Greg Drayman's Final Words to Second Life

[Greg Drayman]

In case anyone didn't receive the notecard that's circulating around Second Life right now, I thought I should put it out here for all to read as well. This is the account of what actually happened and if what you've heard isn't covered by the following letter, it's a lie.

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On the morning of Friday, November 27, I woke to find I had been logged out of SL. My wife, who you knew as Threse Flanagan, and I typically left ourselves in Busy status during the night and left our avatars - along with several of our alts - sitting in a skybox above Kokopelli Raceway Park. The alts - roughly four or five in total - were each logged in using a separate Second Life window and no external program was used to log them in.

In addition to being logged out of SL, I had been sent an email from Linden Labs informing me my account had been terminated. This email had been received literally minutes after I had been logged out which, in turn, occurred just seconds after the security system at my skybox had been set off by a particular individual whose identity we're probably all aware of by now.

The specifics of the email from LL stated that I had been banned for the use of CopyBot or "another means to circumvent the permissions system." Naturally, it seemed odd that I would receive such a ban in the middle of the night when I was sleeping but putting two and two together added up to an abuse report filed by this particular individual after seeing a room full of alts and believing they were traffic bots. LL, upon seeing a reference to "Copybot" in said abuse report, banned me instantly without sending me a warning, a notice that an AR had been filed or any advance notice whatsoever of their impending actions.

The next five days was a process of support tickets that went days at a time without being answered, phone calls that were met with "I'm sorry, this isn't our department" and just a lack of help from LL's supposed "24/7 support team" in general.

Finally, the following Wednesday morning, Harry Linden informed me via email that my support ticket had been locked closed and that the decision to terminate my account was "justified and correctly applied" but offered no explanation for what exactly I had been banned for, except to say that my alleged actions "severely violated the Second Life Terms of Service or Community Standards with mutliple [sic] accounts." I was also told not to bother appealing this decision as "no further communications will be sent" -- not that they had exactly been communicative in the first place.

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I own CopyBot. I also own several SL viewers, a couple of which are known for being popular among content thieves. As a sim owner and a content creator, I felt it was my responsibility both to myself and to my customers -- the car owners and drivers at KRP -- to know what tools were available to thieves in order to better protect us from them.

My "crime", as far as I can tell, was the copying of objects I already owned in order to create unscripted versions, as it is reasonably well-known that CopyBot only copies prim and texture data and does not copy scripts or any contents of an object. This amounted to (at my estimate) three pairs of shoes and one hairstyle in three different colors. As anyone who races or attends races in SL can testify, descripting is practically demanded at all racetracks nowadays and it seemed only fair that I should be able to back up what I already own for the purpose of being able to attend the races I already did. In my mind, it was tantamount to owning a CD and creating a backup for your own personal use.

Never once have I distributed anything to another person that was not my creation, either for free or for sale, where the permissions of the original object didn't already allow it. As a content creator who has had his stuff ripped off in the past, copybotters have never been welcome at my sim and there is no way I would jeopardize my reputation and that of those who race at my track by knowingly violating LL's ToS even in such an innocuous manner.

LL apparently saw it differently. While known copybotters continue to roam SL unpunished, even after reports have been filed against them, a guy backing up his own stuff was banned without warning and the appeal thrown out. Not to mention the act in question couldn't have even been mentioned in the abuse report that got me suspended in the first place; it's hard to copybot in your sleep, let me tell you.

So, thanks to a grudge someone decided to settle by going to the Lindens coupled with a zero tolerance (read: zero thinking) policy and an inconsistent application of their own Terms of Service, Greg Drayman and Kokopelli Raceway Park are no more and all appeals for leniency (and sanity) have fallen on deaf ears.

I will maintain my innocence long after this issue has stopped being the topic of the hour for all the reasons mentioned above. I also maintain that Linden Lab is run by monkeys (no offense, Ford Roffo) whose ability to maintain any level of consistency with the implementing of their own rules is sorely lacking.

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On that note, it's venting time.

To the Lindens who handled my case -- Fuck you and the Mac you logged in on. Never before have I encountered such incompetence, inconsistency and ill communication from a company as I have from you. The way my case was dealt with, from start to finish, was truly pitiful. The "24/7 support team" took a weekend off and left me to sit in purgatory and the phone support -- which put me through to three different people in three different countries, none of them the United States -- was non-existent. Just how many departments are there in this company anyway? However many it is, none of them apparently speak to each other.

My other beef with LL is the failure to follow due process and give me a chance to defend myself and to do something about the charges. For a company who surrounds itself with as much legalese as they do, you would think basic rights like the Sixth Amendment -- where someone has a right to both face their accuser and to know the specifics of the charges presented against them -- wouldn't be passed over. Nor, for that matter, would the Digital Millennium Copyright Act, which allows the backing up of material already owned if for personal use only and not for distribution.

Any reference Linden Labs makes to adhering to the laws and statutes of the State of California or the United States of America is grain-fed bullshit. Second Life is a dictatorship where the rules start and end with whatever the Lindens feel they should be on a given day. There is no consistency from the rules applied to one person to those applied to the next and punishments - if any - rarely fit the crime. Rather than solving basic issues such as sim crashes, lost inventories and lag, LL has instead focused its efforts on policing traffic bots and jacking up the prices of an already bug-ridden service. You know, the important stuff.

Speaking of money, apparently the word of a buffoon with no payment info on file was more valuable to LL than the word and the previously stellar reputation of a sim owner who has fattened LL's coffers by over US$5,000 since the KRP sim was set up. That's before you count the money spent in texture uploads and other related charges which would be impossible to count -- I hazard a guess that it close to doubles that number. "Customer service" is clearly missing from their business model and for that reason, I elected not to file a second appeal as I would only be fighting for the right to pay them $295/month all over again. I assure you, whatever the future holds for me and Second Life, LL receiving any more of my family's money will not be a part of it.

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To the person or person(s) responsible for the abuse report that eventually did me in -- By now, practically everyone knows who you are. I'm sure you felt very clever when you were doing what you did. I hope some of that has worn off since then, now that you realize the damage that has been done to SL racing as a whole and to several individuals in the process, most (if not all) of whom were innocent and didn't deserve this. What has gone around will eventually come back around... maybe not today, maybe not tomorrow, but it will happen.

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Now, the happy stuff.

To the drivers, team personnel and fans who made Kokopelli Raceway Park what it is with all your innumerable contributions -- thank you. We built KRP with the sole mission of providing the best oval racing money could buy in SL and I believe we did that very successfully. More importantly, we also built a very tight-knit community and even up to the last day of the track's existence, that community remained close. Not all of us got along with everyone else but then we've all got family members we can't stand. That's the way it goes sometimes. It was a joy to be able to provide the track, the cars and the league and I thank everyone who participated.

To those who may not have raced often (or ever) at KRP but who I shared the track with as a competitor -- thanks for being part of a very fun rollercoaster ride. I've gone head to head with a lot of aces in my three years in SL racing and to come away with even a modestly successful resume is something I don't take lightly. It's nice to be able to say I've held my own with some of the best SL has to offer. It's even nicer to be able to say I've beaten some of them.

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Last but not least, to the entire SL racing community -- Whether you own a track, direct races or simply turn up somewhere, buy a car and drive, you are all part of a very important collective.

It was my vision when I first conceptualized KRP, long before it was actually built, that someday that which divides SL racers will be broken down; that track owners will put aside their differences and co-operate to make racing in SL better as a whole. There are some truly wonderful cars being conceived and built right now and no one track should feel they have the right to rocket to the top of the board if other tracks are going to suffer.

Don't ever, EVER let greed get in the way of building the SL racing community. The loss of one track is a loss for all racers. That boom month you're having where you sold enough cars and collected enough donations to make tier in the first week of the month? That will taper off and the amount of help you get in a time of crisis will be directly proportionate to the amount of help you and your people have offered to others in their time of need. At KRP, I saw the plentiful months and I had months where I had to beg and borrow (and steal, according to LL) to keep the place open.

When it comes to your fellow track operators, bury the goddamn hatchet already. Most of the "drama" centered around SL racing has to do with the conflict between racetracks: The cars don't look as nice, they don't handle as well, their sim is too laggy, the track is too narrow, they run too few/many laps, they're not nice to newbies... I'll get to that last one in the next paragraph. Look, "divided we fall, united we stand" may be an American cliche but it holds a lot of truth, especially in the fickle world of SL. If a track owner or race director comes to you one day saying they want to reach out a hand of co-operation, be an adult and take it. And when you do work together, treat them as guests and not traffic numbers. SL doesn't begin and end with your sim and how you treat others will directly reflect on everyone who races at your track. If that reflection is a negative one, sooner or later most of your drivers won't want to be associated with that and they will leave.

Further to that point, be nice to the new guys. We were all there once. We didn't have lightning fast PCs, slick connections and a good knowledge of the mechanics of the cars we were driving. If someone turns up and doesn't look like he knows what he's doing, the only way he's going to know is by someone helping him. If he gets shunned or treated like a jerk, he won't bother coming back because this is SL and it's supposed to be fun. If it's not fun, they don't return. These people are your customer base and without them, you are screwed.

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It's been real, it's been fun and on rare occasions, it's been real fun. One last word of advice: Don't piss off anyone who knows how to file a frivolous abuse report and is stupid enough to do it.

Love to my people.

Greg Drayman is Offline.