A case of alleged copyright infringement in Second Life is heading to court.
According to Reuters, Second Life entrepreneur Kevin Alderman, the owner of Eros LLC, a company that makes virtual sex beds, filed the “Eros LLC vs John Doe” lawsuit on Tuesday.
Second Life user Volkov Catteneo is alleged to have copied and distributed the “SexGen Bed”, an item that sells for L$12,000 ($45.11). The lawsuit seeks to force Linden Lab to disclose Catteneo’s real-world identity, as well as asking Catteneo for damages.
The case, the first of its kind for Second Life, will be interesting from a legal perspective. There is no legal precedent for the case, and as Stanford University’s Lauren Gelman said in a Four Corners report earlier this year, the concept of virtual property ownership is vexed:
“All of this is virtual bits and bytes, ones and zeros that are sitting on the servers at Second Life’s headquarters and the server farms they have around the world…how much can you own something that’s really under the control and domain of another party, this is really where the law is being tested to see how they’re going to figure that out.”
On the surface it also seems a little strange that Linden Lab has not already dealt with it; Second Life has strict rules in relation to copyright infringement and has previously acted in favor of in-world copyright owners.
PR campaign? Duh!
Probably harder in this case for Linden Labs to act since the guy wants real world damages that they can’t really award.
lawsuits are now a days used to be in newsprint and other media and also to settle ego scores.
http://www.tekn...ld.blogspot.com
“bits and bytes, ones and zeros that are sitting on the [snip] server farms they have around the world…how much can you own something that’s really under the control and domain of another party”
I’m not sure that the professor thought this one true: we have ICANN-style domain names (virtual constructs under the control of others’ servers that only have value inasmuch as we say they have), remote centralized licenses, hosted avatars, streaming video client licenses, all of which we claim belong to us but do share the characteristics quoted here: not in our control, not in our domain, ethereal. Some of these things, I’d wager, have been cause for the creation of relevant jurisprudence.
I think that it’s just another stupid PR, they need only make a mention about themselves.
Doesn’t Second Life have a virtual court? I guess that would only work when you don’t want real life damages.
Lies well disguised!
They pay people to think up new ways of getting their name into press releases. I know this because a friend is involved, and unloads his angst over the odd email. Remember the “worlds first virtual terrorist act” secondlife disguised PR?
Just what we need. The courts in first life are already backed up; now they’re going to have to deal with junk from second life.
“…how much can you own something that’s really under the control and domain of another party, this is really where the law is being tested to see how they’re going to figure that out.”
When I started my bank account – I figured they had already worked this out…
“All your pr0n are belong to us”
I commented on this on the other site, but seriously, go hack something apart in a Microsoft game title on the XBOX or reverse engineer something in Warcraft, and see how fast lawyers come down on you.
There’s more novelty to post that this has some ‘virtual world’ slant, when really it does. “Fake items, virtual items” holds no water. It’s code. It’s jpgs or polygons, and the same concept applies. It’s source code.
Our second lifes seems to approach our first ones.
See my small cartoon:
http://geekandp...ifes-are-t.html
Bye,
Oliver
They should hold this nonsense in second life court -