Wrong to be bothered by this?

[Wayfinder Wishbringer]

I have to agree with Nalates in this.  While I am the last person in the world to defend Linden Lab-- and am very aware they have repeatedly crossed the copyright line in the past as well as other lines of legality (I won't bore with details)-- in this case they are merely pulling in a convenient complicated mesh for testing. They're not distributing it, they're not selling it, they're not massively reproducing it and giving it away.

 

It is being used as a limited test subject on a non-commercial beta grid.  It's not the main grid.  As such, I'm not aware of any copyright law they're breaking.  They are not selling the item for profit.  They are not distributing.  They are not depriving the author of expected gain.  

 

About the only thing they MIGHT be guilty of is using an item for purpose not intended by the owner... but that's a very gray area.   So myself, I don't really see the harm or impropriety in this particular thing.

 

Now bait-and-switch pricing... stomping on user copyrights and preventing us backing up our own work... palagiaraizing customer documents and items for their own use without even asking the author-- and hiding behind their TOS while committing outright copyright fraud... that's a whole nother matter and people certainly have a right to complain there.  But this particular thing... no harm done to the creator that I can see... thus no copyright breach as far as I can see.

 

However I will say that for a company that is so stickly about supposed copyrights that they won't let us back up our own creations because they contain full perm, public domain textures... yeah... that's a little two-faced.