I’m updating VB’s “Blogroll,” which you can usually find at the end of the right-hand sidebar. I have, frankly, let far too much time pass without updating the list to acknowledge the sites I visit regularly, so in a partial effort to make up for my laziness over the last few months, I’m going to reproduce the list here, as a post, so readers can join me on my morning coffee routine or stroll through these over the weekend.

I expect about two-thirds of these will be familar to most VB readers — but I’m guessing there are some real gems that you’ve been missing in the other third. These are sites I actually visit. I’m not a fan of feed readers because they destroy formatting, so instead, I use a Firefox extension called Morning Coffee to open a subset of these sites each morning. Some I hit daily, some a couple times a week, and two (in Polish and Italian) I can only mine for links. But I regularly visit every one of these sites, and I enjoy them all — whether I agree with the authors or not.

There’s real variety here: some law sites, some virtual world art and fashion blogs, a number of game designers’ pages, some resident-experience blogs, some political sites, and more. I hope you find the list as interesting as I do.

If you happen to run one of these sites, and you’re following the incoming link, please consider adding Virtually Blind to your blogroll as well. And if your site (or one you love) isn’t listed here and it should be, shoot me a note or leave a comment. I will check it out. Finally, I am sure that I have overlooked some that I read regularly, and I apologize in advance for the oversight.

Movable Life is a relatively new web-based Second Life viewer run by a Japanese company called 3Di. It lets users log in to Second Life over a simple web site and perform a few basic functions, primarily chat. It is currently in alpha, but it already shows some real promise. Unfortunately, Movable Life’s Terms of Service usurp Second Life’s well-known preservation of certain user intellectual property rights, and claim all intellectual property created via Movable Life as property of 3Di.

There’s a good overview of the Movable Life product at Second Life Insider. In short, Movable Life is a web page that lets you log in to Second Life and perform a handful of limited, though important, functions.

You can move a dot representing your avatar around a two-dimensional map, chat, and look at your inventory. Your avatar will actually move around Second Life itself and will be visible to anyone using Second Life (though you will look really odd, see image, below). And for now, you can’t actually see, create, or interact with any objects. That’s on the horizon though — a functional low-bandwidth 3D web-based client that does allows interaction and creation of at least some objects is 3Di’s long-term hope, according to Ryan McDougall, a Movable Life designer I spoke with at Virtual Worlds 2007 in San Jose.

Though the viewer has promise, Movable Life’s Terms of Service deal with intellectual property rights so poorly — basically, by taking them — that content creators should simply not use the service until they change. The following passage is a bit lengthy, but worth the effort if you’re a content creator.

From the Movable Life TOS. I’ll highlight the relevant part.

6.2 Intellectual Property Rights. You acknowledge and agree that 3Di and/or its Affiliates retain the sole and exclusive right, title, and interest in and to the Intellectual Property Rights in this Site, the Movable Life Services, Site Code and Site Contents and all copies thereof, in whole and in part. All ideas, techniques, inventions, systems, formulae, discoveries, technical information, programs, prototypes, and similar developments (the “Developments”) developed, created, discovered, made, written, or obtained by you in the course of or as a direct or indirect result of accessing or using this Site and/or Movable Life Services, and all related industrial property, copyrights, patent rights, trade secrets, and other forms of protection thereof, shall be and remain the property of 3Di, and/or its Affiliates. You agree to execute or cause to be executed such assignments and applications, registrations, and other documents and to take such other action as may be requested by 3Di and/or its Affiliate to enable them to protect their rights to any such Developments.

The sum of that is that if you write, build, script, interact with, or even discuss an idea, invention, project, or creation while using Second Life via the Movable Life client, 3Di owns any IP rights you’d otherwise have in your work.

Read the rest of the post »

I’ve been piling these up for a while. A couple are related to virtual law, but most are self-indulgent fun. Settle in, grab your favorite beverage, and get your mouse finger ready. I’m cleaning out my link bucket.

• “Get My FBI File” walks you through the process of doing exactly that. Your mileage may vary. As one Boing Boing (where this comes from) commentator put it: “If you don’t already have a file, now’s your chance to make one! Yabba dabba DOOOoooo.”

• I’m not entirely sure why, but I really like “Second Life, First Person,” a new blog by Second Life’s ‘Kit Meredith.’ It’s hard to classify — a mix of virtual world psychology, culture, and random musings, so far largely about the author’s internal debates over making her avatar more appealing. Not my usual cup of tea, but ‘Kit’ is a good writer, so while it has almost nothing to do with law at this point (‘Kit’ lists her expertise as “Law,” which is how I found it, so there’s hope it will later) it has made my semi-regular rotation anyway.

• There’s a good post on the legal nuts-and-bolts fallout from the Bragg case in terms of EULAs and TOS agreements on Law.com from David M. Klein of Paul, Hastings, Janofsky & Walker. It might require signup; I can never remember with that site. A few places are covering this, but I owe my hat tip to Steven Davis’ excellent Play No Evil, where I saw it first.

• Also via Play No Evil, three Chinese programmers were arrested for scripting unauthorized ‘bots for the MMO game Perfect World. Remember what Castronova said at Virtual Worlds 2007? Game and virtual world regulation is coming; let’s make sure it’s good regulation. Exhibit A: China. This is not good game and virtual world regulation.

• As you’ve heard from six-thousand places already, CSI: NY is doing a mixed-media multi-episode blah blah blah, partly in Second Life, in partnership with The Electric Sheep. Every aspect of my personal and professional self hates these shows — they consistently get the law wrong, overstate the capabilities of the technology, and worst of all, hide the ball until the end, so you can’t even solve the mystery. Here are a few facts for readers who are being misinformed by just about every other site covering this: (1) It’s running on Wednesday, the 24th, not Thursday, the 25th, (2) it’s called “Down The Rabbit Hole,” not “Avatar” (that was the other cops-and-robbers show) and, (3) it’s going to get killed by game one of the World Series. That all said, the Electric Sheep build is certainly going to be cool (writeup with video from the NY Times) and I like the Sheep, so I’ll visit it for them.

• More way off-topic goodness. Team Fortress 2 (packaged in The Orange Box) looks like the best multiplayer online game out there right now, including Halo 3. It also highlights something I’ve been wondering about recently. As graphics get better and better, do they really need to get more photorealistic? Are all games going to turn into gory miserable horror movies? The answer, happily, is no. Watch the Engineer’s trailer (movie). When you quit grinning, buy a copy of The Orange Box and get ready to tangle… in a month… once the first draft of Virtual Law is in my publisher’s hands.

• Somewhat oddly, I recently found myself in complete agreement with a recent Fox News editorial. The gist of it is that the internet would be better off with less pseudo-anonymity and more more real privacy. Read it and see what you think.

• Last, but not least, remember Ginko? The little Ponzi scheme that either lost, mishandled, or stole hundreds of thousands of U.S. dollars worth of depositors in-world currency way back in the ancient metaverse past — three months ago? Well, Ginko insider ‘Hinoserm Rebus’ recently posted “Part One” of what looks like an interesting first-person history. ‘Hinoserm,’ you’ll recall, owned the Ginko names before they became synonymous with “financial fraud.” It’s self-serving, of course, but hits a note of honesty that makes for a compelling read.

I’ve received several requests from readers for a leaner, faster-loading version of Virtually Blind for mobile devices over the last few months, and I’m happy to announce that VB Mobile is live today.

If you visit VB on a mobile device, you will now be served a highly streamlined page that shows only the ten most recent posts as text links, with no download-intensive sidebar, graphic advertising, comments, related links, or images. You’ll still have access to VB’s full content via each individual post’s page, but VB Mobile will let you check for new articles on the front page with only a tiny, 30k hit on your mobile device.

No feed reader, special address, or complex configuration necessary; just visit the site normally (at http://virtuallyblind.com) using your web-enabled phone or PDA, and if your mobile browser is supported (most are) VB Mobile will automatically load. If you happen to have a very fast mobile connection and a device that can handle the full site, there’s a link at the bottom to the non-streamlined front page that you can bookmark.

Hat tip to Alex King, who wrote the core plugin for WordPress that makes VB Mobile possible. Alex is constantly updating the plugin to cover new devices and mobile browsers, so if yours doesn’t work yet, check again soon; everything I’ve been able to test so far has worked great. Big thanks also to the VB readers who tested VB Mobile over the last few weeks.