I hate Sundays. Banned for “being underage”.
Do you want the good news, or the bad news?
This is a statement which I should always say to myself when waking up on Sundays. Because it seems Sunday is drama day.
On the good side of things, my first ever product has sold tremendously well and has become the #2 best selling item on SL exchange at time of writing.
How? Well, i’m not exactly sure. I tried to market the KKF name by simultaneously releasing a free cuddle collar on SL Exchange, but that hasn’t proven immensely popular. I’m beginning to think that maybe it’s some bug in SL Exchange, because i really haven’t sold THAT many… have I?
However, on a more stern note, Linden Lab took this opportunity today to hit my account with the banstick. Much as I love linden lab, they do have a habit of sucking cock when you least expect it.
They banned me for being underage. Hopefully my account should be restored soon, given that i have submitted valid ID to them.
This isn’t really a problem. But what really affronted me was the way in which Linden Lab ridiculed their own age verification system. That’s right, I was age verified before the ban. If Linden Lab don’t believe their own age verification system, then why should anyone else?
For the record, i’m 23. I was born in 1984. I have been an adult for 6 years. How many other ways can I say this, linden?
Oh well. My account is still getting rich while i’m banned. Though i suspect lots of people are getting free stuff from my vendors, since a banned account can’t receive lindens… gotta love it!
F.
heya freak, hurry up and get unbanned will you? lol.
Glad to have you back in SL, Felixe. It only took what … a week?
False UA reporting is a particularly nasty form of anti-kid harassment. What really galls me is that LL just takes the false UA report at face value, suspends without warning (generally right before the weekend), and then takes its jolly good time un-suspending. LL provides no info about your false accuser, and presumably, take no action against the harassers.
That your account was already age verified is really the icing on the cake.
How should LL change?
First of all, take their heads out of the sand. I understand their paranoia about RL underagers getting into SL, and places where they shouldn’t be … but LL should realize that certain nasty people are gaming LL paranoia. This is (in your case) clearly serious *harassment*, not to mention a waste of LL’s time and resources.
If LL receives an UA report, it should (1) if age verification has been completed, assume the UA report is false unless there is some compelling reason; (2) as a rule, provide a notice with (say) one week to provide age verification *before* suspending; and (3) investigate people who file (say) three or more UA reports which prove to be false.
Florian13 is hardly the only kid who has been harassed in this fashion. I think it took LL about two weeks to unfreeze Koffee *after* he faxed his driver’s license and stuff. And there have been others too.
p.s. Btw, the age verification system sucks. I couldn’t get it to auto-verify against my driver’s license, passport, or social security number – and I am even a U.S. citizen well over 18. I hate to think how it works (or doesn’t work) for other countries.
p.p.s. Is it really true that you can’t get paid from your vendors if your account is suspended? Sue for damages!
I’d be delighted to bring forward a case on suing for damages if this happened to me. (Although it’s odd, you don’t hear of many adult AV being banned for being under age, but maybe I’m wrong). I think it would help bring legal precedent to issues that require them. My running theory is that the EULA is not an enforceable contract in instances where user activity within the world is part of the policy of the platform owner. So, SL has a EULA which they can always resort to as their last line of defense towards doing whatever they want.
However, it is contradictory when the platform owner (Linden) sets down strict rules and a governance model where they are, at the end of the day, the judge, and then gives users rights such as economic production, land management (it isn’t Linden that sets a sim as PG/Mature, it’s the land owners), and the right to collaboratively contribute to the JIRA, policy discussions and other vehicles for code improvement.
EULAs will be thrown out as a legally binding mechanism. It would be like an ISP saying “You do whatever commerce you need to do on our network (so long as we don’t receive a legally binding judgement against you), but we’re going to reserve the right to pull the plug without a minute’s notice if, by our own judgement, we don’t like something.” The ISP that DID pull the plug would be liable, as the BitTorrent hearings in Congress are currently demonstrating.
EULAs instead will need to be constructed so that they offer a broad model for governance, IP protection, the rights of the platform owner, and policies about behavior. However, they will only act as a touchstone against which policy decisions are made, but policy will end up being as legally important as the EULA itself. Policy will become a shared decision making process between ‘residents’ and platform owners – as economic production increases, it will not longer be acceptable for platform owners to nerf classes of users, the dollar values will become significant and class action lawsuits will follow.
In this case, Linden is confusing its rights via the EULA to ban someone based on an unsubstantiated complaints, with the broader policy question of age verification, both of which are tied into how the code constructs the enforcement and expression of these policies.
My impression is that over at Linden there are silos within how the company operates, in which policy and law may be more closely linked to coding (age verification) than to execution (processing of ARs).
SL is a testbed and as such struggles as the early and perhaps most libertarian explorer of them all. In all fairness, newer platforms like Kaneva have strict age criteria and don’t allow young AVs, nor does Twinity, nor do … well, almost anyone. Linden has tried to strike the most open possible system, but like many things it succeeds more at the level of philosophy than its execution.
(And reading Wagner Au’s book is confirming this).