Editor’s Note: At the request of Brock Pierce’s attorneys, this article has been edited to remove three passages summarizing portions of the now-sealed complaint. Although the complaint was filed June 11 and publicly available for more than three months before Pierce’s attorneys had it sealed, it was eventually sealed, and they have provided an order [...]
A new, non-profit, legal services organization, the Virtual Intellectual Property Organization (VIPO), has opened in Second Life. VIPO advertises that it offers “accessible legal advice concerning virtual property, trade and commerce and the use of real life intellectual property in virtual worlds.” VIPO is the brainchild of Tamiko Franklin (Second Life’s ‘Juris Amat’). Franklin was [...]
Outrage recently erupted among Second Life users, particularly those involved in the art scene, regarding the fact that artist Richard Minsky (Second Life’s ‘ArtWorld Market’) has registered the trademark “SLART” with the U.S. Patent and Trademark Office. (See Vint Falken and Massively, among others.) Not only has Minsky registered the mark (for which a notice [...]
There’s a new battleground emerging for Second Life copyright claims: protest screenshots of in-world ad farm installations. “Ad farms” (collections of skyline-busting animated billboards that have spread across the Second Life landscape) are widely despised in-world because many owners use them not to generate advertising revenue in any traditional sense, but to force neighbors, often [...]