Intellectual Property and Public Virtual Spaces

Rik Riel, cruising for a DMCA notice

If you're a photojournalist reporting on the news in New York's Time Square, you don't need to get the permission of every business owner whose logo and trademarks will surely show up in the published photo.  That's because there's already an established legal precedent of fair use.  (Especially if the logos are part of the news-- for example, photos of an anti-globalization protest outside a Nike store.) Trouble is, every Resident owns the IP rights to their content (including logos, trademarks, etc.), but to my knowledge, no real world court has adjudicated over its fair use by others, in similar contexts.

Which brings us to why NWN events maestro Rik Riel is sitting on an ugly red cube. 

He's doing that, he explains on his blog Rikomatic, to provoke a DMCA takedown notice.  The cube is part of an in-world advertising campaign designated by many as "ad griefing"-- an ethically dubious means of pressuring landowners to sell their property by cluttering adjacent parcels with ugly billboards.  (I wrote about one such scheme here.)  They're so common, they've provoked a name-and-shame counter-protest launched by veteran scripter Ordinal Malaprop, who's created a Flickr stream aptly named "slgriefbuild".  Ordinal's invited other Residents to expose ad griefing on that stream, but now, one of the SL companies under scrutiny for "ad griefing" has threatened to file Digital Millenium Copyright takedown notices with the Lindens and Flickr.  To my knowledge, nothing's yet come of that request, but to try and force the issue, Rik has posted a Flickr photo of the DMCA threatener on his blog.

Read more about it there.  I should add that this isn't just an isolated internal issue only affecting Residents.  To my knowledge, it's impacted the policies of at least two of the big five media conglomerates.  Each was creating screenshot and video content in Second Life for their products, but at some point, their lawyers essentially said, "Wait a minute, if SL users own the IP rights to their content, does that mean we need to get written permission from every single Resident whose content might show up in the background of our images?"  Maybe, but maybe not-- the issue isn't settled. It's striking that massive international corporations with billions of dollars in revenue are concerned about nuisance lawsuits from random Residents.  In a keen irony, they may also be waiting for a precedent set by an avatar sitting on a giant spinning cube.

Comments

[rikomatic]

Thanks, Hamlet. Neither Ordinal nor I have received anything official yet AFAIK.

[Ordinal Malaprop]

Yes, thank you for mentioning this. I have been waiting to post something myself until I had heard from Flickr/Yahoo about what, precisely, was supposed to have happened to my pictures, but I haven't heard anything at all thus far.

[Syd Loon]

Thanks for writing, this is definitely a Grey area especially when it comes to protecting small businesses and in world resident creations, and those ad farms are horrible, seems like crops of something might be more productive or at least better to look at =]