Rolling Stone article

There's an interesting article in Rolling Stone about Second Life. The article includes a noteworthy quote from Linden Labs founder Philip Rosedale:

“I’d like to see it get to a point where it’s all irreversible. It’s all a little bit too under our control. That power shouldn’t be in our hands. We don’t want to make mistakes. For me, there’s a critical point that we’ll get to where everyone can take this stuff and run with it.”

What makes this attitude remarkable is that most people already feel that Linden Labs has a pretty small footprint in Second Life as is. According to a 2004 Linden Labs paper in the New York Law School Law Review, well over 99% of content in Second Life is user-created, and it takes a fairly laissez-faire attitude toward resident activity.

Of course, it's also worth noting that Jim Saxton, JEC's Ranking Minority member, was quoted about how taxation of virtual worlds remains unresolved:

“Virtual economies are still at the early stage of development, so it is difficult to predict how tax policy toward them might evolve over the next five or ten years.”