Interzone’s Football MMO: local conflicts
In 2008, we mentioned the upcoming release of Interzone Futebol, a sporting MMO with some promise.
Over the past week, issues between local developers employed at the Western Australian office of Interzone and the US-based head office came to a head when Interzone’s VP of Business Development, Mike Turner, was confronted by employees.
Game Developer [...]
Class action lawsuit leveled against Second Life’s Linden Lab
Kevin Alderman’s Eros LLC, a Florida company devoted to mature content which started operating in Second Life way back when, has been the star attraction before. Alderman, also known as Stroker Serpentine in Second Life, has been well-known for his successful, adult business ventures, as well as two successful legal actions for virtual environment based [...]
Who’s your Daddy?
US Congressman Mark Kirk (R-Ill.) would like to be your parent. At least, he would like to act as though he was your parent.
Starting back in May 2008, Kirk has been singling out Second Life for special attention: he would like legislation to be introduced that prevents children from accessing Second Life- both the [...]
SLCN – trademark challenges
As this post by Benjamin Duranske alludes to, Linden lab have requested an extension of time to determine if they’ll oppose SLCN registering their name as a trademark.
The extension may lead to not much at all in that Linden Lab may decide not to challenge. We’ve discussed the trademark issue previously and the situation isn’t [...]
Patents and virtual world commerce
Terra Nova has a fascinating article on patents and virtual world economies.
Our recent interview with Dr Melissa de Zwart from Monash University shone some light on this very grey area – there’s still so much legal precedent still to be established.
Discussion paper on virtual property rights
Virtually Blind has an interesting article featuring a discussion paper on virtual property rights.
The paper is written by a Columbia Law School graduatem, Daniel Gould and you can read it here. It covers the challenges in defining virtual property and the part that stood out for me was:
bits in memory do not, by [...]
Virtual lips and law enforcement
Two interesting but totally unrelated pieces of information:
1. For the academically inclined, the Virtually Blind blog has an excellent piece on virtual law enforcement with a link to the paper written by a Dutch Assistant Professor at the University of Leiden, Bart Schermer. It’s a fascinating read best summed up in Schermer’s own words:
From this [...]
