My view on Linden Lab’s midnight DMCA raid

I’ve had a chance to think about the Lindens’ unannounced erasure of allegedly pirated inventory items over the weekend, and what I’ll say probably will stun those who’ve seen my ongoing criticism of the way that they’ve conducted their business. I am 100% behind Linden Lab on this. To explain further, I have a few [...]

DMCA crackdown in Second Life (FINALLY?)

I’m not fully up-to-speed on this issue, but I’ve seen a couple blog posts that refer to a mass deletion from the Second Life database of presumedly pirated intellectual content… Linden Lab’s Big Content Takedown – Massively Linden Expunges Illegal Multi-Position Sex Beds – Second Thoughts Again, I don’t know anything about this…but it appears [...]

Random thoughts on a Sunday NetVibes scan…

I probably ought to read The Making of Second Life, but I’m not sure I can stomach another fanboy piece. We get enough of that on some of the more “popular” SL blogs. The Lindens released a “clarification” (my term, not theirs) on their new trademark lockdown rules. Within 24 hours, a wildcat user group [...]

Linden Lab’s “stand” on intellectual property says…

…it’s your responsibility.  Not theirs. Now, if the Lindens put some vigorous enforcement into DMCA reports, we might be getting somewhere.  But to tell the userbase that it’s THEIR responsibility to inspect individual items before purchasing…well, that’s crap and we all know it.  Especially when one of the commenters on their blog post reframes the [...]

Linden hypocrisy re: intellectual property

From Miss Hera, posted on the JIRA: “Linden Labs should”, unforturnately isn’t the same as ‘linden labs does”. Look up the amount of resold stolen item and the percentage of items where linden labs removed the UUID after a DMCA. I’ve got a nice collection of stolen skins  of which all still work and none [...]

I complain because I love

Harper’s comment about the increasingly dour tone of this blog in recent weeks has had me reflecting on why I would be going in this direction. I think I’ve come up with a couple notions. To preserve the visual integrity of this blog, I’ll put my extended thoughts after the fold. Read on…

How can honest creators win?

I was all ready to smack Hamlet Au around for his Linden-fanboy post, “If CopyBot Comes Back, Should Anyone Care?“ But then I saw this comment by a reader named Zetaphor: CopyBot 2.0 is here. CopyBot never left us, it simply went into hiding. CopyBot is nothing more than the export and import commands of [...]

We can’t let feelings like this be left on the JIRA, can we?

For those who don’t know the Linden Lab product improvement system, the JIRA… It’s the main system by which Linden Lab customers vote on the importance of improving different technical glitches in the Second Life software. Users can file JIRA reports with suggestions or complaints. Other users then vote on the different items, giving weight [...]

Phil Linden: I can’t run Linden Lab well and have to protect my investment

That’s surely what it looks like from the initial announcement through Reuters and then in his own personal comments. Perhaps the new CEO will straighten out the mess with bots, griefers, anonymous accounts and content theft. Phil had plenty of opportunities and passed every time.

Linden Lab clearly has missed the boat

Check out these couple paragraphs, buried deep within Gwyn’s overview of the world of intellectual property and content theft in Second Life: Education is probably the best effort that can be done so far. Lobbying for Linden Lab to acknowledge the issue and enforce copyright theft prevention is quite another story. One of the most-voted [...]