Amendments are hard, so how much easier is it to get judges to invent ‘rights’ out of thin air, and make rulings according the their consciences instead of according to the law?

When you start going down that road, and we are well down that road already, you may as well not have a Constitution at all.

You do not have a constitutional right to free speech. Your government (local and federal) is simply prohibited from making laws that would make your speech less free. Anyone who isn’t your government can set what rules they like in their own demesne.

‘Common carriers’ are not the US government and no amount of handwaving or bloviating will make the First Amendment apply to them.

But massive social media services like Twitter? Second Life? etc.? They serve as a public commons, as a common carrier, and it is really of grave concern that these public commons where more and more people spend their time because they’re not in RL public commons have more restrictions than their town halls would have.

IN fact, I didn’t do anything wrong. Lindens at the time said I didn’t violate the TOS. What happened is their NDA players rebelled and jammed their little fanboyz fingers on the AR button so many times that the Lindens felt they “had to act” because “thecommmuuuuunity” wanted it. They said they did this “for business reasons” and they’re right. I criticized the very top selling feted inner core residents who brought them the most publicity, press, and income and with whom in some cases they had pet projects, private deals, NDAs. So, they were right, by their lights, to act against their own TOS for “business reasons”.

Interestingly, I am now allowed back on the Linden blogs and new threaded comments. They overhauled the web page and dropped the old bans deliberately. I don’t change anything about how I post. I may not last long, who knows. It’s funny to think about how the mighty have fallen, some of the people the Lindens so fiercely protected from my legitimate criticism over the favouritism shown to them are long out of SL or not visible anymore or has-beens. One of the is a founder of OpenSim, the SL competitor.

Basically, getting data on electronic communications should have the same restrictions as getting a wiretap, and it currently isn’t. The only way the people running MMOGs can get in trouble is if they’re abusive in the way that they collect and use information streaming over their services, and it’s really not hard to make the changes to the service to avoid that; purge chat logs after a given (short) interval, make it illegal to access them without consent or for clearly defined service related issues, and then only to the extent that is necessary and everything’ll be fine.

The more important thing is to protect this data from government and law enforcement in the same way that other priveledged communications are; otherwise you bypass all privacy protections as more people start using the net related services for communication instead of the telephone.

I’d say there’s also the extreme version of Profit, where it’s deemed that maximizing profit is the utmost value of all. In fact, I’d argue that Profit tends to be more totalitarian by default, because it’s more direct and focused, it’s only complexities seem to be when it butts up against Rights.

Now, you could say I’m skewed, that I’m clearly in the Rights category, but in all honesty I’d like more balance. The presentation of this triangle is such that the balance leans more toward Rights because Rights really has two points on the triangle together with Drama. I’d posit that the weight, culturally speaking (Western / Our culture) is far heavier on Profit, because even those on the side of Rights respect Profit to such a large degree.

Whatever happened to game developers with passion for games, fun and social experiments? Rather than a means to and ends at a dollar? I do like the reference to Raph Koster’s attempt at balance.

Profit’s biggest problem is the lack of respect for the longterm and bigger industry-wide picture. Cashing in constantly is detrimental to almost everything.

robusticus :
It is in their shareholders’ best interest to support the mod community, end of story.

Only when it makes them money each quarter.

It’s debatable whether the mod community does that or not. It could be argued, that supporting the mod community actually costs them more money in support costs than they would ever earn from it.

Personally, mods made me play Wow far longer than I normally would have. But its hard to equate my 2 months of extra retention against the cost of 6 support calls (assuming $5 dollars per call) for those same tools.