Latest SL lawsuits
(Visited 7690 times) Game talk
Oct 292007
“Booty & the Geek”: The New York Post covers new SL lawsuits.
“They can say whatever they want to say,” he said. “It’s a video game.”
He also said the plaintiffs found their “evidence” by taking pictures inside his Second Life home. He contended that if he could be sued in real life for what goes on in Second Life, then U.S. search and seizure laws should also apply in the virtual world.
Ah, it’s interesting how quickly we can slip down the rabbit hole. 🙂
8 Responses to “Latest SL lawsuits”
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Somebody remind him that the RIAA has found their way around search & seizure laws here in the U.S.
You do seem to be a tiny bit obsessed by Second Life. Could it be you forsee similar lawsuits with your latest venture?
The 4th amendment protects you from the government, not from private investigators in Civil suits.
I think the sooner the Federal Government agrees on a tax structure for these types of transactions, the sooner your local griefer will be spending time picking up trash on the interstate.
No… but I do think that following SL is very important, because they are breaking new ground on a lot of fronts.
Wot? You mean there are other gamescomputationally-represented landscapes with lawsuits swirling around them out there to follow?
Raph, you need to enable the strikethrough tag. 😛
Well, how about *this*! When asked about the issue of privacy in the home and the taking of screenshots by camming in, a Linden said, “So, what, are you saying that if nobody sees what he is doing, then it’s ok?” lol
The question is whether a screenshot is admissible in court.
Even if it had been the government getting the information, if this guy thinks some clump of polygons and textures has any sort of legal status as “his home”, then he’s the one forgetting that it’s “just a game” as he puts it. Presumably he has a real life body and some sort of real life house or apartment that he stores it in, which would be the place that has some degree of protection from searches and seizures.
If Linden Labs were to start a real world cafe tomorrow, with a bunch of dollhouses sitting on the tables, and allowed customers to “claim” one of the dollhouses and use it to store piles of photos, poems, stories, music CDs, etc… I would have to smirk at anyone that put incriminating evidence in their dollhouse and said “Hey there was an illegal search and seizure! I live in that dollhouse!” Check whatever contract or user agreement you signed with the cafe’ about who can or cannot look inside it, and don’t expect some guarantee of privacy that ain’t there.
Claiming what he DID doesn’t matter because it’s “just a game” is silly too. If they accused him of some real world crime that really doesn’t meaningfully translate, like charging him with assault and battery in World of Warcraft, sure, he’d have a point. Copyright law though is all about replicating audiovisual data and computer code, which is exactly what they do in that game. Someone might as well cry out “I’m not guilty of copyright infringement, because I did not use a xerox machine or a tape recorder! I just played around with my new networked holovid copytronic recordomatic toy in Imaginationland, since it’s made for playing with, and since Imaginationland isn’t real, I’m just playing and not breaking laws, right?”
If you hit someone over the head with a toy robot, that’s still a no-no. Even though it is a toy. This story is just one more reminder that it’s going to take people years still to get used to even the issues that might be suceptible to some common sense. Let alone the issues that aren’t!