Third Party Viewer Policy

News

Linden Lab supports an open platform with opportunity for all. The flexibility of the content creation tools and open viewer allow for great creativity and innovation, but that openness also carries a responsibility for those developing on our platform and those using third party tools with our platform.

In our recent blog post Our Content Management Roadmap we addressed the responsibility Residents have to respect the intellectual property rights of others inside or outside of Second Life, and we urged developers of third party copying tools to adopt standard industry practices that protect intellectual property. Similarly, developers of third party Second Life viewers must act responsibly in how they develop and distribute their viewers. We are currently working on revisions to our policies regarding the use and management of third party viewers. To support those policy revisions, we will be implementing tools and programs to help us protect our Residents and their content, and enable them to have better, more predictable Second Life experiences.

Resident Responsibilities

There are currently many third parties who create and distribute viewers. Most of these viewers are useful because they are innovative and many enable a more customized Second Life experience for those who use them; however, it appears that some of those third party viewers also contain functionality that is being used to copy content without the right to do so, facilitate griefing, enable phishing, collect user data without clear disclosure of such practices, and distribute software that contains harmful elements. When our revised policy goes into effect, any viewer containing functionality that can be used to impede our efforts to manage Second Life will not be tolerated. We will collaborate with developers to work towards a clear set of expectations and guidelines; however, we will also, if necessary, take action against those who actively seek to disrupt our service or violate our Terms of Service.

Residents who use third party viewers with the functionality described above to violate our Terms of Service or Community Standards, will be warned and then suspended from the service.

What will Linden Lab do?

We will create new guidelines and policies outlining the standards that third party viewers must meet in order to connect to our platform, as well as tools and programs to help the developers of third party viewers and the wider community learn about and comply with those guideline. One of the tools will be a "viewer registry" that will allow developers to list their viewer in a third party viewer directory maintained by Linden Lab, identify the features of their viewer, and represent to the Second Life community that it complies with Linden Lab's guidelines for third party viewers. Over the next few weeks we will be holding a series of 'brown bag' meetings designed as working groups to help us with these challenging issues. In addition we will have a forum for feedback to help all of us make good choices going forward.

We're sure we will get many great ideas, more probably than we are able to implement, and we may not be able to use them all right away, but we will evaluate and incorporate Resident input. Please participate and make your voice heard! Watch this blog for more information on how you can get involved.