Take my life, please! (Theft in Second Life)

There's a woman I met a couple months ago in Second Life who struck me as a true example of someone trying to own her life and live it richly. She is divorced and has a daughter who has leukemia. So in order to be with her daughter at home and still put food on the table she dove into Second Life and started a business selling clothes.

This she does full-time and has been able to build her business over the last 8 months to where it just pays the RL bills with a little left over.

Last month she discovered her creations being sold in a freebie market by SL thieves.

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Last week as Yeti and I were setting up the vendors in a brand new store we were made aware by one of our beloved customers that thieves have come to our door as well. In-game and on SLX you can find bikinis that are pixel for pixel the same as ours with someone else's name on them.

I've read the forum posts about this expanding issue. I've read blogs, and JIRA files, and listened to dozens of people who paint the same dark picture of the gradual erosion of trust in SL. Particularly troubling is Linden Labs silence. I get the sense they are frozen. In the face of an important decision they have locked up.

What I want to speak about is what comes to me when I sit quietly, watching this drama unfold, and I peek beneath the surface. Where does this have its roots.

I remember listening to my animation students bragging occasionally about software they'd gotten for free from friends or wares sites. As young artists they still didn't make the connection that the programmers that made that software might care about getting paid as much as the student would want to be paid for their animations.

What happens, when a creator DOESN'T get paid? I know a few things that DON'T happen. They don't eat, they don't have the quality of life every human wants, they don't feel valued, they don't want to create anymore.

And what about you, the THIEF? Do you know what's really happening here? You've been given a chance to live a life on this Earth that is all about YOU and the amazing person that you are... you have skills and thoughts and dreams that all the rest of us would benefit from... but what are you doing instead... pissing away your every breath in these childish attempts at seeing what you can get away with. If your parents gave you this mindset of scarcity then you need to be responsible and get counseling to undo it. Right now you are asking total strangers to pay for your insecurities and the day is coming when they are going to stop paying. Eventually we ALL HAVE TO WORK OUT OR OWN SHIT. No one escapes their own issues forever. So why not deal with it now and have the rest of your life to wake up proud of who you are each morning.

Meantime, set up a mall with profit-sharing scripts so you let people who create take half of their sales and you take the other half in place of rent... sharing... what a concept. I do it with one mall and it works just fine.

Thieves... you have options that will not end each day with "criminal" in your tag. And if you wont consider the ugliness that results from what you are doing, then consider simply how people feel about who you are.

I cant believe you wouldn't rather be my friend than my enemy.