My Sister is Scum, and not allowed to shop

Then you probably should have started it out with a more "educational" title in mind, rather than the appeal to the emotional "My Sister is Scum; and not allowed to shop".

I mean, if it wasn't meant to be a rant, that is. <.<

Considering just how close people were to naming names, if I were the store owner, I don't think I would take ANY of the posts in this thread seriously as a result, probably being cheesed off over the whole deal, and reinforcing my rationale for my choices that much more.

I like to have fun with thread titles.

It also demonstrates (a bit dramatically) what someone's gut reaction would be.

I'm not going to argue with you the rest of the day, over it. If you didn't learn anything in the thread....and don't want to have a discussion over the concepts.....then exit.

Of course.

I find it rather ironic that a thread started about how a business appears to others based on one aspect of its presentation or policies would not be expected to be be posted with concern about its presentation, especially if the OP expects it to be accepted by said business (or similar) as "educational".



Key word: "drama", as in "the instigating thereof".



Oh, I learned quite a bit, thanks, and tried to have some discussion over it. I presented another take on the situation. Obviously, you don't agree; there's a shocker, I tell ya!

As for "exiting", I'll do so when I please, thanks!

Your pattern is becoming abusive, Talarus.

Apologies to those who offered up answers to the questions, for the current distraction. Thank you for your input. It was enlightening.

Nope, i don't think i'd lose that bet at all.....there are some copybot viewers out there that can''t be detected at all, as it masquerades as either the Emerald Viewer or the SL official viewer...Cryo Life viewer by comparison is very lame! (& detectable) Given the population density of the grid, it would be easy as pie to be left alone in a variety of shopping locations and copy to your hearts content. (no need to hide behind NPIOF alt)

The majority of Copybotting, is done for personal use, they wouldn't have been paying customers anyway and those would be mainly NPIOF a/c's.....but there's enough documented evidence that existing Merchants who are PIOF have been doing it too (note...i didn't say Creator although they could be included too).

There's also been instances of SIM owners copybotting whole regions of builds. (1 sim owner was permabanned recently) SIM owners are always PIOF. I also know of instances whereby SL mentors being caught copybotting and distributing their stolen wares.


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There's a difference between what one can and has a right to do, and how one should behave, and further how to best behave for the general advantage of oneself and others.

Just because one can do something, doesn't make it wise to do so. Good behavior is not acting to the minimum bar, its acting in a socially responsible way.

So I too cannot respect someone arbitrarily choosing not to do business with a broad segment of other people.

Just have to say I have a few alts that no they do not have the PIOf or what ever it is.

till the other weekend we all moved around till my newest one went to go to a place that I will not mention but had the same thing happen so Mickey your not alone in this.

Had not seen it before but yes the message was quite rude in my thinking.

I have no idea who the prefab seller is in this case, so this may not apply, but just in general there's a huge leap of logic in concluding that somebody is trying to run the most profitable possible business just because they have some stuff set for sale.

There's a broad continuum between, at one extreme, really competing for sales as a serious business (or perhaps equivalently, treating SL as a game with L$ income as the point system), and at the other extreme, leaving out some items set for sale if anybody happens to find them.

In this instance, because the seller went to the not inconsiderable aggravation of listing items on Xstreet, they probably aren't close to the latter extreme, but the NPIOF thing suggests they aren't close to the former, either.

So one can't go to their store with an NPIOF alt. That's their choice, and it could be a perfectly responsible one. It is not an unreasonable position to take that *all* accounts should have to supply verifiable RL identity, for which PIOF is the closest available approximation in SL. One may not agree, but that doesn't invalidate the position.

Yes, it's an unreasonable action.

Because the person doing the ripping isn't the one at risk. It's the person who uploads the ripped content who is. The NPIOF alt is never going to visit the store.

As you may guess, I don't agree. I *do* agree that it wouldn't have any effect on whether or not the seller's stuff gets copybotted, which I believe to be the grounds on which it's deemed "unreasonable."

But that's not the "reasonable position" I suggested. If one believes that *all* accounts should be associated with verifiable RL identity, then it's perfectly reasonable to refuse to do business with accounts that do not. (That's leaving aside the problem that PIOF isn't exactly equivalent to verifiable identity, because it's the closest we've got.) Maybe it causes somebody to put payment info on file, reducing the (vast) problem (by one), or maybe it makes somebody understand the problem who didn't before. Or maybe it has no effect whatsoever other than to assuage the conscience of the seller, having done all s/he could not to contribute to the perceived problem.

I do something analogous myself. I used to have both Mature and Adult locations where one could buy one of my products. I've since closed my Mature location and changed the product from No-Copy/Transfer to Copy/No-Transfer, so if anybody wants one, they have to be Adult-verified to get it. I doubt if that has actually caused anybody to Adult-verify (I did some other things that I think *did* have that effect), but I think it's an important enough matter that it's the least I can do to refuse business from anybody who won't Adult-verify.

That surely won't make sense to merchants who are trying to squeeze the last possible rank from search optimization, but I really don't care if I sell another thing, ever, so if somebody finds it difficult to buy my stuff on my idiosyncratic terms, fine: they can buy somebody else's stuff.

I agree with you - but the difference is that you do have to _buy_ on XStreet - i.e., pay for the purchase. You can't copybot off of XStreet and the general opinion is that copyboters tend to be NPIOF - even though this is not necessarily the case and the majority of NPIOF avs are good customers.

I thought about this and decided that the number of content thieves was low in comparison th the number of bona fide customers and a content thief could have PIOF anyway. So IMO restricting my shops to PIOF only would be over reacting to the level of the threat, nor would it stop a determined thief - at some point a PIOF account must be involved to get the money out.

The general experience is that unverified alts are generally used to upload ripped content. That doesn't mean that the account used to rip the content was unverified. Banning NPIOF doesn't do anything to deter rippers.

Sorry - bad choice of words - I edited my post Argent - I mean it is the perception of this - an erroneous perception which has taken hold.

I understand that they do no have to sell to everyone. But assumed, as you said, that if they are listing on Xstreet, it might indicate that they want sales.

Was just asking what would be the reasons for the block, and does it happen often....and do you think that the merchant has a clue what the reaction would be...and do you think that the merchant knows how many NPIOFs are out shopping....and do they know that it's a pretty good sized piece of the population spending lindens....and "if" you are one of these merchants, might want to pay attention about the impression it leaves.....it might go farther, than just one missed sale. In my case, they probably missed about 30 sales off it.....and in that case, was it worth blocking, to avoid some of the hassles that were brought up, such as copying and griefers.

The price points were 2500 to 8000.....maybe someone doesn't understand that a NPIOF can have that amount of lindens. I could see where someone might have that misconception.

Veering off course a bit....but another thing to consider...and I notice this in my store a lot...is that people are sending their alts out to shop. Many of my customers have told me that their alts buy half the stuff, for one reason or another. You never really know who that is wandering about your store (or your SL life)....and they might be the alt of someone that you could snag some major business from, or do some kind of collaboration with, or simply someone that would go about SL giving you some major good PR. In this case, it was exactly that. Someone was about to get some major free advertising to the exact market that they were probably trying to hit (that is, if they were trying to make sales).

Fair enough.

I'm leaving my post up to reinforce the point that it *is* an erroneous perception, and that there really are no good reasons for blocking NPIOF to prevent copying.

Well consider all the PIOF left in other online games like WoW, Everquest etc......has it prevented theft or TOS rule breaks? If you're in any doubts why not "Google" and find out for yourselves.

I maintain that a % of all copybotting are done by PIOF a/c's anyway! I might get stick for saying it......but for example, the majority of content theft reported within the CCA Group are those with PIOF a/c's. (Usually shop owners selling stolen content)