Seems that most of what you hear in and about Second Life recently revolves around creator rights, copyrights, trademarks, intellectual property rights, infringement and so forth. It's not that intellectual property infringement is new – you can certainly replicate content with the official viewer if you know how – but it is in the limelight and a major feature of Second Life discussions by virtue of assorted high-profile infringements, and legal actions.

Copyright infringement can't be made to go away. Since the Statute of Anne in 1710 originally codified copyrights in law, infringement has only been somewhat quelled by various means, never practically eliminated. In these predominantly digital times, there are many new tradeoffs could be made that could reduce the incidence of infringement, but at the cost of also reducing functionality.

While Linden Lab allows you to submit a DMCA notice via post or fax, there is a third option that's valid while you're waiting for the promised new DMCA process to come along.

While many service- and platform-providers insist that they do not accept emailed DMCA notices, if you submit them correctly, the provider is lawfully obligated to accept them. Interestingly, a proper DMCA notice by email can actually give the recipient more surety about the identity of the submitter than faxed or posted notices.

Last week, as you might recall, we covered a tale that really caught people's interests, and warmed the hearts of many a Second Life content-creator; That Linden Lab had run a bit of a sting, which neatly suckered a bunch of copyright infringers, resulting in their banning.

In the wake of that, a number of readers (indeed quite a lot of you) wrote in to tell us that you had heard that the bans of most or all of the those involved had been reversed within a day or so. While people do indeed circulate all manner of rumors, that would certainly be quite an interesting turn of events, so we got some legwork done to see if we could get to the bottom of it.

Numerous Second Life content creators are warning their clientele that the Web-site virtualget.net (which has been apparently been operating for a couple of months now) is a credit-card harvesting scam. Whether that's correct or not, the site appears to be using the product images and product descriptions and trademarks of numerous Second Life content creators without their permission. The original images and text appear on Linden Lab's Xstreet SL virtual goods shopping Web-site.

Numerous DMCA notices are reportedly being filed by content creators at present. We attempted to contact virtualget.net (anonymously registered in Singapore) for comment, but none of their email addresses appeared to be functional -- One email address was restored to function when the majority of the site was taken down a short time ago, but we received no response. Linden Lab, who has an intellectual property stake in the matter, was not available for comment either.

Users of Kaspersky protection software found the Web-site marked as a phishing site several hours ago, presumably based on user reports.

Update: The operation seems to have disabled access to much of the site in the wake of numerous DMCA notices filed by content-creators.

---

	Are you a part of the most widely-known collaborative virtual environment or keeping a close eye on it? Massively's Second Life coverage keeps you in the loop.

Eros LLC, and graphic designer Shannon Grei (Munchflower Zaius) have filed a class-action lawsuit against Linden Research Inc, more commonly known as Linden Lab, developers and operators of popular virtual environment Second Life, on behalf of themselves and of copyright/trademark holders and Second Life content creators.

Filed in the Court of the Northern District of California yesterday, the complaint defines four groups of class action and alleges: four counts of trademark infringement (two direct, one contributory, and one vicarious), four counts of copyright infringement (two direct, one contributory, and one vicarious), a breach of California Business Professional Codes §§ 17200 and 17500, one of Intentional Interference with Economic Relations, and one of Negligent Interference with Economic Relations.

This week, Linden Lab announced a move to quash casual infringement of marks, rights and copyrights on their Web-based Second Life goods service, Xstreet SL, among a general tightening of the listing rules.

It doesn't come as much of a surprise, really. Linden Lab has, it can be argued, a high level of contributory liability for material on Xstreet SL, compared to any user-based infringement in Second Life itself. Also, goods on Xstreet SL are readily visible to search-engines and lawyers, whereas in-world materials do not generally have that kind of visibility.

Over the last few months, there's been an increasing amount of talk about the modified Second Life viewer being used with Open Life Grid (a third-party virtual environment based on reverse-engineered and open-source systems and protocols). Most of the talk centers around copyright infringement -- or license violations, if you prefer.

It's claimed that the operators of Open Life Grid are failing to comply with the source-code licenses (the GPL with FLOSS exceptions) under which the Second Life source code has been made available. Now, while the issue has been reported to Linden Lab's license-infringement hotline, the issue is actually a bit trickier for the Lab than it would first appear.

You see, the viewer code contains contributions from a number of third-party contributors, each of which retains their copyright, intellectual property and rights to their contributions under the terms of the contribution agreement. All of whom have the right to commence their own actions.

On 14 November, 2003 Linden Lab caused quite a stir by announcing that users who created or published content via the Second Life service would "retain full intellectual property protection for the digital content they create, including characters, clothing, scripts, textures, objects and designs."

Essentially, the same rights that they'd have anywhere else (barring assorted terms of use/service to the contrary). It seems obvious, in many ways, but ultimately it's actually very rare. Terms of use/service which express a contradictory position are in the majority. In fact, go to the filing cabinet and pull out the contract for your current RL job. Odds are, there are a whole slew of creator rights that you've already signed away that have little or nothing to do with your job.

That, unfortunately, is the normal condition. When it comes to the new, novel, or creative -- almost everyone wants a piece of your pie, and few want to leave a slice for you, if they can avoid it. Even taking Sturgeon's (second) Law into account, competition for the remaining portion of human content and pop-culture is quite stiff.

Van Hemlock would like to talk about a certain virtual world, but, alas, he cannot. It's not because he doesn't want to -- he does. Or because he thinks any less of ... this place, because he doesn't. It's just because he's careful. A certain entity has laid claim to some letters placed next to other letters, and he's just respecting their rights. Van Hemlock isn't angry. He's just confused.

Other games and virtual worlds have trademarks and yet manage not to anger their fan communities .... Right or wrong? We don't know, but Van Hemlock's hilarious take on the matter had us smirking and turning certain trademarked properties into pieces of public art for fun.

Linden Lab reports that it is putting more 'resources' on to DMCA duty to deal with improper duplication of content in Second Life.

This would be a significant improvement over reports of one person, not even performing the DMCA processing full-time. We don't think the new people will be full-time either, but more person-hours either way. Well, that's all assuming that 'resources' means people. Maybe it means the rumored part-time DMCA processor is now full-time.

See if you can follow our reasoning on this one. Avatar Reality, the creators of the Blue Mars project, which is aimed at delivering a next-gen graphical Second Life-like MMO, are outsourcing the actual content of the game, while they work on the engine. Given the screenshots, and what we've been told by the studio, there will likely be many replicas of real-life objects -- golf equipment, for example, for the golf game that's said to be in development.

However, one of Blue Mars' third-party developers, Virtual Space Entertainment, sports a company logo that's eerily similar to that of mountain bike-makers Specialized. Is VSE so into their role as replicators of real things that the mandate has seeped into every aspect of the company? Someone's in trouble here, and it's not Specialized.

[Thanks, Peter!]

You may or may not have heard of V-Day. It is an international day of activity with the aim of stopping violence against women. If you have never heard of the protest day before, you have almost certainly heard of its most famous fundraising activity: the Vagina Monologues.
A group of women in Second Life decided to stage the Vagina Monologues as part of fundraising activities for V-Day. They correctly approached vday.org, and were given permission to perform. Then things got messy. According to Lillie Yifu's excellent (but frequently NSFW) blog 2nd Sex HBO hold the copyright for broadcast versions of the play, and claim that Second Life is a broadcast rather than a theatrical performance medium. Whilst I can see their lawyer's point, I rather think they've missed the wider point of just why they are looking to do this.

However, happily, all is not lost. The organisers have decided to host their own event, called In the Pink. If you would like to know more about this and get involved, or write for it there is a meeting on Tuesday 30th at 6pm SLTime in the VLS theatre sim.

After Aimee's post on the actions of Guide Hawk (or guidehawk_ltd) with respect to using resident's imagery to promote his guide book, I asked Linden Lab about Guide Hawk's claim that he paid and has authorization from Linden Lab for use of the material and their name for promotion of his auctions.

Linden Lab's response was - well, they declined to answer the question.

A person who operates under the name Guide Hawk or guidehawk_ltd has been marketing Second Life related goods on eBay by using an array of images taken from other users. But here's the kicker ... he has watermarked these images and defends them as his own! Some examples include Khamindie by Arahan Claveau and an image by Lena Kennedy. Not the least of this person's victims is Linden Lab itself, whose trademark logo is used to promote the products without the "No infringement is intended" notice required of any website or blog that uses the logo which might cause brand confusion.

A simple misunderstanding? Well Lena Kennedy contacted Guide Hawk and by his response it would seem Guide is sticking to his guns. Here is what he had to say: