The Copybot Drama

It seems that that sign invited drama. It was my own fault, thinking about it so much I must have invoked Murphy's Law. The observant Hirokii Hyun sent me a notecard this evening, which was a notification that my Desperado Hat and Guy Fawkes mask had both been copybotted. The worst part: that they were distributed with full permissions in a group with over eight hundred members. This left me shaking, upset, and panicked. It's the thing you pray will never, ever happen to you.

I took a breath, and realized... I'm a concierge level customer damnit. I have the Linden hotline right there on my support screen, and if there's any time to call it, that's now. I made a support ticket and called the concierge support, and through that my ticket got immediate attention. I requested that the item ID's be removed, and that they be removed from the group notices immediately. I was also told that I could have a scanned version of my signed DMCA notice added to my ticket, and so I quickly wrote one up (not too quickly, I made sure to spell check and dot my i's). I'll be sending the physical DMCA tomorrow along with images, as well as having the image on my ticket. I'm now waiting on Linden action regarding the items.

In my panic though, I didn't know where else to turn, left in suspense and not sure when the Lindens would act, I was waiting for responses to my ticket, refreshing the page and wanting to make sure that the thief was thwarted. I banned him from my land, I sent an abuse report... but I knew that AR's are very, very rarely responded to immediately. Unless they're done by many people.

I sent a notice requesting my friends, my loyal customers, my Illusionists and members of Masqueraderie to send their own abuse reports on the thief and his alt. All of a sudden a rush of IM's in the group channel were asking for details, expressing their support and their outrage at the thief. In less than a half hour, his name was removed from search. Less than five minutes after that, as the group turned their AR's against his copybot alt, that name disappeared too.

I just want to say I have never seen that quick a response from the Lindens. I've seen swarms of fashionistas descend like a plague of righteous AR'ing locusts, and never seen a response like that. Abuse reports can still take a day or two, or at least a few hours(!) to be processed, even when filed en masse by angry shopping addicts. I've heard that even then, sometimes the culprits are only suspended, despite clear copybot abuse. I have simply never seen anything like that happen, which means you guys are clearly Extra Special Grade A Awesomesauce made from freshly grown organic Awesome. Just knowing that all of you showed such overwhelming support that the Lindens had to panic and remove his names just to stem the unending tide of reports made me feel so protected, grateful, and much more likely to sleep well tonight.

In honor of that support, and the incredible power you guys showed together, I pulled something appropriate from my inventory that I was working on, and sent it as a very grateful thank you

I feel very much a part of a family of wolves right now. And wolves protect their own. Thank you for baring your fangs when I needed it most.