Dusan is right when he says that if you complain about the Lindens’ policies you are essentially complaining about living in a capitalist society. The conclusion that I draw from that is that it’s time to start thinking about other forms of social organisation, both on and off the grid.

If we found out LL was bankrupt tomorrow and nobody was willing to purchase them then they could and *would* pull the plug on the servers.

Your virtual toys are lost and currently the law gives no recourse to the consumer.

This isn’t to say that a better solution wouldn’t be a good idea and that people who *offer* such a better solution wouldn’t have advantages in the marketplace (all other things being equal). Still, it remains the responsibility of the providers to create the infrastructure, the content providers to utilize such infrastructure and the consumers to accept whatever costs such enhanced content comes with.

Doing otherwise (such as using copybot type tools) is nothing more or less than copyright infringement. Dress it up anyway you want, it doesn’t change the legal impact and possible consequences.

The main reason we don’t see more consequences in SL is that suing for US$10 of stuff is beyond pointless, especially considering the transnational nature of SL user base.

Google also has something called the Google Data Liberation Front. It has the goal of letting you take all your data off of Google services easily. For example, you can click one button to get all your Google Docs in one big zip file (or get each one separately if you like).

However, I’d propose that the difference is that there’s no “platform”. If Autodesk was a platform it would have direct bearing on virtual worlds.

Take, for example, the idea of selling or transferring avatar accounts. Many game platforms prohibit this, including Second Life. It’s not just the software that’s being sold “second hand” but its use within a specific domain.

I’d propose that in Second Life, the virtual goods may be represented by software which, on its own this ruling suggests a ‘buyer’ has a right to resell, regardless of the license provisions set out by the seller, but the difference is that the software is also sold within the context of its use within a specific environment, which would mitigate the impact of this ruling.

Having said that – I have no doubt that these issues WILL be challenged eventually in court. And maybe a similar ruling will come out for context/platform-specific cases, in which case all bets are off across dozens of industries.