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 [...]
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 [...]
