By now, almost everyone in and around Second Life will have heard about the NeilLife viewer, which in a nutshell provides an enormous amount of tools for content theft activities. So far, I didn’t pay attention really, because that’s not the kind of viewer I’m interested in. Compliance with Linden Lab’s ToS is not optional. If you want to be in Second Life, then you have to play according to their rules. Period. And even if they didn’t have any rules regarding content theft, it should be obvious to anyone, who’s not utterly stupid, that copying other people’s content is very likely to conflict with copyrights and other laws protecting intellectual property. Just because you can do something, doesn’t mean you’ve got the legal rights to do so.

There are many discussions and arguments going on around the NeilLife viewer. Mainly between Neil himself and the majority of people who disapprove of his way to make use of his programming skills. I’m not going to chime in and throw mud. However, in this blog post, Neil forced me to react.

To avoid that content is being manipulated later, I’m quoting his blog post here (Nov 7th, 2009):

I am going to support this guy with a 1 man working team and open source

http://www.sfreq.org/wiki/snowglobe/Snowglobe

he has made 2 viewers, one for emerald and one for snowglobe

I would like to congradulate him for also being one of the people compiling on emerald too. I would also like to say he did a good job. I support him 100 percent.

Obviously I don’t want your support, Neil. I do think you may be a good C++ developer, but even more so you are using your knowledge in a way which I strongly disapprove of! (Plus, you haven’t even made an effort to read the latest news, where I also pointed out that Emerald:Frequency is discontinued. Our focus is exclusively on Snowglobe:Frequency.)

Snowglobe:Frequency is not and will not be affiliated by any means with Neil, his viewer, or people supporting him, ever. We all have read his point that he’s providing all the tools for personal backups, and to enable people to make copies of their own stuff, or shift it between their alt avatars. However, the folks who leave comments on his blog, show a different attitude. Neil knows exactly who he’s supporting there. And even if he didn’t, he can’t deny the conflict with the ToS. Linden Lab have reminded him at least once, blocking his account and logins with his viewer.

To sum it up: Snowglobe:Frequency is and will be ToS compliant. NeilLife clearly isn’t. You’ll need to make friends elsewhere, Neil!