Illegal in RL but okay here business practices?

Okay i won't say who it is or name names. But...

Suppose someone made a system that many many sims found a great addition and it worked with other scripted items. Now the people who made this system made it fairly easy for the items to work hand in hand so people could sell their items and it was competitively open.

THEN::::::::
The people who made this system changed it so that no other items that worked with this system. Now in hundreds of sims no one could sell their items anymore and where shut out in those hundreds of sims?

Of course the people that made this system now have a full line of simular items that will work where everyone elses items are no longer usable.

In the real world this kind of practice is very illegal. It's called restriction of trade and an unfair business practice.

Should it be illegal in SL also?

Welcome to the world of unregulated capitalism, Petite. The 19th-century robber barons would have been in their element here.

Presumably no-one has told Apple then?

Pep (I don't think you are right.)

Well it would be like if Apple suddenl made it so ALL Software couldn't work with it after an update and then offered Apples versions only to millions of Apple users who either had to comply or try and sell their Macs and buy a PC. Or you could say what if Microsoft did this.. which I know they would love to do..

I think a bit of research will show that that is not true everywhere on Earth.

Hell no -- SL is NOT RL. There are many things you can do in SL that you cannot do in RL and visa-versa. The goal is not to mimic every aspect of RL in SL.

Yes, that's right . . .

Pep ( . . . and your point is?)

lets not forget false advertising, bait and switch, non-refundable defective merchandise, brand and trademark infringement, outright theft, product flooding, libel by proxy, price gouging and fixing, smear campaigns, customer harassment, and at least a dozen more things that go on that aren't on the top of my head.

I've got no idea what item the OP is complaining about, which leaves me bemused by Is the complaint that someone makes a combat or RP system or some such that's suddenly stopped being compatible with third-party products?

you mean like a certain shop (name withheld to protect my forum access) that actually prides itself on the line of lifelike running shoes styled after shoes from the three biggest brands in RL?

you mean to tell me you only found ONE shop that does exactly that? I have landmarks for half a dozen, and that's just shoes...

yeah but shoes, who cares?

of course there are more but that shop moved FROM making good looking clothes TO copycatting real life running shoes and actually brags about it in their product announcements, while being big enough not to have to resort to that kind of shit.

/me assumes Dekka is a man!

But if it was illegal in SL, Void's posts and others only show that LL would enforce it for the people they didn't like anyway while letting their friends and big customers do whatever they wanted.

Tried a simple search for any brand-names on XStreet? LL obviously haven't!

Sorry it must be early but what is the OP talking about? Too much is left out of the story for me to follow it.

Would have?

grin...

DESMOND

Now truth comes to light ..
Oh my God!

Ahhh, the good old days.

Thanks....there is coffee all over my monitor now!!!

Well . . . at least you are nattily dressed . . .





ETA: I wanted to Photoshop this to put in Prok gnawing at your ankle, but decided it was too much work.

The 19th century robber barons made life better for most people. The free market always improves the standard of living for the majority of people.

Hmm.

Yeah, Dickens, Elizabeth Gaskell, and other 19th-century writers had a lot to say about the wonderful "standards of living" in pre-unionized industrial Britain . . .

In the same way that "Peyton Place" documented the humdrum mating rituals of suburban America in the 50/60s.

Pep (And "East Enders" the mundane lives of a Cockernee community in contemporary London.)

PS And "Mary Poppins" reflected the dreams of Jerry Garcia.

Nobody is stopping you from creating your own vending system to sell to those very same sims where your trade is "restricted". Your competition has just cut you out of the market very efficiently. Nothing illegal there, they just have used their competitive advantage.

You should try to do something about it and not whine here...unless you are looking for a government subsidy, or you want the government to intervene and castrate your more efficient competitor...

Under Standard oil the price of heating oil dropped to .08 cents a gallon, comparable to $1.60 a gallon today. This was with him owning 60% of the market. A near monopoly and prices dropped? How can that be?

In less than 30 years Andrew Carnegie pf Carnegie Steel reduced the cost of raw steel from over $60 a ton to less than $12 a ton.

If you want to know more try the following:
http://fee.org/nff/the-myth-of-the-robber-barons/

http://www.amazon.com/Myth-Robber-Barons-Burton-Folsom/dp/0963020315

What it sounds like is:
1. Vendor A offers a scripted system which supports plug-ins.
2. OP, and others, create plug-ins and sell them.
3. Because of expanding feature base and plug-in support, scripted system becomes popular.
4. Vendor A looks at what plug-ins are made to get ideas, makes their own versions of all of them, then modifies the system to disable everyone else's plug-ins.

Dispicable? Yes. Illegal? No. One of the reasons I got out of scripting was because the only way to protect ideas is to find abuses and bugs in the SL engine that others may not discover. Anything that's made using only regularly available functionality is doomed to be duplicated and likely eventually reduced to zero value.

I know it's tempting to say that consumers will be angry about their plug-ins no longer working and will switch brands. Try asking an old hand about the "JEVN incident" and you'll see why that's not accurate.

A more standard response would be: get together with all the other plug-in authors, make a version of the underlying system which contains all your plug-ins, then open source it (hey, you can't make money from your plug-ins any more, so..).