Why is LL, (Philip Linden), protecting thieves???

I think we have a right to know, and I think we deserve an answer from Philip himself.

It goes without saying that theft in Secondlife is out of control. With no viable form of policing it has become virtual anarchy where thieves roam the verse, stealing other users content and reselling without any worry of retribution – it is a thief’s paradise and Linden Labs is letting them get away with it.

As far as I am concerned, Philip should be absolutely ashamed of himself for not protecting the very people that keep Secondlife rich in content. What's worse, LL has basically allowed these thieves a carte-blanche license to operate. Why? They refuse to punish them.

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Case in point A:
One month ago, the same three users go from store to store wearing a 'Store Manager' sign above their heads. They tell customers, shopping at the store, they work for the store and can give massive discounts on skins. Unsuspecting customers give their monies in good-faith only to be delivered empty boxes. Thousands of dollars worth of Lindens are stolen, abuse reports are sent by dozens of content providers and…

All three of these users are online RIGHT NOW!

Case in point B:
Two weeks ago a user is caught trying to sell stolen skins from the very store she stole skins from. She waits until a customer is trying on a skin, then sends them an IM telling them she can sell them the same skin for, 'a greatly discounted price'. The thief is caught in several more stores doing the same. She then tries to negotiate the sale of some stolen textures for other goods.

The user is confronted and she says: "Report me, Linden Labs don't give a f@ck if I steal from you."

Once again, multiple abuse reports are filed against this user and…

She is online RIGHT NOW!

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I cannot digest why LL has taken such inappropriate action. Most gaming companies would immediately ban users suspected of money duping or theft. Not Linden Labs, it's almost as if they take pleasure from our misery.

Please Philip, please explain why your organization prefers to harbor thieves than protect its content providers. Please explain why you refuse to ban/suspend accounts of known thieves. Lastly, please explain why you continue to avoid this issue.

Your, REAL, content providers await a response.

Well, what is even funnier is how back in 1.1 when LL declared that we the residents of SL own the rights to things we create.

But LL does nothing to help us enforce our rights over intellectual property that we create.

I think they made that grand announcement back then for publicity sake because they have done very little to help us protect our intellectual property.

Briana Dawson

It sucks. I know. Bigtime. Why are ARs being just blatantly ignored?

My guess? LL's totally swamped. Drowning. They can't tell the legitimate ARs from the trivial because they simply don't have the manpower to do it and can't afford to hire as many people as it would actually take to stay on top of the problems. I'm betting that the backlog is so huge that many are just marked "resolved" without even a second glance JUST in an attempt to clear out the queue...but that could just be the cynic in myself speculating.

They opened the floodgates with the new reg system and then almost immediately nerfed up the the Abuse Reporting functionality...what does that tell you? It sure seemed like a "duck and cover" move to me. They want the numbers but don't have the capacity to handle the fallout...and those residents who give more than two you-know-whats about SL are having to absorb all the problems, annoyances and real losses...while, at best, LL treads water.

I have to chuckle at the whole goal of getting WoW-like numbers. It really sounds like a goal born of investment money to me. WoW *never* had to make their accounts free to get their massive userbase.

If you're after an answer from LL, you've posted in the wrong forum. SL Answers will get you one. General - generally - won't.

Any bigname investing companies you see in SL, boycott them... that will start the wheels to motion

Or... given the small numbers of people using this forum, the even smaller number of people who know who the investing companies ARE, and the even smaller number of people who care enough to do it..... they won't even notice.

Boycotts haven't been useful for a long time, unless it's some religious organization boycotting something for "destroying our children", and then it's on a constant loop on Fox News and the 700 club.

I hear ya Storma....

This problem of theft and/or scamming WAS happening in our shop at least once or twice a week. NOW, running into these problems has become an everyday, if not several times a day occurrence. my entire last couple days has been dedicated to fighting off theives and scammers. this issue is becoming so repetitive, wth are we designers suppose to do?? Continue filing ARs and DMCAs? Sorry, but how is this going to stop all these poeple from theiving? They can just create a new account and simpley do it again? I understand this issue is a "grey area" but Linden labs needs to aproach this problem differently. My partner and I have contacted several Lindens to help us deal with these issues. The only response we get out of them is to file DMCAs and ARs (which in most of these cases the DMCAs are ineffective) and that they do not want to get involved with the matter. I feel no protection to my content i create in SL what so ever. The matter is completely out of hand for us designers. If we are not allowed to get these people's names for the whole sake of privacy, so that we can figure out a solution ourselves, this SHOULD fact be LL's job, and it NEEDS to be handled more efficiently.

That's not automatically a justification because here -- right here -- is the means to identify generally what concerns the SL community as a whole. Sure, Random Idiot #284 might AR for nothing, but if you're already aware of the larger picture, of what SL residents are chiefly concerned about -- and why -- you can apply that knowledge to that hypothetical swamp of ARs and get a sense of which ones are probably worth extra time and effort.

I mean, that at least seems reasonable to me, speaking admittedly as someone who doesn't actually work in LL's office. Maybe I'm missing something important here that would totally invalidate my assumption, but I can't presently imagine what it would be.

What bothers me is that we know that at least a few Lindens, and especially Torley, do read the posts in here ... at least from time to time. So they can't be wholly unaware of what's being said, can they? In which case, I'm left to wonder how and why all of this is happening.

Surely that can't be the problem?

I've witnessed 2 lindens now who appear to have an unhealthy interest in a small plot of land near my shop.
Such a great interest that I've seen them chat for hours with its owner on several occasions - last night just to help him position a flexi windsock.
I've seen them log out and log back in with alts.
Quite interesting really, I'm just waiting to see if they do any favours for the land owner (terraforming protected land etc).

Not sure if this is an oopsie or not, but interesting nonetheless!
/invalid_link.html

yes that seems to be it although i have no idea what that post is about. I was under the assumption that the land was for slingo purposes.

It seems to be a Linden breeding ground and as I noted before I find it totally fascinating that they can spend at least 2 hours making a flex windsock blow in the right direction, I even had to return a "wind direction detector" that was dumped on my land.

Makes me wonder too why LL would do this and allow users to keep playing even though it is quite obvious they are theives. It's only going to get worse and something needs to be done now and not later or at all. It's not like they can't do anything. We all know they can do something about it, why aren't they???

Without content creators, there IS no Second Life.

Without a customer base, there ARE no content creators.

Intellectual property theft, scamming, and texture copying hurt every damn person in this game, customer AND creator... Except, with the current hands-off policy of LL, the person DOING the deed. Is it just me, or is something very, very WRONG with that??

Anything I can help with I will. I should outright state that yes I am terribly swamped at times, but every day is a new day and I want to start things fresh. Some things I've been working on. I'm just one person but I want to do the best for you guys.

Yes, as Eryn alluded to, the abuse queue is munged up with false reports, reports without sufficient details, and we really need some categories to be added like EXPLOIT and UNDERAGE and IP VIOLATION I think. Just being able to sort and organize info = priceless. You should see my email box, it's insane. There's a project to revamp abuse reporting and induce "good friction" to manage expectations AND result in more effective actions being taken.

Also, I know it's been asked several times when we'll have better ways to identify the original creator of a texture like first-use metadata. It was brought up the other day and it burns brightly in my mind. Anything we can do to help identify who's the original creator.

On a very human level, what makes me sick are blatant rip-offs served with self-justifying excuses being paraded around. I know the zeitgeist is such that when I go into numerous shops, I see signs saying things like:

THERE IS ONLY ONE MANAGER OF THIS STORE AND HER NAME IS...

I think bad copies are shameful and I think Storma makes nice stuff and it makes me puke to see it happen to any content creator. I've had many friends it's happened to. :\ The legal aspects aren't my forte but I will forward this thread to Philip and Ginsu for their insights.

no offense but I don't think they are Ginsu's either;

"I think I work pretty hard, but this is beyond my capacity. In addition, copyright is not actually my field of law - in fact, there isn't a single person at Linden Lab who is properly qualified to adjudicate copyright disputes. Asking me to review your copyright matter is like asking a foot doctor to perform brain surgery."

Ginsu Linden

As I pointed out in my e-mail to Phillip, I don't think lawyers are what's needed - its someone who knows graphic software thats needed, to review original files and determin where one is faked/stolen. I say this as someone with 15 years professional experience in Photoshop, its quite easy to determine a legitimate claim of theft.

Forget whats legal and whats illegal, remove the legal mumbo-jumbo about DCMA blah blah, make it user friendly - look at it from a moral point of view rather from the view of a lawyer.

I have to agree with this, we don't really need lawyers, just enforcement.

I'd love to see a more strict categorizing of ARs to make them more manageable. I'd even go so far as to suggest that when selecting what category of a report you're filing, it brings up the relevant section of the TOS so the sender knows what's valid and what isn't.

A lot of the scammers, griefers and alt-harassment don't need thorough investigation. If it happened, you get the boot. IP theft is sticky and I can understand that the Lindens are hesitant to step in it, but they don't need to be extremely heavy-handed in the approach. Playing a little bit of Devil's Advocate is all it takes to determine if something is a derivative work, or a captured and re-uploaded copy. If it's really questionable, let it slide, that's okay.

We don't need the Lindens to be perfect, but we absolutely do need them to be responsive when thieves are bold enough to admit their actions with impunity.

Torley, as always you're a saint.

I don't mean to single out Philip, but this is really getting out of control and we need someone who will take this issue seriously; it is ruining SL.

Thanks again

A creator just found a bunch of her stuff being sold in THERE.com, think the Lindens should hurry up and find the hole here, before were all shipped off...

I am not even sure that you can file a DMCA if you aren't from the US, waiting for clarification on that one from LL.

She should file a complaint with "There".... they seem to be a bit more pro-active on texture theft than LL:

http://developer.prod.there.com/developer/developer_help_textheft.html

Wich, as Wanda rightfully pointed out, is IMHO an absolute amount of leprechaun droppings. SL is not the real world. LL Doesn't have the authority to issue RL penalties (and will never have it), but they don't need any legal authority and/or qualification to adjucate theft and scam issues in their OWN world. Terminating a thief's account is entirely in their powers and they need absolutely no legal qualification to do it.
They just need the will to do it.

In any case, thieves and scammers aren't the most dangerous problem here. There's something wprse, and that's the devil's advocates that defend them (some because they like to argue just for arguing sake, but some actually even believe in what they say). Unfortunately there will be alwats people trying to steal, but what really debaffles me is that there's always someone more than ready to defend the perpetrators against the content creators' supposed "greed". maybe they should better go play robin hood in sherwood instead of in Second Life.