Banned Customer

So I have a customer who was banned from SL. They didn't say why. But they're back in-world with an alt. They're asking me to replace some inventory. I am not so inclined. If they want their inventory back that speaks to me of a permanent ban (they've IM'ed me a couple of times over the course of a week). Isn't returning with an alt a violation of LL's TOS?

If LL imposed the ban and they are circumventing the ban by returning as an alt it is a violation of the ToS. You can AR them. But, I'm not how you can definitively tell LL that this person is an alt of a banned account. Only LL and the person banned have that information......unless they told you they were an alt. Hope you kept the chat log.

Rusalka would you have given the alt the item if they had claimed non delivery on the initial purchase? The sale was between you and the av who obtained the item, you owe the alt nothing.

1) You have NO WAY of verifying that they are the person who originally purchased from you.

2) I've purchased a number of things from you. Your prices are reasonable enough that repurchasing shouldn't be a hardship for anyone.

You owe the alt nothing. This could be a scam, because they might not be who they say they were.

And how is their getting banned your problem, that you need to replace the item? They must have done something extremely stupid to get perm banned, probably something with a certain viewer....

QFT!

Just chiming with an "I agree with the above".

Your sculpts are very reasonably priced and I don't see why you should have to replace them under such sucpicious circumstances.

Thanks so much, everybody. You've helped me, and confirmed my feelings. A very awkward circumstance!

And another thing-- when I started building with an alt, I didn't give her anything of mine that I hadn't made. She went out and re-purchased textures and other full-perm items I owned.

I've had the pleasure of overhearing people in my shop telling friends not to buy from me; they'd just pass along copies. That's worse, but I'm not going to participate in ripping off creators with alts.

This guy is out of luck.

I wonder about textures. Is it ok to share those with your own alt. Most people have a builder alt.

It isn't like expecting a free set of clothes since the seller of that can't know who is who. But most people put textures in their computer to work with and reupload anyway. As long as they are NOT giving the textures to any other REAL person, what does everyone think about this issue?

Just so you know, this is hypothetical. (so far)

(About the original question I cannot think why anyone would expect a shop owner to pay for the person's own mistake or misfortune in this situation. It isn't their fault. Paying for an alt's wardrobe is partly why it does not take away from SL to have NPIOF avs. People equip from scratch routinely.)

This is kind of like Bernie Madoff contacting all the vendors for the items he lost as a result of his imprisonment and government seizure of his properties and asking them to replace them. In lieu of replacing his inventory I would offer to kick him in the family jewels.

For what it's worth I agree with everyone else. Nothing like this has ever happened to me but all my clothes are copy no transfer. If someone bought something from my shop and then asked me to GIVE a copy to their alt(s)... well the reason they're no transfer is that it makes more business sense to me for each avater who wants one to pay for it...

That and with prim clothing, it's better if people have mod/copy. And if you have copy, then you don't want transfer. This is also a reason I use a vendor system that allows gifting. That removes the excuse of "well, I was buying it for my alt account!"

Now, textures.. I have transferred some over to my build/model alt, then deleted them from the main. Only reason I did this was my older building textures were from well before I had the alt, but she became the one I could work on the build in peace with. Now, I just transfer the L$ to buy things to her.

Speaking as someone that used to run a texture shop. If people passed copies to their alts and did not delete the originals then yeah I would have been ticked. Its not like our textures were that expensive at 10L per.

From what I remember most texture shops pretty much had a policy like mine at that time. No telling now.

Reality is I got out of the business when the time and effort needed to track down our work in freebie boxes got too large to be worth the effort.

I must be missing something about textures as written about in this thread. If a copy of a texture can be given to an alt, then it's copy/trans and I don't see a problem. The seller sold it to be copy/trans, so what's the problem - or what am I missing?

Darkness said that he would have been ticked if someone bought his textures and passed copies to an alt. That doesn't make any sense to me - just the opposite - *I* would be ticked if I bought copy/trans anything and the seller complains that I've given copies to an alt.

If textures are sold copy/trans, strictly for use in one's own creations, and I buy some and give copies to my alt, it's ME who is creating. *I'M* the one who bought them, and *I'm* the one at the keyboard doing the creating, regardless of which av I use for it.

What am I misiing?

an 's' and you have too many 'i's

What you are missing is that textures are mainly builders' items. The primary reason to buy a texture is to apply it to something you are building. Most builders build with the intent of selling their creations. Textures are sold full-perm by necessity, as any restrictions whatsoever makes the textures worthless as builders' items if the build in question is to be sold.

Full perms does not necessarily mean freeware/public domain. This is especially true of textures.

To be honest, the idea of giving your textures to... well, *yourself* - is an interesting one. I would see it as the equivalent of making copies of your CDs for your own use, which is legitimate fair use. However, I can also see it as installing a game you just bought to two or more computers that you own, which is generally prohibited by most software EULAs. It's a tought legal and ethical question.

Why not offer an importable object xml file along with your product? Those greedy customers won't have an excuse.

You purchased say 1 texture from us. That entitles you to use that texture on your own creations made on that particular av (the only reason they are sold copy and trans is they are useless to builders otherwise). If you wish to pass them to an alt all I am saying is the proper thing to do is pass them then delete them on the the toon that bought them. You still have 1 licensed copy which is what you paid for.

In my case it is moot. I am no longer in the business by my own choice. When the entire contents of our store started showing up in freebie boxes against our licensing I just couldn't keep up with the whack a mole and said enough is eough.

Good one lol. I won't change it now that you've pointed it out.

I didn't miss that - it was my point. And it doesn't make sense to me that I can buy textures for my creations but I can't use them unless it's with the same av that I bought them with. To my way of thinking, it is ME who buys them - not the av - and as long as it is ME who uses them, regardless of which av I use them with, everything is good.

What's people's take on it if I pass to my building alt not the full-rights texture but a script I have made using that texture's uuid, which applies that texture to a prim and then deletes itself?

Or should I just have the alt rez the the prims, log on as myself and texture them, and then relog as my alt to finish the job?

I realise that you are no longer in that business, so this is academic. Also, I've never bought textures, so it's doubly academic.

I don't agree with you - not even if you were still in that business If I buy a full-perm texture to use in texturing my products, I don't accept the entitlement you mentioned. As far as I am concerned, *I* buy it, and *I* am allowed to use it for that purpose. I am also allowed to have copies of it. The only things I am prohibited from doing are selling it as a texture and giving copies to other people (notice I said people ). If a seller wants any more restrictions than those, there would need to be very clear notices around the place and, if there were, I'd buy elsewhere. Not being a texture buyer, I don't know if there are such notices around the texture shops.

My recollection is that such copies are specifically exempted from being infringement based on the same law that established royalties on blank CD media labeled for audio use. In other words, it's allowed, but not because of a fair use argument. That's also why this exception doesn't apply to multiple installations of a game.

A fair use argument may still exist for all these cases, but no one wants to litigate it unless they're sure of winning. Hence it remains a tough legal question. One school of thought says that the fair use provision explicitly lists items such as editorial comment, and hence uses that don't relate to that list aren't fair use. Another school of thought says that the list isn't exhaustive, and certain personal uses should be allowed (although making your copy available on the net via a file sharing service has been repeatedly found to not be a fair use).

In this specific SL case, texture sellers should include a notecard containing their license provisions, and those provisions may or may not be specific enough to reach a conclusion about what's allowed. In the absence of such clarity, I don't see why a seller would care, but I suspect that copyright law would be on their side.

It's too late by then. It would need clear signs around the shop for me to accept any such provision. Then I could choose to accept or decline the provisions by buying or not buying, but I wouldn't accept the provisions if I could only learn about them *after* I'd bought the textures.