Intlibber Brautigan: "Linden Labs is Costing Me My Mortgage"

Intlibber Brautigan appeared on the MBC News on November 2nd on a segment about the OpenSpace Policy Change. Brautigan, and within his capacity as CEO of the Ancapistan Captial Exchange (ACE), has been a major supporter of the ~SOS~ (Save Our Sims) campaign that has waged protests across Second Life and initiated a Lindex Currency Exchange Boycott since the October 27th announcement.

Brautigan's first comments summed up very succinctly the ~SOS~ position, "The reasons (for the price increase) are baseless, extreme price hikes people can't handle"

Since the initiation of the Lindex Currency Exchange Boycott, the ACE Currency Exchange (ACE^2) has seen a massive influx of volume, including a large number of new active accounts registered at ACE.
Brautigan went at length explaining the various areas of concern within the Openspace Policy change.

"Private estate owners pay higher tiers and our higher tiers subsidize the customer service that Linden Lab provides mainland land owners--they get support for less per cost than we do. they get better access to noobies coming into SL, better access to things like the showcase on SecondLife.com, and alot of other advantages beyond that and frankly the Openspace prim limit increase equalized things a bit. While (BNT:ACE) didn't start off with a lot of Openspaces, we have been slowly converting some of our full sims to Openspace, so right now we have about 17 Openspaces at the moment, and we are not going to be hurt very badly by that. We've discussed this with a number of our residents and some are fine with paying the higher tier, some are not, some we are going to be converting 4 OS's back into full sims and converting these into quarter sim customers. If people do things in an organized manner its not going to be a big deal, but its definitely a problem if the lab is going to charge us $100 to convert Openspaces back to Full Sims when it is something they are essentially forcing onto us by violation of their contract. When you enter into a contract, you don't get to change the terms of the contract you entered into. The biggest offense with this policy is the elimination of grandfathering. Personally most of my SIMs are not grandfathered. A few that I have and I enjoy a small break, and there are a lot of people I compete against that are mostly grandfathered sims, for example Surreal Estates who are almost entirely grandfathered. So I do have a competitive disadvantage to people like that, I also have a competitive disadvantage to Mainland Land Owners who enjoy much lower tier than we do."

Nexeus Fatale was a fellow guest who provided in many cases the "devil's advocate" position, in essence reinforcing the Linden Labs position and at one point tried to downplay the "67%" figure that many in the ~SOS~ movement have used to describe the rate increase.

Brautigan immediately described how marginalizing the issue as "just a $50 increase from $75 to $125" is misleading by explaining, "Trying to poopoo the issue by saying 'it's just $50' is an evasion. BNT may be a large landowner in SL, but in the grand scheme of things, this translates really into that (BNT:ACE) are a mom and pop outfit. If you take the $50 and times that by the 17 openspaces (BNT:ACE) have, that is more money than the mortgage on my real life house. So essentially Linden Labs is costing me my mortgage. So that's nothing minimal in real terms."

In describing the various legal issues that may arise from the policy change, Brautigan surmised, "The major issue is when they changed the prim limit, when they doubled the prim limits, and they started actively promoting these as "personal getaways", not as oceans or wilderness, they promoted it as personal getaways--they sold about 10,000 with that sales marketing premise--and if there was not technical support for using these as a personal getaway, then that was false advertising and by changing the tier prices after they sold all of these os's, that makes it bait and switch which under the law is illegal. And when you are dealing with the fact that many of the Openspace owners are estate owners who are in competition with Linden Labs, then you are dealing with anti-competitive activity which is another area of the law where their actions are illegal, and may even fall under RICO statutes."

The discrepancy in the purchasing of "property" in SL was brought to light by the following Brautigan remark,"They are not selling you a sim. When you pay $1000 for a full sim, or $250 for an openspace, You are not actually buying property ownership to the sim, thats a 'setup' charge. So when you get into a situation where you say "Im done with this sim so buy it back" you don't get any money back that was the "setup" charge. You don't have any sort of equity ownership in the sim that you supposedly own. So the only recourse is "take this sim and shove it". What sort of recourse is that? If your not willing to pay the additional fees "too bad you screwed out of your sim". That is a blatant ripoff."

Nexeus Fatale at this point tried to point out that the "property" purchased by residents represents a real capital and physical resource that Linden Labs much invest in to provide the goods and services to it's customers, to which Brautigan heatedly replied, "They don't own those servers, they are in data centers. They rent those servers from data centers. They don't put any upfront cost into these, because I rent servers in the exact same data centers that they do for my web servers. I did not have to put up any money for them, and I know considering they buy a hell of a lot more than I do they don't put any sort of deposit on them. So all the money they charge for a setup fee goes straight into Linden Labs pockets, not into the captial costs of the servers."

Comparing Linden Labs policy and BNT(ACE) policy Brautigan said, "At BNT we treat our residents land as their land and they are free to resell it as long as tier is paid. We have a lot more respect for property rights in our sims than Linden Lab has for Estate Owners."

In summation, Brautigan proposed his take on the real motivation behind the Linden Labs decision, "The whole point of this policy really is to price people out of their Openspace and push them into buying mainland from Linden Labs and the Land Dealers that work with them."