Second Life Fankit or inSL?
March 26, 2008 4:25 pmIf you’re developing a site, check out the downloadable Fansite Toolkit for Second Life logos, banners and backgrounds for use on your site. … Ideally, your site will have updated banners and logos (available from our Fansite Toolkit), with links to the Second Life registration page to encourage others to join!
This is what you get when you go and read the Community’s Fansites page on SecondLife.com. This is what they used to do to encourage us - Bloggers and others with SL dedicated sites - to do to support them. Now we have 90 days to remove that copyright infringing content. As Orange Montagne pointed out on Dedric Mauriac’s Generic Post to Avoid Copyright Infringement, the Fansite Toolkit is still there, contain all the hand-in-eye logo’s you could wish for. So let’s all cheer for LL’s firm and non-confusing guidelines!
But just to be sure, we could all follow Rheta Shan’s prime example of how a true dedicated Second Life® Resident should behave to make his or her published content as conform as possible with the new Second Life® Brand Guidelines. She did several modifications to her content of which this one is probably the most drastic: All mentions of Linden Research’s trademark « Second Life » have been replaced by « You-Know-Where » throughout all posts, pages and comments. She - and all bloggers with her - await anxiously for Linden Lab’s legal team to overview the changes and acknowledge Miss Shan has taken the appropriate measures to ensure a non-infringing blog. If she gets that approval, the same modifications will be put through on all content she published on the internet, if it is modifiable.
In the mean while, my heart goes out to: ’secondlifeherald.com, SLprofiles.com, SL-newspaper.com, SLartmagazine.com (less), SLexchange.com (less, I assume they have permission), SLforum.be, secondlifecrew.be, SL-central.com, SLmannequin.com, SL-education.org, second-life.com (less, to obvious a rip-off), secondlifedating.nl, secondlifevideo.com, etc. etc. etc.’ And to all the poor Linden™ Lawyers that will get to hunt those down. Or won’t they? Probably they wont? And then why are we making a fuzz?
Myself? Frankly, because I feel cheated on. From ‘Ideally, your site will have updated banners and logos’ to ‘This is forbidden now’ is a long way. Somewhere on that road I would have loved to see at least a ‘We’re sorry for the inconvenience caused.’ sign. And if Linden Lab - is that ® or ™ - fails to respond quickly and adequately to content creator’s claims of IP infringement, then why should we care about their property rights, if they do not care much about ours?
14 Responses to “Second Life Fankit or inSL?”
And… our pour Portuguese weblog with more than 1 year: getasecondlife.net :(
After removing offensive words from “this virtual world we are talking about” itself, the time has come for “the people who run that virtual world” (fuck them, not a word of free advertisement for them anymore) to spread their little freebie wings and go out into the blue yonder, high above Kirkby, Grasmere and Ambleside, past the sky and into the real world. And remove words there - with threats of in-world disciplinary action, no less.
May the new user signup drop as hard as the use of the Hallowed Name of the Game.
You said it Vint. And maybe they’ll truly crackdown and maybe they won’t, but damn…the flipflopping they’ve done sucks.
Bing Bing Bing…right on Vint. Some kind of signpost…anything..
And they should have never done this without at least publicly acknowledging something–anything–about the content theft issue before springing this. Even if it was just “we know it’s a problem, we’re looking into more robust solutions?” blah blah
Do they not have a PR department? Or if they do, should they all be fired for doing such a crap job? Does anyone in Linden Lab (now i forget if LL is tm or r oh screw it) realize or care at all how this looks/feels to the average resident? Or are they stuck in mute because the lawyers tell ‘em they can’t talk about it?
The whole thing leaves me with such a slimy feeling. Ick. Now I gotta go take (another) shower….
QueenKelly, they did already two years ago. They are acknowledging, but not executing much of their ‘this could be a solutions’.
I wonder if we’ll get a friendly notice, warning, cease and desist letter, account permaband, or what?
Bang on Vint as always.
With a possible blog strike approaching I’ll start casting my eye to other platforms so I’ve got something to think about during the big freeze…geez, sure hope I don’t STAY in one of them.
The Name Who Must Be Obeyed really doesn’t get it. Interesting, I made an aside comment on the 3DVIA Shape application for 3D modeling in my follow-up posts on this topic, and someone from the company jumped onto the blog and asked id I wanted to discuss ideas on how they could improve it for better integration with VW platforms. When was the last time a Linden did the same?
They have a right to protect their trademarks. They’re like seals of approval, and that has value. But when they’re sealing approval on something which is gaining less and less approval, they might be sealing their own doom. What galls me is how they’ve managed YET AGAIN to mismanage communication. I keep dreaming that they’ll properly set-up a proper developer’s relationship program of some sort, but they can’t even keep their current constituency properly informed and engaged let alone sketch out plans, schedules, and excite potential content partners and developers.
Philip must be chanting in a corner somewhere about the great nirvana ahead and trying to duck into the broom closet when the lawyers and venture guys stalk the hall, because someone isn’t managing decisions that are far more global that offering a useless logo to the masses (who the heck in meat space is going to know what “inSL” stands for anyways? May be fine for in world, but even on that front it’s a couple of letters being burped out of a broken prim, so not only is the whole thing poorly managed but the new logo is awful to boot).
OK…so if you had a choice…There.Com, RealXtend, or suck it up and just head for OpenSim?
I think it is safe to say, if you are planning on selling something and use SL in reference to the product, you should be using SL™, like ([b][i]This New Advance Laptop for only $999.99 can perform at top efficiency even in the world of SL™[/i][/b]). If you were just talking about SL, then the ™ would not be needed. Do we ever type a ™ when talking about for example: Mc Donalds, Pizza Hut or Microsoft?
I have read about bloggers worried about past content. I would also think that older posts (or photos that have the logo takien in it) with the fact that these are “time stamped” before this change took place would also be fine. You can’t really go back and rewrite history everytime someone changes something to a company. This would more relate to “Headers” and “Footers” on a website that are part of the main design or for advertising.
Basically, as long as you are not making money off of their name, their lawyers won’t come after you and you won’t need to worry to much about it.
I think Kasumi is on the right track here and put this down to Linden Labs not explaining themselves and what they are trying to achieve properly.
Isn’t this a ham fisted attempt to curb the use of “SL-blah” type names for things that may damage or dilute their overall brand.
Similar to Apple trying to restrict people making products with the name blah-pod etc?
They do seem to be expert at shooting themselves in the foot!
I’m honestly not sure how to react myself. I mean, my blog has been called “Sio’s Second Life” since 2004, and even linked to by LL occasionally. I guess it comes under the umbrella of prior-art, but not being a lawyer, I don’t know for sure.
I suppose I’ll end up renaming it and just not blogging about their laggy little world any more.
I will assume Kasumi is correct, it seems reasonable (Hahahahah, since when are corporations reasonable?). I would hate to have to rename all of those Flickr groups!
As I always say, there’s not a snowball’s chance in Hell that any court of law anywhere on earth would defend the trademark Second Life. Just ignore them.
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