P.S.: If this is a joke I think now’s the time to say “Gotcha!” and run off. >.>

(Other readers, note I wasn’t “too harsh” on him. He LITERALLY steals the clothes off our backs and picks our pockets.)

What I wanted to say - any tool has two sides - and looking at only one side is wrong - whichever side that be. There are a lot of folks who look at it from either “it’s only for backups” or “it’s only for piracy” point of view.

There’s no illegal *technology* - there its illegal *use* - and the latter should be subject of noise, not the former.

As for the dependance on the asset servers - it’s not unique to the LL grid. AFAIK there’s no distributed technology at the moment - simply because boxing the users into the walled garden is a more fruity business for now.

I suspect if someone takes the copies off their own assets for backup purposes - they will be only right to do it. Indeed, IANAL, and the laws are strange these days - so maybe that’s not legal after all :)

/d

And Ambigious, as long as you back up your own assets I have no problem with it either. As long as you don’t resell multiple copies of those that were not created by you.

But the whole problem here is, that there seems to be no way to prevent people from stealing without loosing the freedom we have now. Maybe the right way to deal with this, is to stop trying to prevent them, but find a good and efficient way to punish them if they do? (And the current procedures in place are neither good or efficient.)

My main concern is the dependence on LL asset servers. LL encourages this virtual economy and a consumer-based one at that. So people actually sink in some real dollars to “buy” things. Once people do that, they will try to protect their investments, whether they be island sims, mainland parcels, dresses, suits, etc. etc. I assume LL keeps records of who bought what parcel/sim/estate as it must to charge the all-important tier. But it cares nothing for people’s inventories. I think that to resell other’s works for one’s own profit is completely wrong. But to back up your assets to a safer or redundant system is just a legitimate and prudent thing to do.