Quicklinks: Trademark Reporting in SL; Gold Farmers in WoW; Lindens Helping Authorities; a “Justice List”
May 29th, 2007 by Benjamin Duranske
I’ve been out of town for a few days, so I’ll get caught up by way of VB‘s regular feature, “Quicklinks.” Here’s today’s batch.
- Tony Walsh is asking readers for input on trademark reporting in Second Life. He recalls (as, vaguely, do I) some mechanism in Second Life for reporting trademark violations to Linden Lab. Neither of us can find it now. He’s interested in your recollections, and I’m curious too.
- Blizzard (operator of World of Warcraft) is suing Peons4Hire, a group that sold World of Warcraft gold to players (and apparently advertised their services heavily in-world). The reaction in Bilzzard’s forums is almost universally positive.
- Second Life CEO Philip Rosedale was recently quoted in an Information Week article saying that “everything in Second Life is marked with your identity and name. If you break the law in your locality in real life, and we can facilitate people going after you, we have no problem with that.” The writer asked whether this would apply to an authoritarian regime’s request for information. Rosedale didn’t directly answer, but did say that “preserv[ing] people’s freedom as much as we possibly can” is important.
- A post on a Second Life project called the “Justice List” and an interview with ‘Ashcroft Burnham,’ one of the driving forces behind the project, recently appeared on the Secondlife Newspaper Daily News. The idea of the Justice List is — in extremely broad strokes — a proposed grid-wide, opt-in justice system that uses formal judicial procedures and parcel ban lists. [Disclaimer: Though I am not personally involved in the Justice List project in any meaningful way, I have discussed the project with 'Ashcroft Burnham' in my capacity as President of the Second Life Bar Association, and some SLBA members are part of the project.]
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2 Responses to “Quicklinks: Trademark Reporting in SL; Gold Farmers in WoW; Lindens Helping Authorities; a “Justice List””
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I think your memories are wrong – you could try an abuse report under the “other” category, but LL’s position tends to be that it’s up to the copyright/trademark holder to assert their rights, however they *will* remove flagrant breaches of trademarks that they happen to see.
I agree I am probably remembering it wrong. The one piece of Linden documentation on this we found was a Knowledge Base item which states “Any resident may file an abuse report if they see any other resident making unauthorized use of trademarked material in SL.” Given the range of categories, “other” is the only sensible option.