Copyright infringement bans upheld, or repealed?

Last week, as you might recall, we covered a tale that really caught people's interests, and warmed the hearts of many a Second Life content-creator; That Linden Lab had run a bit of a sting, which neatly suckered a bunch of copyright infringers, resulting in their banning.

In the wake of that, a number of readers (indeed quite a lot of you) wrote in to tell us that you had heard that the bans of most or all of the those involved had been reversed within a day or so. While people do indeed circulate all manner of rumors, that would certainly be quite an interesting turn of events, so we got some legwork done to see if we could get to the bottom of it.

Firstly, there's a difference between a suspension and a ban, though many Second Life users use the terms interchangeably.

A suspension is a temporary thing. More than one of us here at Massively have been suspended from Second Life at one time or another by Linden Lab, though the reason for them were never actually divulged to us.

A ban, though, is something the Lab does rather less lightly, when they feel they're on far firmer ground. The legal contest with Marc Bragg back in 2007 was probably a factor in that.

"The team is good at what they do and account bans are not taken lightly – we're careful to make the right decision the first time," a spokesperson for Linden Lab told us earlier this week, "All of our abuse reports are reviewed by people on our specialist team, who include both the user's past history and the current report in making a determination about outcome of the report; because each review is done by a person, sometimes mistakes can happen."

"Because we recognize that, Residents have the ability to appeal if they feel the wrong decision has been made; abuse appeals are run by the supervisors, not by the same folks who process the reports. Most of the time, appeals don't provide information that would result in bans being overturned, but occasionally new information comes to light through those appeals that makes it clear a mistake was made, in which case we reinstate the banned account." That's a process you can find out more about here.

Insofar as this action was concerned, it appeared to be bans and not just suspensions, so the Lab was obviously pretty sure of itself to begin with. Also rumors of accounts banned with good reason being mysteriously unbanned do circulate among users at times. If you wanted to try to shake the confidence of content-creators, that would be one way to do it.

Per policy, the Lab's being tight-lipped about the whole affair and not really giving any information about the action or the accounts. Even so, a few of the involved accounts have been chased down – and indeed, they do appear to remain banned from Second Life.

So it seems that the rumor that the bans relating to this action were subsequently overturned is just a rumor, and nothing more.

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