Who owns our resident-owned assets?

I figgered this type of griefing would happen and to think it was a LINDEN who was doing it also Who would have guessed...


...Recently, when long-time Second Life resident Weedy Herbst contacted XXX Linden about a problem with improper seizure of a small plot of land a few months ago, Guy was more than willing to correct the mistake. Herbst received a different 16m2 plot in exchange and an apology. More recently, however, Herbst saw the same mistake happen again, and again, and received nothing but a disciplinary action, all based on a simple mistake by an unknown Linden Lab employee...



http://www.slnn.com/index.php?SCREEN=article&about=who-owns-what-in-second-life

Interesting, but not surprising.

Curious.

Weedy has two issues: 1) the land, and 2) her abuse report record. The land she was able to be compensated for, and it was offered, but the abuse report record was a condition that she tied to the land.

It will be interesting if this case survives, because the land portion is something she could have rectified on the spot and then taken separate action to address the disciplinary issue. Just my first thoughts, this is in no way legal analysis.

A resident gains contractually-created rights by entering into these transactions.

"Buying" virtual land may not be analogous to buying land in real life. However, making the land purchase transaction creates a set of obligations between the purchaser (resident) and buyer (Linden Labs).

So what do you get when you buy virtual land? You get to use the Second Life software, and Linden Lab's hardware and software, for a certain set of purposes. And in return, Linden Lab gets your money.

If Linden Lab comes back and unreasonably interferes with the use to which the resident and Linden Lab initially agreed, and it causes the resident damages, then Linden Lab has liability for those damages.

The TOS in which Linden Lab tries to carve out immunity for anything it might ever do to you is subject to being ignored by a court, depending on the circumstances. A Linden Lab's employee intentional or negligent actions are part of the circumstances that could get those broad immunity disclaimers ignored by a court. A contracting party is generally not going to be allowed to use a broad disclaimer as a shield for acting in bad faith.

So if a Linden Lab employee is just reclaiming a resident's land, not through an honest accident and through no good reason, then there is going to be some sort of liability for Linden Lab. The next tough question is the extent of liability. Even if Linden Lab is liable for its act, if you can only show that you lost a couple of dollars because of it, then the most for which you could sue is a couple of dollars. Which is absurd since that would not even cover the filing fee with the court. And in the US, the loser does not automatically pay the winner's attorney and court costs. In a contract case, most of the time, if there is no provision for litigation costs, each side bears its own costs, win or lose.

If Linden Lab is doing something to harm a resident for just a few dollars of loss at a time, the realistic answer is not lawsuit, but to stop dealing with Linden Lab.

I think it sorta is, if you think of LL (or any estate manager) as the federal government..

What do you get when you buy virtual land? You get an additional set of privileges (building rights, primarily) and obligations (paying tier, primarily). Everyone is subject to the TOS whether or not you own land, and owning land is not a precedent to applicability of the TOS.

As a land 'owner' in SL, I'm really curious to see how this turns out.

It is unfair of LL to simply seize property as an ad farm without even checking out the site first. It would be like the police confiscating your home for the dealing of drugs, without ever having seen the drugs there or anything.

More double message Lindiocy.

Blue button is little better than the ad farmers, in my opinion they are worse with their remote scanning. It is a damn shame that remote scanning scripts are not limited to the owner's land boundaries.

I read that slnn article twice all the way through, trying to convince myself that some plausible variant of that account might actually have occurred. Among the parts that won't parse for me is:Say what? The whole problem is that LL might "double dip" for part of a month on tier paid by both the former and current owner of a piece of land? And that's somehow breach of contract?

There's probably a story here somewhere, but if the article is reporting accurately, it's a Really Dumb story.

Notwithstanding the fact that it's an awfully lopsided, dumb story.

Reads like a success story for getting rid of mainland small plot abuse.

Data mining is even worse than advertising.

Pardon me while I laugh at the entire article. Linden Lab has made it clear time and again that their employees can and often do act autonomously.

So far as I am concerned this is about as absurd as the Bragg v. Linden case was ... In reality you 'own' nothing at all in Second Life except the idea behind what you create.

On another note: A scripted object, buried in the ground on each 16m parcel? sorry, that's just asking for trouble. Someone ARed the parcel, the report was actioned, the result falls under resident disputes at this time ... Something Linden Lab refuses to take any real side on.

On the first, this is why I'm curious to see how it turns out. I want to see just how far LL is willing to go with the idea of users "own" their land.

On the second, yeah... I have issues with this. Seems like a waste of resources to me, but to each their own.

Back in March, around 2am one morning, the mainland region that I live on had _all_ parcel owner-owned objects deleted or returned at the same time - most people who lived there came back to find their land wiped clean of everything except litter. One of the parcels in the region was also reclaimed by LL that night.

My friend who owns about 1/3rd of this region contacted live chat and had a Linden come out to look at it. She spent almost an hour trying to convince the Linden that something had gone wrong on LL's end - showing different parcels of people who hadn't logged in for weeks that had stuff on them the night before but were now empty. All the Linden could come up with was "maybe it was autoreturned" and "maybe they just picked everything up". The fact that it happened to everybody in the region at the same time - even ones that hadn't logged in in days/weeks - and that LL had cleaned/reclaimed a parcel that night didn't seem to sink in.

My friend added a support ticket, asking for a rollback, and was told that the sim had experienced a "cascading object return" and that LL never, ever rolls back mainland.

Long dramatic story short, LL refused to do anything about it or explain what happened or even admit that this wasn't a problem caused by the residents. She eventually caught up with Jack Linden at his office hour, 5 days later, and he seemed to get it and offered to roll back the region, if all residents agreed to it - of course, 5 days later, some people had sold their land there (which was unhappy - it was a very friendly region) and moved to islands so a rollback wasn't really possible any more.

So... While I think a lawsuit might be a bit much, I can certainly see why Weedy is pissed off - some Lindens are _really_ a pleasure to deal with. Some are complete bozos or arrogant asses that do more harm than good and should not be allowed to deal with residents.

And my conceirge-level friends support ticket asking for clarification on what a "cascading object return" is is still open and unanswered. Since March.