Jez Ember

I would love to know why LL restore habitual content thieves accounts and their MP listings within a few months of DMCA take downs? I can't understand how the DMCA can be interpreted to be a temporary request. I also can't understand how LL can have such little regard for creators that, having been given the asset IDs of exploited prims used for content theft, they do not erase the assets and permanently suspend the accounts that own them. How can a bug from five years ago be allowed to continue profiting content thieves today? I'm happy to name names to anyone who asks (I'm aware of 16 alts of the same content thief) although many creators will already know exactly who and what I'm talking about. I'm only not posting links here to eliminate any excuse to kill the post. Might this be taken more seriously if I get a lawyer involved with my next DMCA takedown and subsequent non-compliance? Has anyone tried that already? Jez Ember Games

My suspicion of cloning came from a communication from a well known creator of animations, who I guess I can't name without breaking the TOS (not that he'd mind). He was certain his stuff had been cloned as he acquired one and checked it against SlySense. A few years ago this went on all the time, but I thought the holes for content duplication were closed now, other than rollbacks which we can only hope LL perform with due diligence. I don't believe an inventory clear out would yield a continuous stream of product over a number of alts which replenish each time they sell out, unless the one actual game delivery I'm aware of was a one off and all the rest are scams. I have no problem with people selling on their old games that they no longer require, and I'm aware of a few second hand product dealers who trade trans items, but I don't believe that's what's happening here. I guess I can't prove anything, so the question remains, for the obvious scam (delivery of a freebie item instead of the advertised product) what does it take to get a listing taken down? I thought LL would be all over that kind of shenanigans, considering how aggressively they police legitimate content creators who make an innocent listing slip. Jez

Delivering only a free HUD when the listing is for a full game is not a yard sale. I did notice that the listings are limited quantities - whenever they run out they get topped up within a day or two. I guess I'll DMCA the listings for using my descriptive text. Jez

I received an IM from a well known creator of animation systems a couple of weeks back, bringing to my attention a group of sellers (all obviously alts) on the MP who were selling cloned and fake products. He uses SlySense so was able to prove that items of his on sale there were cloned (no mention of how). He had DMCA'd the sellers and had his stuff removed, so obviously LL were aware, but had not banned the seller nor taken down the store. The stores are also selling some of my games, in particular a card game called U-Know. Since then I've had complaints from people who have purchased the game from those stores but received only the game HUD, which is a copy/trans item that anyone can get for free, and is useless without the game table. I've established that he also, occassionally, sells a complete table. This has me even more concerned, since I'm aware that he's selling cloned items. However, since I don't currently have a licensing system, I've no idea how to prove that. I've no idea how it's even possible to clone a scripted item in SL these days, other than a rollback. It's making me very paranoid about sending redliveries and replacement no-copy items to my customers! You'd think it would be easy to do something about this... but what? I've AR'd the sellers, no response, no action taken that I can see (in that the seller is still active). I tried to flag the item but there's absolutely no category for scam listings, and I assume my efforts were ignored. The stores are full of items that are widely pirated within SL (search U-Know and take a look, right now all the listings other than mine are, I believe, the same person). I can't in good faith file a DMCA without being able to prove that these items are stolen, and the selling of free HUDs as something else would seem to be a TOS issue, not DMCA. In the cases that I've been contacted about I've urged the buyers to file a report. Any thoughts? Anyone else affected by this? Jez

LL have removed delivery failure reviews whenever I've flagged them. I don't flag them until spending time (a lot of it sometimes) attempting to educate the customer in question and have them change the review of their own volition. I've never failed to motivate a customer to do so, but often they lack the technical ability (there's a button called Delete, you have to be logged in, is it really that hard?). As much as these reviews get under my skin, much of the blame lies with LL and their unreliable and confusing product. I wish I could drive every sale in-world (where I basically never get delivery failures) but sadly 75% of my customers continue to shop at the MP (often while standing right next to an in-world vendor). As far as I'm concerned LL provide the MP service and charge us for doing so - they should provide the support to customers with failed deliveries (whether it actually failed or the customer got confused by the SL inventory system). Of course they can't because there are SO MANY of them. JE

Banning third party viewers would do nothing to reduce piracy (the copybot viewers would remain) but the loss of residents unhappy with being forced back to the stock viewer would most likely hit our trade rather hard. Piracy is annoying but those of us who work in the RL software industry will be conscious that the rate of piracy in SL is way lower than for RL content. Speaking for my own SL business, I'm pretty sure I'm far more affected by loss of income during marketplace and in-world downtime such as the glitches that have plagued the grid today. JE