Purged of Intellectual Property... Is this fair?!

Life ain't fair. You want a free house....then you become my friend, and do some favors, and scratch my back. It's not a paying customer's business (who signed a contract) what I do in those regards. Enforcing contracts is not running the business "terribly".....if you do not, then you have no business....eventually.

QFT

The OP's message almost justifies the usage of Second Inventory or the soon to be released Builder Bot. Particularly as there are those Open Sim alternatives now.

My sympathy is with the OP though. I don't think he deliberately did not pay the Premiums, it was more an admin error on his part, whereby he received a new CC which had a different but valid account number and forgot to update his SL a/c.
That's an easy mistake to make....i had something similar this year with a Internet related service......my MLB Baseball TV of all things as i received a new CC, which had different account numbers on it, so my subscription wasn't automatically updated at the beginning of the season and meant i missed the first 2 days of the new season whilst updating the info.

It's business. Not only does "fair" matter, but perception of fairness matters, big time.

In fact, it matters so much, that it's the "good faith" understanding which is the basis of contract law in every court in the western world. Deal in bad faith, and a contract is very often worthless.

In fact, western law requires contracts to be null and void if they overstep in many, many ways, even if all parties agree to them.

Violation of good faith understandings, technically I think it's called "breach of implied covenant" is rather serious stuff.

But I'm not a lawyer type ~ this is the kind of thing that black/white right/wrong people find out the hard way when things actually come to push and shove in a court.

And as far as his stipend goes, they *wiped* his account. Ever deal with a wiped account? Nothing is there. No name, no balance, nothing. Even Linden Research realised this was wrong and took steps to correct this kind of thing. If they could restore his data too, I am sure they would.

Really stupid question time; Doesn't LL backup its own servers? It does for individual sims, I know, because they can roll back a sim to X time period. Why not users?

Chance! You know i <3 you babe.

I am sorry this happened to you. It is totally F'd up of LL and i think they just flushed a huge part of SL history - but not like they care, LL under M. doesn't care for it oldbies and especially not its pioneers like you.

LL 2009 is pathetic. How the hell does a Basic account = Infinity, while Premium = less than that?

*hugs* Chance

You've never done contracting or run a business have you?

We're talking people who are maybe 60 days in arrears, and owing at most one month's back service.

I get customers who don't pay on an invoice for six months sometimes. Big companies. They lost it. Really, they did. I've seen it happen from the other side, when accounts payable let something slip and the first think I know I get a letter from a vendor.

I send them another invoice, I get paid and I get another job down the road. I go ballistic and trash their CVS repo and call a collection agency on them I get a percent of the money back, and no more work from the, Or their friends.

Look at the premium account figures and tell me that LL can afford to lose customers.

I have managed rental units. Lots of deadbeats leaving in the middle of the night and abandoning all their crap. Two months without rent or any contact and I was hauling a truck load of stuff to the local auction house. Chance got his "past due notice" letters, for what ever reason he ignored them.

On the technical side, I think this was more of an 'oops' than an intended plan... remember the scaling issues of the early days.

There is a significant "garbage collection" issue with the grid ~ if they didn't purge a lot of the data we all generate every day, we wouldn't be here.

Though obviously purging user data wasn't a really good idea, considering the pennies to keep it compared to the dollars return when almost anyone comes back.

I honestly think they would help Chance if they could. If anyone reads this thread and has copies of any of his stuff... might not hurt to drop it to him. That way he could talk to someone and have at least those items set back to full mod.

Linden Lab isn't managing rental units. Chance's "crap" isn't keeping anyone else from metaphorically renting a unit. Neither are the 20 metaphorical units full of crap they're NOT hauling off to an auction house that belong to the 20 other people who aren't paying LL one red cent. Because metaphorical units don't take up space you need to bring in other renters.

Have you run a service business, anything even vaguely similar to what Linden Lab is doing? If not, you have no relevant experience to apply to this situation.

If it was garbage collection then you wouldn't be seeing Premium accounts that fall into arrears being aggressively purged when Basic accounts that have been idle for longer are just fine. It doesn't feel like an "oops", it feels like a policy.

Unless someone in this thread has worked for LL....then no one here has totally relevant experience to apply to this situation.

A contract is a contract. Renting apartments is a service business. I also did cabinet work, I expected payment upon delivery or when the work was done. It doesn't matter what deal LL has with the 20 people who don't pay. Chance made a deal and broke it. This all comes down on his head. But expecting someone to take responsibility for their actions is mean and unfair.

Linden Lab can keep the inventories of MILLIONS of abandoned basic accounts around for years. It costs them practically nothing in comparison to keep the inventories of residents whose premium memberships.

If those residents never return, Linden Lab is out nothing.

If they do, Linden Lab either reaps the goodwill of keeping their inventories around, or the bad blood from deleting them. Which is more beneficial to LL in the long run? If even a fraction of those residents return, LL comes out way ahead by keeping their inventories intact.

It's simply crazy business logic to be willing to delete the inventories of the tiny fraction of residents who have demonstrated the willingness to give you money for a premium membership.

I think it was, and it went hand in hand with not keeping extraneous data around, until they thought about it for a bit.

Chris, a contract is a contract... until it's changed beyond all recognition.

Say they changed his contract to read "data will be deleted unless he hands over his firstborn." At some point, it's not a valid contract.

Anyway, I have to go pick up my youngest ~ I'd love to continue but gotta get in the car and drive now. Catch everyone later.

And when the terms changed, Chance was free to leave at any time. He didn't. He could have downgraded to basic.........he didn't. He could have kept paying his bill, after two notices that he was past due and still he didn't. This isn't LL's fault, it all rests with Chance.

So you are cool with letting a certain percentage of your tenants not pay for a while, and you will keep their belongings in place, and wait around? Or let's say you will go ahead and rent their properties again....and out of good faith, you will clear off a paying tenant's land, and hand the land back over to someone, when they come back around?

Erm - LL is not a normal behaving company......they do some of the strangest things I've come across! lol

I have worked at the same company at the same time as the current LL CEO.....does that count?

Yep, very valid points and ones that i agree with if i were running LL.
Aside from the fact that these 03 pioneers were largely responsible for creating or at least the shaping of this current SL platform.

Cool! Maybe!

LL is not a normal company period. No amount of speculation on how they manage their business will explain anything. But I bet they are making more money than any RL business owner or service provider in this thread who is speculating.

The example is flawed in at least two ways.

First, Linden Lab has demonstrated they are willing to let the vast majority of residents not pay anything, ever and keep their inventories intact, even if they have been gone for months or years.

Second, the OP's absence from SL does not prevent anyone else from joining, upgrading to premium and their return does not require anyone to be displaced.

Unless the OP was gone from SL for years and it was apparent to LL they were not returning, LL had no compelling need or reason to delete their inventory. Doing so was not good business. Jack acknowledged that when he stated they were no longer doing it.

I think it would be acceptable to me if, upon going into arrears, a premium account inventory was archived and the account downgraded to basic. The account owner would need to pay something like $100 to reinstate inventory (plus amount in arrears).

It's still bad compared to basic neverending-inventory, but at least there is a way to have things returned, and LL is not out of pocket. The bad customer relations for this deletion policy is a monster.

A good contract is a good contract. A bad contract isn't worth the paper it's written on. This is a bad contract. It discourages people from doing business with LL.

If you gave people the option of getting the cabinet for free, or paying for it and not getting it if you didn't pay, you wouldn't get many customers paying, they'd all go for the free cabinets.

And, no, apartment rental and selling actual physical cabinets are not similar to the business LL is in.

I'm not talking about what's fair.

I'm talking about what's best for Linden Lab.

I am not convinced that they have stopped. Jack's comment may have been about purging *idle* accounts. Jack may not even know.

Yes.