Linden employees are allowed to take copies of any item they wish.

I don't care, I mean, they're responsible .

If you wanna see proof they can:

Client -> View Admin Options
then
right-click an object you don't own -> More... -> Take Copy is enabled.

See? They just need to enter God Mode lol.

And, the Lindens can also delete your account, but you're not worried about that, right? I mean, jeez, they won't do anything with your precious objects >.> And for all I know from Linden friends, they pay for what they want, as in buy. >.>

At least this is a twist on the Sky is falling. And...it IS Friday.

Inspecting your inventory can only be done by "superior" Lindens AKA engineers only. They inspect it only when you're on the wrong grid and you're being moved (Only MG -> TG) .

EDIT: But they no longer do so on second thought, they simply delete the avie info if moved from MG -> TG (I had my old alt moved, so I know). When TG -> MG they don't even look at your "Welcome to Second Life!" notecard .

I have extra tinfoil hats if anybody wants one........

Chas might like one to cover his hair

It goes against IP rights, copyright and TOS though. We are supposed to have rights over our creations.

We DO have rights, they don't use it at all. I mean, Google can look in anyone's Gmail inbox, but they don't. They can but won't. I guess they only have that as a backdoor for emergency stuff and investigations.

I would imagine LL has their employee access set up similarly like SOE's (EverQuest, Vanguard, etc).

Guides (main interaction employees in game, ran quests, chatted, did trouble tickets, etc) had near godlike power but were not only required to turn in logs each day but also had their guide accounts monitored.

GMs had even more god powers, but they were in house employees but also had logs and monitoring on their GM accounts.

There are checks and balances in place and when those were tipped, SOE stepped in and took action. Everything left a trail.

The plus side to such living under a microscope as a guide? SOE paid my regular account monthly fee, I got each expansion free also.

For two years I did that. Had a blast.

.




so LL abuses its powers ... abuses its priviliges ...
intrudes on privacy ... steals from its citizens ...
enjoys their perks ... controls a false economy ...
violates their own TOS rules ... infringes on copyrights,
creations and objects of inworld members ...

if Washington DC can get away with it, so can Linden Labs ...

it all comes under the heading of Protecting the Children,
or, Protecting the "GAME" ...

and besides what really is an object on Second Life
that a Real Life Human created from their Real Life inspiration
and spent their Real Life hours of labor to create?

its only an arbitrary micro digital synchronicity of coded data interpretations ...

its not like its your Real Life DNA code, or codes that awaken
the mind to the changes of evolutionary conciousness ...

i mean, who can see exactly what kind of shoes or nose ring
you are wearing from more than 3 SL meters away from you anyway?

*if one hasnt noticed, apologists are everywhere*

and afterall, isnt Second Life just a "GAME"?

so if for most people, Second Life IS just a "Game" ...
then ISNT all of this, as well as all of the other technical problems
and losses that many people grief themselves about,
simply part of the "Game" too?



and besides, what kind of Game is it that does not have various prototyping pitfalls?



.

I disagree that something should be done to change it, as I consider it their due.

I also don't see it causing much of a problem, so why bother getting worked up about it? I've had two Lindens purchase items off of me (or my wife) that they didn't need to buy, so it doesn't appear to me that they abuse that power, and even if they did.... Why care?

.

Don`t you mean double standards?!

FTW!!!

I love Friday


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I suspected all along that the Lindens could take copies of anything. That's because they login with the god rights enabled. Basically, they can do anything they want, anywhere in the grid. I don't agree with it, but it makes sense to me that if they're expected to do their work, they should have abilities all the other AVs don't have. It's sort of trusting the police with your kids safety...do you?

.




by double standard ...

do you mean like the national public outcry
when Paris Hilton was set home from jail,
but barley a whimper was heard when Bush pardoned Libby?


no not quite



.

OP has gone quiet it seems.
lol

I dont know about others opinions - but that has to be up for an award of "daft post of the year".

Yes, this is no secret. But most Lindens will and do actually pay for things. There was a very good post about this very subject on Second Citizen recently.

http://forums.secondcitizen.com/showthread.php?t=17750

This is necessary for investigating abuse or crimes. Lindens buy lots of stuff.

Sometimes they might also need these rights to actually HELP with something?

I use to work for American Express and had the option to look at anyones account information in the world. Any celebrity, any politician, you name it.....with the consequence of immediately being fired for doing so without cause. Just because they can doesn't mean it's ok.

If they do, how are you going to police it?

Does it really matter? How many Lindens are there compared to the 40,000 or so that log on every day. Personally I'd love to get a picture of a Linden using something I built. I hope lots of others see it as well.

I love SL but there is plenty to complain about....this does not make my list as one of them.

I worked for an ISP -- to view a customer's email (to deal with corruption, large files choking the system, etc) we had to go through a number of identity verification steps, then get the customer's express permission. Anything less was an immediate security guard escort out the back door. Not worth a job to read someone's email to Aunt Martha about their trip to Wisconsin.

I'm *far* more concerned with the various asset sever screwups making my stuff full permissions, and then public domain for the resellers to get hold of, than I am about a Linden helping them self to something once in a while.

Actually, I've had Lindens BUY my stuff. Even though they CAN take it (anyone with a God account could access your things, its just how it is, deal with it) they don't, unless there's a good reason for it - technical support problems, griefing objects and scripts causing trouble, etc.

And hell, I'd even give it to them if they stuck it out in the Linden village for everyone to see Who could beat that advertising, hee.

There's a bit of a difference here between letting cable employees have free cable and letting your employees copy the items of your customers without paying.

The free cable is being paid for by the cable company employer. The copying of customer items is stolen IP from the customer, possibly IP that the customer sells to help pay their land fees.

If it's true, it's worse that video piracy, because it's being done with the the express permission of the lindens, not by third party pirates. For that matter, most third party video pirating is pirating of stuff that's been broadcast anyway.

Hey, if any Linden wanted to wander around wearing something I'd made I'd be thrilled to little tiny bits.

Apologies to the OP. I had a response here but it wasn't constructive.

Let me try again. It has always been necessary for some of the Lindens to have God Mode powers. Not every Linden has these powers and the request to go into God Mode is logged everytime. They need to track and debug errant scripts and textures etc that may inadvertantly be crashing sims etc. It is also necessary to have in case of a greifer attack. Imagine them not having the ability to both stop an attack and also see the code inside the script to plugs holes in the code base to prevent them.

Lindens have always had God Mode and there has never been even a hint of one profiting from that power. But also please realise that they not only have the power to copy a single object, they have the database for every single object in SL already.

Several months ago while having a casual conversation with a high ranking linden , I was told she basically has an un-ending supply of lindens in her account . Dispite the fact lindens have god mode , I think their fairly happy to spend alittle of their money into the overall sl economy. I also had some of my items purchased by lindens several times now .