Potential Precedent Setting Case

Am I the only one who sees the long-reaching ramifications of legal action on the recent exploit by anyone other than LL?

Just curious.

A few people posted how hypocritical the situation seemed. I just prefer to bite my tongue and watch in matters like these.

Hypocritical in what way? I'm just reading through things this morning so I've probably missed something whilst trying to catch up.

As pointed out by a few astute people, it's hypocritical because many residents (who will remain nameless) build their empire on others' intellectual property in Second Life... yet are so quick to join the lynch mob when their stuff is abused and/or stolen.

Seems the moral high ground here is riddled with holes, and the backlash could be significant.

In terms of legal action, the user agreement with LL states that they could pretty much make it official policy to delete your stuff and you couldn't do a thing about it.

However, a legal case against the people distributing intellectual property in violation of your copyright would be relatively straightforward. In other words, they would basically be screwed, and you would get either a settlement or a verdict.

The unknown quantity here is how much you could expect to get from it. There would likely have to be some kind of demonstrated loss of income to get much, but similar cases have been fought and won.

As for Linden Lab, not knowing the details of the technical side of it, nor what their lawyers have advised, I can't say, but IF someone violated the TOS and illegally cracked the client, all with the intent to steal other customers' intellectual property, then they would be in some serious trouble.

Violating the TOS is pretty insignificant when a federal crime of hacking has been committed, isn't it?

Ah I see what you mean. However, I'd suspect that most of the higher profile people who have had their code exposed due to this hacked client would not fall into that. I don't know if anything of mine has been open sourced through this, but certainly I'd have no reason to feel at all hypocritical about being annoyed by it, if it has been. It may be hypocritical for some, for the reasons you've stated, but not for all, so it's probably best to put that caveat in

I think the other issue in that thread concerned what might constitute legally-recognized and -mitigated damages, given that the act occured in a virtual economy and the ToS is clearly a document designed to protect LL from the fallout from such losses. As happens so many times here, so much falls on whether SL is a "game" or not.

Unfortunately, so much righteous heat is being generated, it's tough for anyone to argue out such a premise.

People are making a big deal out of a non event. These types of exploits have been around for every language since the beginning of languages.

Decompilers are all over the net.

Honestly folks, if GOM, etc ad nauseum have not been compromised, this is a non event.

The real risk here is a lot of ignorant folk running around making a big deal out of nothing.

All due respect, you don't know what you're talking about, blaze.


If this was as rampant as you suggest, everyone would have the source code to all their favorite games, windows, photoshop, office, etc etc ... but they don't, because you're wrong.

Decompilers don't give you source code. They give you one (or multiple) interpretations of what the code could have been. When a compiler changes a language into bytecode, all form of organization, comments, and structure is lost to optimization.


blaze, I suggest that you go script something remotely significant and come back and claim that with a bit of perspective of the issue.


Thanks, abuse reporting your thread for personal attacks.

You are really acting immature with these attacks. And I'm especially shocked that you would dare claim that the federal crimes that have been committed are anything but significant. Congrats, you've lost the last ounce of respect I ever had for you.

Definitely. Still, it frightens me to see the witchhunter mentality kick so rapidly into overdrive. I consider this sort of thing to be morally wrong on all counts, yet the backlash of righteous fervor can in many ways be equally wrong.

I took some pretty drastic measures back when it was discovered select jacka... ehm - residents were using one of my scripts to copy peoples' objects. Didn't save me from precisely this sort of public stampede, though.

I would say that if this person gets nailed, the charge will be hacking of LL's intellectual properties, as opposed to the lost content involved. The former has a very concrete base for litigation, whereas the latter would be a real gamble.



And blaze, non-event in the grand scheme of things, yes. Far from a non-event for certain individuals.

Agreed, however not because of your reasons.

If you want to claim loss of content, it'd be a civil case, not criminal. In that manner, you'd have to prove loss of sales; since this was handled so quickly, I've not yet heard of any significant loss of sales.

Now, should someone find that their major selling product was lost, and can then show the money they earn per month on that object, I see no reason that they cannot file a civil suit against the offender.

Agreed. There's still a deep rift in credibility there, though.

First, how does one prove loss of sales in a concrete manner? Would GOM or IGE transactions be permissible as evidence in court? Would bookkeeping based on conjecture be permissible?

Second, proving lost revenue over the sales of virtual products is a very shaky business in the current legal system. While I have heard of stories which tried these as real property, I've found many were not in American courts, which would be the default jurisdiction for a San Francisco-based Linden Labs. A better argument in the short term might be that the person is providing a service, but even then you enter the bookkeeping conundrum.

Finally, how would one be able to find information for who to sue? Surely these things are not published openly as part of the double-edged design. And even if you find the person, at what point does the possible benefit outweight the monies paid in lawyer's fees and time?


And that's just the tip of the iceberg. Suffice it to say, while possible, the legal hurdles make litigation at the resident level extremely unlikely.

the sky is falling! the sky is falling!

You're all just acting like a bunch of chicken littles.

In about two weeks, it'll be some other drama of the moment and no one will even be talking about this anymore.

Congratulations, blaze! Welcome to the first spot in my ignore list.

While much ado about nothing overall, these issues are very relevant for discussion, sans drama. No matter how many times they've been mentioned. And these things matter on a more personal level.

Well, precedence was set years ago for lost moneys on a WWW website hack. It's really just a matter of setting precedence for SL. In fact, if you were to argue that the data exists on the current Internet, and SL is a subset of that, there really is no difference.


US Gov't had no problem including my GOM earnings in my tax calculations. Any bookkeeping could be requested / subpoena'd by court order.


You're right in that I think it'd be hard to draw the line on where lost sales lie. But, let's say you earn $3000 US / month, and since the exploit you're earning $1000, and you can show that it is due to loss of specific products that made you $2000 last month. I'd say that'd be pretty convincing evidence.


That is more tricky. I doubt Linden Lab would protect someone that hacked them, though.

I think the biggest setback though is that no resident has lost a significant amount of cash yet.

Perhaps, but excessive discussion about an issue which will bear out to have little to no impact on the future of SL is just damaging and pointless.

Can't we all contain this in one thread? Do we have to have multiple threads all over the place about this?

We're all bored of this already.

See, if everyone had made their scripts Open Source it wouldn't have mattered at all

[Edit] Don't get me wrong, I think we should keep the possibility to choose whether or not we want to open the source of our scripts.

Is there a link to wherever this was first mentioned?

Alexa

I totally agree there, getting the person on hacking is a much more concrete basis as you say. If my stuff has been open sourced, although I'll be a mite annoyed by it, I don't really see that litigation would be much of an option. But then, there are some people who have had a lot of work exposed through this from what I'm hearing, and it may be worth their while at least examining the litigation route.

Funny, "we" seem to keep posting on it, blaze. Apparently, "we" are not bored yet.

Did "you" forget that "you" aren't multiple people, again?

Oh but he is. And frequently admits to gaming the forums as such. Which is why he has zero credibility.

The thing about this whole situation of the hack is that it was too well-directed at commerce-based & content creating folks. The source code to Suzie's SL Blog or to a generic low level script wasn't compromised, it was either high level products and the scripts involved with commerce based websites. I'm not one to play the conspiracy theory card and I don't know squat about hacking, but this exploit by whomever it was seems to me to have been quite deliberate and possibly done out of spite. Even if that is not the case, the hacker seemed to have a pretty good idea of Second Life itself and who to target as far as scripters go. This is what I find most disturbing, not that it was done, but why it was done.