Second Life gets its first copyright law suit
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Sex bed tussle leads to court A dispute over a sex bed has become the first copyright law suit within online alternative reality game Second Life. The lawyer behind the suit told weekly podcast OUT-LAW Radio that the nature of the game should not change the issues at stake.â¦
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The online game infringes the copyright of the longstanding board game, game-maker says.
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For its season opening, the Royal Liverpool Philharmonic went to the unusual extreme of building a new hall: a virtual environment in the online world Second Life.
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(InfoWorld) - As the number of virtual environments increases, standards and vendor collaboration will help make teleporting between different worlds a smooth experience, ensuring, for instance, that your avatar arrives in a new world still wearing the clothes it donned in your home world. Currently, Linden Research Inc.'s Second Life is the most popular virtual world, outshining a number of alternative universes such as Active Worlds and There. "A lot of people are looking at Second Life and saying, 'Let's do one of those,'" said Bob Sutor, vice president of standards and open source at IBM Corp. "The last thing you want is a lot of different ways to do the same things. You need standards for how to teleport between different virtual worlds and to bring objects with you." Besides an avatar's clothes, those objects could include the money it was using in your home virtual world as well as a presentation you might want to share with your colleagues or potential customers. Issues to consider include the mechanics of teleporting between worlds, Sutor said. If you invite someone from another world to come and visit your world, would they need to become a member of your environment or could you simply issue a guest pass? Can a person retain their home world identity in a new world? He also wondered how people will communicate across worlds, for example, via IM (instant messaging). That could be achieved by agreeing on a common service or setting up gateways between different IM systems. IBM's set to debate these issues on Friday at a virtual worlds event it's cohosting with the Massachusetts Institute of Technology at the MIT Media Lab in Cambridge. Sutor will be there along with Mitch Kapor, the chair of Linden Lab, and a variety of academics and companies including Toyota Motor Sales USA Inc. and PepsiCo Inc. Sutor applauded Second Life's move in January to make the source code for its end-user viewer application freely available. The viewer enables users to do a variety of things in the virtual world, including controlling avatars, communicating and buying and selling objects. "They've set a very interesting precedent," he said. Sutor expects that other virtual worlds will follow suit. Like the open-source movement, "virtual worlds are fundamentally about communities coming together," he added, looking forward to the establishment of a global community of developers focused on building worlds based on open standards. Sutor has been using Second Life actively since November and has been detailing in recent blog postings his virtual world requirements . That's a common experience for users once they've adjusted to moving around in a virtual world, he believes. "After they've finished walking into walls, they probably say, 'This is OK, but I really wish it did X, Y or Z'," Sutor said. "The odds are other virtual worlds have that. Looked at in total, we probably have much of what people would like implemented already available somewhere." For example, World of Warcraft, a hugely popular multiplayer online role-playing game, has many features that could be applied in other virtual worlds, he added. Businesses are experimenting with virtual worlds, particularly inside Second Life. "They're mostly translating 2-D marketing ideas into a 3-D world, which is more or less successful," Sutor said. But looking ahead, questions arise around the meaning of the retail experience in a virtual world. For instance, what kind of artificial intelligence will companies use to determine how sales assistants in virtual stores behave when a customer walks in? Will the customer be approached by the sales assistant closest to them or by the assistant who looks the most like them, Sutor wondered. Alternatively, will the sales assistants be programmed to examine the customer's avatar to determine what you're likely to purchase and therefore which assistant could be of the most help to you? Â
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Italy's Gabetti Property Solutions has  joined the Second Life land rush, laying claim to being the  first real-life property company in the booming virtual world.
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A creative clip titled "Here Comes Another Bubble" gets popped due to a copyright claim from an unnamed third party.
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Computer software should not be protected by copyright laws designed for music, literature and other creative works, according to a lawsuit filed in a U.S. court in San Francisco.
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The virtual headquarters of Democratic presidential candidate John Edwards has been defaced by a "feces spewing obscenity" created by Second Life political rivals. Welcome to the internet, John. At Table of Malcontents.
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Blog: Google wins on appeal in Usenet copyright case.
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Virtual world Second Life had to close its doors for a short time following a 'worm attack' called grey goo.
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RatePoint is extending its rating system to residents of the Second Life online city, who can now determine which virtual neighbors to play and work with.
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LOS ANGELES  - HBO has snapped up a documentary film that was created and produced entirely within Second Life, the 3-D virtual world that boasts more than 9 million residents worldwide.
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Back in September we reported on the legal battle between Valve and Vivendi surrounding the &quot;cyber cafÃ©s&quot; issue where Valve served Sierra On-Line, the then-Half-Life publisher, in August 2002, suing for copyright infringement in violation of the
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Retailers and manufacturers are setting up shop in Second Life, the three-dimensional online world, hoping that users will steer their avatars to real world stores.
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Valve announced recently that it had won the first round in the legal fight between it and publisher Vivendi Universal Games. The US Federal District Court in Seattle has upheld the complaint
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San Francisco-based company Second Life has opened up its virtual world to the mobile phone, and is looking for interested beta testers to put the application through its paces.
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A California-based software company has filed a patent infringement suit against Microsoft over two patents that enable the creation of virtual private networks.