Kitely Forums

I know this is going to open a can of worms, but I hope to get it out of our system before the next community meeting. So we can talk about more useful things at the meeting. (Not underwear again!) At the last Kitely Community Meeting there was a lot of discussion about setting the maturity ratings on our worlds, but I have not seen any discussion about it since.

Ilan seemed to be suggesting that the way to avoid trouble was to always mark your world as Adult, unless you are there to moderate what is going on and immediately ban people who violate the ratings. Here is the sort of scenario I think Ilan was concerned about:

• You mark your World as General.
  A teacher brings a class of children to visit your world.
  Someone hypergrids in naked, runs back and forth in front of the kids cussing, f*rn*c*t*ng with his girlfriend where the kids can see, she does an erotic pole dance on the mast of your sailboat.
  The teacher is fired for taking kids to such a dangerous place on the Internet.
  Other teachers refuse to take kids anywhere in Kitely any more.
  The parents decide their kids are scarred for life and look for someone to sue.
  Who is responsible for this place? Ilan says the owner of the world, that is YOU.
  You get sued. Ilan gets sued. Amazon gets sued for running Kitely on their servers. Al Gore gets sued for inventing the Internet.

Ilan seems to imply that the only defense against this scenario is to always mark your world as Adult. Then if sh*t happens people cannot say they didn't expect it. Most of the rest of us objected to using the Adult rating, because it means “SEX HERE!” in SL. We are not putting, nor plan to ever put sexually explicit material on our worlds. Why must we mark our worlds as Adult just on the off chance that someone we don't know will show up and do something offensive? There was discussion about adding a new maturity rating that means “come at your own risk” (or “Don't Sue Me”) but of course the servers and the viewers only support those three maturity ratings. (For a definition of the ratings, see http://community.secondlife.com/t5/Engl ... ction_.1.1)

Here is another scenario:

• You are the manager of a brick-and-mortar Target store in the USA.
  A teacher brings a class of students to visit your store.
  Someone runs in the store naked and cussing.
  The security guards jump on him, throw a blanket over him, drag him outside, the cops come and take him away.
  The teacher is fired for taking kids to such a dangerous place.
  The parents decide their kids are scarred for life and look for someone to sue.
  Who is responsible for this place? The manager of the store.
  The manager gets sued. Target gets sued. Al Gore gets sued for inventing the Internet.

I'm guessing that Ilan will claim that the presence of the security guards makes a difference, and the process stops there. But I am not so sure. This is the USA, a country founded by a bunch of lawyers, for a bunch of lawyers, run by a bunch of lawyers. They made sure you could always hire one of them and sue anybody, at any time, for anything. The only way to reduce the risk to zero is to close all your worlds, cancel all your accounts, stay off the Internet, go live in the woods, in a cabin without electricity. Then the bear shows up.

For myself, I am willing to take some risk in life. I think the probability that someone will show up and do something offensive is low. I think the probability of getting sued for that is already close to zero. Not zero, but close enough. I am marking my world as General and leaving it that way. I may put up a sign at the landing spot indicating that this world is rated General and suitable for anyone, including children. If you violate the standards here, you will be banned.

I have never actually seen anyone hypergridding about nekkid. OpenSIm generally doesn't attract much in the way of griefing/trolling presumably because it's no fun without much of an audience. Our desolate emptiness shall save us!

I don't want to make my world Adult because there's nothing actually Adult going on there, and I don't want to *encourage* people to start doing the business with their lovers on my land. Not that this is very likely either, but there is indeed the stigma of "ooh, Adult land, nudge nudge, wink wink, we know what sort of perversions you get up to there!" My land is Moderate at the moment so I can swear and sell cigarettes but that's about as far as it goes.

So I assume Kitely has a younger audience than the rest of OpenSim? I assume this because of the painted-on underwears and suchlike. That's fine, but we can't always think of only the children lest the adults decide to leave.

at least in Kitely it is possible to make scripted ahem, attachments vanish on non-adult/private worlds easily enough. Hopefully that will restrict exposure to inappropriate prims.

Hm, wonder why that isn't standard.

i vote for this "Al Gore gets sued for inventing the Internet."!!!

How about putting "General - Please respect the "child-safe" nature of this world." in the world description that shows in the viewer header?

I finally went with "Please note the "safe for work" nature of this world." Good point, Dundridge.

Don't care about child safe, "teacher safe" or "safe for work" sounds MUCH better.

It looks as though people feel quite strongly about this, given how quickly responses have been added.

Count me in as another who is unhappy with the suggestion that worlds should be inappropriately labelled "Adult" when they are deliberately created as "General" content.

Would the bear be naked?

Anyways, I will also keep my world general although I just finished my Japanese Onsen (spa). I will put out some free fundoshi for people to wear while taking a bath. I can't believe taking a bath will be tagged adult.

Btw, thank you Kayaker. I am very happy this discussion is fired up again because I am a little bit nervous about this. SL drove a lot of people away because of the changes in TOS.

Ami

I'm pretty sure that image would count as a nsfw type thing.

Count me in as one of the people that hates the idea of marking my world as Adult just to escape the consequences of someone else breaking the TOS on my world. Whatever Adult is supposed to mean on Kitely, just about everyone, everywhere, not just in SL, associates "Adult" with sex. I decided to take a wait and see approach to see how an issue like that is actually addressed.

So, Kayaker, are you saying that I might actually get sued if someone goes streaking across my world naked while children are present? I would think that it would be the person that went streaking!

Sherrie Melody wrote:So, Kayaker, are you saying that I might actually get sued if someone goes streaking across my world naked while children are present? I would think that it would be the person that went streaking!

What if the "children" present turn out to be 50 year old men playing kids? Who is going to sue who then? Should we hire detectives?

Ami