Robin Linden speaks to residents on current issues.

Robin Linden recently held a meeting with residents where a number of current issues were brought to the table. She explained in detail why the two characters in the German video were banned, and how EU laws were not compatible with the type of activities that were taking place within Second Life.

Robin Linden: there are several countries in the EU where the virtual depiction of sex with minors is taken as actual child pornography
Robin Linden: This is a *criminal* offense.
Robin Linden: Tiberious: until the jurisdictional issues are worked out we have to be mindful of laws that will affect our business.
Robin Linden: the alternative is to block all Germans I suppose, but then we'd miss Tao
...
Dreams Lightcloud: i blieve age play is against TOS, isnt it?
Robin Linden: They were banned because they were engaged in sexual behavior where one was playing a minor child.

She believed the very existence of SL hinged on how age-play and the likes were treated within Second Life, she also believes that banning Germany or any other country where these activities were illegal was not the way to do it. Given that the majority of active Second Life residents come from Europe, with Germany being the number two most active country right behind United States.

With the creation of the age and identity validation system, she hopes that in the future the liability of such illegal activities could be passed onto the land owners rather than Linden Lab.

Robin Linden: and we are working with the lawyers to find out if it's possible to pass liability to the land owners if they want to do something which is against the law in their country

The exact way this could be implemented was not mentioned, but it might be that in a future update LL would allow land/estate owners to ban people by country or region?

She also goes on to explain why certain words have been unusable within the advertisement system, such words as "Loli*" and "age-play" are already banned along with the word "casino" (strangely most casino's are now listing their establishments as "kasino" instead). This change does affects many people who sell products based on the "Gothic Lolita" fashion design.

Ryozu Kojima: What is LL's position on the fact that this will affect totally unrelated businesses, such as "Gothic Lolita" fashion?
Robin Linden: we can't let the actions of a few put the entire service at jeopardy

Robin also mentions that the new age and identity verification system would also have real life gender verification, which would show up in the in-game profiles. A thread posted on the Second Life forum by concerned residents debate what the implications of this might be in the long run.

Robin Linden: Brenda - should someone decide they want to authenticate their RL gender it would show up in their profile.

A question was asked by Khamon regarding Meta Linden's recent buhaha on this blog, which went as follows:

You (Khamon): If we're shifting topics, Robin, is LL going to enforce a policy concerning inworld material such as chat logs posted to independent blogs and websites?

Robin Linden: We have a policy about Lindens posting on external blogs. It wasn't followed.

You (Khamon): Meta apparently told someone to delete material from their blog because posting it was a TOS violation. That's since been retracted but I wonder if she was acting on a new policy that just hasn't been published yet.

Robin Linden: No old policy, new Linden who hadn't read it, I think.

Thus, it appears our friendly abusive Meta Linden, did not read the established policy on posting on external blogs, and did not understand the Second Life ToS. Furthermore, she just randomly decided to use the power in her "Linden" name to threaten and harass a resident. It was also known that she's not in the abuse department, and that her activities as documented in this blog were all personal grudges... very disturbing.

Linden Lab should make it so that this kind of abuse does not happen in the future, and should implement some sort of internal review board as seen in eve-online.

A full text of this meeting is available at Second Citizen.