Sl Land

Agreed.

If I pay Linden US$1675 for an island, will they give me my money back if they all skip to Googleworld?

*dives under the table.............

This isn't quite true. Plenty of people have "bought" and "sold" estate land. So there is a value
to it.

The issue is people buying islands and ignoring the existing agreements. This practice needs to be discouraged. Whereas the new owner has every right to have a different vision for the island, they should either honour exisiting agreements, buy the parcels from existing tenants or compensate them for cancelling the agreement and any such fees should be deducted from the price they're paying for the island in the first place.

But surely the reason they dont (in the main) is that what the renter has actually bought has no real value, either in terms of the initial payment or even the rent.

Unless this fundamental changes then I dont see how some wont abuse it (and in fact its not even abuse in the letter of the "law"

I would not mind if the initial payment was scrapped OR made binding, its the fact that it is money for nothing that is the problem.

Any that are sold on are done so again without supplying anything of value, if you bought a plot one day and the island owner sold out the day after, who is the baddy - the previous renter or the island owner (old or new)?

As always it's the grey areas that are exploited.

It's an agreement between the old landlord and the renter, and the old landlord is the one that should be compensating the renter. It's not the new landlord's fault. What the renter has HAS value, or else the new landlord wouldn't be seeking to obtain new tenants that fit his vision. Unless the new landlord is buying the island purely for personal use, it's obvious that what any tenant has has some value. Don't introduce that red herring in here... bottom line is that a landlord that is selling out should do the honorable thing and compensate if the new landlord cleans house. It's not fair to the new landlord to deal with all that on top of paying full price for a sim.

I guess we dont fundamentally disagree.

The reason I say it has no value is that it doesn't in LL law and therefore such value is totally dependant on goodwill.

If it was deemed that the tenant held some value in the parcel IN LAW then none of these problems would occur - or at least not without a chance of some recourse.

In essence I object to a covenant that says "buy this land" when in fact, legally, they are not doing that.

Most of your rant certainly makes sense - I think its a scam too. Something should be changed about how covenant land works.

However this last bit -

Were we supposed to give her a pass because she was older? She's was railing not about pedophiles but actual unsubstantiated active child abuse on the grid.

Comparable to the difference between ranting about possible murderers and actual murders being committed.

I know if I live up into those years I don't want to be humored and coddled because of my age. I want the same treatment intellectually as I always had.

I have my doubts she is who she says she is anyway. I have yet to meet anyone over the age of 30 who types that way.

Miscellaneous brief comments:

LL should clean up estate rental/sales business, no question. Disallowing "sale" of less than an entire island and requiring landlords to put one month's rent in escrow so that tenants never get booted are obvious, if perhaps brutal, cures for the problem.

As it is, it is inherently confusing and potential buyers are not required to do anything to educate themselves, sigh. One resource we rarely point to, but perhaps should, is the NCI class on landowning. Their curriculum now is quite clear about the difference between estate and buying from the Lindens. If residents go there, I bet they will also encounter Carl's "List of Scams" ... which I would love to see sometime.
They ARE landlords ... so they are both as good and as bad as any other landlord. Except that in SL there is no consumer protection provided by the local government (LL).
Ty Evans, Desmond Shang ...
??? Rob Linden is the open source development manager, I believe. I am clueless as to what responsibility he holds for any of this ... do you mean Philip?

And would them being led away in handcuffs happen before or after the company goes public?

That said, condolences on whatever SL madness made your screen look like that.

My take was she meant "Rob" Linden

To be fair to LL, SL is not a game, as Rebecca seems to think it is. It's an environment for people to make of it what they will, and they are not running what happens in it. On the whole, they only seem to get involved when something is really serious, like gambling and banks. LL didn't set up the land schemes - they just sold land to people. People decided to rent it out, and sell it while keeping ownership.

To read much of what's been written in this thread, you'd think that island scams were the norm, but they are not. The really bad stories are comparitively rare - and unfortunate. Even the lesser things, like a new landlord doing things differently, are comparitively rare. Pretty much like RL actually.

LL won't interfere in the way that some posters want, and neither should they unless something bad becomes too widespread. They are not running what goes on in SL. They never claimed to be running it. It's almost entirely what people make of it.

Nice Job Phil.

I think LL should make it more clear that the landlord has power to seize covenant land without reimbursing you.

People are not generally aware of this.

Yet, covenant land is included in the tab with mainland land sales, and by default you get both when you do a search.

This benefits the covenant land seller far more than the potential land buyer.

I agree with that. LL ought to compile a beginners' FAQ with that sort of thing in it.

I don't think that would be enough

A Large number of People don't read instructions.

It Should instead come up when you go to buy Covenant land.

They really do need an updated, comptehensive user's guide, that can be found easily online. Not that crappy book that you have to pay $35 for *Or whatever the price is*

You can say that again. But if the information is in plain sight, people who fall foul of something can only kick themselves for not bothering to read it.

There's another thread, in which someone is compiling a list of places where new people can get free/nearly free stuff. I don't know how the info is going to be distributed to new people, but something like that would be good for distributing the needed info about land.

Yah, right, Phil - look at the landbot thing with people still selling land to others for 1L to anyone. What is the point of selling for 1L? Why not 0? Anyone REALLY MEANS anyone. But people still blame LL when the protections were there and we're back to Clintonizing the term "anyone" for the sake of people's pride.

well yes and no

The Average reading level of Adults in the US is somewhere below 10th grade level. As more people join SL, the average SL user is going to be near that same point.

You cant assume that the average user has the same ability / drive to understand written material before making purchases that we do.

You have to design a system for the audience it is intended for.

Another problem new landlords have with old tenants is the after grief, old tenants have to quickly learn that their disappointment with the old landlord selling out as nothing to do with the new landlord, I'm sure some new landlords just boot out old tenants because rightly so they're thinking "I don't need to take this person's shit"

How bad is it when "anyone" doesn't mean ANYONE? How much simpler can you make it?

Adding more words makes people less likely to read and pay attention.

People like to abdicate responsibility and blame LL when the lion's share of responsibility is theirs.

We can try to educate.... one thing LL can do is make the knowledgebase easier to access. But it's not going to stop this problem, ever. And the complaints will never end.

Well of course you can only do so much

But in that case the real problem is people are uneducated about landbots.

they don't know that "anyone" means "anyone, even from a distance and even if you cant see them"

sorry but the new landlord hs a duty to ensure he's not ripping off his new residents. Buying a going concern and ignoring existing agreements makes him or her just as guilty in the scam.

It's inexcusabale for the new landlord to plead that it was the old owner's fault.

true

Unless the old landlord evicted everyone prior to the island sale.

I don't see how you'd go about selling an island where its all covenant land..

those people already paid for their plots.. and any new owner wont get that money.

SO should the island be discounted the amount of the plots already sold?

I'm sorry, but if I am buying an island, I am not going to be bound by the old owner's obligations. That's his problem. If I pay full price for an island, I expect to be able to do what I want with it and I am not going to be bound by people I don't even want to be there. The old renters are the old owner's problem. They become my problem if I want to keep them around after the transfer. The old owner probably made his money back, unless he did a straight rental with no purchase fee. Why should a new island owner have to reimburse tens of thousands of L for something someone else did? Unless that has been negotiated in the price of the sim (and it probably wasn't), then I wouldn't give a rat's behind about the problems the old owner brought onto himself.

yes, very much so. The new owner should not be paying for plots that don't actually belong to him and to ignore that this may be the case is participating in the rip off. Why does the old owner deserve a more or less full island price if the old owner has sold plots? Those plots are not part of the deal, they don't belong to the seller.

No they are your problem if you buy the island and don't do the homework and find out how the land lies. You are as much a part of the ripoff as the old owner. You are buying land that does not belong to the seller and shrugging your shoulders makes you as complicit in the ripoff as the old owner. Absolutely no excuses, you are part of the con.