Object ownership and cancelled accounts

What happens to an object if its creator/owner then cancels their account? I think that the answer is "nothing" but urgently need to be sure.

If that object had been shared for modification with a friend, does that friend retain the edit rights after the owner's account has gone?

best bet would be for owner to set object for sale for 0 for ya before they leave

Too late for that

Nothing happens to in-world content belonging to terminated residents. The object remains in SL as long as the land owner whose land it is on will allow it to remain. This even applies to vendors belonging to perma-banned residents! (Terminated tesidents no longer get the money paid to the object, but a vendor will still deliver product.)

I am not sure on the edit rights, if the object wasn't theirs, but they had mod rights prior to the account deletion.

If the remaining person has mod rights and the item is copyable, they can copy it and that copy will be "theirs". If it is not copyable, the mod rights might go away when the original account is fully deleted.

When you say 'cancels their account' ... is this person just canceling their premium membership subscription? 'cause freeloaders are allowed to have friends and objects, even if they aren't logged in or planning to log in again, so you may not have any problem at all.

Thanks, Ceera - a good help.

Jake - I'm talking about someone who's decided that SL was bad for their RL health and was leaving. Not sure if they had a premium account. The profile is still there at the moment, and they may not bother to actively cancel the account, but there's a risk they will. Since we depend on a lot of objects created by them, I wanted to understand potential implications.

If you can still find them in search their account is still active even if they aren't. But yes, even if they close it none of their things will go poof.

What sort of objects, if I may ask? If it's things like buildings, prim trees, or furniture, it probably won't matter in the slightest. The worst thing might be that you may at some point not be able to move the item, when you plan to eventually redecorate the area. But you can still return/delete it to get rid of it, if you're the parcel owner. Simple scripts like pose balls and door scripts will just keep on working, though at some point the scripts might need to get reset. If the item permissions allow "share with group" and "anyone can move", then moving a former Player's scripted bar stools or whatever shouldn't present a problem.

I think the only thing that might be an issue may be things that require frequent editing of a configuration notecard, like some types of security systems, for changing the default access list. If you lost edit access, you might not be able to update them. In that case, I would recommend working to replace the items as you can manage to do so.

Ceera, thank you for your input. You've captured the essence of our issue. We'll certainly deal with this better now.