Six of Second Life's top brands Eros Designs, RH Designs, Le Cadre Network, Nomine, PixelDolls and DE Designs are filing suit against Thomas Simon (known as avatar Rase Kenzo), and ten other as yet unidentified avatars. The suit was filed in Brooklyn, New York by attorney Frank Taney, a partner with Buchanan Ingersoll & Rooney who is representing Eros Designs against Volkov Catteneo, for similar copyright violation.
As long-time SLI readers are doubtless aware, there is no technological means that exists to guarantee prevention against copyright violation. Indeed, most such measures are usually bypassed or broken before they are even released into the wild. That leaves one forum for copyright violation - the same one that has always been there. The RL courts and the legal system.
Spent US$987,000 at an exchange rate of L$267.3 to US$1
Exchanged US$194,000 at an average of US$8,100.0 per hour.
Market buys were US$152,000
Market sales were US$42,000
Limit-limit buys were US$200
The busiest time was at 10am when about US$12,000 was exchanged.
The quietest time was 12pm when about US$5,000 was exchanged.
It looks a bit like "normal" folk stayed away from SL yesterday because of CSI:NY since there were no other obvious differences/difficulties on the day.
Following on from the story of Ginko's long protracted death finally ending in termination, and a shifting to the WTF "rescue" plan Shaun Altman has decided he can do better. He is proposing a clear liquidation plan of his own - for full details read his website. The highlights - Everyone get Ginko stock value to Shaun by the end of October, he'll say what the state of play is on 1st November, liquidate the assets (and say who is still holding any others as best he can), and give the money to Luke to buy out the Ginko bonds so they can be delisted. All GBP holders get some (size to be determined) bottom line return to walk away from it all.
Nobody Fugazi is in agreement with Shaun's analysis of the merits of the WTF plan - a quick bit of back of the envelope stuff at my end gives the same numbers too. Like Nobody, I won't tell you what you should do with your money - it's got to be your choice. It all comes down to a balance of trust - Luke (and maybe Nicholas) v Shaun. Who do you trust the most?
According to this announcement on WSE, Ginko is finally, totally, absolutely dead. Nicholas Portocarrero can't make the interest payments and has shut the Ginko Perpetual Bonds, transferring them to WSE Trader Funds (WTF - honestly!) which are the new fraud funds from WSE.
At first glimpse this looks like a good idea. I was chatting to someone who hadn't (as I did) bitten the bullet and pulled out my savings at around the 20c levels, and just prior to this GPBs were circulating at 10c or lower - very not good, and very hard for interest payment capital. However, Shaun Altman has examined the numbers a little more closely, factored in the other frauds that are likely to be transfered to this fund soon, and estimates, if you're lucky, you'll get 0.02c (2% return if you wish to think of it that way) on your defrauded L$. Ouch.