On Saturday 5 July 2008 10:00:24 Roger Hicks wrote: > On Sat, Jul 5, 2008 at 8:52 PM, ihope <[EMAIL PROTECTED]> wrote: > > Or just give it some money. Is anybody willing to donate their estate to > > Agora? > > I've been toying with the idea of running a "Jackpot Nomic" for a > while, where to become a player you have to pay a certain amount of > real money into the "pot" (it of course would need to be > administered). I figure there is two ways it could go:
There was a game show like this, see whowantstobe.co.uk. I was thinking about an Agoran treasury a while back, and here's what I thought of: A corporation could be drawn up under the jurisdiction of some sovereign nation. Its charter would include sufficient self-amendment clauses that it would qualify as an Agoran R2200 nomic. This corporation (let's call it Agora's Purse) would then be made an Agoran protectorate. Assuming Agora's Purse were created in a jurisdiction that granted it the ability to own assets, this would in effect make Agora able to control "real-world" assets. Most likely the Agora's Purse charter would only be able to act by the will of Agora, unless of course it were amended otherwise. In order to raise funds to put into Agora's Purse, we might: + Ask for donations. This is unlikely to be particularly effective, as there really aren't that many people who care about Agora. + Explicitly "sell" game benefits (currency? VVLOD? registration?) This is probably too distasteful to actually implement, but it's worth at least mentioning. If this were to be actually implemented, the most likely thing to work and be acceptable (in my opinion) would be to sell judicial leniency or "indulgences". For example, perhaps a sentence of APOLOGY could be waived for $10, or the set of prescribed words shortened for $1 each. Even with this, however, it's probably a bad idea. RMI generally creates a lot of bad blood in online gaming, and we really can't afford to lose players over something like this. + Sell hardcopy mailing list archives, or AWJ issues, or other non- essential "feelies". This is potentially the coolest in my opinion, but could possibly run into serious copyright issues. It's not clear who "owns" most of the text that makes up Agora under any non-Agoran jurisdiction, and I don't think that the implicit social contract that allows us to run websites like the CotC database automatically extends to for-profit ventures. Attempting to actually secure explicit copyright disclaimers would involve tracking down more ex-players than there currently are players, and people have a strong tendency to disappear from the internet -- see the large number of bouncing addresses in the Registrar's list of watchers. I wish this could be made to work, but it potentially could cause even more (and worse) bad blood than selling indulgences. Does anyone know enough about "real world" copyright law to tell if a publication like the AWJ, which includes no verbatim text from other players, but only discusses in-game events in depth, would infringe on anything sticky? Pavitra
