silentcorner

Speaking of gaming, Slashdot reported that Second Life is recognizing users’s online IP rights by changing their Terms of Service to allow copyright ownership of the created material. I believe this is an unprecedented move in the online gaming world, and a bold one at that, considering they place themselves in the middle of what will likely be many legal disputes in the future.

So is this a good move? Honestly, I think the motivation behind doing this is a good one, with the intention of giving value to the work done by the users, but I think that mixing the virtual world with the real world is a bad decision. Why not provide user ownership, but only within the game world? Allow copyrights of works and licensing, but only to extend within the game world, and not in the real world, and enforce a creative commons licensing structure instead of just recommending it. By extending ownership to the real world, gaming companies introduce another economy to the equation (real money) and another legal system (actual law,) not to mention you can really shutdown open sharing when people start to realize they can make real money for their creations.

However, that said, to some extent I’m glad Linden Lab took this route to give ownership to digital property, because it will be an interesting social experiment to see how people will respond to owning virtual property, and maybe they will prove me wrong and show that the mass online gaming public is ready to handle digital rights respectfully. In any regard, I’ll be keeping an eye on this to see how it develops.

I wonder how long it will be before there are virtual IP lawyers in Second Life…