Brenda Connolly

I am pretty much an outsider in the whole thing, it really doesn't affect me. I do think LL acted horribly, and not out of any incompetence this time, they knew what they were doing. Some of you here were affected by it, and you are all pretty much insightful and level headed about it, so I am going to ask here.

Across the street there is a very vocal bunch who are rightfully indignat/furious/vengeful over the affair. However some of them are taking the Patrick Henry route, and screaming about all sort of social injustices and such, including all sorts of legal actions. There are several threads on it, but I'll use this one:

SL Forums

To me this is a case of just a case of a company taking a business action that is objectionable to some, a small percentage of it's customers probably, with the recourse being stay and take it, or go elsewhere. But I'm not versed in the legalities. Is there any ground for what these people are calling for, or are they just a bunch of raving lunatics? Albeit entertaining ones.

Kyllie Wylie

Im not a lawyer, but I know in the place I work every major decission is run through the Legal Department with the question "are we going to get our butts sued off us if we do this?"

I imagine LL does the same thing... at least I hope they do.

of course you never really know in the states... in the US if you get scalded by a hot coffee in McDonalds you get $1,000,000 ... in 98% of the rest of the world you get a free cup of coffee....

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Briana Dawson

all the screaming about legal action is probably just pot stirring to make it look serious.

I really doubt anything will come of this. The people with the money to do anything about it (like pursue a law suit and afford legal fees), also have the money to absorb the cost increase without thinking twice about it and probably for the most part do not care.

if they are so pissed off they should just cancel their accounts and move on to something less stressful and more financially stable. Once you start deciding to try and sue game/virtual world platform makers then in my book you are taking all this way too seriously.

Cristiano

I am shocked that they are allowing threads with discussions of legal action against their company.

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Tyche Shepherd

Well the OP in in official forums is mistakenly trying to apply UK law to a Californian Entity so its a non-starter in the first place. Secondly even if LL were a UK company , or their Terms of Use claimed the UK courts as the Legal Jurisdiction of any disputes the OP is still wrong about the Trades Description Act (1968). LL's Terms of Use have enough information in them to alert any customer as to what the product/service covers - whilst IANAL I'm 95% sure that a UK court would throw out any such complaint.

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Briana Dawson

Nah, it is not necessarily allowed. It is just that Katt Linden (ALL HAIL the great moderator) has a 48hour ping time.

Malachi

To this layman it seems that there is little basis for relief there under US law. There are two claims: LL uses the word "buy" when they really mean "rent" and the rent is being changed.

You could probably pop the "buy" verbiage with reference to trade in software, music, and movies, all of which are said to be "bought" but are actually "licensed". Unilaterally changing the content of a lease is bad, but these leases have always been month-to-month and so a change with advanced notice is perfectly legitimate.

Brenda Connolly

I would thinks so too, but we are talking about LL. A year or so ago I would say there was a great chance of them being legally clueless, but I think that M and M have changed that.

On the Coffee Caper, while there are too many frivilous lawsuits, that one has grown into a bit of a urban myth :

The MCDONALDS Coffee Cup Case--- Separating The McFACTS From The McFICTION

Brenda Connolly

What interests me is that this is such a small percentage of the population affected by this, and while to them it is disastrous, and will result in ending their Second Lives in some cases, in truth most of us don't really care. I don't mean it to sound harsh, they got rooked, but it really won't have as big an effect on the world as a whole, despite their rantings.

Cindy Claveau

I was one of those affected by the OS fiasco. I lost my dream home and now pay about the same amount for a much smaller, much less private parcel. I came VERY close to leaving SL altogether but I'm just not ready for that, yet.

But I don't think I've legally suffered any compensatible damages and I don't think LL breached any contracts. I had no recourse than to just soak up the small financial loss and move on.

What would these people do if the Lab closed shop tomorrow and closed the grid? It's not written down anywhere that they are legally obligated to keep it running.

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Brenda Connolly

Also there is a sense of entitlement that they should be guaranteed that the price of the seervice they were using would not go up. They are still getting what they are paying for, server space. Yes the conditions of use have changed a bit, but that's it. I don't see a bait and switch here as there is no tangible asset. I'm not defending LL, but i think it is what it is, end of story. The calls from some to physically show up at LL World HQ and demonstrate seem especially ludicrous. Unless you live in SanFran, a plane ticket will set you back a lot more that the price increase.

CoyoteMomiji

Ha!

It's Time Again - The McDonald's Coffee Suit

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Isablan Neva

I'm getting ready to exchange my OS for a class 4, so I was effected. However, the TOS is pretty clear that LL can do whatever they want, whenever they want - so I don't think there is any recourse. It just is what it is, either you deal or you leave. It strikes me as being exactly what happens in a lot of companies - the sales dept isn't talking to operations. I have worked for several clients who have this problem. Sales guys sell the sun, moon and stars and then operations gets wind of things and starts catching the problems.

Rosie Barthelmess

I was displaced in the fiasco, and I think it is going to end up affecting way more than a "small percentage" of the folks in SL -- I tink I saw a thread saying that more than 50% of the regions on the grid were OS's at the time they made this announcement. Whether that's individuals owning one or more than one, or situations where more than one person live on an OS, I already know about half my friends that have been somehow displaced from the OS problem or who will be come January when their landlords who actually own the OS's raise rent commensurate to the fee increase.

But, I don't know how much actual legal action one could take against LL. We just took advantage of their offer to consolidate, got four OS's together, and went for it.

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Tyche Shepherd

It was just over 50% (13,000) of private estates, about 42% of the total grid.

Brenda Connolly

I imagine many will do so as well,and mny will move to regular mainland or private estates,and along with new buyers and those who can afford the increase, by this time next year it will be as if nothing has happend. On the whole I think it will cause some churn , and yes personally a lot of people will be affected by losing friends, seeing businesses close, etc, but it will not be th end of SL for a lot of people by any measure.

Khamon

They can still fix this by running homesteads two-to-a-processor and setting them to support 5000 prims and twenty avatars. Scripts will never be regulated beyond the goo fence because, well, tedious work and Linden Lab are antithetical. They can redeem homesteading though if they just will.

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Galen McGinnis

Does the price change suck? yes. Can they do it? yes.

Plain reading of the following TOS provisions would say not a chance, but with the right jury, the right judge and a whole lot of luck, who knows. The U.S. legal system, at least civil side can be a hell of a crap shoot. Got 500K USD to play?



1.7 In the event you choose to use paid aspects of the Service, you agree to the posted pricing and billing policies on the Websites.

Certain aspects of the Service are provided for a fee or other charge. These fees and charges are described on the Websites, and in the event you elect to use paid aspects of the Service, you agree to the pricing, payment and billing policies applicable to such fees and charges, posted or linked at Second Life | Second Life Billing Policies. Linden Lab may add new services for additional fees and charges, or proactively amend fees and charges for existing services, at any time in its sole discretion.

7.1 Governing Law. This Agreement and the relationship between you and Linden Lab shall be governed in all respects by the laws of the State of California without regard to conflict of law principles or the United Nations Convention on the International Sale of Goods.

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Jahar Aabye

Yeah, I'm not seeing any legal recourse here...and while I am not a lawyer, I do have a BA in Political Science and have taken quite a few legal and cons law classes during undegrad...so I guess that counts as being legal counsel for SLU purposes

California courts (and the West Coast in particular, including the 9th Circuit Court of Appeals) are known for being liberal and often going against stare decisis. While this can be good (such as the decision to allow gay marriage) this can also be bad when they decide to issue a ruling on a business matter that goes against all previous decisions...so I'm just saying that anything can be possible in these courts.

However, the ToS does state clearly that Linden Lab may add amend their fees and charges, which they have done, and add new services for additional fees and charges, which you could also argue that they have done.

And then there's another issue, which is that if the amount at stake is less than USD $10,000, the plaintiff may file for arbitration instead of going to court:

And of course, who knows what an arbitrator might decide, although my guess is that the ToS would be more likely to hold up under arbitration than in a court of law, since an arbitrator is less likely to decide to declare the entire ToS unlawful or inapplicable.

But in the end, it comes down to this: A service provider realized that they could no longer afford to offer a service for a given fee schedule, so they decided to alter the fee schedule and alter the services. If that action were rendered illegal, it would, overnight, destroy the entire US economy....well, more than it already has been. There were no long-term contracts for use of the service, so there isn't any breach of contract issue here, Linden Labs announced the policy change several months before the changes went into effect, and at this point it would be very difficult for anyone to argue that they did not receive notice, given the massive protests.

Ciaran Laval

The only legal issue I can see with LL is their incompetence in not changing the private region pricing page, which even today doesn't mention the impending price rise. That is misleading advertising, if someone pays for the service under the impression that the maintenance fee is USD$75 and get a first bill for USD$95 then they could easily claim they've been had, it's very unlikely to be worthwhile but it's a good example of how piss poor Linden Lab's customer relations are.

The rest of it, you should only invest in LL what you can afford to lose.

Joshua Nightshade

I've been affected as well. I was breaking even on my sim before this and am waiting to see how things go until January before I decide what to do.

I do think there's a potential lawsuit here. Not for the reasons in that thread, or discussed here, but entirely around the way LL handled things.

They removed most of the restrictions around obtaining openspaces (no longer was it necessary to buy four at a time, or connect them to an existing island), they beefed up the prim allocations for them, and they lowered the prices. Upon doing that, there was a surge of interest. Which they could not have known about, especially in the cases of openspaces that had a billing contact different than the estate manager-- that was a change that Lindens had to do manually.

So having improved accessibility to them, and watched as the numbers surged, they suddenly came back around and attacked the people who purchased them as abusers and changed the cost again.

If the sim had 3750 prims, I'm going to use 3750 prims. That's like LL coming along and saying that you have X numbers of prims on a full island but you're not actually allowed to use all of those prims, they're just for decoration. Not to mention that an unscripted prim (which is 99% of the prims on my openspace) have no affect on sim performance at all. Scripts and avatars, both of which I personally restricted myself, are the only thing that affects sim performance.

So I'm not happy about it, mostly because of the insulting and dumbass way Jack acted (as usual), and I do think that there's lawsuit potential. They dropped the prices to encourage adoption and then having had everyone pick them up, doubled the cost back higher than it even was originally.

But that having been said, I doubt that any lawsuit would happen, or amount to much. Instead I find it very gratifying watching their numbers tank, and I hope that this gets worse for them so they have to actually start accepting their moronic policy decisions.

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Caitlyn Clawtooth

Wells, yes and no.

Yes in the sense that not everyone in SL has their own island.

No in the sense that a lot of people either have business with someone who does (who will now have to adjust their income in other areas) or will see favourite places disapear (whether the island it was on went bye-bye or the owner decided to leave).

Even further, a wider disruption to the entire SL economy and much less trust in LL with everyone wondering what will be the next place the axe falls. Which will spur the exodus to other grids.

Gigs

It's not a small percentage. 13,000 regions with an average of lets say 3 residents per region that call that region home for most of the time they are on SL, being conservative. That's 39,000 active users that will be displaced.

39,000 of the most active users is a huge deal.

Here is my take on the legal situation, which I posted on my blog shortly after this:

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Briana Dawson

This is totally inaccurate. Sure 3 residents per region could be affected, but that is not a 'direct' affect, it is 'indirect'. Before this fiasco, you could teleport to dozens of OS parcels and full OS sims and lease them right there. Which is what lots of people did. So no, it is not like 39,000 people have become agitated by the system and will in turn agitate back through various channels, like legal channels. They will instead pack their things up and move to a new sim (Estate or Mainland) that has the right price for the right amount of prims they want to use. Now they can take there 30K Linden and go give it to someone else for 3,750 prims.

I bet more people have been displaced from their land by shady land lords who collect mass rents up front and then shut down than the OS sim fiasco.

Briana Dawson

Does anyone have any REAL law background that can give any insight as to what legal leg if any, OS sim owners have to stand on?