Linden Lab have announced the creation of a new sub-section on the Second Life website called the Second Life Brand Center.
It’s essentially a more formalised structure for promoting your business as being part of the Second Life community. It’s also a further way of Linden Lab reinforcing appropriate use of their Trademarks – including the main Second Life logo. Anyone using that logo is being given 90 days to ensure its use meets Linden Lab’s guidelines.
What do you think of this? Is it a useful tool for your business or a means of Linden Lab further tightening their grip on what you do in-world?
On the state blog of Second Politburo (trademark pending) many contributors accused Second Politburo of speaking lawyerese. Nothing could be further from the truth. The guidelines reek of amateur bunglers playing cut-and-paste with boilerplate and some would say that’s about par for the course for the company that may not be named.
Note this is a somewhat disparaging response so I am, in theory, prevented from using the name of the company that may not be named for fear of breaching their alleged intellectual property.
The measure of the silliness of these guidelines, and speaking only in terms of US domestic law, can be found by considering what instruments the guidelines purport to suspend.
1. The First Amendment to the Constitution of the United States. Apparently the press are no longer free to use the name of the company that must not be named if their text criticises said company.
2. The law of conflict of laws. Choice of law and choice of forum clauses are quite common in contracts. They derive their validity from the law of conflict of laws. The guidelines of the company that may not be named purport to suspend the principles of that law. It is unclear how you can suspend a body of law by an instrument that owes its validity to that law.
3. Many of the alleged intellectual properties of the company that may not be named have been in common use for several years. Once you let the IP cat out of the bag you do not have the right to recapture it years later.
4. Intellectual property is part of the law of property which governs claims made against the whole world. The law of contract governs claims agreed to by the parties to the contract. A court has already ruled, in Bragg v Linden Lab, that the the terms of service are a contract of adhesion and therefore draw strict scrutiny against the company that must not be named. Trying to enforce a law of property claim by getting law of contract parties to accept changes to a contract of adhesion is so ridciulous a legal tactic that it beggars belief. Indeed, it may actually have the unintended effect of abandoning an intellectual property claim against persons who do not accept the terms of the contract of adhesion.
Many companies, including now the company that must not be named, post boilerplate they know is void ab initio. It is to be hoped this is an example of an ambit claim, rather than a serious belief on the part of the company that must not be named that their internal memos somehow override the US bill of rights.
Software engineers really should stick to writing code and getting the grid up to scratch.