Comments on: Commentary: Lively by Google’s Beta Terms of Service Raise Predictable Legal Issues

By: Doubledown Tandino

Doubledown Tandino — Thu, 10 Jul 2008 20:05:15 +0000

ITS BOOOOORING!!! This is actually the glorified chatroom that people used to call Second Life….

… I spent an hour, got to a room, talked to a few people, created my own room, put a chair in there…. and DONE!

that’s that, boring in my opinion. boring, late, stupid…
however, once they tap that into you being signed into google… that’s when it’ll become something worthy.

If they gear lively to be the next form of google, where you take your avatar to browse other “lively enhanced” websites. It’ll be good for checking email, chatting, shopping, Earth, etc etc.

but right now… it’s just a long journey into a 3d chatroom of comic book googlefans sayin “now what”

By: Benjamin Duranske

Benjamin Duranske — Thu, 10 Jul 2008 15:46:58 +0000

@6 – I thought you were on to something with the technical glitch idea, but I ran a test and I don’t think that’s the explanation. I just tried three randomly generated names from a password generator, and all three were available. Then I tried my benjamin.duranske, bduranske, etc. combinations, and all still were not available. I think somebody at Google either registered known names before it went online (if you’re at Google, how hard would it be to scrape those from “virtual world” and “mmo” sites?) or else somebody spent the first few hours this was online putting in everything they could find manually. What’s odd, though, is that creating an ID requires a unique Google account, so if this is what happened, someone went to some real trouble.

By: Michael Donnelly

Michael Donnelly — Thu, 10 Jul 2008 14:16:36 +0000

Ben,

I also ran into the name taken thing. Admittedly, my name is rather common, but even the pseudonyms that I normally use for anonymous access were taken, such as my initials combined with the part number of an old processor.

Given the newness of the software, I wouldn’t be at all surprised to find it’s a simple database issue, such not displaying the correct reason when a transaction fails. It could just be the name check is coming back with a “database too busy” or other early-launch-instability thing and then the web app interprets any failure as “name is not available”.

Either that or they’re front-running names, like Network Solutions once admitted to, by inserting them in response to queries. I can’t imagine any reason for Google to do that, however.

By: Benjamin Duranske

Benjamin Duranske — Thu, 10 Jul 2008 01:18:06 +0000

Another annoyance: I logged in within hours of it going live, and every reasonable variation of “Benjamin Duranske” (BenjaminDuraske, Bduranske, Benjamin.Duranske, B.Duranske, etc.) was taken as an account name. “Benjamin Duranske” is uniquely my name, as far as I know, and I have never been unable to get pretty much whatever variation I want as an account name when I sign up someplace.

Something fishy is definitely going on, as I’ve heard that quite a few others who write sites, books, etc. on virtual worlds had the same thing happen — I wonder if it was an inside job or just a really fast squatter. I ended up with duranske.benjamin, which is fine, and since it doesn’t really matter that much (you can change your visible screen name to anything you want regardless of your account name) whoever took my name can have it until they forget the passwords.

Presumably, though, that’s where the TOS against “impersonation” could come into play (e.g. somebody logs on and causes a drama storm under my name)… or at least I hope that’s where it comes into play.

By: Primforge » Blog Archive » Lively

Primforge » Blog Archive » Lively — Wed, 09 Jul 2008 20:19:34 +0000

[...] 9th, 2008 Torrid Posted in Business, English, Media, Scripting, Tech | Lively, Lively, lalalalala. (Doesn’t run in wine, nor Linux. So I’ll obstain from testing that [...]

By: dandellion

dandellion — Wed, 09 Jul 2008 18:58:24 +0000

I was waiting for your take on Lively ToS.
This part was interesting to me:

We don’t allow impersonation of others or other behavior that is misleading or intended to be misleading.

What does it mean? Actually, “impersonating” means any presence in an virtual world. When I make an avatar, I am impersonating myself (or somebody else). While this interpretation would be obvious paradox, question arise what Google had in mind. Was it only “don’t show up as another (existing) person” in a way that is common on MySpace, don’t make celebrities as your avatars or something like that? Or be accurate as much as possible, in a way that FaceBook wants you to be. Is gender-bending considered misleading in this case, for example? Or having skin of the other color than your human’s?

As much as I liked these ToS as short and easy to read, so many things are left unspoken here.

By: Benjamin Duranske

Benjamin Duranske — Wed, 09 Jul 2008 18:09:14 +0000

@1 – Yeah, it is harder to enforce. Mostly, because there’s no indication that the person actually read it, or even ever had it in front of them. I suspect that there is a click-through someplace back in my past when I first signed up for a Google account where I promised to follow all the subsequent posted rules or something, but that’s a bit of a stretch. Either way, you’re absolutely right that this does make it somewhat harder to enforce.

By: Michael Donnelly

Michael Donnelly — Wed, 09 Jul 2008 17:58:05 +0000

Isn’t a EULA without an “I Agree” step quite a bit less enforceable? I have some recollection of a case where the terms or EULA were out there linked, but at no point were the users of the software required to read them or consent.

It’s all legal murkiness to me, so I may be way off. I sure wouldn’t feel like I was bound by anything in such a case.