Alto's Blog

Earlier this month Jack Linden announced that "network advertising" will be banned on the SL mainland starting from October 1st and that new policies regarding this blight on the landscape will be announced.

He said, "There will be a number of phases to this work that will include policy changes, land recycling, zoning and urban regeneration programs."
One of the policies will involve issuing advertising "licenses" with restrictions, to allow "legitimate advertising."

Superficially, this sounds like a good idea, and a first step towards reclaiming the messed-up mainland areas of SL. Absent hard details of just what the rules will be and how they will be implemented, a lot of questions remain.

The question that bothers me the most is the issue of "land cutting" - creating little 16 meter squares of land to float nasty ad towers over, or to make life miserable in the immediate neighborhood, or to extort money from owners of adjacent plots.

Raise or lower the little piece of land to the maximum and suddenly the area looks like it has taken some artillery shells, with holes and mounds scattered about at random. Add a glowing cube or some other visual blight (with or without an advertisement) and you have a nice way to make an otherwise pretty neighborhood look awful.

Sell a 512 plot but "hide" a 16 plot in the middle or at a corner (put a tree on it, or drop your big "land for sale" sign over the 16 to hide it), then when the unwary new owner discovers she cannot place a house on the 512, ask for lots of L$ for the 16. Do this with larger plots, too. Too much of this extortion goes on in SL at the moment.

Don't believe me? Use GVURL to search for 16m plots for sale and look at the prices, then look at where they are (many are within or at the edges of larger plots for sale). The land cutters who do this use multiple accounts to hide the fact that the large plot and the little cut are owned by the same person.

Each time this issue is raised there ensues increasingly strident argument in the SL forum. On one side there are well-meaning folk like the Arbor Project and Timo's "Ad Zoo" who have been working for a long time to clean up the mainland. On the other are the land cutters who vehemently oppose any restrictions, usually claiming such restrictions would be an assault on their right to free speech.

Also frequently raised in this context is the question, why allow cutting land into such small chunks? That question provokes people who operate rentals in SL. They often cut up their own land into small parcels to better manage things like prim allocation to renters. Residential renters may want their favorite audio and video channels on the parcel they rent. Commercial renters (shop stalls, which might be quite small), obviously want the rights to rez objects, run scripts, etc on the little parcels they rent. So rental operators absolutely and vehemently oppose a ban on cutting mainland parcels into little plots.

It seems to me that there is a fairly simple solution. Continue to allow small parcels to be carved out of mainland land. All the way down to the infamous 16 meter plots. Just don't ever allow the sale of plots smaller than, say, 512 meters.

Seems to me, that would solve the problem for rental operators and it would take away the "easy" cut-and-extort or cut-and-grief-by-making-ugly-land games. Managing the process would not cost the Lindens staff resources. Sure, the cutters will probably find a new way to "game" the system, but at least they would be forced to work with a minimum 512 plot size and plots that size are easy for neighbors to hide visually.

What do you think?

Read Jack Linden's announcement here and then follow the link near the end to see the forum flame wars.