LL bans 50+ users for copyright infringement

This isn't about modding an SL client. Please go back and re-read the thread before making yourself look like an ass.

And by the way: Computer crimes are taken deadly seriously in the US.

Every time I read the title of this thread, I shiver. I am a "50+ user", and I keep thinking I've been banned.

Naw it's the 40+'s that got banned.... and only from adult content.... due to popular request

This!

Your examples were great; but I think this one hits it right on the head.

I understand your point and grudgingly agree that this issue probably won't get the attention it merits simply because we as a society have grown to disrespect the law to such a degree that law enforcement can't keep up and are forced to triage.

But this should NOT minimize the issue at hand. We have here a bunch of people who have no respect for personal privacy and propriety and believe that, just because it exists in the digital realm, it is theirs for the taking.

Once one starts committing black hat crimes, it starts a really slippery slope. Right now, it's hacking apart MMORPGs and bringing them to their knees exposing exploit after exploit until the game folds up, and like a swarm of locusts, they move on to the next field after having ravaged the last. But if you honestly believe these malcontents will remain satisfied exploiting video games to death, you're being naive. The people stealing your intellectual property in a virtual world today could be emptying out your RL bank account tomorrow.

After starting this thread, I took a look at the SL incident report and haven't noticed anything about bans being issued. If fifty bans were implemented over this incident, you'd think at least some of them would show up here: http://secondlife.com/support/incidentreport.php

I'm not sure if all incidents are publicly recorded on the police blotter by the GTeam or perhaps it's not because it didn't go through them. Makes me go hmm ...

"So someone downloaded copies all your companies files including production formulas, prototype drawings and company credit card numbers. How much damage did they cause?"

"oh, no damage? kkthxbye"

Personally I think LL needs to turn off the blotter to cut down on wasted cycles.

Kudos and party hats all around. A token gesture to a gigantic problem that's been rampant now for years.

While I haven't personally thrown my hat in the ring with Stroker's class action suit (what can I say, I like the Lindens and I'd rather see their money and development time focused on fixing stuff and improving the grid without breaking it.) I can't say I disagree with it. And over the last few years with my own IP issues having cost me thousands of dollars in legal fees and the potential for them to cost me even more before its all said and done, and the likely return being nothing other than the removal of one user from the grid for fraud in the DMCA process...all I can say is, 50 copy bot users? Tip of the iceberg at the very least.

The DMCA process is, and to my opinion, will always be, while in use by Linden Labs, a horrible joke that is easily manipulated by the people that are actually perpetrating electronic crime within the Linden's systems and to my opinion the process a complete waste of time when everything on the asset server, in my opinion, should be the responsibility of the hosting agent, to review under a case of dispute.

If a user has a valid and legal copyright filed or even a simple creative copyright, and someone steals what they did, and the Lindens can actually see that by comparing the texture mask or script structure and then looking at the creation dates of the assets involved to see who created what first....to me, its a simple process of in house investigation to resolve..or at least it should be, but thats not the case and here I am two years down the line and thousands of dollars poorer for having done nothing but created some fun content for the grid that was popular enough and strong enough for other people to want for themselves too and some of them were willing to get it by fraud, rather than create their own assets to emulate it.

So yeah...50 copybot users. Thanks, its a start I guess. But to twist an old metaphor, its a day late and in this case, thousands of dollars for me, and for many other content creators, short.

Supposedly LL turned around and unbanned them. So I have to wonder if it was all a hoax just to grief.

Neil is still absent from people search, so it must be a secret unbanning or something

LL was just waiting for people to start clapping before they undid it.

The fact that Neil's still banned doesn't, though, necessarily imply that all the folks who got caught with this sting are. I don't know if he's telling the truth or not, but it doesn't seem to me impossible that Linden Labs thought putting a good scare into them would be enough, particularly if Soft had been acting on his own initiative.

This is the sort of statement that really shouldn't be posted without sources. Is it information from a public source, reliable anonymous sources, or just a rumor making the rounds?

It's from the guy who writes the viewer. Not sure how he could possibly have any sort of decent enough relationship with Soft to know this.

The entire episode is based on dubious sources rofl.

Indeed, but there's no smoke without fire!

I've requested the sources for his viewer 3 times now. Under GPL he is required to provide identical sources for each binary he published and he failed to do so. He ignored/deleted my requests but still mentioned them in his latest post, still failing to provide the sources. http://neillife-lol.blogspot.com/

So, Mr. Neil is not only a supporter or facilitator of SL content theft, he is also a code thief which is a RL offense. If you would also like to see the GPLed sources he is legally required to provide, please send an email to [email]licensing@lindenlab.com[/email].

http://www.gnu.org/licenses/gpl-2.0.html

True, but at least there were pointers to blogs, so we can read them ourselves and make our own decisions about believability.

I don't mean to pick on you specifically, but there are so many posts of the form "I heard that ....", where what the person posted isn't precisely what the person heard. It's like a game of telephone, except that rumors take on a life of their own before they can be corrected. Your post just stood out as a particular example that was crying for a link.

LL may or may not choose to enforce their license and copyright. But if his sources include code written by someone else, who maintained copyright ownership, then that person also has a right to take action.

I was responsible for this, I think, because I pointed it out in a discussion over the road in SLUniverse. I don't really want to post the link to his blog here, but yesterday (October 7) he changed his entry about how rotten it was of LL to ban everyone and it was everyone's fault but his and his friends, and replaced it with

Thanks, much appreciated.

Actually just saying "Neil said on his blog that ...." would be enough for me. That way us skeptics can double check or at least judge the reliability of the source, without making it tedious for everyone.

Neil said on his blog, after his post that everyone got unbanned:

"Please note that incident, Where soft linden took over rewrite the asset. Only happened to people who retrieved asset. If people wrote tickets, most got back in because too many got banned that day. And for anyone who got banned that day could be a cryolife user to any client user. Only if they had the ability to retrieve the asset( which also meant they had the ability to full perm items in the game to retrieve the item)."

Neil is, I am told, an Australian, but does anyone happen to know what his first language is?

Spoiled Child?