Harry Potter and the Ambiguous Intellectual Property
To judge by this screengrab from the Second Life log-in screen featuring a "Hogwarts" sign (top right corner -- click to embiggen), there's either an official Harry Potter-themed experience in Second Life, or this is a fan-made sim for Harry Potter roleplay, a very popular (and passionate) sub-community in SL. (I've e-mailed Linden Lab for clarification.) In either case, it's provoked some frustration among members of the SL Potter roleplayers:
[Linden Lab] refused us on mentioning "Hogwarts" as a sim name, or even allowed in Second life regardless. They said it was against their Terms of Service to allow the name Hogwarts on any lands, items or titles in Second Life... but they allow the picture with "Hogwarts" on their banner.
On the other hand, maybe the Linden social team just didn't look at the red sign closely enough. Like most virtual worlds with user-generated content, the company is in a frustrating place itself -- knowing that there's a lot of user-made content that might infringe on the rights of IP holders, not wanting to discourage it, while also not wanting to attract nastygrams from IP holders' lawyers. (As happened to Second Life's Dune roleplaying community.) But if you think it's frustrating now, wait until the European Union puts Article 13 into effect.
Great photo but oddly neither the SL search (legacy or web search) knows the photographer (named in article) and neither does Google (I have about 1.4 millon mentions so Google DOES know about virtual folks LOL.) Nothing searching Flickr.
To be fair that might be her RL name. I have spent a great deal of time and effort getting OUT of the search engines as a RL person. I just checked and the only mention of the RL me is in the phone book "white pages" listing -- which were correct amazingly LOL.
I went to the top sims listed in search for "Hogwarts" and "Harry Potter" and neither appeared to be the sim in question.
So definitely a mystery. Really nice to see some new photos though!
Posted by: Chic Aeon | Friday, September 28, 2018 at 06:35 PM