Trademarking

The ancient hand-eye symbol, used by both Muslims and Jews, known as the hamsa or "Hand of Fatima" that is supposed to protect from the evil eye.

"Anyone Still Here, Keep Your Hands Off Our Logo," Marshall Kirkpatrick snarked about Linden Lab's latest crackdown on its unruly generating users. Of course, I imagine if I started calling this blog "Readwriteweb" or RWW something, I'd hear from his employer's lawyers lol. So often, people want Linden Lab to be more progressive and serve as a symbol of Opensource Heaven when they themselves aren't prepared to do this.

Still, as I mentioned in reply to his blog, this new-found trademark obsession is an annoying virtual immersion buzzkill.

All of a sudden, you really feel the pinch of being just a fake little business in a little toy world. You're not going to be able to bust out of the game. If you built up a business in the last five years with the name "SL" or anything called "Second Life Something" or with any variation of the famous culty hand-eye logo (paging Second Life Herald?), you could face legal action.

Worse, if you had plans even to go along with whatever licensing requirements the Lindens put forth, you would still face what some will call a walled-garden-type hurdle: you cannot use this name "SL" any place but inside SL; LL even specifically mentions that you may not use it in other virtual worlds (!). Drat, there goes my plan to run tours of SL out of EA-Land.

Yeah, there's nothing that ruins your Second Life (with those awesome all caps!) like it becoming Second Life (TM), and then, well, not "Your World/Your Imagination" anymore, but a corporation's property. Of course, it was always like that, and it's just, well, that the pool getting drained or something... One thing I find interesting in all this is that there is no Linden Lab. That is, that's just a nickname, and a domain name obviously, but the company's actual name is Linden Research, Inc. There were never any plural "labs" of course.

I did go and register an organization within SL called the SL Public Land Preserve, which has been around for nearly 3 years now. It seemed easy and trouble-free to register. I was only left puzzled a bit whether I now *have* to use this ugly modernesque mint-green or black-and-white logo "inSL". I'd just as soon *not*. I'm not sure that logo is going to develop any love or value in the community, I just don't know. I don't know if whether, out of the thousands of groups with the word "SL" made in the SL Group List, whether some people will just find this a kind of nice endorsement of their sacrifices for our greater cause of the Metaverse, our modern pyramids.

I guess I would have to agree with Hamlet, who is an utter cynic about social movements in SL, unlike me, that people will bitch and moan but ultimately do nothing. Because...they can't play Second Life with their own money.

Speaking of playing SL with your own money, and having the kind of BIG budget which you need to do the Open Source tip jar thing with, look at this -- IBM and its customer Fashion Research Institute really is backing the whole Adam Zaius thing. In case you thought this was just kids hacking this together with scotch tape and Coke cans. Adam Zaius/Adam Frisby is Second Life's other millionaire, winner of the LL Recruitment Center building contest back in the day, and of course, former Gigas Mall owner, Resmod on the forums and FIC in good standing! Btw *Looks at watch*. How long before Zero Linden is hired by one of these new OS entities, I wonder? And will Ugotrade get a job out of this?

BTW, in looking up Adam Zaius, I came across an old article of mine from 2005 which is really a brilliant explanation of why telehubs promoted democracy and free enterprise, and what a blow it was to the economy to lose them. Wow, it's so amazing to go back and read all that now -- to remember that awful, sordid hothouse of the forums FIC screaming about telehub compensation (though all of them were compensated in their day with 4096 m2 free tier for life ROFL), etc. And...so amazing to read the pre-history for *why* we have two really ugly, nasty phenomena of SL: a) ad farms, which still persist and b) FPS-thieving clubs in the hinterlands on cheap land that most other people in the sim are trying to make residential land.

So little thought has gone into the underpinnings of the telehub concept. The other day at the CMP lecture, Hydra of Luskwood was hammering over and over again the concept that telehubs were "laggy" or evil land barons "charged too much for them" blah blah. (Of course the...um...evil Lindens opened up their bidding on the auction at a higher price to start with and accepted high bids for them, so let's re-address this envelope please lol).

Anyway, people fighting among themselves over different visions of SL may find themselves fighting over nothing, soon enough, if it is IPO'd, open-sourced or just flatly fails (and failing could mean that it still stays open with a much reduced population, awaiting its day of re-engineering, like The Sims Online did).

BTW, in case anybody is still caring about Woodbury Watch (time to write to the good Doctor and department chair again), MC Fizgig is playing his own little "trademark" prank. He has a new partner named "Prokofy Nava" yuk yuk. Hey, thanks for putting that name in the list, Lindens.

"Prokofy Nava," like other "Prokofys" before him has the exact same picture as my profile, the exact same text advertising my rentals and blog, and the exact same groups, etc. Wow, now is that really brilliant! I tried abuse reporting it for harassment, not likely to go anywhere.

Comments

[Alex]

The complete Topic digest on SL Brand and TM is here ( http://yolto.com/FeedTopic.aspx?Id=515 ).

As to telehubs, there are two things that are very questionable is SL environment from the business standpoint, namely:
1. Teleportation to ANY location - you CAN NOT build an installation for a SERVICE if you don't know where the customer will start experiencing it (landing points solve only a part of this problem).
2. 'Flying' - camera movements are THE BEST achievement of Second Life in general, there's no actual need in 'flying', there should be multiple means of transportation in the environment (for many reasons) but NO 'flying' (IMHO).

These two properties of the environment make it particularly inconvenient for a business.

[Crap Mariner]

I'm sure my subdomain for the blog is in violation in some way or form, so I'll just prepare a compliant alternate one with the usual snark-tone (firstlife.isfullofcrap.com).

However, I really want to get a copy of whatever letter they plan on sending out to violators. Would look nice framed and up on the wall, next to my one from Dear Abby's attorneys. (A Dear Abby fan keeps asking how much I want for it.)

Unless, of course, they just plan on TOS-ing folks as a first step.

That would be somewhat... annoying.

[Prokofy Neva]

Alex,

Rather than look at business theoreticals, you should look at SL itself. Have you any experience directly in it? If what you are saying is correct, the telehub model is better, because it creates a predictable experience. Not just a landint point, but a hub, a place where people will fly around and stay, or at least fly over. And they did. And business thrived. And those who think this was just due to avatar traps are silly, as they haven't studied the 40 odd hubs as I did, camping them till dawn observing them.

The idea that flying is someone objectionable is silly. Flying is the best thing about SL that makes it unlike RL. Everybody appreciates it. They simply flew and looked at the landscape before, which rolled out nicely underneath them, showing interesting things, and didn't show as grey squares or water for 5 or 10 minutes as it does now!

The Lindens knew full well that telehubs made business thrive. But that also created a bulwark of landowners and an independent, democratically organized public that was apart from them, and they instinctively reached to kill it.

For one, their pets' stores were all in the hinterlands in the core sims, not always near the hubs. So those people bitched about telehub malls taking away their business -- new land barons, new dress makers, new customers all just bypassed the core systems (this is a chronic problem for SL in general and persists, but not as bad as it did then before p2p).

So they demanded p2p to get theirs -- and stick it to the telehubs. The Lindens were also guilty about having p2p in god mode but the People not having it.

[Prokofy Neva]

Crap,

My motto always is: "Better beg for forgiveness than ask for permission." So I would wait for them to come after you. Let them get to you, and don't lose your known traffic.

I personally registered my little SL group just to walk through the steps and be able to report on it (it was very easy and didn't seem to threaten any take-aways, just removals from putative future worlds and future registration 99 percent of the people who have SL things wouldn't be doing anyway!).

[Ciaran Laval]

I wonder how this is going to pan out with land rentals. I mean they are a service but heck, if you rent land on mature land then you could well find a non PG business renting from you.

Whose name is then associated with the non pg venture? The tenant, the landlord or both?

[Tammy Nowotny]

Sometimes flying is the only way to get around the (let me see if I got this correct) the Second Lif4e (R) virtual world. If you stay at ground level it is easy to get lost in a maze of No Entry fences, or even just to get stuck inside a building. And of course, flying is the only way (unless you know where the telport discs, if any, happen to be) to access skyboxes.

The "p2p" teleporting also comes in very handy when you're stuck... just pull up the World Map and drop yourself a short distance from where you're bogged down.

[Prokofy Neva]

Ciaran, the Lindens' doctrine has always been that landowners are responsible for what happens on their land -- they merely continue the analogy of real-life law to them as a service provider.

I find most people don't open the map and p2p -- my admittedly small-sampled poll shows that few use it that way, they either have friends teleport them or use search and teleport from search ads.

Part of this is because maps scare people, especially Americans who don't have them in school anymore, and part of this is because the map lags out your game.

[Prokofy Neva]

as I asked on Twitter, now that SL is a product, not a place, will these guys have to change their domain name:

http://secondlife.reuters.com/

[Ciaran Laval]

Prok I was talking more of the brand of the land rental model, rather than being responsible. For example if Ravenglass Rentals were to host a debate on an adult oriented theme (and you are not someone who will shy away from a debate) or a debate that contained non pg language, would this mean that Ravenglass Rentals shouldn't be associated with the new logos?

Land rental services are generally PG in their advertising but much of the content and discussion is not PG.

[Prokofy Neva]

You are still not making sense Ciaran at all.

Would the Lindens like to find a way to roll up the entire rentals business model? Sure. They would. Most certainly. And they're working on it.

Can they do this instantly? No, not without cutting off their revenue source.

If you are going to posit that any business in SL will be construed as damaging the Linden trademarks with non-PG behaviour, you'll have to catch a lot of fish in a very wide net. But the Lindens are working on that, by getting this age verification thing in place. Once they prosecute a few highly visible landlords for the mature behaviour happening on unmarked lands with no verification bans, they will put a chill on the rental business or even close it off, except for very filtered, sanitized partners.

[Ciaran Laval]

Sorry Prok, I'm referring to the fact that to obtain the inSL or SL logo your service needs to be PG oriented. They don't want the logo associated with adult business which in some ways makes sense but there's a hell of a lot of adult business here.

However maybe that is the aim and this is the way in to the sanitisation of the world.

I'm still not making sense am I!

[Prokofy Neva]

I didn't realize that you had to be PG_oriented to obtain that logo, I didn't realize that stipulation. The one SL group I have *is* Pg.

If someone has a service called SL Rentals -- and there are such agencies -- then yes, they may have to worry about PG activity.

But I don't see that the Lindens can use this logo operation to go after non-PG rental activity. They will pursue it more in classifieds, websites, visible symbols, not policing activity which is harder to do.

However, I do think that ultimately, as I see it now, that the way they *will* police it is to make all businesses sign contracts with them as vendors, just as if you were in a real-life carnival and had to worry about insurance, safety, labor, tax, etc. regulations and laws.