’s something I want to say,
About the state of SL, the way it treats us today.
Inworld they give you shit, drop you in the pit,
You try, you try, you try to login, but you can’t because they’ve fucked you about.
Then you’re a prime example of how they must not be,
This is just a sample of what they’ve done to you and me.

Do they owe us a SL?
Of course they do, of course they do.
Owe us a SL?
Of course they do, of course they do.
Owe us a SL?
OF COURSE THEY FUCKING DO.

Don’t want me anymore, cos I threw it on the floor.
Used to call me sweet thing, I’m nobody’s plaything,
And now that I am different, ‘d ♥♥♥ to bust my head,
You’d ♥♥♥ to see me logout, ‘d ♥♥♥ to see me dead.

Do they owe us a SL?
Of course they do, of course they do.
Owe us a SL?
Of course they do, of course they do.
Owe us a SL?
OF COURSE THEY FUCKING DO.

The SL that is owed to me I’m never going to get,
They’ve buggered this brave new world up, up to their necks in dept.
They’d give you a banhammer for something you ain’t done,
They’ll make you an epitomy of everything that’s wrong.

Do they owe us a SL?
Of course they do, of course they do.
Owe us a SL?
Of course they do, of course they do.
Owe us a SL?
OF COURSE THEY FUCKING DO.

Don’t take any notice of what the public think,
They’re so hyped up with WoW., they just don’t want to think.
They’ll use you as a target for demands and for advice,
When you don’t want to hear it they’ll say you’re broadly offensive.

Do they owe us a SL?
Of course they do, of course they do.
Owe us a SL?
Of course they do, of course they do.
Owe us a SL?
OF COURSE THEY FUCKING DO.

——————–

Sorry for that lame attempt at humor but I couldn’t resist. It does share a part of truth, toward the fact that LL may be a business, which I have nothing against, we still are investors and citizens of this brave new world. I have a very high level of tolerance usually and I especially feel for the Lindens, as I do practically the same job. But sometimes, the administrative decisions are taken without consideration of the backlash effects on our population. As much as I’m a Linden fangirl, some of those decisions are really hard to backup and swallow. Some of us, even the more moderate of SLitizens, will sometimes need to vent it out a little. And I prefer doing it the smart ass sarcastic way. *smiles*

Here are a few JIRA issues I have been checking out since last week, some of them linked to the latest Release Candidate.

MISC-975 Notable sim script perf decrease (FIX PENDING)

SVC-1760 Complex hollow on megaprims broken (Thanks Lillie Yifu)

VWR-2085 Linux viewer has CTRL-ALT-F1 borked under Linux. Quite useful for machinima. (Thank you Opensource Obscure!)

VWR-4471 “Copy selected” with “Rotate Copy” behaves incorrectly (Thank you cuddlefish!)

VWR-5538 Getting sculpty data from HTML-on-a-prim has odd results (Thank you Seifert Surface!)

VWR-4192 To add more options for hand positions in the animation upload menu. Cuddlefish seemed to say there was limitations but hey it’s worth the check. (Thanks Ana)
I’m still checking SVC-1764 but it’s fixed pending, and of course our beloved MISC-208 is still unassigned. We all know it’s a complex issue but hey, we can dream. *sights*

One of the greatest restrictions for content creation and cross interoperability within the SecondLife client has been the total inability to display HTML within the SecondLife viewer. Well it seems the Lindens have been working hard at it, because I think their last Release Candidate notice does not sound like an April Fool’s (we are far too early for that anyways).

Read the release note:

http://blog.secondlife.com/2008/03/06/parcel-media-changes-in-1191-release-candidate/

Okay it is not HTML on a prim yet, but sounds promising. It cannot yet display Flash content because it lacks support for Firefox extensions, which it is based on, but I guess it’s better than nada. Hopefully we should see more development in that sense soon.

Well, way to go. I’m a long time user of SculptyPaint, one of the nicest free software around to make sculpties in a quick and dirty way. Of course as most free software developers, Cel Edman needs to sell other products, mainly sculpty packs. Well sounds like he’s getting ripped off pretty hard and he cites a few reasons on the SculptyPaint page showing his outrage. Indeed, if all of that is true, it is outrageous. Especially the bits about physical threats, and alledgely getting ripped by a big mentoring group. Of course, I have no proof of that happening, yet, but the notice on the Mental Mentor page says a lot. (removed)
I didn’t ask for permissions, lacking contact info, but here is the integral message on SculptyPaint webpage.
(— CUT HERE —)

The morality? Well respect the content creators TOS, or wave them goodbye. Freebies are great, but mentoring groups must preach by the example. Violating someone’s right to distribute his content like he wants to can bite back on your ass. Now, nobody can download SculptyPaint and use this awesome tool, which deprives every content creators on the grid from using it. Which is quite the opposite of what a mentoring group is supposed to do.

I just hope all of this is a misunderstanding. Time for more dialog and diplomacy, and maybe time for the Lindens to get a rapid response team for dealing with DMCA since this kind of problem will get reported more and more often.

EDIT: Ordinal Malaprop also blogs it.

Massively talks about it too.

ADDENDUM:

A few feedbacks are suggesting, like I thought it could be, a big ass misunderstanding. Let’s hope the concerned parties clears it out in a civil manner. While then, nothing keeps us to talk about it and maybe tell the Lindens we need better DMCA provisions.

I wont go in details on how annoying the 25 groups limitation in SecondLife is (yes, you can thank me, I won’t!). Most of you hate it. But groups is essential not only to receive spammage, but also especially to manage property and salespoint. As an aspiring land shark I feel this limitation is seriously borking my ambitions for total world domination. OK that was just a joke but if you own land, and is a member of a few clubs and interest groups, it doesn’t take long before you are capped.

Some important highlights about the problem:

• Group limitation is responsible for my own estimation of at least 50% of the alternate avatar creation. People get capped to 25 so they create useless alternates just to hold or manage more groups, which is a huge waste of technical resources. Also dramatically bork LL’s own statistics about the real number of people inworld.
• Group limitation may seem trivial, but some people told me it had to do with some technical limitation too, something about checking active group at each parcel border. It seem the limitation was 15 previously, and then raised to 25. But this is no reason for not wanting more, I think the “alternate avatar” problem eats up much more resources globally.
• There’s a JIRA entry regarding that limitation.

A bunch of DJs got fed up with the limitation and decided to write a petition to Linden Labs. They suggest to raise up the limit from 25 to 50. If you ask me, I could use up to 100! Please sign the petition avaliable here:

http://www.petitiononline.com/25_to_50/petition.html

UPDATE: On an even moar funny note, PetitionOnline.Com censored my avatar name. I tried signing the petition 3 times without success. I starred a letter in my name and it got through, I’m signature #731. Is “bastard” even a swear word? Fuck you PetitionOnline.Com! Really! Censoring someone’s name is NOT free expression!