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I could have called this "The curious case of RobbyRacoon Olmstead". This is a strange one indeed, RobbyRacoon Olmstead awoke on September 10th to an im that his Wave Katana that he had created seemed to have been copied and was being sold as part of an outfit as an unscripted demo sword. Curious (or more likely fuming) he purchased the outfit and confirmed that in his opinion it was indeed a copy of his sword. I'm not using "In his opinion" as a sleight, I simply don't know myself but I think most people would trust the creator of the original to be on the ball on these matters.

The evidence of this can be found here, where RobbyRacoon explains why he feels he has such a strong case of content theft and the evidence there does look very strong indeed. This prompted RobbyRacoon to file an abuse report, and he logged off expecting that the matter would be dealt with. What he didn't expect, and nor would most people, was that he would be banned for violating the TOS in the form of "Identity confirmation", which confused RobbyRacoon as he'd had payment info on file for three years.

RobbyRacoon scanned in a copy of his driver's license and two other pieces of personal identification, and attached the scan to a support ticket and waited and waited, but was simply informed that his ticket was in a queue. As far as I'm aware, it's still in a queue. RobbyRacoon has tried to make progress by contacting Linden Lab by phone and also has had friends trying to contact concierge support on his behalf, all to no avail. I understand why his friends would make no progress as concierge support aren't going to take up someone else's cause. I've had this issue too when a resident lost items and concierge told me that the resident needed to file a ticket, so they are consistent there and rightly so really. However why his phone calls and support tickets aren't progressing is another matter.

RobbyRacoon admits he's no angel and that in his early Second Life days in 2006 he ran land bots, so maybe he's made some enemies along the way to now being involved with Samurai Island. However Samurai Island seem happy enough with his work, although they've now taken his vendors down as with RobbyRacoon being banned, he can't support customers who run into problems.

So the issues currently appear to be, content creator reports content theft, content creator gets banned, content creator can't get his tickets progressed or rectified within a reasonable timeframe.

Now the problem with any sort of banning issue in Second Life is that we never hear the Linden Lab side, and we'll never hear the Linden Lab side and that's understandable, disclosure of such information to the public at large would certainly lead to some problems for Linden Lab. Usually when these situations arise you get a sense that someone isn't being completely honest about events, the problem I have in this case is that I am not getting the "He's missing huge chunks out of this story" vibe here. Something does feel amiss about what has happened.

RobbyRacoon has received support from the community:



This really needs to be sorted out as quickly as possible. Content theft is a hot topic, having someone who appears to have been the victim of content theft ending up banned is almost certainly nothing more than an unfortunate coincidence, I certainly don't think that Linden Lab have banned RobbyRacoon because of his abuse report, it's more likely that someone else has got their revenge in first but the issue shouldn't be dragged out like this and people shouldn't have to wait this length of time to get their accounts reactivated when they've sent in the required documentation, if there's a problem with the documentation then Linden Lab should respond that that is the case.

RobbyRacoon finds himself in the situation of being guilty until proven innocent. I understand there are reasons for this approach from Linden Lab, we don't want minors on the main grid and we don't want people with false personal information on the main grid either, especially not merchants, so Linden Lab do have to investigate these charges but they need to be investigated not only in a prompt and efficient manner, but with tact and diplomacy too.

The upshot is that RobbyRacoon is more likely to focus his efforts on Blue Mars rather than Second Life from now on, when people perceive they've been the victims of poor customer service they have memories of that for a lot longer than they do good customer service.