Ordinal Malaprop

I certainly did have faith in the past and, like many of the lapsed, would love to have that faith restored. However I increasingly have the feeling that this is all scripted by Graham Greene rather than John Bunyan.

Look, Tateru, I've been trying to point this out all evening. You can register *any name you like ever* on Avatars United. Anyone. A Linden, Tateru Nino, Ordinal Malaprop, anyone. It doesn't matter whether they have registered before - it doesn't even check for duplicate names.

Is nobody going to bloody mention this? The fact that *this makes the entire service completely and utterly pointless, and in fact an enormous hole for fraud and impersonation?* Apparently not. Avatar names are just words after all, they don't really matter.

"Stiletto Moody" is "Second Life's largest virtual goods brand"? Hm.

Changing names in itself seems reasonable - though it is taken for granted that names will remain consistent, just like avatar keys do. (I don't imagine any security-significant scripts would actually rely on name remaining constant as key is far more useful; the possibility always exists of course.) In fact I would prefer people with awful and annoying first names to change them. I do quite like the persistent surnames, I have to say, as they are connected to joining date.

But I suspect you are quite right in that this whole thing simply has not properly been thought through. There is not much point in trying to rewrite it to have it make sense as a proposal; "let people use their real names" just would not work.

Well, obviously. That would break existing content.

Er, actually VWR-12987 _is_ critical, given that it ruins any change in alpha for any prim, and pretty much every single animated attachment and an awful lot of animated non-attached objects use alpha changes in some way.

Personally I consider that this is certainly a precursor to a merge between teen and adult grids - oh, not a straight merge, that would be pointless as there isn't a lot on the teen grid anyway. Rather, allowing teens onto the main SL grid, to fulfil this bizarre idea that LL seem to have that the future of SL is in "education" (despite their lack of money and legendary parsimoniousness). This will begin in certain areas with specific permissions, and eventually spread to everywhere.

The thing is that campers _are_ trafficbots. It used to be the case that bots were not quite as easy to program, hence, the practice arose of offering money for people to perform the same service. That is all that it ever was; when bots became simpler, people were not offered money to camp (or, in areas where they still were, bots farmed said money).

If traffic bots are to be banned then camping does need to be banned as well.

I think the case will end up being settled out of court as you say, but I remember noting at the time that by taking over Xstreet, LL had automatically removed any safe harbour status that it might have had for anything sold on Xstreet. The DMCA explicitly says that the OSP must "not receive a financial benefit directly attributable to the infringing activity" in order to qualify, and they now do by commission.

Given that

(a) there is a vast amount of potentially infringing content out there;
(b) LL does not vet products before they appear on Xstreet at all;
(c) LL does not really vet them afterwards apparently;
(d) some people really will sue anybody for anything, despite the fact that so far they haven't very much, possibly because LL _could_ claim safe harbour status and suing residents isn't worth very much money;

I wondered back then what the plan was to deal with this sort of situation, and I still wonder. Of course, there _was_ a plan, I'm sure. Anything else would be inconceivable.

What irritates me is that a lot of the restrictions are not necessary under the act anyway. For instance it is not necessary to pass on the counter-filer's details to the filer - and _absolutely_ the wrong thing to do I would say - without a subpoena, and it certainly isn't necessary for the counter-filer to respond within two days. In fact unless I am misreading the Act, if LL refused to take into account a counter-filing after two days they would be in breach, as it doesn't specify a time period.

And as I said, it could certainly be argued that replacing the deleted content with broken content is not really restoring it at all, which also puts them in breach.

The thing is that as I said above they are no doubt aware that the chances of them being stung on a charge of removing inventory are pretty small.