Originally Posted by Jahar Aabye

Darling, are you referring to the parody called "Core of Quantums!!!!" that Jag put together in 5 minutes and gave out to make fun of your product? That was a joke, a fairly obvious joke, and one that was done in response to his outrage at your suggestion to your customers that they should grief his sim. He was justifiably pissed off and we all felt that having a good laugh was better than being angry. I don't think that anyone could possibly have actually confused it with your product...although I do believe that it was scripted, but the scripts were to do things that were parodies, like giving the user some funny message, or rezzing those self-replicating fish or some other stupid sophomoric thing, I can't remember, it was a long time ago.

To my knowledge, none of my friends have ever tried to sell anything purporting to be your products, as neither myself or any of my friends wish to have anything to do with a product that tries to crash other users' clients or otherwise engage in nonconsensual activities that denigrate another user's SL experience. Please do not make such accusations without some sort of proof to back them up, or you will very quickly find yourself backpedaling and looking rather foolish.

I am sorry that people are misrepresenting their products as being your work. I've seen people copybot our guns and stick freebie scripts in them, and they're usually caught pretty quickly because our products are fairly well-known and people recognize it as being copybotted and IM a staff member and send pics. That's the nice thing about having a very loyal and enthusiastic customer base. But I do understand the outrage when people steal your work or try otherwise try to misrepresent their work as being theirs.

But I do think that you are absolutely right to deactivate products that were ripped or otherwise illegally obtained. I do not know the extent to which the illegal actions affect your business, nor do I know the extent to which deactivating the illegal products helps sales by encouraging people to buy them legitimately. However, deactivating illegally copied products is certainly a fine idea.

Personally, I think that the best method is to maintain a solid, loyal customer base, and continue to innovate and create new products and update old ones, report and DMCA illegal copies when necessary, and hope that LL closes serious serverside exploits when possible. Unfortunately, copying prims is probably impossible to stop, given the nature of the server-client relationship. And as Argent has pointed out many times, at some point in software development you have to accept that some stuff will be pirated and that you can't stop every case, and focus on the product and marketing in the expectation that most people will purchase a legitimate copy.