Statement regarding a recent content-related issue in SpotON3D

As the result of a situation that came up today regarding someone's content in SpotON3D, our COO Tessa Harrington has released the following statement:

We have a creator in SpotON3D who is upset with me personally. We have a Gorean grid that we are setting up for a gentleman and the main entry sim was in a state of flux, and needed to be in one person's name for it to be edited. I took it upon myself to do this, to ensure that it was done properly. This would put everything in the name of my admin avatar, so that I could ensure that content edited or modified was done by an authorized person using my mod rights. When the conversion to my name was made, I had no idea that there were active stores on the region, as we were not officially open and the individuals involved had their own region and marketplace. Their signs that display the goods they are selling were put into my name by accident, which had gone totally unnoticed until the creator in question came in accusing me of stealing her content.

The staff members who were present, and even some of our community members, tried to explain that the signs do not contain the content. They only have an HTML trigger in them that opens up a Web page for our marketplace, where people actually buy their items. Her merchant box was ALWAYS in her name, and she was compensated for any and all purchases made, and we proved this with multiple people making a purchase and her receiving the funds for those purchases, including myself.

Except for giving away an item for 0, IT IS IMPOSSIBLE TO SELL PRODUCTS DIRECTLY FROM A SIGN ON SPOTON3D. So, yes, the signs never should have been taken over, but that in no way made it possible for anyone to "steal" her content. I have NEVER taken any sales money or diverted any sales money from this or any other person. She simply misunderstood our selling system and assumed my name being on her HTML trigger signs meant that I owned her content too, and that I was diverting funds from her sales. This is impossible to happen with our system, and that's exactly why we do it this way. We have set up stores for creators in the past with them taking care of their boxes and we help set up their signs. This in no way constitutes ownership of anything BUT those signs. The product being sold is in a box owned by the creator, and they receive all proceeds from the sale.

We at SpotON3D have taken content protection very seriously, creating the most secure and responsible means to create, sell and even enable creators to expand to other grids more securely. We take any situation like this very seriously. We regret the error and have tried to communication with this vendor as openly, professionally and honestly as possible. Having said that, we cannot change the fact that she refuses to acknowledge that her content was never in jeopardy, no matter what evidence we give to her. We understand this is probably due to years of abuse at the hands of real copybotters. We would never intentionally or wantonly take over anyone's content, even their signs that simply point to a web page when clicked on. Our community is understanding of this, and hopes this vendor will come around at some point and reconsider her stance on this. If not, we feel we've done all we possibly can to rectify the mistake and take responsibility of it as soon as the problem was made apparent to us.