Lawsuit Against IMVU for Modifying Audio Items

tkennedy
by tkennedy · 51 posts
13 years ago in IMVU News
Posted 13 years ago
Mr. Kennedy,

I have 434 products that have trigger music attached in the IMVU catalog for sale. Besides my own products, I have 93 other triggered music products that I've purchased from other developers. I bought/submitted these products at various prices. My email is available-- meanderingthru@hotmail.com -- to help in any way I can with this class action suit. If my telephone number becomes necessary, I have one of those, also. Thank you and hope to hear from you soon.

MHighsmith
Posted 13 years ago
Well really glad that you are sueing them and there is a bunch that are ready to help out. there is a few other things that imvu is doing is just out of hand. Maybe you can just incorporate all of them...cuz really something needs to be done to this corporation to let them know don't take our money than change the rules or cheat us out of credits and items.
1. they take items and don't credit you back they keep it all
2. We buy ap suppose to be for adults only but they only let you sell what they think is approriate...who are they to say as us being adults what is approriate for us. We pay to be able to buy adult stuff than why treat us like children with dos and don'ts.
3. they just started limiting people sending others credits...whats this BS. I can send whatever but others are limited of what they can send...just wrong.
4. They start these games people put money and time into them and they take them away for new games so they can get more money from you.

If you would go into the forums you will see all this stuff....someone really needs to teach them they can't keep screwing over people. Thats all I have to say well I do have more but heck
Posted 13 years ago
i have 4 ava who have music thing one was 6 min or more and the frist min or two was music and i love so did my friends on imvu but now it suck
Posted 13 years ago
makeitright wrote:
2. We buy ap suppose to be for adults only but they only let you sell what they think is appropriate...who are they to say as us being adults what is appropriate for us. We pay to be able to buy adult stuff than why treat us like children with dos and don'ts.


Too true. This is not the first time IMVU inc has done something like this. From 2004-2007, sex was allowed on IMVU for people who own AP (the adult pass). Then in 2007, they removed all items in which hips touch and made sex against IMVU TOS, even for people who own ap, and to justify it, they renamed The Adult Pass as The Access Pass.

In relation to that, IMVU inc pays associates $1.75 for referrals who buy their account names (get the "guest" removed from the beginning of their name). Before, 2007, IMVU inc use to provide banners to these associates advertising IMVU as "The Best Sex Site Ever". Many of their associates (many of which are porn sites) still use these banners and get paid for it. Then when adults follow these banners to IMVU, they of course buy AP and attempt to have sex, but IMVU bans them for it...even after they buy AP. These old ad's still being used have been reported to IMVU, but they do nothing about it. IMVU inc still pays people to advertise them as a sex site, and then bans them when they try to have sex.

On top of that, while IMVU no longer directly gives out sex banners on their site, they have continued to make banners with double meanings and censor bars which suggest that IMVU is a sex site. I know that this has nothing to do with the music, but it is part of IMVU's history of false advertising and changing TOS / taking away products at a whim while making a profit off of it.
Posted 13 years ago
Well I may not be a attorney but this sounds kinda illegal to be doing all this changing. I know for a fact that they allow some to get away with stuff..they give them warnings upon warnings and others they take action against them. something really needs to be done about them and I know there is tons of people that would jump on a lawsuit to get stuff change. Let the adults be adults let them chose for themselves if they want to do stuff or not. Well hopefully somethng can be done cuz I sure like imvu to know they can't just dick around with people and get away with it. For instance I submitted back in march maybe later a item for that pink fllyod and it still has not been approved. Iguess they didn't like my letter or something cuz its going on a year with a few letters from me , but they don't care that is the point they have not to bright people there in my opinion after talking to them. Well cross our fingers that some attorney will battle imvu for us.
Posted 13 years ago
Imvu is honestly at fault. in 2008 they made an announcement that all future sound products would be limited to 20 seconds. I even posted about it in the vip forums and a moderator said that we had plenty of time to get used to it. when i asked about the products prior working he said they were "grandfathered" in. so 1 imvu knew it was illegal at the very least since 2008 so they cant say they didnt know no matter what. 2 they made a profit off it it and I know for a fact new music items were created even later then that with the full songs playing. There offering a refund as of dec 1st to present date is just stupid they knew it was wrong yet they turned a profit on it and still dont want to give credits back to the ppl that bought these items. Imvu also did a price increase on all items in the imvu catalog wich if you'd like email me and i'll find the appropriate proof for you. So not only was imvu making money from the submissions but as of that date they were making a profit off of every sales of said products when anyone purchased them.
Posted 13 years ago
Well about time some one doing something to get some justice for us users that spend 1000's of dollars buying things that keeps becoming useless ty to IMVU, & countless hours creating things only to discover angry costumers month later cause IMVU decided to ether change rules o just screw up items & not bother fixing them dew to there changes, I have been on IMVU sense 04 & seen lots changes done but music was never 1 of illegal items & as I recall few times that music was mess up dew to there updates they r ones who assured ppl they r working on it to fix all triggers o triggerless tunes, as music store in roll they disabled creation of new music promising old music in catalog created prior to music store roll out will never be effected now they over sudden decided that store can bring in more money if all tunes r disables CORNERING MUSIC MARKET 4 THEM SELVES, IMVU always been about nothing but money and they always been changing rules to benefit there valets, and yes when i 1st sign up sex was a normal thing and even imvu banners on site had adds in them promoting sex 4 ap holders now all there adds targeting kids and over sudden adults became kinder garden graduates and being told what they cant and can do, its a free country and adults have right to make there own choices what they want o not want this is direct dictation ship and a violation of free speech and expression site should be open to 18+ adults kids got no plays in adult networks its makes it unsafe for kids it makes it un safe 4 adults, kids lie about there age putting adults interacting with them at legal risks with out adult suspecting they r committing cyber crimes....
Posted 13 years ago
I am all for this. I have spent too much money on trigger/triggerless music to just "let it go".
Posted 13 years ago
I have 2 accounts and been using imvu for over 3 years, and time and time again they're lazy methods of running the system has robbed us of our money we put in. I just have no more confidence int he site. They told us that we only get a refund for the music items we bought one month before they made the music change, which is dec 1-jan 1, and to get your refund you have to go into your customer balance log and fish out every individual song you bought. I bought alot of items, and finding them one by one in there is a tedious chore. I then looked up my entire log since i started 3 years ago, and i have over 2500 items to go through one by one. It's like imvu is making this hard on us so that we won't bother trying to get our refunds back. When they removed the adult items and implemented the access pass years ago, they removed the items and gave everybody a refund, but they refuse to do this now with the music items, and they just break them, rendering them completely useless to us. IMVU use to support, profit, and protect the music items. Now that they changed the rules, they're completely turning their backs on their customers again, and are saying that they don't even have to give us a refund and are not even giving everybody one. They're just claiming that we agreed to this when we signed up to join their chat site. There was no where in that agreement i signed twice where it states that in signing this i allow them to steal from me!


One of my accounts i'm a developer and i make about 4 000 credits a day, and looking at my sales reports i notice that imvu has over charged alot of people for my products. I wrote to them about it in a ticket and they told me that it was just a "credit sink", they didn't even explain it further then that, so i investigated it on my own and found out that at first IMVU was saying it was just a system glitch, then later on they were saying that they were doing new price testings on it's new users and claimed that the extra money they were paying were not being profited by imvu and just being deleted automatically as in "credit sink". I was pissed of that they were robbing my customers, then later they raised all the prices in the catalog by 60% then all my sales plummeted!

They use to promise no submission fees for developers, then later on they implemented one, so now whenever we want to make an item to sell, we have to pay a submission fee ontop of a deriviation charge.

They also make it very easy for underage children to buy an access pass. All they have to do is steal or "borrow" their parents credit cards, buy an access pass, and when they get caught, the minor is never penalized for their action of theft and stolen identity, just the rest of the imvu adult community is punished and they remove more and more adult content from our adult section that we payed extra for. We have an access pass that allows us to use and purchase adult content, but because of the many children who illegally obtain their access passes, IMVU makes the adult section more for children then it is for adults. and in a way, that encourages more more underage users to buy the access pass because it's been specially made safe for them! It's a complete waste of money, and imvu won't refund our 20$ for an access pass that is safe enough for a 13 year old and is completely useless to us.

We're not even allowed to share our accounts with our friends even if it's a mother letting her daughter use her general audience account. When imvu finds out, they delete the account no matter how many of thousands of real $$ they put into that account. I remember a case where a mother did not want her daughter to use imvu unsupervised, so she created an account and shared it with her 15 or 14 year old daughter, and monitored her message inbox and used the account together over the years. She bought many items, like put in over 2 000.00 american real dollars into the account, then one day imvu found out they were sharing accounts, and disabled it without a second thought, so she created a new account just to post her story in somewhere in imvu.

Then there was one of the new games imvu had called TOP MODELS, where everybody was automatically registered into the game without signing up, and the whole objective of the game was to sell and buy people's imvu Display Pictures. People were really pissed off about this because alot of them were artists and did not know they were in a game that they did not register for, so people were stealing their artwork and selling it and using it as their own Display Picture. In imvu, people actually pay artists to create a Display Picture for them, and even alot of money, it's a business all on it's own, and for this game to steal a picture that someone spent 50$ to have made, and sell it in a game, is robbery and imvu STILL protects this game! All they said that if people don't want their Display Pictures taken and used by other people then they would have to go into the game and "opt out" which means to exit the game completely. Those bastards, "opt out" isn't even clear, it took me awhile to figure it out on my own, they purposely made it difficult for people to leave the game! I just feel so bad for the many people who still don't know they're playing a game they did not register for, and are having people out there stealing their pictures and using them to pretend they're them.

Another thing is that they don't protect our accounts from hackers. They stated that if they manage to retrieve our accounts back from the hackers who stole it, that they will not restore the account back to the way it was before the h4c|<7r stole it. So any items that were deleted stays deleted and any credits that were stolen does not get returned, and they said they will not give us this service because of security issues incase someone takes advantage it. BUT Second Life does this service. In Second Life, if a h4c|<7r steals your account, deletes your inventory and steals your credits, when Second Life staff members retrieve and save your account, they restore the account to the way it was before the h4c|<7r messed it up, so you get your credits back and all your items back. Imvu doesn't want to do this because they want their users to start from scratch and re-purchase everything all over again, making imvu more money -.-' The laws of the real world must be implemented into the online community.

I would like to vote to remove the owner and managers of imvu, and have a new and more responsible company take over imvu. Like MSN or Skype...... i truely dread the day when imvu starts attacking it's customers for having brand name pixel clothes and comic book hero pixel costumes and take them away without giving us a refund.. we all know that's going to happen next, and we all already put in alot of money into this website that we don't have the heart to pick up our losses, and just leave. We don't want to be robbed, and if imvu get's shut down, we would all be at a great loss. What's the point in returning our credits when there's going to be no place to spend them or no market to sell them on for real money? So i vote for someone responsible to the public to take over imvu and run it the way a business should be ran. Thank you.
Posted 13 years ago
Hello. I've been a user of IMVU since March of 2008. I'm an ex music dev as well. When I first started IMVU the play list didn't exist, and a majority of the radio link furniture were limited to 6 radio stations. Without triggered music we didn't have much of a selection at all and no body warned us that our music was going to be taken away. I was angry enough when I couldn't dev anymore due to the cut off when the play list started. Not to mention the fact that the playlists rules makes, makes it so we can't really listen to what we want unless we disperse it into so many different playlists. I'd like to know what legal purpose those rules serve actually.

Either way, overtime before the playlists I've collected 110 music items. I used to pride myself in being one of the best anime room DJ's. And some of those items were precious to me. There was one music bracelet I wore every day with every outfit, for YEARS. It was part of my avatars identity man... and now I had to remove it from all my saved outfits and hide the thing cause IMVU broke it. I understand that chances are I'm never gonna get my bracelet back in working condition, but IMVU should take responsibility for what they done.

We spent our own credits on those items. Which means it either came out of our pockets or we took the time to earn them in other ways. But the items we bought belong to US. As soon as we payed for them no one should be allowed to tamper with them. And what IMVU did is the virtual equivalent of someone breaking into your house and breaking your possessions.

Good luck with the lawsuit. I hope I get my creds back for all 110 of my items...

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