As reported first on both Your2ndPlace and SL Reports (in that order according to my RSS reader) companies are abandoning WSE and heading over to ISE. They are all heading to ISE as well, none to AVIX.
In an entirely separate event, I happened to meet someone who has a company listed on AVIX which is currently trading shares at about half of the normal value. He directly, if without any supporting evidence, said "the cashing out of the gamblers is to blame" and was confident his shares would pick up. Confident enough to recommend them to everyone else.

In the meantime Nobody Fugazi has drawn together an interesting mix of topics to make some comments about transparency in dealings, everyone from LL down is touched within his article, and it's hard to see flaws in his logic. SL Reports has elucidated its transparency policy in line with SLEC guidelines - sadly I can't find a link to the actual guidelines anywhere. Meanwhile, an anonymous comment suggests WSE is editing (I would suggest the word they should use is censoring) critical comments from companies - you can't easily test all of these out, but google has cached some of the entries referred to, which you can no longer find directly... oops.

Phillip is rather regularly suggesting we, the residents of SL, need to police ourselves. Whilst I'm still not sure how we are supposed to enforce any such steps, there is, it appears, starting to be a consensus on steps the financial markets should take to make themselves more reputable.

Interesting times in finance in SL.

Second Life residents have seen that Linden Lab responds to petitions/open letters, so there's another one starting to do the rounds. This one addresses the radical shift in Linden Lab's Second Life governance policies.

Will Linden Lab keep hopping with responses every time an open letter reaches any kind of critical mass? Or will they choose to try to shut that door again?

Either way, read on for the full text of the letter.

Silent changes, secret rules?

Some Second Life residents are discovering today that Linden Lab has silently removed content. No, we're not talking about your Mute lists being erased again (though this has apparently also happened). We're talking parcel names and descriptions.

Linden Lab has changed many parcel names and parcel descriptions to "Description removed: Please see blog post Advertising Policy". Doing a quick search of sites reveals about a hundred or so, at present. But there are problems with how it was done.

The New York Assembly passed a bill on the 30th of May which would make selling or renting video games with mature content to minors a Class E felony. This is about the tenth time a US non-federal legislature has passed such a bill, and each and every one has been struck down by a Federal judge on first amendment grounds, because it is - basically - censorship.

Making this a class E felony makes video game boobies and pixellated mutilation fall into the same class as riot in the first degree, criminal anarchy, first degree aggravated harassment, bigamy, incest and wiretapping.

US citizens in the audience, I'd like you to think about three things. The people proposing these bills know they are unconstitutional, but they burn your money on them anyway. The fact that these bills cost a lot of your money to draft, pass and strike down is actually not the most important issue here.

As posted previously, Anshe Chung had all videos of her being pelted with prim penises taken off of YouTube, citing DMCA issues. However, apparently some legal experts have spoken with them, as Guntram Graef, Anshe's RL husband, has now retracted the complaint.

"I would like to make it clear that I regret filing DMCA claims in this case, because the real issue at hand wasn't at all about copyright," Graef said. "I didn't realize that some people would misunderstand this as a censorship attempt, which it definitely was not." Interestingly, the video hasn't returned, as YouTube now says it was removed for " ... a Terms of Service violation"

Can anyone pinpoint what, in the TOS, this might violate?

(Via ZDNet)

When I was invited to blog for SLI, one of the very attractive parts of it was that despite the blog being owned and operated by AOL, nothing was sacrosanct. I was told that I would be entirely free to blog anything that I wanted to blog, and that would include criticising SL, Linden Lab, AOL, whatever I saw fit.

I have always liked organisations that can accept criticism, and which are big enough to allow criticism of their operation. I think it is a mark of a mature organisation that it can allow others to criticise and respond openly to that criticism. The Quakers attracted me with one of their Advices and Queries, which are things for members to think about, not proscriptive things-one-must-do, which suggested: "Think it possible you may be mistaken". For "you" read you, me, anyone and us.

I understand that blogs have to ban people who persistently post porn or commercial links or advertisements to viagra etc. But I hate the idea that we have banned someone for making comments we disagree with on the comments to the blog, especially when it seems to me that some of the postings concerned deliberately provoked the comments.

I wasn't informed that we had banned Prokofy; I discovered this from his own blog. I haven't heard yet the justification, and suppose I should restrain myself on this until I have received a reply to my request for information, in case there is something I haven't understood about the situation. This is supposed to be a team blog, but I have not been part of this decision, and I want to make that clear, because it conflicts with my belief in freedom of speech and not censoring people who say things that we find disagreeable.

I am not sure that I will be able to stay here if censorship and not allowing criticism has become part of SLI. You may well find me migrating to VTOR if I don't get satisfactory answers to my questions.