Robert Leatherwood is a loser, settles with Eros LLC
by Tateru Nino 
Mar 15th 2008 at 4:00PM
Filed under: News items, Second Life, Legal, Virtual worlds
Texan teen, Robert Leatherwood, has settled the Second Life copyright violation lawsuit with Eros LLC, finally having admitted to also being Volkov Cattaneo - which he had previously repeatedly denied as Cattaneo, while simultaneously mocking the case against him and admitting wrongdoing and copyright violation.
As Leatherwood failed to lift a finger in his defense -- not even responding to papers served -- the court handed down a default against Leatherwood, essentially making him the loser, regardless.
Since then, Leatherwood has admitted to being Cattaneo after all (a matter which few seemed in any doubt of, in any case), saying that he'd kept mum to avoid helping Eros LLC's case (which his reticence ultimately lost him anyway) -- of course, as Cattaneo, he'd already established his liability.
Leatherwood and Eros LLC have reached a settlement agreement which will become final at some later date. Aside from an agreement barring Leatherwood/Cattaneo from copying, no other terms (either financial or conduct) of the settlement agreement are available at present.
One of the things that has been settled by all this is testing a straightforward process for tracking back Second Life users in the event of legal action -- whether they think they are impossible to locate or not.
[via Virtually Blind]
Reader Comments (Page 1 of 1)
Nacon said on 9:32PM 3-15-2008
Oh it has been settled now? Geez... that took quite a while to get anything done with DMCA.
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Patchouli Woollahra said on 10:30AM 3-16-2008
Excuse LL and the courts for taking some effort to, y'know, make sure it was valid and not some kangaroo case aimed at shutting down a legitimate business?
But seriously, this is one of the main problems of using current legal processes on metaverses - it never happens as fast as people in the world want it to happen.
Neural said on 6:35PM 3-21-2008
Going by the news articles I'm reading today, Robert is far from being the loser here.
No fines. No jail time. Just a heavily padded slap on the wrist with him saying he won't copy or use any of the content made by Eros LLC.
Big ****ing deal. There are how many other designers for the stupid prick to steal from?
Naturaly the news media is playing up his sob story side of things. "I wasn't out to do a huge market thing. I was doing it for a little bit of money."
Let's gear that up with the same philosophy but a different situation:
"I wasn't drinking and driving every night of the month, only on the first Friday of every month"
"I wasn't reselling thousands of copies of Microsoft Vista, I was only selling a couple to make some money"
"I wasn't out to kill an entire race like Hitler was, I was just killing a couple people who I was annoyed with."
Pathetic, useless, waste of oxygen. Guaranteed to return in one way or another and continue to make a living stealing and reselling other peoples work.
The only good news to come out of this is that these little pricks will learn the hard way that you *can* be tracked down in RL.
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