What happened to Tierra de Volcanes

This question has popped up again, and I guess it will keep popping up: "What happened to Tierra de Volcanes?"

Well, since nobody seems to be willing to talk about it, I'm going to spill the beans here.

Something happened of which just about everyone here firmly denies that it will ever happen. OpenSim was DMCA'd by a Second Life creator.

In August this year, the Second Life creator Vae Victis hired a law firm and filed a DMCA complaint against the Alternate Metaverse, home grid of Tierra de Volcanes and Tierra de Volcanes 2 which offered stolen Vae Victis creations. The admins were given 72 hours to remove all of this content.

At the same time, the US branch of Contabo where AMV is hosted received a related DMCA complaint: If AMV still contained the offending illegal Vae Victis content in 72 hours, Contabo would have to delete the grid from their servers.

Think I'm kidding? I'm not. This is the truth. And I have first-hand proof.

Everything was coordinated and documented on Google Docs; here is the link: https://docs.google.com/document/d/1XncFrUrvDaSmLseDo4UxAGbx88ob-BLPew1RNveJ4Y0

Read through this document, and you'll discover that there have been more DMCA complaints filed against OpenSim grids by other creators.

Second Life creators are literally organising self-defence against OpenSim users stealing their content and offering it in OpenSim. They've cooked up a way of doing that and shared it publicly for others to do the same, also seeing as it has been successful.

So what happened to Tierra de Volcanes then?

Clifford Hanger, co-admin of AMV, deleted both sims. He deleted all backups of these sims. He also blocked the sim owner Marpil Grafenwalder including all alts. By the way, if you pay close enough attention to the document I've linked, you'll discover that Marpil Grafenwalder was actually Ethan Mesherman, former Sacrarium content pirate who later launched Foundation Grid and operated the freebie-spreading sim The Conglomerate, the guy who invented the "FREE" boxes as successors to the "Stuff" boxes.

You may be upset that TdV is no more. But I guess you'd be even more upset if AMV as a whole had suddenly ceased to exist. With no announcement or anything, unlike OSgrid. Obliterated by an annihilation strike from Second Life against copybotting. TdV would have been gone either way.

DMCA, by the way, is also the reason why Aurora Starchild relocated the Starchild Shoppe to a new grid whose owners and hosters can't be tracked down in real life.