Nobody should be surprised in any way that this doesn't work for long. What Linden Lab has tried to do is replicate the atom-world scarcity rules in a bit-world environment. They're right - but is the Second Life economy worth saving? And since there's a direct conversion between in-game money and real-world money, anything that weakens the SL economy threatens the real-world economic livelihoods of many SL residents. If the ability to make copies continues to exist, these vendors argue, the basis of the SL economy will be destroyed. As a result, apparently over a hundred in-game designers have shut down in protest, and threats of lawsuits and copyright-infringement actions are flying. It's not tedious or challenging, it's a click of a button. No matter that everyone can have the capability to make limitless numbers of in-game objects - unless you can design something that other people want, you're just making digital junk.īut with CopyBot, these limitations are less meaningful, because it eliminates the barriers to making your own duplicates of other people's designs. Although the only "raw material" involved in the creation of Second Life goods is the memory & storage space needed on the SL server, the capability to design desirable objects serves as a market-generating form of scarcity. The Second Life internal economy was predicated on the notion that designers could produce in-game objects that they could then sell these objects would ostensibly be scarce (in the economic sense) because the designer could put limits on how many copies s/he would sell, and because - in principle - other residents couldn't make copies except by tedious efforts to reproduce a design by hand. James "Hamlet" Au offers a recap of the situation at his New World Notes site be sure to read the comments to get a sense of how upset many SL residents are about this program.Īs Sven Johnson suggests, the important story here isn't about Second Life per se, but about the clash between a scarcity-based economy and an abundance-based world. well, just about anything, including clothing and objects other Second Life denizens have created for sale. The big news from the metaverse this last week has been " CopyBot," an application that allows a Second Life user to duplicate.
![second life copybot stopper second life copybot stopper](https://secondlifecopybot.com/ckeditor_upload/uploads/1593324981_P2begiwtq516Jr2.png)
The rules we come up with to grapple with virtual objects of real value will haunt us for decades to come, if we're not careful. When you are able to manipulate atoms as easily as you do bits, the rules of the bit world apply.
![second life copybot stopper second life copybot stopper](http://3.bp.blogspot.com/_fEglkkU__oM/SSILnDiWqkI/AAAAAAAAD4c/MR8PT_MgGRc/s280/Growing+pains.jpg)
Two related quotes from previous Open the Future posts: