Be careful whom you converse with

So there you are, you've typed up your listing for Xstreet, you've decided to make it a plain English listing rather than a keyword fest, so you describe your item with a litle background on its origins with a storyline.

So say for example you are selling silks, you decide to say who might be using these silks and being Gorean there's a slave element and you point out that the slaves are allowed to converse with any free person. Then you discover that someone at Linden Lab doesn't seem to understand the meaning of the word converse, they are only familiar with the brand of footwear and they remove your item from the marketplace.

I'm not making this up, this is exactly what happened to a much surprised Constanza Amsterdam, owner of  Eyecatcher and co-owner of slapt.me (warning site contains adult content). The thread can be found here (warning, may contain profanity).

Constanza received an email explaining:

"We’re writing you because your Xstreet SL marketplace listings include the following branded item(s), brand name(s), or other item(s) containing intellectual property:

CONVERSE

*Marketplace Listing Guidelines*

Branded items may be listed or sold only by the brand or intellectual property owner or its authorized agents."

The actual offending and apparently intellectual propert breaching part of the XstreetSL listing was:

"White silk pure, not necessarily a virgin, often a new slave who is still in training will wear white Reserved for the slave's owner sole use. These slaves are generally permitted to serve drinks and food. They are allowed to converse with any Free Person"

Did you spot how Constanza had heinously used another brand name and infringed intellectual property rights? Yes, of course, she used Virgin, whom I pay for my cable television and Internet package, oh wait that's not the one!

No no it's converse, a brand of footwear and despite Constanza using the word in context, correctly, in plain English, this wasn't noticed by what I can only assume is an automated system that isn't very good at its job.

The email went on to explain:

"We also do not allow keyword spam in listings – or the use of brand names that have nothing to do with the item listed so that the listing will appear in search results."

Nope it's not keyword spam, it's not in this case a brand name, indeed there's nothing at all wrong with adding some background to an item to get a little bit of interest going. So Constanza sent an email asking what the hell was going on, to which Linden Lab replied:

"Thank you for contacting us with your questions. Linden Lab disabled your XStreet SL marketplace listings because they included brand name keyword spam, including use of CONVERSE as a keyword"

Now Constanza included in her email the original listing and the images, so it's not as if Linden Lab can be excused here for only having access to the reason for the listing being removed, someone should have read the listing details and spotted the error. The item isn't even footwear for a start, how on earth it got to this stage is mind boggling.

Eventually someone at Linden Lab did read all the details, the listing was reinstated and Constanza received an apology:

"Dear Constanza,

Thank you for your email. After reviewing your Xstreet SL listings upon your request, we have reinstated them. We apologize for any inconvenience caused by the temporary disabling.

If you have any other questions, please let us know.

Sincerely,

The Second Life Marketplace Listings Team"

What they should be doing is reviewing their systems. How on earth was it not spotted that there was no intellectual property violation regarding converse initially? That's what Linden Lab need to address. I'm assuming that someone reported the listing because there are certain keywords I can use that find infringing content, clearly infringing content yet somehow someone decided that using a word in its correct context, for an item unrelated to the brand was infringing.

This is important because it would be possible for someone to be infringing trademarks and try and be clever about it, for example someone could create some trainers in the style of Converse, complete with their logo but try and be a smart arse by using the word in its correct context in the listing to try and attract people looking for Converse footwear. However that was clearly not the case here.

Linden Lab do have listing guidelines and I welcome moves to enforce them, but they also need to add a human element to these processes, is that really too much to ask?