Court system? eeeek!!!!

Sadly this is true..short and sweet...........

LLAB doesnt get involved of even care. There are so many thiefs and cheaters all over SL its not funny.

Not entirely true Ordinal.

In SL the creator of a well known brand of adult sex toys (beds) took another avatar to a real life court for copy write breech, there was the Bragg case, and Blizzard, (World of Warcraft) pursues people who sell both a so called cheating device that alters stats, as well as avatar animation macro software.

All depends on the amount and in some cases the principle.

Sooner or later, I would expect to see a big legal action over what most of us would call insignificant amounts of money in real life

What? The fact that there are not enough people who want to give up their only advantages to mainland only highlights the fact that all simowners are essentially the same?

Thank you. A minority of... of... sheeeeesh... gives the rest a bad image.

I am normally a very patient person. But such statements get my tummy upset. Simowners, like all others, have to adhere to the TOS. Fact.
There are no 'Private Island Purchases', never were, between you and the Simowner, these are 'rentals'. Fact.
How the simowner tries to refinance his/her island is totally up to her and her moral. Fact.

And... it just occured to me... why am I getting upset actually? Meh. hehehe... loosing my control like that, so sorry.

Our tennants are very satisfied, last time I checked and I intend to keep it that way. We, speaking for my wife too if I may, would get into a binding contract with each and every one of them instantly. Why? Because we take their good money and they exprect good service.

Sheeeesh.... Just thought that sounded old-fashioned.. meh... has it become so unusual to provide good work for good money? Has it become so unusual to be honest and fair? I just got upset and tried to defend the thing I call 'normal'... being honest and fair... what is wrong?

I sure did FD, damn typo's! lol
It was 2006...

The Stroker case was based on copyright infringement, which is a real life crime. Bragg was suing LL, a real company; and Blizzard are a real company themselves.

As far as I'm aware, there has yet to be a lawsuit for violation of a contract purely within SL. Furthermore - at least, according to Wikipedia - a covenant is defined as one-sided. Only the person who accepts the covenant can be considered to have broken it, even if it includes promises by the offerer of the covenant.

Moreover, enforcing a covenant legally requires various things - such as a seal, and deeds - which don't apply to virtual land. In actual fact, I could see a probability that if a lawsuit over a SL land covenant did go ahead, LL might actually have to intervene to prevent a legal precedent being set that would associate virtual land with real land - since LL had to settle in the Bragg case presumably to avoid a similar thing happening.

I get the point. I just don't think Linden Labs agrees or they wouldn't have the system they do. This system was set up obviously to earn private island owners money. LL knew where their bread was buttered.

The Lindens may be "neutral" but I think have made it clear what side they really are on.

Your rights in a lawsuit are those granted by the place you live and the island owner lives. You might have a right through the courts to force a landlord to uphold a contract in a virtual world, sure.

But even if you win LL won't be acknowledging any in-world "Rights", they will continue to act as they have until the situation gets so bad (ala banking, adfarming) they will have to AR regulate it.

Well, not, actually -- courts are only as good as their decisions are enforceable. That enforcement involves the coercive power of the state -- ie, the police and law enforcement agencies. Without that, a court's rulings are simply advisory opinions. Do we really want an SL police, or even LL, running around enforcing court judgments?

I think that the problem with courts in LL is what law to apply? LL has no laws, it has no statutes, it has no common law, it has nothing in terms of legal infrastructure. For a judicial system with the power to issue enforceable decrees to be legitmate, the entire legal system on which it bases these decrees has to be legitimate and decided in a manner that reflects that legitimacy. In other words, it has to be a part of a governmental system.

SL has always been a libertarian place, that is one of its touchstones. There are many of us who have no interest in recreating the instruments of state power (and courts are one of these) inside SL because that would lessen the mostly libertarian nature of the grid.

I think it's unlikely that Linden would go for a system to hem in what the island owners are entitled to do. Particularly not if that system is seeking to establish that residents have "legal ownership" of their land parcels -- LL surely does not take this position, as a legal matter, with respect to resident ownership of mainland parcels, for example. If anything, it's more like a usage right which lasts as long as the usage fees are paid, and the "purchase price" is the price of entry -- ie, the price to be able to make usage payments with respect to a parcel.

Well said! Hit the nail on the head!

Sure, let's change it - I'd LOVE to flush the power trippers and the incompetents out of land barony.

But how? The very fact that we *do* have control over our land and can manage it is what makes the land compelling.


The core of the problem:

a) Land, expensive as we consider it, is generally not worth RL dispute resolution.

I don't see a fix for that unless things get a lot more expensive.


b) Estate owners are expected to work for nothing.

If time was valued at all, up front fees for land would be laughable. There are some people who don't need more than a few minutes of an estate owner's time. But they are hopelessly outweighed by the rest. "You deleted my house!" "Ah, let's talk about group tags and autoreturn." "Why? You deleted my house!!!!" Forty minutes of drama ensues, ending with profuse apologies but by then the time is just plain gone. This sort of thing is not rare - and that may be my understatement of the year.


c) Consumers trust too easily.

There are many, many places where the estate owner wouldn't dream of tossing anyone even if the resident was having a full-on tantrum on the lawn. But people don't do the research, rent from Joe Scammer and then paint us all with the same brush.


d) Residents don't see our hours spent, or our cash losses.

For example, I spend between two and four hours a day taking care of things, and regularly lose between 200 and 400 USD a month out of profits 'forgiving' potential dispute issues before they happen. Mostly in the form of "I can't pay because of ____" or "I said I understood yesterday but I really didn't read the covenant or the notecard you gave me, lol!" Tier is inexorable - I'm paying 206 USD a day no matter what, and there's no forgiveness for me. About 5% of landed residents (honest estimate) agree to one thing one day and then utterly go back on it the next.


So sure, I'm up for all kinds of regulation - bring it on!

If the costs of it, hidden or otherwise add up to less than 200 a month I'll *save* money in my particular situation. All flaky residents would then have to hold up their end of the bargain. Currently, when they default it's a cost of business to me the same way credit card companies have to deal with consumer fraud.

I'll be one of many, many estate owners still here - unless of course we can't ultimately do anything about a guy who drops an ad farm in the middle of our estates.

Yep it's quite all right for people to use their system to steal and rip each other off but they will give you a warning for using the system to slander or belittle someone, go figure.

Nonsense, Mox.

First, it's perfectly possible to "buy" (rent) land from an estate owner and have a good experience. Just do your homework on the owner before you buy! There are lots of reputable folks out there that I'd deal with in a heartbeat.

Second, mainland is not "all but extinct". There's lots of it for sale, much of it at very reasonable prices. The new adfarm policy has cleaned up a lot of the visual ugliness (though much remains to be done).

I've owned land on both a private estate and the mainland, and I've been very happy with both.

Speaking from my experience and I'm sure my friends and other people who were unfortunate enough to deal with this guy. I have no doubts that we were just unlucky and that most estate owners are good, this particular guy is just unstable full stop.

I do own (lol that term is laughable) land elsewhere but I don't think I will be buying any more. I'm going to get a sim instead and join the ranks of decent sim owners.

Maybe I can say I'm sad, because I was "allowed" to sell my land, ("or move" but the saddest part of this situation was our sim owner was our friend I thought.

Fifthteen months of friendship even, we all played, used skype when sl was down, sent funny You tubes, shot each other, shopped together, played tricks, played games.. We even nursed as much as we could the sim owner during his gf woes.

I don't know what happened in rl or sl to bring out this behavior. It must have been huge to cause his personality change.

It is sad. rl goes on, sl goes on and life is good.

Thank you for your advice and comments.

skycat

It didn't sound like you had a choice, you would have ended up in the same boat as TC and me otherwise.

None of what I suggested changes anything about the "absolute control" of a sim owner over his/her sim though, it simply suggests shifting the balance of the agreement somewhat to give the tenant some protection against an abusive sim owner. Or in my opinion anyway, I can think of a few other things I'm less fond of, but that would accomplish the same thing yet do nothing to keep you from reclaiming land should you need to.

Although I don't think it would do enough (people grant debit permissions to stuff though even though you have a big "scary" pop-up) I think not being informed is probably the very core though.

If someone knows and understands what could happen if their sim owner turns out bad but decides that his/her reputation is enough to make that an acceptable risk or for whatever other reason doesn't mind loosing out on the initial cost then that is perfectly alright.

Eviction isn't even really the only problem, landlords will pester tenants into abandoning the land as well: one would randomly return portions of someone's house, when she put it back, he'd terraform the land to bury her house and so on... another was banned from the sim and told he had to pay L$20k to come pick up his stuff... yet another rented 'double prim' land only to get told 2 months later that "LL has disabled that feature" and her rent would double as a result and "it's LL's fault" and many more.

It was awful to have to listen one horror story after another and only be able to offer the ever helpful, "I'm sorry, but LL just won't do anything about what is essentially a resident disputes... there's nothing you can do". None of those people had any idea that the sim owner could/would do what they do, and if they did know they assumed LL would intervene. These things shouldn't be able to happen in the first place, let alone go unpunished by LL's "hands off" approach when they do happen.

Why is that full of waht if and abouts? Please spare us........

I think you're reading too much into the metaphorical use of the term 'covenant' in this situation. It's not at all clear that just because LL uses the term 'covenant', it can't be considered a contract. Also, according to that wikipedia article, the seal was used to make it enforceable when there was no consideration, but there's no doubt that in these situations, there is consideration.

The Bragg case had nothing to do with associating virtual land with real land. It had to do with contract rights under the ToS and licenses granted by LL.

According to that article, the term "covenant" specifically means that there is no consideration, because only the person accepting a covenant can be held to it. IANAL, but I think it would be very hard to argue in court that something clearly marked as a covenant was really a contract. There is nothing anywhere to suggest that the word "covenant" is used only as a metaphor, and I believe that even real world "land covenants" are one-sided in the same way.



The original case did, but the question is what prompted LL's mysterious withdrawal from the case. The widespread rumor is that the court would have set a precedent that LL had committed false advertisement by telling people they could "own" their virtual land, potentially paving the way for Bragg to initiate a class action that every landowner in Second Life could enter. The danger is that a lawsuit of this kind between two landowners could potentially set a precedent which could then be used in a future lawsuit against LL.

The last two sentences, though true, are non-sequiturs. There's nothing here that relates to the assertion of mine that you quoted.


They're not so naive as to believe the profits they make from the estate owners has no dependency on a stable market of parcel buyers.


So what? If you can enforce the contract in small claims court, who cares what LL's opinion is?

Keep in mind that enforcing the contract doesn't mean forcing the estate owner to give back the parcel. It means forcing the estate owner to pay cash to the parcel buyer. No LL involvement is needed.

That not completely true.

LL has the RL identity of the island owner. They aren't going to release just because you say "I filed a small claims suit" There will have to be legally binding documentation involved.

Secondly - Its very unlikely that the land owner and the Resident suing them are in the same jurisdiction. Meaning small claims suits quickly become non-cost effective.

Look at Ginko .. Ginko Nick is not even being sued.


Its quite possibly people are with in their rights trying to pursue court cases involving covenant land .. but practicality is another matter.

And as long as thats the case who's side LL is on .. matters.

Good grief. The very use of the word 'land' is metaphorical. That same Wikipedia article (not that I want to credit them with being a legal authority) says that covenants are typically associated with contracts.



Conceivably, but again, so what? If they were really afraid of this, they'd simply prohibit estate owners from using the term 'own' to describe the licensing rights being granted to the parcel buyer. And while they could probably get standing to enter into the case (because it involves the transfer of rights under a license they issued), all they can do is protect their own interests. They might try to argue that the term 'ownership' shouldn't be interpreted literally for that reason. They might even try to support a provision in a covenant that gives the estate owner the right to arbitrarily terminate the license, and to say that consumer protection laws don't apply. But how many estate owners are going to make such provisions explicit?

A subpoena, in other words. But way back when, perhaps in another thread, I was pointing out that it's issues like that this that make the difference between "meaningless" and "difficult to enforce." There are cases of services being forced to reveal such identities, while parcel owners who choose to reveal this information voluntarily may be able to get a marketing edge.

Again, I touched on this elsewhere. But it's not as big a problem as you may think, as long as they're in the same country. SL is hardly the first situation where people had to cross state lines for a small claims case.

I never started my Estate for profit, or for any power tripping. I started it because I got pushed out of my First Land by 3 casinos moving into my sim on the mainland and I couldn't do anything about it. So from Day One my estate has been about one thing, offering people a place they can live and work that is free of lag, spinning ads, and general stupidity.

Desmond's analysis is very accurate, if you take the ability for the estate owner to control what is happening on the sim, you just end up with a new kind of mainland. If that's what you want, go live there, LL is adding new sims all the time.

I have over 60 renters, they are all very happy, many have been with me since the day I opened and will continue to be. It is very sad that there are some who choose to abuse the trust given them, but that is sadly how life works out sometimes. It's been said 100 times or more, but I'll say it again. Do your homework, talk to renters, find out the reputation of the person you are renting from before doing so. It's relatively easy, unless they are someone fresh from orientation island.

If the thought of paying a large sum of money for land on an estate scares you, then find an Estate, like mine, that offers 0L down rentals, there are a *lot* of us out there. If heaven forbid something should go wrong, your risk is mitigated.

That is okay, I thought I it might be typo even translated it in my head to 2006.
But I wanted to just double check cause who knows perhaps you were renting in 1996
in alternate SL dimension from some other earlier version of SL than the one that started in 1999 lol

If I remember correctly in my state if you want a subpoena for small claims it costs money, and not a trivial amount.

This ups the amount it would be worth it to sue for.



Well its not so much that its a "big problem" its that it increases the expenses.

If you have to start shelling out $25 here and $50 there, etc to pursue your case .. when the total amount is only around $100 dollars .. its just not cost-effective.


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Then of course theres the ultimate issue with small claims. When you win, trying to collect can be a nightmare.