Second Life Designers Sue Linden Lab Over Digital Fashion Counterfeiting

You may recall we reported yesterday that popular browser world Evony is suing long-time blogger and gaming industry veteran Bruce Everiss over what Evony claims are fraudulent statements concerning alleged links to Chinese companies.

Now veteran Second Life journalist Hamlet Au reports that Linden Lab is the target of litigation as some of Second Life's most prominent virtual designers join forces in a class action lawsuit against Philip Rosedale's virtual world.

From the article:

Munchflower Zaius and Stroker Serpentine filed a class-action lawsuit in U.S. District Court against Linden Lab, for allegedly allowing and enabling content theft of their material by other Residents.

Linden Lab, unlike games like World of Warcraft, provides the user with rights to all content they create in the virtual world. This makes the situation hairy. If copying a music track from a CD and selling the bits and bytes constitutes copyright infringement under current case law - and it does - it seems plain that bits and bytes representing a digital coat are subject to the same protection.

Hamlet asks a question that I feel is the real consideration in this case: will a decision in favor of the plaintiffs promote or limit content creation? Au has a point that lawsuits hurt small businesses. Just ask Edwin Howard Armstrong, the RCA employee who in the 1930s improved on AM Radio by producing FM frequency. RCA litigated him into submission and, unable to compete, blocked superior FM technology for years.

Virtual worlds will impact the legal world in a profound and negative way if Second Life is forced to limit its liability by extending greater protections over virtual products. Small content producers will simply not have the ability to compete with a company that, as Au notes, sold over $1 million last year.

The Alphaville Herald has a great report on the newly-launched case complete with a link to the class-action lawsuit. What's telling is that both plaintiffs acknowledge they don't seek monetary damages from the lawsuit. Their goal is more restrictive regulations on who can create what, and ultimately tighter control over the virtual market for those already in a commanding position.

A telling line from the lawsuit:

Linden Lab directly and secondarily infringes the trademark of Plaintiff Eros by using Eros’s mark to sell infringing virtual goods within Second Life and by providing the tools to other infringing Second Life users.

This is chilling not because it holds Second Life accountable for the independent actions of its users, but because it argues that providing content creation tools in the first place constitutes enabling intellectual property theft. No doubt it would be effective from a business standpoint to sharply limit content creation now that the plaintiff companies have strong market positions.

The virtual economic boom in Second Life is a product of free creation and healthy competition. Restricting competition and encouraging the concentration of products in a few large fashion houses has more in common with the real world that Second Life's libertarian principles sought to upend. Not only does this lawsuit open up small creators to punishment for innovation, it stymies their incentive to create at all.

Comments

[www.facebook.com/profile.php?id=642588858]

I have not read the full lawsuit, but I got the impression that they were not going after content creation tools but content duplication tools.

The old problem that many of these designers have had to deal with is how easily automated tools can duplicate entire objects by just being in the same world. The duplicate produced (if I understand correctly) is a fully unlocked and editable version of the object that can then have its markings replaced, packaged up, and resold as locked objects again.

To use the regular software analogy.. it would be like seeing a copy of MS Office on-line, hitting a button, and being provided with the full source/assets/build environment. In the past at least these sellers basically wanted technical changes to stop the ease of the process.

[PixPol]

This is an interesting take - the wording of the case seems to point one way, but your way certainly makes more sense. Perhaps it was the word "tools" that got me.

I'm going to look into this further. The same problem happened earlier in Second Life's history with machines that could make duplicates, but there were no major suits from it. People had less at stake then, maybe?

[www.facebook.com/profile.php?id=642588858]

Got a chance to read the lawsuit, and it is indeed concerning the DRM and it's ease of bypassing by various copy programs.

Eros has gone after individual copiers in the past (I have no idea how those suits went) but I think this is the first time they have gone after Linden directly. To the best of my knowledge EROS has won two of the suits so far but the problem has been continuing.

I admit, part of my interest in this comes from having worked at game companies that were heavily effected by for-profit piracy.. so bit of a sore spot with me ^_^

[www.facebook.com/profile.php?id=642588858]

Almost forgot, If you do not have a link to the suit:

http://foo.secondlifeherald.com/slh/2009/09/eros-llcshannon-grei-vs-linden-research-the-class-action-complaint.html

[Thorn Witrial]

It will not hurt small business at all, if small business people are *ORIGINAL*. What the crux of the problem is is people who are stealing designs and then selling them. In my opinion, these people are not small businesses, they are parasites.

IF anything, forcing LL to contain the piracy will help smaller businesses get off the ground in that they won't have their original designs stolen out from under them and sold for pennies on the dollar.