LL bans 50+ users for copyright infringement

That sidesteps the question. Why would I want police doing this when they could be going after identity theft and credit card fraud? I may lean towards the liberal side of things, but that doesn't mean I want government spending money foolishly.

Every ISP or Net-based service agreement that I have seen forbids the use of the connection or service for abusive purposes.

LL should be contacting the abuse departments of ISPs to report abuse of their servers by users of those ISPs. That would include griefing as well as content theft.

In the world of email, continuing failure by an ISP to slap down abusive users results in blacklisting. Blacklisting by LL isn't a big threat on its own to an ISP though. Perhaps LL could take legal action against ISPs who don't react to abuse reports. The publicity might be more effective than the actual action.


An effective measure could be to refuse connections from all known anonymising proxies. I don't know if there is any valid reason for LL to accept such connections. I doubt, for example, that a whistle-blower needing anonymity would a small specialised platform like SL to state their business.

LL bans 50+ users for copyright infringement!

So, its OK to copy things if you are under 50?

Well done to the Lindens, but they'll probably be back on line with more disposable alts soon enough.
The 50 were probably only this clowns alts and 1 or 2 of his aquaintainces anyway..............

If any of the banned accounts belong to people in the UK, at least, and the details are passed on for investigation over here, the people concerned will doubtless find that having the police turn up at their homes and removing for forensic analysis all the PCs, laptops, disks and memory sticks they can find is quite a salutary experience.

In my experience, such complaints do get investigated -- and rightly so -- because even if eventually the CPS decide not to prosecute, if you know someone's been up to what might turn out, in the great scheme of things, to be pretty trivial mischief with his computer, it's worth taking a look to see what else he might have been doing with it.

Not just California, but all across the US. Just because you're given access to a computer system or network does not mean you can indiscriminately hack your way around the network. It's kinda like trying to gain free reign over an entire hotel building when you are handed the keys to your room.

Fair enough. I'm not necessarily saying that LL *should* pursue criminal sanctions against the people involved; only that they *can*, and have a far better chance of getting convictions with hacking charges than with virtual theft charges.

If you even try to make a Second Life client or an add-on, you'll end up finding stuff like that on accident constantly. It never turns out to be something that could be construed as "hacking" in that sense of the word... remember the megaprim "exploit?" It's hard to think of it as an exploit when all you have to do is attempt to create a large prim, for example, and it succeeds. As bad as it sounds, asset ID disclosure problems are the same way: it's often as simple as ask & receive.

The thing is, all it takes is someone who doesn't know any better to rez a 25-meter prim to find out that it's possible. There is no way one can "accidentally" request the asset server to cough up a copy of something that person does not own and does not have permission to copy. It takes poking and prodding and actively looking for exploits for that to happen - and it's the active looking that can get these people in trouble (well, Neil, at least. The 50 people who got banned could go down for using a hacking tool to gain unauthorized access to the system).

Most computer access agreements (and I am sure it is in the TOS) explicitly state that you will not try to increase your access/access data that does not belong to you. Much as the patriot act is loathsome, I would not be surprised if they violated that too, in addition to the DMCA.

"how big was the damage?"
will be the first question the cops will ask.
"oh, no damage? kkthxbye"

"what? someone is building bombs in their basement? how big was the damage?"

I very much doubt they would dismiss it when told nothing was blown up yet...

bombs != modding an sl client ^^

w00t w00t

I hope they banned their ip toooooo

I don't think the poking and prodding would count. For example, it's perfectly legitimate for a user to try various combinations of permissions on an object and its contents to see how they affect use by others. Extrapolating that to someone working on the viewer, it's perfectly reasonable to test tweaks to the code to determine how things work, or even for the intent of finding bugs and reporting them. (Come to think of it, this is the first example I've come across where releasing the code under open source might really weaken protections, since without the open source, such poking and prodding would be more questionable.)

Once the bug was found, however, using it to obtain unlicensed access is clearly wrong. A more interesting question is whether releasing it constitutes a violation of the part of DMCA that makes it illegal to crack copyright protection technology. I'd love to be a technical consultant on that case.

banned means nothing you know....
They get another account they go and retrieve there greifer boxes packed with all there inventory. They have there back ups ready to use. Sadly some of these twats know coding quiet well, better then the staff of LL. Just go to any welcome area you will see them there.

HAHHA Bravo LL!!!!

This is a great start!! I hope they banned the IP's

Pardon that I'm just starting to read this thread and commenting before finishing... but I had to say thank you for the above quote which provided the best comment to Neil:

"Fucking hell...so that's probably what got me banned then. Thanks Neil!"

/me laughs very hard. I'm delighted to see Darwinism is still alive and well.

It's a slippery slope. I have observed in society over the past few decades an increase in minor violations (i.e. traffic, drugs, theft etc.) simply because law enforcement either doesn't have the manpower or priority to deal with such infractions. People KNOW they can break the law without consequences, and this is an open invitation.

As an example, while I am pleased the police do as much as they do to limit drunk drivers on the road, I see far too many near and full accidents involving people who simply don't drive responsibly (they don't shoulder check, they speed like maniacs and do not use signals). On the one hand I think it's a waste to pursue those who do not signal to change lanes, on the other, I really wish for a good hard hitting example to wake people up.

Then again, perhaps people will never care and what I'm seeing is not so much people increasingly taking advantage of a non-reaction to their "crime" but an increase in self-absorbed individuals with no care for anyone but themselves.

There is no real answer except that there is a slippery slope in "doing nothing". What has to happen before people realize that something truly horrible has happened. What events will lead to that? Perhaps none, perhaps something.

Actually there has been, for the Pirate Bay team, but compare the gigantitude of the copying going on there, the lack of prosecution of all the *other* torrent site operators out there, their millions of users, and the size of the copying in SL, and its just way way down on the list. We are just not that important.

This

In the category of computer crimes, there are guys hacking bank accounts, corporate data bases, and the DOD, and then there is breaking into a game and stealing doll skin and hair and toy guns. Which ones do you really think will get priority?

After seeing a guy arrested for terrorism because he had a woodball nerf antitank weapon in his trunk I have to say I am confident the LE will prosecute anyone they want to prosecute given any valid excuse to do so.

For those not familiar with woodball it is paintball played in the woods on a large scale with two opposing armies. "Nerf guns" (Compressed air sponge projectile weapons) are used to simulate antitank weapons to shoot at "tanks" which could be anything from a refrigerator shipping box "man powered" by a bunch of players inside it picking it up and moving along to a realistic looking tank built on a golf cart.

So in this case the guy obviously had pissed someone in power off for something and the nerf gun, being realistic looking, gave the cops an excuse given the climate of paranoia the USA is currently in.

Speaking of climate of paranoia timing the DHS is about to hire 1000 cyber security professionals. The timing is excellent to be busted for stupid antics so by all means if you are still feeling invincible like the guy in that goldeneye bond movie then keep right on profiling yourself.

The California law I read talks about unauthorized access, not unauthorized use. It does not appear to be a law that provides criminal penalties for violating a particular company's terms of service, or a law that provides criminal penalties for violating contract just because a computer network is involved.

If you give someone a key to your house and invite them to come in any time, just don't raid the fridge, they are not breaking and entering when using that key that you gave and invited them to use. It doesn't suddenly become breaking and entering because they take something from the fridge.

Now, it may be theft when they take something out of the fridge, but in such a case, they would be prosecuted for theft and not breaking and entering. It would not be the case that grabbing the milk from the fridge would be too small to warrant prosecution of theft, so instead of prosecuting theft, we prosecute breaking and entering.

It's always possible that some judge somewhere has taken that statute and through creative interpretation read "access" to mean "use" to allow criminal prosecutions under that statute rather than more on-point statutes, or to allow criminal penalties for a civil matter because it somehow seemed "fair." That's been known to happen. But it's not what the law says, and it would really make no sense to read it that way as a back-door to copyright infringement prosecution, or to make violations of various games' TOS to be criminal matters.

Right, but just because someone is granted read access to public information on a web site does not mean you wanted them to be the domain admin. Someone who did something they were not authorized to do is engaging in unauthorized access even though it is the same physical machine.

as much as I'd love to join in with the YAY SL, lets see more like this... I can't help but look at it from a coders perspective.

There is a gaping security exploit in the asset retreval system in notecards, this hole has been known for a long while behind closed doors, and is how a majority of scripts / animations are getting stolen.... LL finally does something about it because one person was stupid enough to put a 'decent' UUID that results in something griefers would want in public.

I have to ask myself.... is this stupid? lets gather data for 1 day then ban the 50 or so? most the other MMO's would be finding a way to track ALL attempts of doing this, not just from one single UUID... let it run for a month or so... then do a MASSIVE ban at the same time the fix goes in to stop it happening in the future.

This is just way to small scale to be celebrating over and very poorly orchastrated if they truely mean business to be putting a stop to it.