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 [...]
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 [...]
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 who [...]
As of today, it has been exactly one year since I wrote my first post and launched Virtually Blind.
A Note of Thanks to Virtually Blind’s Readers
This year saw virtual worlds and multiuser online games explode in popularity, and with that, legal questions were pushed to the forefront. The massive increase in players and [...]
According to the official site, Second Life’s Ginko Financial is selling a Xeon 5160 server on eBay. So far, no one has met the opening bid of $3200.
Ginko Financial was a self-styled Second Life bank that collapsed last summer. It owed depositors approximately US $750,000 when it closed its doors. Ginko’s collapse [...]
Posted in Civil Procedure, Content Creators, Copyright Law, DE Designs, DMCA, Eros, International Law, Lawsuits, Le Cadre, Linden Lab, Nomine, Pixel Dolls, Property Law, Providers, Quicklinks, RH Designs, RMT/RCE, Second Life, Trademark Law, VB Features, Virtual Government, Virtual Law, Virtual Law Practice, Virtual Legal Orgs., Virtual Worlds & Games, World of Warcraft on January 20th, 2008 No Comments »
Virtually Blind periodically runs “quicklinks” — items that are not long enough for a full story, but are worth a click. We have a huge backlog at the moment, so here’s an extra large batch.
The Honorable Sandra L. Townes, U.S. District Court Judge for the Eastern District of New York, signed the consent judgment against [...]
I had the pleasure to attend a real-life conference on virtual worlds at the IDC Hertzelia. The conference dealt with the real issues of virtual worlds, not just the legal issues, but also other issues.
Dvir Reznik of IBM presented their perception of the metaverse and discussed Second Life and other virtual worlds. Reznik compared virtual [...]
Chinese government agencies regulating the online game industry have released new regulations regarding foreign online game companies operating in China, reports Pacific Epoch. Under the new regulation, the General Administration of Press and Publication (”GAPP,” China’s primary agency for censorship of published works) will postpone the examination, approval and licensing of foreign company [...]
Posted in Contract Law, Criminal Law, Interviews, Linden Lab, Providers, RMT/RCE, Second Life, Securities Law, Tax Law, VB Features, Virtual Law, Virtual Worlds & Games on January 16th, 2008 16 Comments »
You probably haven’t heard of Joshua Zarwel (Second Life’s ‘Teufel Hauptmann’), but he was the very first person I thought of when Linden Lab banned banking last week. ‘Hauptmann’ doesn’t get a lot of press. He’s never been accused of insider trading or blackmail in the Second Life Herald, he doesn’t spend much money [...]
