Update, April 13th: the full transcript of Ebbe’s VWBPE 2014 address is now available.

On Friday April 11th, Ebbe Altberg, Linden Lab’s CEO addressed a pack amphitheatre at the 2014 Virtual Worlds Best Practice in Education (VWBPE) conference in Second Life. Some 200 people were in attendance in what was around a 90-minute session which comprises an opening statement from Ebbe, followed by a Q&A / discussion session.

I’ll have a full transcript of the meeting available shortly. However, as a part of his opening statement, Ebbe made a series of comments relating to the Lab’s Terms of Service, which I think are worth highlighting on their own. So here is a full transcript of his comments on the subject:

Terms of Service. I am working with my Legal Counsel to try to try to figure out how we can make it more obvious – or very obvious – that the creators of the content own the content, and we obviously have no intent of ever stealing your content or profiting off of your content independently of the creators in some fashion.

The current terms might indicate that we might somehow have some plan to steal people’s content and somehow profit from it for ourselves, without benefitting the creator, and that’s obviously not our intent at all. It would be very damaging to our business if we started to behave in that way because this whole platform is all about the content you all create. And if you can’t do that, and trust that it is yours, that’s obviously a problem. So I’m working on that, and I can ask you right now to trust us that we’re not going to do what the current clause might suggest we’re going to do, but we’re working on some simple tweaks to the language to make that more explicit.

We also have no interest in locking you in; any content that you create, we feel you should be able to export, and take and save and possibly if you want to move to another environment or OpenSim, that should be possible. So we’re not trying to lock you in either. Obviously, it’s very important to us to get content both in and out, so I just want to put that right out there.

Quite what will come out of this obviously remains to be seen, as will whether or not the changes successfully quell all concerns. However, it would appear that the wheels are finally in motion, and that hopefully, an equitable resolution will be forthcoming.