Tengu Yamabushi

Anyone interested in replying to Hamlet's Content Theft Challenge?

My personal take is that user-to-user transaction volume doesn't necessarily reflect a sale lost by the content creator to a discount ripper - it just shows why LL might not care about who is selling what to who, as long as there are sales.

Edit: Comments are now enabled.

Archer Braun

Well...first of all note that he's not saying that it doesn't have an impact on individual creators. What he's illustrating is that it hasn't had a negative impact on the overall in-world economy...yet.

As many will be quick to point out, perhaps if enough creators leave, you'll see a dip in those numbers.

Camille Serpentine

Between 2006 when the copybot first appeared and now, the number of users has also skyrocketed.
So if you were to graph user to user $transactions verses and input them as to a percentage of the user base at that time, I would gather you would find that the user to user $transactions don't look so 'bountiful'.

Because as the number of users increases, the number of user to user transactions increases. It would be interesting to see if the percentage of user transactions verses the population figures stays the same over time. If that's the case then this silliness about copybotting affecting the bottom line is moot (the issue of it not being an issue would be moot).


blah.. perhaps someone else could explain it better.

Miriel Enfield

This.

Hamlet's logic seems kind of faulty in addition to that. Even if all of that increase in sales were from legitimate purchases, that still doesn't necessarily mean that copying isn't causing financial problems. You have, unfortunately, no way of knowing how many legitimate sales would be made in the absence of theft.

I'm serious about calling this unfortunate, by the way. There are a lot of arguments about the impact of theft (we've all heard the people who say that thieves would have never bought your stuff anyway, so it's not really a big deal), and while certain points of view seem much more reasonable to me, there's no real way to run actual experiments and get hard data.

Siggy

You can't - he's cut off comments.

Irrespective, there were a LOT of other things going on at that point in time.

There was the rush in of people from free accounts.
It was the height of media on SL and of companies using it (I was in News then and was showing all the shit on the AP to my news director to convince them to do a story on it)
There were several articles on wired and the like, focusing on 'make money in a video game!'

The population leapt so fast that SL was breaking down constantly...


There was so much happening during that point in time that saying 'Factor X did/didn't have effect Y on the economy' is pretty dumb.. there's too much signal to noise during that time to say any one thing had any specific effect.

Side Note: Hamlet is the biggest yellow journalist I have seen in quite some time... and always has been. So he is naturally going to go for his over the top headline....

He also masturbates regularly over anything said by Lawrence Lessig, so I'm hardly going to call his opinion 'balanced and objective' It's going to be slanted that way... Just as folks who have taken a hit to copying are going to be slanted the other.

I don't think either are correct.

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And as it was in the beginning, so too shall it be in the end. That bullshit is bullshit, it just goes by different names.

Camille Serpentine

Here's my graphical image of what I was trying to explain.


*edited to add: yeah I took Hamlet's image and modified it a bit. The black line is all mine though! It's set to no mod, no transfer, no copy!!!!

Attached Images

Graph.jpg (101.0 KB, 297 views)

Wildefire Walcott

By your graph, I can only conclude that COPYBOT SAVED SECOND LIFE!!!

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Camille Serpentine

Hey! shhhhh!
Don't let Hamlet hear you!

Siggy

Which is what Hamlet would have us believe.


But then again this is the same guy who wrote a great article on the Air Force fighter pilot who logged into SL from his tour in iraq... very charming story except for one minor detail:

The guy was unemployed and lived in his mothers basement.

Camille Serpentine

Hamlet goes on to say:
I would say that except for when there was a huge increase of user to user $transactions at the end of 2006/beginning of 2007, it doesn't so a radical growth pattern, more like a steady increase as the number of SL accounts grows. If we saw the growth of new accounts, I'm betting the graphs would look very similar.

Wildefire Walcott

Oh, I missed that!

Cubey Terra

Wow. I don't believe he actually came to that conclusion. So transactions increased between 2006 and 2009. You can't infer anything about copybot or any other individual event based on that data -- except that there were more transactions.

Correlation does not imply causation.

In case you're reading this, Hamlet, here's a link: Correlation does not imply causation - Wikipedia, the free encyclopedia

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Cubey Terra
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Couldbe Yue

It isn't possible to know just how many transactions were actually sale of goods rather than anything else. The only figure I vaguely remember is a Linden (don't even remember which one) said 0 - 1L made up something like 30% of transactions but a single figure total amount.

Some relevant (or not) figures.

At the beginning of sept 06 (Q4) there were less than 1 million accounts. Now there's around 17 mill.

Around 1/2m accounts spend money each month. The other half million don't even spend 1L.

Private estates have probably grown from around zero (I can't remember when they came in) to around 75% of the grid. I don't know how many of those are rental but they need to be paid for by the renters and I'll bet a large majority of them pay inworld rather than through paypal.

I would suggest that a lot of the increase comes from estate rentals rather than a flourishing economy.

This is like counting angels on a pinhead and if Hamlet had paid even little attention to any of the financial stuff/what's been happening on the grid down the years he'd be aware of this. Particularly my first paragraph. If LL don't even know why money is transferred between accounts then what hope does anyone else have?

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Camille Serpentine

What about the sex workers? and the tip jars?
those poor forgotten workers.. Hamlet just wants them hidden behind closed doors.

Tengu Yamabushi

Comments are now enabled.

Gigs

Stop calling it theft. It's not theft.

Anyone who calls it theft sounds as ignorant and stupid as the RIAA.

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Persephone Milk

If, according to his figures, the number of people that spend money within Second Life has remained relatively constant over the last three years, while the total number of residents has increased some eighteen fold, then expressed as a percentage of the total resident population, the number of people spending money in Second Life has literally plummeted since copybot was released. Where is that graph?

Of course, none of us believe the total resident population numbers any way - we know those numbers are inflated by alts, bots, people that play but do not stay, and the boat load of unverified freebie accounts that are predisposed to never spend money in Second Life.

But if Hamlet wants to be fair minded about this, he can't just show the numbers in the way that makes his case, while ignoring the other side of the argument.

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Camille Serpentine

I commented.

okay I thought I did.

Cristiano

Actually, playing the semantics game about it is what is ignorant and stupid, Gigs. Calling it "copyright infringement" is not purely accurate either. No, it is not like physical theft where the item is gone, but it is not simply copyright infringement either when people are losing income.

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BJ Tunwarm

Worth pointing out the software industry has had to deal with content theft for years and still is going. Enough people are honest enough or lazy enough to pay the price. I suspect the reality is people who would copy bot stuff wouldn't ever pay for it the first place.

Of course that box being tossed around at Burning Life takes it to a whole new level. Even an honest person is going to have a hard time saying no when someone walks up to you and hands it to you for free.

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Gigs

Camille Serpentine

Crap, I posted twice since my original showed up, then was gone. now it's back and the second is gone.
ARGH!

Gigs

It is not theft. Period. The semantic game was started by entertainment industry people who wanted to push the idea that casual copying was some kind of high crime.

It is simply copyright infringement. It doesn't matter if it's a small player or a big corporation that loses money.

Tengu Yamabushi

Note the URL:

http://nwn.blogs.com/nwn/2009/10/content-theft-challenge.html

So... who are you addressing?

Cristiano

There needs to be an additional term for it, because calling it simply copyright infringement is preposterous.