A number of factors lately seem to have contributed to increasing the friction between different nationalities and cultures of residents within Second Life.

Firstly, of course, we have the ... robust nature of some of the political extrusions into Second Life - largely harmless and inconsequential wars between small numbers of ideological groups - though no less deadly serious to the participants.

SecondLifeCasinos.com entrepreneur SL Loonie is launching a new way to screen your real life and SL movies into Second Life - by paying for them. In a world of cheap server space and free hosting options for Quicktime movies, such as blip.tv, I have to wonder how she plans to profit from this venture. Her prices range from 5 dollars all the way up to 80 dollars USD for 30 days of viewing. In addition, she has hosting and sponsorship options for parties. Maybe she didn't get the memo that residents have been doing this for free since the movie stream was introduced?

On the plus side, she's also hosting a contest where you can win L prizes and free screenings of your film. They are looking for the Tube2SL YouTube Film Producer of the Year 2007. What does this mean? They will take your work, which has already been compressed down to a low quality flash file and download it, then re-encode it to Quicktime format. I see Oscar potential. Or do I? The quality is pretty bad so I can't actually tell.

I'm all for showing off your hard work in Second Life, but I simply cannot endorse a pay model when there are so many other choices out there. If you're genuinely interested in earning the 25,000L price and seeing your movie highly pixelated on the big screen, you can get the rules and info here. The contest ends on September 14th, with the winners being announced on the 29th and 30th. Will you be participating?

As reported, LL has placed a ban on gambling in SL, which has caused casinos gridwide to shut their doors, grumbling. However, this Reuters news article reports that many operators have simply gone underground, choosing to operate in private, similar to the speakeasies of the 20s and 30s in the United States during its Prohibition period.

Robin Linden has said 'We'll do the best we can to enforce the policy,' which has created doubt in the mind of the representative speakeasy owner of the article. 'No real player wants to be a snitch,' claims 'Miss C'.

I'm looking forward to seeing EliotNess Linden and his crack team swoop down upon any and all abusers of LL law. Voe-dee-oh-doe!

(Via http://secondlife.reuters.com)

Linden Lab have just released a FAQ that is intended to clarify the new gambling policy. Discussions with Second Life users suggest that the items clarified in the FAQ are the ones that our focus group members didn't really need clarification to, and that a few issues are still open.

Depending on how you choose to read both the policy and this new FAQ, items such as the various *ingo games may be prohibited (which are generally analagous to poker in terms of the balances of chance and skill). Still and all, the FAQ does serve the useful purpose of clarifying the legal applicability. The full FAQ is reproduced below the fold.

We've started to get a new baseline for transactions and LindeX exchanges since the gambling ban was imposed, ignoring days such as RFL, days with significant downtime etc.

Since the ban, and excluding obviously bad days, we've got 5 days, giving us a mean transactions of $1,194,400.00 ± $25,793.41. For the five days before the ban we've got $1,682,600.00 ± $137,794.41. So, daily in-world transactions are down by about $488,000, and despite the short baseline, there is a statistically significant difference (p<0.01).

Looking at LindeX daily trading, since the ban the average is $214,600.00 ± $18,091.43, before the ban it was $230,200.00 ± $20,921.28. Although there is a difference of just under $16,000 per day, there is no significant difference in these values - indeed if you rank the numbers across before and after, the second and third quietest days on LindeX were BEFORE the ban.
(continues)

Yesterday in Second Life we:

• Spent US$1,201,000 at an exchange rate of L$267.3 to US$1
• Exchanged US$231,000 at an average of US$9,600.0 per hour.
• Market buys were US$166,000
• Market sales were US$64,000
• Limit-limit buys were US$500
• The busiest time was at 2pm when about US$19,000 was exchanged.
• The quietest time was 7am when about US$0 was exchanged.

No obvious grid issues yesterday. We'll try to establish a new baseline, but transactions seems to be about US$500,000 lower than approximate baseline from the week before the gambling ban and financial institution's difficulties.

Taking effect immediately, Linden Lab has announced a new policy that is uncharacteristically specific, clear and unambiguous. The letter of it is clear, and aligns with the intent. In summary form, the new policy is not to allow gambling, period, and defines it pretty clearly.

There's not a lot of wiggle-room on the new policy. Such things as Baccarat, Blackjack, Craps, Faro, Keno, Pachinko, Pai Gow, Poker, Roulette, Sic Bo, Slot machines and more are simply not permitted as of right now. 'sploders and raffleballs are covered by this too. This is more than just a simple bar on advertising.

The UK's 2005 Gambling Act comes into full force this September, with direct impact on many MMOs and Virtual Worlds who serve citizens of the UK.

"In September the remaining provisions of the Gambling Act 2005 will finally come into force. Its main purpose is to update the law on gambling, which in some cases is over 50 years old and is therefore inadequate for the modern world," Campbell Hooper's Alex Chapman told GamesIndustry.biz.

"This is because the new law creates a new single definition for 'Gambling', which includes playing a game of chance for a prize, and makes it a criminal offence to provide facilities for gambling without having and complying with an operators licence," explained Chapman. (our emphasis)

Last October, president George W Bush signed a law called the Internet Gambling Payments ban, restricting financial services and institutions of various stripes from making payments to online gambling sites. The legislation seems, thus far to have been relatively ineffectual.

Today, a House of Representatives panel said it would be holding a hearing on Friday to examine whether Internet Gambling could, in fact, be regulated. Not an unusual decision, considering. Most legal historians will tell you that every unenforced or unenforceable law weakens the entire structure of law, and can provide many relatively contemporary examples.

Additionally, Committee Chairman Barney Frank has already introduced a bill that would effectively lift the payments ban, while provisioning for the licensing and regulation of online gambling companies.

Whatever happens, you can be sure that it will impact on the Second Life economy, the present ban on casino advertising notwithstanding.

In a thought-provoking article over at Online Spin, Max Kalehoff lists three reasons why, contrary to popular belief, gambling and sex in SL are beneficial to its growth. His points seem to be:

1. Sinful activity attracts interested parties in large numbers, which swells SL's population
2. Traditionally, it's been these activities which have generated innovations in hardware and software, benefiting everyone
3. The evolution of the practices of the gambling and sex industries forces similar evolution of legislation and policing standards in RL

How that last point benefits SL specifically is unclear to me, but perhaps one of our canny readers can enlighten me.

(Via mediapost.com)

Adam Reuters reports the increasing attention that SL casinos are receiving from Federal authorities, at the invitation of LL. While it's still unclear what LL's role is to be regarding the monitoring of gambling areas in SL, it does seem obvious that any system that allows for the free exchange of virtual dollars to RL currency won't remain unregulated for long.

From the article: "There are millions of registered accounts and tens of millions of different objects in Second Life, there is simply no way for us to monitor content prospectively even if we wanted to," said VP for Business Affairs Ginsu Yoon. That's a rather weak argument for the company to make; a simple search for gambling yields a significant number of targets. Obviously it won't be comprehensive, but it would be a start, if the government decides that LL is culpable for any and all such activity taking place in SL.

At the heart of it all, gambling is currently illegal in the US, which would appear to argue that it's illegal in SL as well, given that its servers reside on American soil. Without the numbers on who's making RL money from wagers, however, this remains a moot point. Given its traditional policy of non-interference, it's likely that LL would prefer to remain out of the picture, but it remains to be seen if they'll be afforded the opportunity.