Should LL be held accountable ?

I have read recently about many people having inventory loss and up to now
i dont think iv'e lost anything ( hard to tell with the state of my INV ) but i do
know several peopel that have lost quite a number of things over the last few weeks,
some items were cheap others not so cheap but the point is they were still paid for by
someone.

reading the TOS it seems that LL cant be held accountable for any loss's within SL,
i understand they have to have a clause like this to cover themselfs against scammers
and such but what about peopel that have LOTS of money tied up in here ?

say for instance your a business person and have 50 islands,
thats $83,750 USD real money and something happends where LL's database
gets messed up you could loose everything and LL wouldnt be obligated to reimburse you.

we all agreed to the TOS when we sign up but i dont see SL becomming a serious business platform unless it's customers have some kind of security.

They should definitely be held accountable. Only to paying users though. Free Ride users are on their own.

Altic, I think if that much money was tied up in SL, we'd have a new precedent set about virtual worlds for the US. I'm pretty sure there'd be a lawsuit and well, whether or not LL says the L is valueless, everyone here knows full well it's not. *shrugs* I'm just waiting for it to happen, because it's inevitable. The only case that I know of was because a person used an 'exploit' to get his land at a far cheaper price...

That seems like a rather arbiitrary distinction. Providing paying users with more services, or faster service is one thing. Saying that we're only going to make sure the software works for paying users, or that we'll do the right thing for paying users but not free users, or whatever is another.

Responsibility isn't just a legal condition, it's a state of mind. You can't really be responsible unless you're responsible to everyone.

I talked to Philip about this a few years ago when I had a major inventory loss. He made it pretty clear at the time, that LL will never be able to monetarily compensate users for loss of digital products. The total value of digital goods in SL far exceeds the worth of LL.


As far as loosing ownership of 50 islands, in a data base glitch, I am sure you could pursuit it legally and win. The content of the islands will most likely be lost forever without any compensation (assuming the back ups where destroyed).

The frequency of these inventory losses is alarming and needs to be addressed by LL , ASAP. If it becomes common knowledge that inventory loss is widespread, the economy of SL will suffer. Once consumer confidence has been lost in LL's ability to maintain their user's inventory, nobody will purchase digital products.

Raudf there is that much money tied up in SL, there are individuals that have more than 50 Sims and they have the same security as we have basically none.

and you are right it is enevatable that it's going to happen its just a matter of time,
i think it is DELL or someone that has 20 islands in here i fail to see them just
sweeping away 33,500 USD if things went wrong.



Tybalt i dont agree, i think free acounts should have less privilages than paid accounts
but support and security should remain the same.

In my experience inventory loss is already having a damaging effect on the economy, amongst other things. Many of the more experienced residents are already mindful of the ongoing inventory issues, some will only buy copyable things, other's won't shop at all anymore.

When my business was new I had only a handful of products on the walls of a podshop on a laggy mainland sim right next to a noisey casino. Months later my products have improved, I'm on a private island with no lag, I'm pushing hard to get people through the door and getting good traffic but I'm still struggling to get the sort of sales I did when I started. One of the previous updates shattered my sales by making textures take so damn long to rez and I've never recovered. I can't help but wonder how my business would be doing now if LL hadn't trampled it.

Vale

wouldnt islands be classed as digital products ?

if land is the only " safe " form of investment where users have some hope of compensation
i can see SL just ending up with more land than needed lol

Vale i'm in the same situation as you, started off on laggy main land next to a casino
now on a class 5 server, i hope business picks up again for you.


the small peopel never get listened to hence why no posts like this get responed to
by LL they just ignore them and carry on as they were, after all a few unhappy people
are hardly going to effect their business.


at the moment SL is a one of a kind medium and were all stuck here,
but not for long other 3D enviroments are being developed and will learn from SL's mistakes.
i just wish LL would interact more with the community to get problems like this and others
fixed and not just release a general blog post now and then.


the best thing LL could possibley do is LISTEN to its users and act on the major problems
experienced by them, keeping users up to date rather than adding new features every week.

This is such an odd area,
my RL job is an IT manager and tbh if i turned to my client and said that im not responsible for any of the equipment or data ... and that it may disapear at any point and put them out of business. That i may change the electricity used to one not compatible or even decided that every wednesday i would lock them all out for 3 hours while i ran amok replacing all their computers with the latest and greatest untested unsupported gizmo and then make sure that i locked my door and turned the phone off afterwards..... I pretty much would be out of a job.

The concept behind second life is excellent, but.......

Is it scaleable .......
by the looks of things NO, LL throwing up new land spaces is not creating new land it is creating new LANDBARONS, so all you see is for sale plots with hiked prices bought with dodgy bots. Where is the creativity... why are people not making and building.

Ive got a shop over in Percheria and ive spent as much time designing and building the shop as i have with the products inside.

Agreed there are many users who have found a home in SL, they work hard on what they have acheived but SL is turning into the "Digital Wild West" where if you dont loose your stuff through "technical failure" you are digitaly mugged by copybot etc.
I personally think that Sims should contain green belt land .... between plots or areas where LL landscape those areas so we dont see just a field of red spinning forsale signs or 16m parcels with 3 x porn/casio/(incert taste here) essentially making your land so damn worthless you sell it .... to the advert places under prices so that they then take the advers down and sell the land.

i love SL and havnt posted much in my couple of months i have been here.... and yes i DO make a little money in SL but it doesnt cover my RL SL costs like Tier Fees ...

the Tier is the maintenance cost of the SIM you are in .... you membership cost is the fee you pay for LL to manage YOUR account. With the loss of First Land ..... what do we REALLLLY get for our membership ...

You get the ability to Pay LL more money. Imagine if somebody came up to you in the street and said...... If you pay me £10 I will allow you to NOT buy the item in the shop but it will allow you to own the item that you have allready paid for.

It sounds odd doesnt it

You pay LL to able to buy
You pay another AV for the land
You pay LL for having it
LL looses you stuff and say they arnt accountable.
what ARE they accountable for..... they hold the servers, lackluster technical support and all we really would like.... is a system where things wouldnt disapear for no reason, if they did let them do a restore of your database for YOU.

anyway ive gone off topic and now i need to go home and get on SL as being at work makes me kranky *lol* ....

Se you on the grid

But as LLabs lawyers have said in the past. Nothing exist for real here. Hence you don`t own anything here......Maybe LLabs shoud rethink this issues more thoughtfully.

[QUOTETybalt i dont agree, i think free acounts should have less privilages than paid accounts
but support and security should remain the same.[/QUOTE]

I have to second this, I think all should be treateed fairly in all we do in SL, however I do not feel a person who does not pay for all the services should be entitled to all the services. The fees are there for a reason, equipment and salaries are not free, and the tax man waits for no one, lol.

There should be better services and more privladges for paying customers, not only do I pay for my monthly fees, but a nice big chunk in land tier fees too.

I have lost some inventory items both cheap and expensive, I do hope there is resolution to these issues soon, before something worse happens.

I fail to understand why they can't give out "play money" to replace the digital items lost. It is one thing to say that they can't replace something, but they should not on the one hand refuse to compensate in digital play money, something that they claim has no value, on the grounds that it would be too costly to compensate everyone for their losses. Most items, if not transferable, are replaceable because most content creators are still in the game. It is money that would not have been purchased otherwise on the LindeX because the need would not have been present. Since L is just a number, LL should compensate for the replacement item.

What do you class as paying users and free riders? I don't have a premium account, but the amount of money I have invested is higher than the amount of a premium account. There are island owners who aren't premium members.

That wouldn't stand up in court when someone who paid with real money via their CC for an island and to find it gone

AGREED! But rules are so flakey here nowadays.what was wrong 2 months ago is now right............really they don`t know that Credit cards payments are Real No ? sooner of later they get it and good!

because they expect people to just buy the item again if they really wanted it or they
pass it on to the creatore of the lost content saying that they should replace it.


lost content means you have to buy it again which means you have to buy lindens from LL
to buy it, see where this is going ?

I know why they don't do it, but I don't see why they allegedly CAN'T do it. It's a bullsh-- answer to say that it's too expensive when they say that it legally has no value. Talking out of two sides of their mouths.

Well that is true, but losing it on purpose is just bad business. LLabs is have a very very bad time with its hardware. We don`t want to see Sl landup going out of business. But the resent conditions are just a nightmare.........How SOME Left wing people on sl that are voicing their thoughts away from current issue and support the problems and not support the users ability to play without loss of inventory teleport failure, money lose, etc is just unthinkable!.Then again there are always people wanting to be Differnt

Fighting for a better SL......... http://www.projectopenletter.com

The original post raises some very interesting legal issues that will likely become more important in the near future.
What is the nature of digital property?
Under the current laws of most western countries I believe that anything that one owns in SL could be considered a license for intellectual property (when you lose your inventory you have, in effect, lost your license)
The other question is - since you are participating in an environment that is wholly owned by LL - do they dictate all the rules or do outside laws (such as common law) have any power over them?
Aside from the practical matter of inventory loss - the issues involved are much broader and as yet poorly defined.

if i remember LL made us sign a partical part of the TOS that say that we do not "own" any of the virtual creations in SL, creators are the copyright holders of their creations, but the virtual bloc of data do not belong to him, and when you buy something in sl you do not buy the bloc of bytes but a right to use the said content, like licensing, which btw can be revoked with or without reasons at anytime, or something like this.

Not willing to grease them up but hell they popped an imaginary world out of thin air, i hardly believe anybody beside them can decide what is losses or not.

And yeah sound like me its licensing of content, which mean in theory the creator of a content is "in theory" allowed to revoke your license aswell.

and the creators don`t own what they create either LLAbs owns the digial rights.....

That does absolve LL from any legal responsibility, but not from the ethical responsibility. The TOS shouldn't give LL free licence to be wreckless, it shouldn't allow LL to introduce these sorts of bugs with such a cavalier attitude and it shouldn't mean that the people who have lost their inventory should have no right to be upset.

LL have the right to protect themselves with their TOS, but they shouldn't strut with impunity because we can't force them to fix this.

Vale

Islands are a bit different than other inventory you might have and really is not the same as other things you might buy in SL. I'm not sure you can even try to relate islands and other items. Islands have record of what you have and were in the grid it sits. Who owns it can be verified and recovered even if it is one or many. I highly doubt 50 would ever get lost in one shot but it might, even then all 50 would still have record of who owned it and where in the grid it was located.

LL only sells the rights to control virtual land, really that’s all they do. Notice it's "control", the TOS then sets out that LL owns that land is only really setting the rights you have to use and control such land. Past that we as users here are responsible for everything else. We are the one with record of what we buy and who we bought it from. The ones that sell there things to you, hold the rights to sell it and the liability of the inherent risk of loss by data error. Now the sellers are going to say its LL’s fault for bad code. Bad code or not, still comes down to the seller and buyer do not pay LL as part of the transaction so by that point alone LL is in the clear. To say its BS, is a joke! If you go to a RL store and purchase something and it gets stolen, lost, or damaged, you don't go after city hall to file your claim.

Now might be an interesting way for LL to make some real cash and offer sellers to archive product sales records and the object, then to the buyer could recover lost items where the DB record is now missing. The seller could pass the cost on to the buyer in what ever form they choose. That way free and paid accounts would have the same protection option. But I know what people would say, “why would I have to pay for it?”, SIMPLE, your expecting some one to provide a service that costs real $ to offer.

True, but if you buy a toaster that stops working within the warranty you do have the right to return it...