Massively^™

It's a hectic summer over at Blizzard HQ. Inundating the masses with Wrath of the Lich King across the pond at the World Wide Invitational, announcing Diablo 3 on top of that, and battling it out in the courts against the kingpin responsible for World of Warcraft's bot brigade. Aside from all that, there's the whole pending merger with Activision and Vivendi approval process with Blizzard Entertainment right in the middle.

The latest legal development involves a preliminary injunction filed by some shareholders who weren't satisfied with the $27.50 per share offer. The injunction suit was filed in the Delaware Court of Chancery last February by the Wayne County Employee's Retirement System in an attempt to halt the merger. Activision has announced that a Delaware Court junked that preliminary injunction, a decision made by the very illuminated and WoW-knowledgeable Chief Judge William B. Chandler III. Activision will be holding a stockholder meeting next Tuesday on July 8, if approved the merger will complete on July 9th and a new titan, Activision Blizzard will join forces and the gaming world will never be the same again.

We wonder how many level 70 characters the Judge plays or maybe he's already level 75 in the WotlK beta?

Last month, digital rights advocacy group Public Knowledge filed an amicus curaie -- "friend of the court" -- brief regarding Blizzard's argument that a user making a memory copy of the World of Warcraft software for purposed of using MDY's Glider program to bot violated their terms of use and their copyright. Public Knowledge noted that loading legally obtained software into the memory for purposes of running it is explicitly allowed by copyright law. The judge required Blizzard to respond to the argument last Friday, and Virtually Blind has Blizzard's response.

The basic argument that Blizzard makes is that the software is only rented and that they control and license every allowable use, and every non-allowed use (by their license) is copyright infringement. (Public Knowledge points out that this would mean using non-allowed names, or communicating in game with a member of the opposing alignment, is also copyright infringement).

Do you feel when you buy a game or other software that you are buying the software -- and can therefore do what you like with it, regardless what some EULA allows -- or do you feel the publisher of the software retains all rights to that box and the particular copy of the software you have licensed? This goes beyond WoW and beyond video games entirely.

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.

That epic mount? That sweet sword? All that gold you have stashed away? All the time spent leveling your character? The mount, the sword, the gold, and your character -- none of them are yours. All can be swept away at the whim of the game company, because virtual property, such as in game items, don't really exist, and thus you have no rights over them.

Columbia Law School graduate Daniel Gould argues that a limited recognition of the rights of players to their virtual property would benefit both the the players and the virtual world companies themselves. An astounding position -- virtual world companies are notorious for laying claim to everything that exists or happens in their games, with some notable exceptions. The developer might make a decision that devalues your virtual goods -- for instance, your Uber Sword of Sweetness could begin dropping from newbie field trash mobs. Or all teleports to your virtual homestead could suddenly disappear. Gould explains how models based off real-world property law could show the way to giving the dwellers in virtual worlds some legally-recognized recourse for their grievances.

Virtual property law is a minefield because the very first time a judge assigns a real-world monetary value to virtual property, it can be taxed. And then, everything changes.

After taking a working day to mull over and polish a response, Linden Lab has posted it to their official blog.

The net result of the post unfortunately, judging by responses and discussion elsewhere appears to inflame and annoy involved consumers and creators, as users claim that the response is tangential and evasive.

Meet Jay. Jay started in Second Life in April this year and was interested and involved enough to get himself some Linden Dollars via a currency exchange. A lot of Linden Dollars.

Unfortunately, Jay is now out-of-pocket by US$110, and is being told conflicting stories.

There are widespread reports today that Linden Lab has removed all content from Second Life (from in-world, and from user inventories and object contents) that were the work of a small number of users, apparently over DMCA issues.

Hitherto, Linden Lab has a reputation for only taking down specific, identified items in-world -- stuff that you could point to. Indeed, it attracted criticism for not also removing other copies of such items from in-world and from user-inventories.

Now, it seems the Lab is going large, and doing just that.

PlayNoEvil points out an interesting blog entry on cheating in Runescape. The poster, who wishes to remain anonymous, describes himself as a retired Runescape cheater who devoted five years to the 'darker side' of the game. He states, "This article details all the intricacies of Runescape and cheating and what really goes on behind the scenes, I assure you that it will surprise you."

The poster, identified only by the name ThirdEyeOpen, lays out how cheaters and buyers operated as a would-be organized crime ring. 'Welcome to the Dark Side' is his chronicle of how he began his Runescape cheating career, and how it all ended. He recounts being 'interrogated' online by Jagex Ltd. about his activities, and how the subsequent account banning led to a malevolent wish to get even. His anger eventually snowballed into the creation of an organization of similar-minded individuals, mostly other teenagers, who accumulated a fair amount of real-world currency through exploits in Runescape before cashing out altogether. It's an interesting read -- perhaps a bit disturbing in the sense that he views cheating as a kind of playstyle -- but worth checking out all the same.

Via PlayNoEvil

It shouldn't be a shock that governments are interested in MMOs and virtual worlds. We hear that they even pay attention to the film industry, television, DVDs and other such new-fangled technological industries that turn over many millions of dollars and involve significant percentages of the population.

The US Government's Project Reynard is a different breed of fox, however. The idea seems fairly simple on the face of it. Convince MMO and virtual world operators to open up their systems for complete surveillance and then try to establish 'normal behavior patterns' and see if it is then possible to determine 'suspicious behavior patterns'.

Yes, this is technically unconstitutional (like all those warrantless wiretaps you may read about in the news), but as we've seen, a simple Executive Order signed by the Chief seems to be sufficient to brush that trifling obstacle aside.

PBS' Bill Moyers Journal takes a look at the whole issue, and gives a refreshingly non-sensationalist look at Activision-Blizzard's World of Warcraft and Linden Lab's Second Life, in this rather sobering feature.

[Via WoW Insider]

Well, sort of -- it is hard to be precise in the scant space that a headline provides. University of Southern Queensland (Australia) has a patent in the pipe at the moment that covers the extraction and avatar expression of avatar emotions -- at least if we're reading this right.

The idea is that the system is supposed to work out emotional content based on input text or voice, generate an overall emotion plot in a multidimensional coordinate system, and then express that emotion through your avatar. Essentially your avatar is animated and expressive according to your detected mood in order to communicate the non-verbal cues normally associated with that mood.

Will you see this in (say) Second Life, for example? Probably not. The Second Life Terms of Service grant an "a non-exclusive, worldwide, fully paid-up, transferable, irrevocable, royalty-free and perpetual License, under any and all patent rights you may have" to Linden Lab and all Second Life users as a part of pushing content in or through the virtual world.

That scares the pants off of enough IP-lawyers right there, so it isn't very likely we'll see this show up in Linden Lab's virtual domain.

As you would know by now, Linden Lab recently changed policy on the resident-run Second Life fifth anniversary, essentially switching from a role of donating the virtual land resources for the event to an active management role, overriding the organizing committee and excluding certain community groups, switching the whole event from a predominantly mature event to an entirely G-rated occasion.

Linden Lab's representatives told those involved that in the current political climate they feared a potential partial or complete shutdown of Second Life through legal avenues. Some organizers quit publicly, others simply hunkered down and quit operating silently, and some groups pulled out of the whole event.

Now, it appears, Linden Lab has blinked.

With Linden Lab's 90-day grace period on trademark usage approaching in late June, United States attorney Frank Taney of Philadelphia law firm Buchanan Ingersoll & Rooney PC will be giving a talk and Q&A session in Second Life on Trademarks for Virtual World Related Businesses on 6 June from 2:30PM to 4PM SLT (US Pacific time). Topics covered will include the use of trademarks to build value in a virtual world brand, Linden Lab's trademark policy, proper use of trademarks, and avoidance of trademark infringement.

The talk will be hosted by FilpperPA Peregrine (Timothy Allen) at the UBM Think Services Auditorium, and will be simulcast on the Web via World2Worlds.com. This will be an SL voice session. Taney is well-known among Second Life users for his representation of Second Life users in intellectual property issues over the last year.

As you are probably already aware, Linden Lab have suddenly decided to take an active role in the Second Life fifth anniversary this year, overriding the organizing committee and excluding a number of the invited communities from presentation this year.

Decisions, ultimately, get made because they seem like the best of the available options at the time. Nobody sits down and thinks, "Hey, this is my second best option. I should go with that!" -- they only go with the worse options when nothing better seems to be possible.

So -- why did Linden Lab make this one?

World of Warcraft seems to be the focus of virtual law, lawsuits, angry gnomes, and all sorts of fun these days. Not only is a player suing IGE due to their gold selling practices, but Blizzard also took MDY, makers of the glider program, to court. Now, MDY and Blizzard are moving closer to getting this battle finished.

The arena of choice is the US District Court of Arizona and the two sides put forth their best efforts and finished their replies. Now we just have to wait for the federal justice system to make a decision on summary judgment. As Virtually Blind's Benjamin Duranske points out, that could take some time. Nonetheless, a few people are following such lawsuits closely since this is new territory for the courts and the MMO industry. Some fear the cases bring the federal government onto virtual turf, others think it is time for an end to cheating and want government help, and a few players are indifferent and just want to get their characters to level 70 before Wrath of the Lich King arrives.

Unfair revenue distribution is a concern in many economies. In China's, however, it is a crime. Two gold-farmers, Li and Zhang, were arrested by Chengdu's Shuangliu county authorities after Li ratted on his partner Zhang.

Li and Zhang had gone into business last August, and with 20 employees had raked in around 1.6 million Renminbi (人民幣) -- that's getting towards a quarter of a million US Dollars. That's not bad for what amounts to seven months of gold and item trading on World of Warcraft, now is it?

With China cracking down on assorted online gaming activities that are either too intrusive, or have destabilizing economic effects, we don't think either Zhang or Li will get off lightly. Why, we wonder, did Li turn Zhang in? There's got to be a good story behind that.

[via PlayNoEvil]