Linden Lab came in under the wire on on April 1st, posting a “clarification” of its new branding guidelines, much to the relief of the bloggers and content developers. (OK, that last bit was a sort of post April Fool’s thing).
Well, the clarification isn’t really so much a clarification as a reinforcement of what was said previously. A few comments followed by a bunch of links to the original post, and a few additional comments that just, well, give additional examples really.
I don’t have an issue with protecting the Second Life trademark, or the logo. I have an ISSUE with how it was handled and the fact that the inSL logo is tepid and uninspiring, meaningless to outside observers. I’m left with a few broader nagging questions:
- Does Linden ever plan to use the TOS itself to enforce its trademark? In other words, is trademark protection a legal issue, or do they ever plan to go outside legal channels in order to protect their brand? They have changed the TOS….which means they have reserved the right explicitly to ban residents who they deem as infringing on their brand. They can ban you anyways, at any time, but the question here is of intent – do they ever INTEND to ban or suspend accounts because of lack of adherence to the branding guidelines, or will legal channels and due process, examination of fair use, and the right to a fair defense be considered?
- What kinds of lawyers do these guys HAVE?
- Why now? If they’re getting set for an IPO or to sell off (CISCO is looking, thinking of buying up Qwaq, maybe there are other companies out there casting about for a bigger play into VWs) why couldn’t they just wait until the new President is in place? Could they clarify intent? Did this come from the board or the lawyers got spooked by something in particular?
The one possible upside to all of this is the comment that “if you’re a content creator, stay tuned. We’re taking steps to improve our copyright claim process and will saying more about that soon.” I don’t have a lot of trust in their process and fully expect that they’ll lob whatever brainstorm they’ve had out to the community without consultation or discussion. And frankly, they risk opening a much larger Pandora’s box if they don’t handle THAT clarification much better than they did the branding one.
It’s become so hard not to be cynical – “…steps to improve our copyright claim process…” sounds horribly like “you’ll be able to email DMCA reports instead of faxing them to us!” but doesn’t sound like they’re actually going to implement measures to reduce content-theft, decrease the time it takes to act on reports or actually remove any offending content (rather than just the vendors selling it).
Couple of additional questions:
Is it true that there were plans to move enforcement of the inworld permissions system from the client to the server ahead of open-sourcing the client code?
If so, why was the client open-sourced before this was implemented?
If this had been done would we still have as much content theft, assuming (perhaps incorrectly?) that it would have then been more difficult to hack around the permissions system?
What part, if any, did Cory Ondrejka play in these decisions?
What part, if any, did Philip Rosedale play in these decisions?
OK, maybe not the most compelling conspiracy theory but interesting suppositions anyway…
*sigh*
Yeah, Eris. It’s kinda sad, I find myself spending way too much time wondering what’s WRONG with them instead of what’s right, which is such a shame. Such creative people in SL, or is that inSL, and half their energies seem to go to trying to read the tea leaves of bad decisions, opaque communications, an impenetrable JIRA, poor outreach to potential and current partners (including the in world community), vague policy implementations or over-wrought ones, changes that are announced with much fanfare and then quietly dropped (age verification), etc.
Thank goodness Torley is being left alone to put out great tutorials and Sidewinder seems to be cut from the Google rather than the Linden cloth.
I’m goin to New York – maybe there’s someone down at the conference with some new cool toy to play around with, because fiddling with legal/TOS changes isn’t so much fun.
It’s possible that they may have a problem with using the TOS to ban someone over the branding issue.
If they did ban someone using the TOS and the person they banned had the where with all to sue, there is case law that has declared the TOS is a “contract of adhesion” at least as far as it concerned the arbitration clause, the same might hold true in such a case.
(Jeez, did that sentence make any sense?)
Perhaps, they have already opened that Pandora’s Box.
I doubt that a lawyer advised them to incorporate the IP claims into the TOS. IP claims run against the whole world. TOS claims run against parties to the contract.
One problem is the contract of adhesion issue. The other is that by using the TOS in this way they may be abandoning or abridging their intellectual property claim against he whole world in favour of a contract claim that runs only against those party to the TOS.
As lawyers, the Lindens make great software engineers. As public relations people, the Lindens make great software engineers.
I would question that they are great software engineers, based on their performance in that arena. Or at least on the performance of the product that they release on the world.
Threatening trademark transgressors with a ‘permaban’ is understandable on one level – really, what else have they got?
The most frustrating thing is that, while they waste time and effort on this trademark nonsense, user-content continues to get ripped off and resold inworld and they’ve barely even commented on that. So implicitly, protecting Linden trademarks is far more important than protecting the creative output of residents? That’s a PR gesture that only needs one middle finger…
On the positive side – totally agree about Sidewinder. At least someone within Linden understands how to manage a project AND the customer perception of that project, Sidewinder truly shines in this context. Torley is too uhm, saccharin for me, but he’s hard to dislike…