What about Bots?

check carefully : you were not sold access to the land.

You were sold the pim limits on the land and the ability to use X amount of square meters.

Nothing in the land purchase/rent contract includes access right to it.

You keep referring to the TOS, the TOS is not the law, never has been and never will be. Charging people for something they can't use (and if I can't use the prim limits because I can't get to the land) is not likely to be legal.

Then contact a lawyer about it, and sue next time they lock logins.

See how fast they laugh at you.

You pay for a certain product, but there is also a clause that state that it's not their problem if said product is not usable by you.

And the catch is, TOS are a contract you agree to. As such you are bound by them.

If you sign a contact to do X with the understanding the other party can renegotiate and not fulfill their part without requiring your consent... don't complain to a judge when thye give ya a bag of coal instead of gold bricks.

Of course they wouldn't laugh, it's generally illegal to sell a service and not provide a service, you know what illegal means right? There are consumer protection laws the world over to prevent such situations.



Absolute balderdash, this is the biggest load of balderdash you've came out with so far. If a TOS conflicts with the law of the land, the law of the land wins every single time and it doesn't matter what the TOS says or what you've agreed to, it is not legally binding if the terms are illegal.

Read carefully what service you are signing up for.

You are making assumptions that being able to access the land is part of the service.


It is not.

this is just out of curiosity but what is the difference between tier and land use fees?
this thread has me looking around and i keep seeing tier and land use fee's..
it says Island billing is separate from land use fees. now i'm really not understanding this ..and they look cheaper than tier so what the heck is this lol
http://secondlife.com/whatis/landpricing.php

Tier and land use fees are the same thing. Island billing is separate from land use fees, what that means is you don't get your 10% group bonus on an island, owning an island doesn't affect your mainland tier. If you buy land on an island from a third party, you won't get billed by Linden Lab, it won't change your land use fees.

When you buy land, it mentions your land use fees in the window. If you buy land on mainland and it will take you into the next tier category, it informs you before you buy that your land use fees will change.

I'm making no such assumptions, there is no mention of land or prims in the TOS. However they sell me land, that is the service I'm being sold. If I can't access it then I'm not getting what I paid for, they still use the term ownership.

Hit the KB, no where are you sold access to the land. You are told the m2, prim limit and in case of sims the maximum number that the sim will support so you can plan around it.

During the renting of the land you are not told you will be able to ever access it in the future.

Unlike the real world there is no right to access

Bots never give up, get bored, log out, go on vacation, ...

You're entitled to yell and scream at the customer service desk about your "rights" until security escorts you from the premises, but the law says what the law says. I could wish the law otherwise myself, but neither you nor I are in a position to rewrite it.

The TOS does not mention land or prims or access. A KB article really isn't going to wash. I am however sold a service and if I can't use what I'm being billed for (in this case land) I doubt very much whether consumer law in California is going to be on the side of Linden Lab.

They're charging me for land here Mort, that's what I'm billed for "owning".

Real world: try suing a condo company when you can't get to the condo because there is no road to it due to people filling the roads that lead to it.

You paid for the condo apartment, knowing that there was a risk of limited access. No court will fine them for it.

The condo apartment people don't own the roads Mort, that's a key difference.

never been to a gated community have you

From earlier, this is important: Quite right, and it's a good thing, too, especially on shared Mainland sims. (Technically, I can't see how the hell they're going to do what's really needed, because script execution time is a pretty poor indicator of how much lag a script can be generating on the sim, but that's a whole different discussion.)

On the avatar count issue, there are several different scenarios in discussion that are illustrative in their differences.

Shared Mainland sim, total avatar limit of 40: We know that the ToS has been enforced here to reduce individual landowners taking up too many of those slots too much of the time. The G-Team removes camping spots (in Bear, for example) if they prevent others having reasonable access to the service (their own or Linden land in the sim).

Wholly-owned Mainland sim, no Linden infrastructure, 40 avatar limit: In this case I think LL could force the landowner to keep under that avatar limit, but wouldn't do so under current "rules". It would not be completely unreasonable for them to decide that all sims in the Governor's estate have to be navigable at some altitude by anybody, or perhaps by anybody who's not explicitly banned. (This would also mean a change in how security orbs can operate, obviously.) AFAIK, there's been no such policy, ever, but I don't think this could be considered "taking" anybody's purchased "land rights." It would just be a rule change.

Wholly-owned private sim, owner-controlled avatar limit (let's say 100). Here the premise is that you can mess up your sim all you want and nobody else suffers, so let a hundred avatars bloom. Except of course it *does* have some impact on shared resources. The impact is less if those avatars are stationary bots, but even if they're the more resource-intensive campers or continuous "real" party-goers, I doubt LL would try to curtail the avatar count explicitly. Nonetheless, they could have good cause to do so, and probably have no legal problems doing it.

They're selling a service that relies on some degree of variability in demand--in much the same way that every ISP in the world depends on the fact that not every connection will operate at full capacity 24 hours a day. If they needed infrastructure between the customer and the Internet backbone to support full capacity continuous demand, bandwidths would be limited to dial-up speeds or thereabouts, or fees would rise dramatically.

Suppose that the service is so dependent on variable demand that a change to supporting every sim avatar-full 24x7 would raise the cost of sim ownership to US$2,000 per month. That would obviously decrease the market viability of the service, and LL is under no obligation to destroy its own business to guarantee a service feature that isn't profitable.

Sure, US$2000 is probably more than it would take, but returning to the shared Mainland sim example, and the sim performance itself rather than the backend systems: We know without question that 40 agents in a Mainland sim is *enough*. And we know that 1/40th of a sim is 1638sq.m.--the US$25/mo tier level, for something folks expect to get (and more) with their bonus 512: access to the sim by just one avatar. That would be a heavy price to pay for guaranteed availability. We intuitively understand this about sharing the sim resources; some such sharing is happening behind the scenes on LL's backend systems, too, and with some similar cost savings to all their customers.

Never heard of one to be honest

The thing is they own the roads in the community , they are not public.

thats on the inside of the gate not the outside..

still i don't think anyone is saying that LL would be responsible for lets call them natural causes in connections.. and certainly not for my connection problems..but i bet it's safe to say they would work with their customers if their sim were down a week or two or a month because of something on their end..

the TOS if you ask me is more to slow down the petty omg my sim has been offline today pay me type things..
we are assuming that LL is going to jump right to the TOS worst case scenario backup plan right away..i've never had a business do that off the bat and i don't think they would either..now jump on the phone screaming and they may go right to the book..

Right but I'd bet my bottom dollar if I couldn't access my home because they weren't looking after the roads then consumer law would be on my side.

they have no control over people parking on the roads or using them legitimately.

If you try to sue a city because someone holds a parade that prevents you from going somewhere... you get laughed at.

Same if you sue a city because of a traffic jam during rush hour that results in you not being able to use the movie tickets you bought.

SL is a gated community in a sense. The gate is the login screen.

Neither the access to your house nor the access to a Sl parcel is a 24/7 issue. There's a reasonableness factor. You're right, I can't sue the municipality because of a parade. But I can sue them if frost heaves make the road impassable and they don't repair it within a reasonable time frame. I can sue them if they don't plow the snow from the road and I lose business, or worse, can't get emergency medical care - again, within a reasonable time frame. They're obligated to maintain the road so that I have ordinary access, not 24x7x52.

The situation with LL and land is similar. They have no liability if a server or backbone router fails and you can't get to your land. They have no obligation if the total load on their network causes one of those transient login locks. But if a neighbor operates their parcel in such a way that I can't get at my parcel (assuming mainland and direct ownership), then yes, they're obligated to take action. We've seen cases where they've done that. We've also seen cases where they haven't - not because they have no liability, but because they're walking a line between their obligations to different landowners, and relying on the cost of litigation to keep these cases from escalating.

The absence of an explicit grant in the TOS isn't conclusive. Courts routinely enforce implied provisions of contracts, particularly in consumer cases. A product or service is presumed to provide the features necessary for its intended use. LL isn't obligated to ensure I have 24/7 access to my parcel, but they are obligated to fix a problem that results in no access for an unreasonable length of time.

i finded dis..
this sounds a bit more like a service you would pay for..
i only copied number 5 cause it would have been way too long

Mort, Sling and Argent.

You are perfectly free to have your opinions, as I am perfectly free to have mine. That's all there is to it.

My view is that, if I pay for something, I have a right/entitlement to that something, or my money back. If I pay LL for a parcel of land, I have a right/entitlement to use all the prims that the parcel allows, or my money back. If I pay LL for a whole sim, I have a right/entitlement to use the maximum number of avatars in the sim, plus the maximum number of prims, or my money back. Your views are different. Does it matter?

When those avatars utilize resources that are not yours to use on the grid and affect the grid as a whole.... no you are not entitled to use the slots.

That is the catch on bot use, you affect more than your parcel by using the alt accounts to manipulate traffic. You affect the stability of the grid in excess of a normal user.