Exposé on HiVid

[Noodles]

LL wouldn't have really been hosting it or anything though would they have been?

 

[Cristiano]

LL wouldn't have really been hosting it or anything though would they have been?

They had a HiVid booth in one of their showcase sims. HiVid operated for 3 years in plain sight, and you had to deposit L$ directly into the tvs. They profited from it. It begs the question of why did they allow it to go on for so long? It was clearly a scam. Now you have a lot of incredibly upset residents who spent a lot of money thinking it was legit and it is now gone. It is a cluster fuck.

 

[Noodles]

They had a HiVid booth in one of their showcase sims. HiVid operated for 3 years in plain sight, and you had to deposit L$ directly into the tvs. They profited from it. It begs the question of why did they allow it to go on for so long? It was clearly a scam. Now you have a lot of incredibly upset residents who spent a lot of money thinking it was legit and it is now gone. It is a cluster fuck.

Oh yeah, that is not a great look.

PS, if only there was an official forum place with information about this instead of second hand info.

 

[Free]

PS, if only there was an official forum place with information about this instead of second hand info.

/me laughs in Mole

 

[Cristiano]

Oh yeah, that is not a great look.

PS, if only there was an official forum place with information about this instead of second hand info.

For the uninitiated, this is the reason I started SLUniverse way back in 2003. They have always had an iron grip on those forums, with the bonus of threatening your account if they didn't like what you said in the forums (nothing you did in world). The principle still applies now more than ever.

 

[Madi Perth]

They had a HiVid booth in one of their showcase sims. HiVid operated for 3 years in plain sight, and you had to deposit L$ directly into the tvs. They profited from it. It begs the question of why did they allow it to go on for so long? It was clearly a scam. Now you have a lot of incredibly upset residents who spent a lot of money thinking it was legit and it is now gone. It is a cluster fuck.

I'm surprised it lasted as long as it did. I remember when I first saw it my friends where all over it. I said nope. This won't last. It lasted longer than I thought it would.

There was a meeting a week or so back, and huge thread on the official form about piracy. I'm not surprised the went after this now.

 

[Argent Stonecutter]

I have been expecting this for years. Ever since I went to my first "movie night" on someone's parcel and they started playing a commercial movie. Because when you're streaming to someone's location in Second Life that's a separate stream for each person there. It's not like having friends over to watch a rented movie. The server doesn't know anything about the parcel in Second Life, they just see six or eight or ten connections from all over the world. If the copyright holder or their agent was in the loop, they would be expecting six or eight or ten viewing fees.

So obviously every single one of those "movie nights" is just asking for MPAA enforcement.

 

[Dakota Tebaldi]

I didn't see any of the threads so I'm a bit confused about why LL would delete them, because it seems to me like the situation isn't a bad look for them? So okay some third party was doing copyright violations, people started to complain or otherwise make noise about it, LL can be like "I'm shocked to find out there's copyright violations going on here" and ban them, and that's it. Problem solved. Why would that make them look bad? LL doesn't like individually scrutinize every single upload and every single vendor and every single business, surely.

 

[Dakota Tebaldi]

Back in 2009, there was a similar movie service, I thought it was questionable back then and never got into the whole movies in SL thing. I certainly never had the delusion that they were properly licensed.

Lightning Video. I...err, knew some people who had rented movies from them a few times.

 

[Madi Perth]

For the second time in a row, a thread about HiVid was not just locked, but deleted in the SL forums. Not a great look for threads that were critical of Linden Lab to disappear.

Yeah, that thread is gone. Vanished while I was reading it.

 

[Soen Eber]

They had a HiVid booth in one of their showcase sims. HiVid operated for 3 years in plain sight, and you had to deposit L$ directly into the tvs. They profited from it. It begs the question of why did they allow it to go on for so long? It was clearly a scam. Now you have a lot of incredibly upset residents who spent a lot of money thinking it was legit and it is now gone. It is a cluster fuck.

That's ... kind of like making any opposing council's claims against Linden Lab easy for them, isn't it?

*sighs*

 

[Cristiano]

I didn't see any of the threads so I'm a bit confused about why LL would delete them, because it seems to me like the situation isn't a bad look for them? So okay some third party was doing copyright violations, people started to complain or otherwise make noise about it, LL can be like "I'm shocked to find out there's copyright violations going on here" and ban them, and that's it. Problem solved. Why would that make them look bad? LL doesn't like individually scrutinize every single upload and every single vendor and every single business, surely.

The threads were quite critical of them - asking why they allowed this to go on for so long, and what are they going to do for all of the thousands of customers who have now lost everything, including the original tv purchase itself. It is a terrible look to remove those threads. At worst, they should have been locked and moderated. It is a fucking mess.

 

[Madi Perth]

The threads were quite critical of them - asking why they allowed this to go on for so long, and what are they going to do for all of the thousands of customers who have now lost everything, including the original tv purchase itself. It is a terrible look to remove those threads. At worst, they should have been locked and moderated. It is a fucking mess.

It is kind of shitty for them to do that after they had to know it was illegal as hell and they let it go on for so long.

 

[Fionalein]

I am really curious what to fall out from all of this will be. What has concern me the most is not that HiVid had a massive piracy operation, because duh… what bothers me is the impact it could have on second life overall if Linden Lab gets sucked into nasty litigation over this. I imagine that is why they are memory holeing the threads about this in their forums.

And that is why it was better stopped now than later. The deletion of the discussion will not be looking good in a court case though.

 

[GoblinCampFollower]

I didn't see any of the threads so I'm a bit confused about why LL would delete them, because it seems to me like the situation isn't a bad look for them? So okay some third party was doing copyright violations, people started to complain or otherwise make noise about it, LL can be like "I'm shocked to find out there's copyright violations going on here" and ban them, and that's it. Problem solved. Why would that make them look bad? LL doesn't like individually scrutinize every single upload and every single vendor and every single business, surely.

I never used in world streaming of any kind. I just never liked it. I always preferred just having youtube in the other monitor. So I admit I never thought much about HIVID one way or the other. I can kind of understand how some people at LL early on might have thought it was illegal but also thought they could just fly under the radar.... years went by without really thinking about it only to blow up in their faces. I agree with Dakota that LL really should have just admitted this was a problem and played stupid. Instead all the thread deletions just make it look like a lousy cover up attempt.

 

[Cristiano]

They also sold “franchise kits” where for 30,000L, you could set up your own store and get a cut of each movie sale made in the store. All of the stores were set up to look like an old school Blockbuster. This is what one of the franchises looked like after HiVid went poof:

 

[Noodles]

That kind of amusing that the objects all got removed.

Though I almost wish there was just like, one random F tier movie still sitting there.

 

[Soen Eber]

So far nothing in Google News for both hivid and either linden or second life

 

[Fionalein]

They also sold “franchise kits” where for 30,000L, you could set up your own store and get a cut of each movie sale made in the store. All of the stores were set up to look like an old school Blockbuster. This is what one of the franchises looked like after HiVid went poof:

View attachment 749

well just kinda like Blockbuster in it's last days, history repeats itself

 

[Madi Perth]

They also sold “franchise kits” where for 30,000L, you could set up your own store and get a cut of each movie sale made in the store. All of the stores were set up to look like an old school Blockbuster. This is what one of the franchises looked like after HiVid went poof:

Well, that took balls.