Take nothing from the building

With Linden Lab and IBM's recent announcement regarding teleportation of avatars from Second Life to an OpenSim world independent of Linden Lab's servers, there has been quite a bit of handwringing about intellectual property rights. In particular, people seem very concerned with the possibility that someone might infringe on a resident's IP rights over content they created, and you take Linden Lab and IBM to task for not making such infringement difficult. But weaknesses in this 'code as law' approach (which there will always be) can at least be remedied by bringing in the lawyers, and suing the pants off the infringers.

I am surprised that more people aren't focusing on a much more disturbing possibility--that Linden Lab may take the position that the content creator does not even have the right to take his or her own property to a server not controlled by Linden Lab.

Look at Linden's terms of service , esp. parts 3.2-3.4. Note that you have IP over your goods "within the service" according to 3.2, and --the scary part--look at the word "only" (my caps) in 3.4:

3.4 Linden Lab licenses its textures and environmental content to you for your use in creating content in-world.

During any period in which your Account is active and in good standing, Linden Lab gives you permission to create still and/or moving media, for use ONLY within the virtual world environment of the Service ("in-world"), which use or include the "textures" and/or "environmental content" that are both (a) created or owned by Linden Lab and (b) displayed by Linden Lab in-world.

So, if you take a picture of something you made in SL, you do not have the right to show it on NBC. If you make a shoe in SL, why should you be able to take it to an OpenSim world?

Maybe LL won't be able to defend this position--lawyers, any help here?--but if they can, this seems like a far more serious problem for content creators than that someone else might illegally copy their goods into another world.

Zha Ewry (IBM's David Levine in real life), who made the pathbreaking teleport into OpenSim, will be making a brief appearance at the beginning of Metanomics on Monday the 14th, for our On The Spot segment. Maybe I'll ask "Zha, did you arrive into that OpenSim world with no assets because you couldn't get them in, or because Linden Lab wouldn't let you take them out?"