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 is widely seen as the chief motivation for Second Life banning all unlicensed banks earlier this month. Many, VB’s editor included, were convinced Ginko was insolvent from its inception. For more, see VB’s archived coverage.

The auction is listed by an eBay user with the name “Hinoserm.” A former Ginko employee blogs under that name here. The server represents a significant Ginko asset, and one suspects that victims (including Second Life’s ‘Shaun Altman,’ who is attempting to collect, inventory, and equitably distribute what remains of Ginko’s assets) may be interested in this development.

Perhaps more importantly, the hard drives likely contain a wealth of valuable information that could help depositors collect significantly more of what they are owed. The listing says the drives will be wiped, but a note that has been on the Ginko website for months says that “an archive of Ginko Financial’s database will be kept indefinately [sic] for historical purposes.” There have been rumors of a potential lawsuit since Ginko’s demise; attorneys and depositors considering that route may want to spend some time considering the implications of this auction and weighing their options.

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 Thomas Simon (Second Life’s ‘Rase Kenzo’) without modification, and the judgment was entered earlier this month. This concludes the case, brought by six Second Life content creators alleging trademark and copyright infringement. The consent judgment states that Simon profited from the “unauthorized copying and distribution of plaintiffs’ merchandise,” and enumerates Simon’s obligations going forward, as noted in an earlier post.

• IEEE Spectrum weighed in on real money trading (RMT) and real cash economies (RCE) a little while ago in an article entitled Playing Dirty. Interesting piece. Gets some of the legal stuff right and some of it wrong, but worth a click.

• The Confederation of Democratic Simulators (one of several “microgovernment” projects in Second Life) is adding a new sim — “Alpine Meadows.” The theme is “Alpine Rural Antique,” as set forth in the covenant. There is a video featuring Alpine Meadows (and the other CDS sims) up on YouTube.

• WIRED’s Danger Room blog reports that the U.S. Army recently established an internal “games” office which will “focus on using videogame graphics to make those dull military simulations more realistic, and better-looking.” Serious business indeed.

• Also in the serious business department, the current print edition of WIRED includes an article by Julian Dibbell on griefers and griefer-haters. Summary: somewhere between releasing pet dragons in the middle of a role-playing wedding in Ultima Online and messing with somebody’s real world income is a line. Where, exactly, the line should be drawn is up for grabs, but Dibbell comes closer than most to pinning it down. My feeling? It’s entirely situational. It can go overboard, and may even be actionable in extreme cases (as intentional infliction of emotional distress), but comparing it to terrorism is absurd.

• Dibbell also gets a round of applause for making My Tiny Life, his exploration of early text-based virtual worlds, available for free as a .pdf file. While I’m as happy as the next guy to see it out there, I vastly prefer physical books to reading on the screen, and am willing to pay for them — particularly when a fair bit of the cash goes to the author. So for me, I’m even more excited to see that it is also now available via print-on-demand at Lulu (the Lulu link takes you to the free .pdf too).

• Second Life’s ‘Cybergrrl Oh’ recently ran a great overview of virtual property and intellectual property issues from an entrepreneur’s perspective: Who Owns What You Create in Second Life? It skips the nuances of these questions that these discussions tend to get caught up in and gets right to advice for virtual entrepreneurs. Good starting point if you’re thinking about running a virtual business.

• You can now hire a virtual entourage to hang with in some games. Gamepal refers to this service as — I am not making this up — an “escort service.” Apparently they’ve never flipped through the “E” section in major metro yellow pages (or logged into Second Life, for that matter) where the term has a rather different connotation. I first learned of this horrible idea via Broken Toys, which ran the item under the truly inspired headline, Medium Pimpin’.

• Last month the Second Life Herald ran (in a sex advice column, of all places) an important reminder about chatlogs and lawsuits. Bottom line: Linden Lab knows what you’ve been up to in Second Life — and so will the judge in your divorce proceeding. Linden Lab has already provided identifying information in response to a subpoena once; it is only a matter of time before chat and item logs are sought too.

• A website called “The Issue” has a discussion going on regarding virtual law. The discussion is a bit predictable, but it’s a slick site and I’m going to keep track of it.

• Business Communicators of Second Life’s Linda Zimmer recently ran a post that is well worth your click: Fair Use Reframed in Era of Consumer Generated Content. It presents a novel argument: that the nature of virtual worlds makes the assembly of bits-and-pieces into new works potentially subject to stronger fair-use protection than in other mediums, because copyright law should react to new technology. As is traditional with this question, I’m on the fence. I very much believe creators have to be fairly compensated and need to be able to protect their works, but new creation shouldn’t be stifled. It’s a constant balancing act, and that’s why copyright law is interesting.

• Alston & Bird partner Alan Behr recently answered questions about IP law in Second Life. It’s nice to see larger U.S. firms starting to send even unofficial feelers into virtual worlds, and particularly nice to see somebody like Behr — a writer and photographer, as well as a noted IP transactional attorney — leading the way.

• The EU firm that first established a biglaw presence in a virtual world is Field Fisher Waterhouse, and the partner in charge of their virtual world presence is David Naylor. (Naylor, incidentally, as Second Life’s ‘Solomon Cortes,’ takes over as President of the Second Life Bar Association when my term expires at the end of this month.) Naylor recently did a podcast interview with The Virtual Worlds BusinessCast. Great discussion. I’m going to start tuning into these regularly.

• The USC Institute for Network Culture and Global Kids are hosting a discussion, Philanthropy and Virtual Worlds: Considering Civil Liberties. The event will be held at the USC Annenberg Island (SLURL) in Second Life at 12:00 noon, Pacific time, on Monday, January 28, 2008. From the announcement: “Jonathan F. Fanton, President of the MacArthur Foundation, will chair a discussion about the avatar civil liberties. Joining him will be Robin Harper, Senior Vice President of Marketing and Business Development from Linden Lab, and Jack Balkin, professor of Constitutional Law and the First Amendment at Yale Law School.”

• Your2ndPlace has an interesting note (and a few interesting comments) running regarding employment law and Second Life. One comment comes from attorney Dave Elchoness, who has some big ideas in this area, and also has a new website, VRWorkplace devoted to that is worth checking out. From the site: “Virtual worlds technology brings together geographically distributed groups as if in-person. Let VRWorkplace show you how to be global and local at the same time.”

• Finally, there’s some DMCA drama brewing regarding Flickr pictures of advertisements in Second Life. There’s also some general copyright drama brewing regarding HBO, the Vagina Monologues, and an in-world Second Life organization that is planning to put on a performance. It just hit me that there are now so many disputes like this that blow up in forums and on blogs that unless they turn into something more or provide an opportunity for further analysis, I don’t usually do feature articles on them any more.

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 worlds and virtual reality games. Virtual worlds are made partly in order to increase productivity and solve problems related to distance and other problems which major corporations have now as globalised corporations, of course, however, the recreational features of virtual worlds have much to do with the economy of these spaces as well. IBM first entered SL in order to explore the usage of virtual worlds for business benefits. IBM also allows other companies to use their services in order to provide SL presence, as Sears launched their SL business through IBM. IBM Also enables software and other vendors to test their products through IBM’s platform.

Moshik Miller, a Ph.D student researching virtual worlds’ economy had researched a Second Life project for a Spanish Bank. He explained about the local currency of virtual worlds. Miller explained that more than 1 million US dollars are spent daily on SL, and showed the Linden Dollar exchange rate against the US$. Miller compared Linden Labs with a central bank and elaborated on how the SL economy works. Nowadays, financial services are given on SL including real-estate services and monetary exchange services. Also, the opening of SL to an OSS environment as Miller explained, is problematic (and I dispute) Miller offered a system to reward SL users by converting Linden Dollars to real money, depositing it in a real investment and after profits, receive the profit. (However, I believe the real profit will occur when investments will be made on a SL bank will invest in a SL operation and increase profitability and increase financial options.). Though there are a few comments on Miller’s words, I reckon that he failed to understand the value of virtual economy and the possible profits from investing in virtual economies and not just using the virtual world as a monetary aggregator.

Dr. Hanan Gazit from the Israeli DiGRA chapter explained about the Second Life experience and decision making in computer games. Gazit, as a video-game researcher, explained that “The way that you play says something about you”. Gazit presented his research about Children’s virtual world dynamics. he used a theoretical framework about the Microdevelopment Approach and the Active Theory, Gazit mapped the virtual relations and social networks in virtual worlds.

Dr. Asaf Friedman lectured about the navigational issues in virtual worlds. “When we look a the basic principle of how people interact with images, the brain adjusts to an object, but when we are talking about interactive viewing, we want to do things”. In 2D games, like Pac-Man, you have a different understanding from 3D. The navigation is counter intuitive and still has problems with navigation. Without discussing the Wii, Friedman explained how to design 3D interfaces with intuitive perspective. Perspective is in direct connection to realism; without perspective we are talking only about fragmented reality, where perspectives gave the dimension and reality. Friedman explained the nonintuitivity of the pan-turn buttons on SL and the environment of interactions in virtual worlds.

Prof. Doron Friedman compared reality and virtual reality and explained Putnam’s “brains in a vat” theory and how far are we from this vision. He explained that the main difference between virtual worlds and virtual reality are the interface and display. The problem is presence: we want to create a perfect copy of reality and this would be a photorealistic copy of this world. However, we are very far. In order to create “good” virtual reality, he claims that we should create sufficient sensors which transfers not only the presence, but also feelings.

Lior Flum discussed avatars in WoW. In his research, he concluded that it is not the players who control the avatars, but the avatars, with their social reactions and interactions, are those who control the players and create the social reactions between the players. Grouping, according to Flum, are a cohesion of avatars with an a specific hierarchy which is created by the avatars, not the players.

Heidi Halevy, a Ph.D Student, discussed CopyBot and the emergence of virtual communities; when stating that technology help qualities to infiltrate the virtual communities. Her research included a question regarding performance of bots as technological agents. Her thesis is that bots are technological bodies. Copybot was a few lines of code which were coded in order to debug the platform, and the script reverse engineered objects and textures. This script was publicly available and released as a script that could actually retain information and rewrites ownership and title in the object. According to Halevy, all the signs of a threat to virtual economy were false and that though social fragmentation was made, it hasn’t created too much damage.

I reckon that for the first conference held in Israel regarding virtual issues (without any regards to legal issues) there were quite a few experts who had no time to explain their research. My main problem with this conference was the description. As this was described as a “Workshop” on the invitation sent to me, it was too much of a lectureathon instead.

Legal issues were not the main aspect, however they were present throughout the lectures. When speaking about anonymity and hiding behind virtual identities, when explaining the monetary issues, the law, at least in Israel, was too much behind this development.

Jonathan J. Klinger is a Cyberlaw Attorney from Israel, writing his LL.M Thesis on speech norms at The Interdisciplinary Center In Hertzelia. You can find more of his articles in his blog, 2jk.org (English, Hebrew).

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 products if the companies are sued or targeted for arbitration actions by Chinese online game companies. The GAPP will not continue consideration of the products until after the complaints have been resolved. Whereas all publishers in China are required to be licensed by the GAPP, the agency basically has the power to deny the right to publish, and completely shut down any publisher who fails to follow its dictates.

Commentary

China isn’t the only country guilty of this sort of thing, but this is another clear act of local protectionism. The Chinese government has repeatedly sought to protect its game industry by keeping out South Korean and U.S. companies. South Korea’s top online game maker, NCsoft Corp., publisher of City of Heroes, Lineage and Guild Wars, would certainly love increased access to China’s ballooning gaming market. According to a recent report, China’s online gaming population rose 23 percent to 40.17 million in 2007, and is expected to more than double to 84.56 million by 2012, with estimated sales of 26.23 billion yuan (USD $3.63 Billion). Surely, China’s gaming population is large enough to accomodate some outside competition. Meanwhile, 28 Chinese online games are expected to expand overseas this year. It will be interesting to see if they receive a warmer reception than foreign games moving into China.