Does Trademark Use Belong in a TOS?

Hopefully I will correctly have followed the guidelines and read enough in the four of the, I believe, 8 pages of trademarking law and guidelines that this post will not result in my account in the Second Life® virtual world being revoked. The strange wording of the previous sentence was predicated by the new Terms of Service and specific brand guidelines that would prevent me from saying my account with the name of the virtual world between my and account.

Now I agree that the corporation that owns and operates the above mentioned virtual world (neither which I am certain how to properly address since it isn't clear that just mentioning them as proper nouns is permitted) has a right to protect their copyright, and perhaps even a responsibility to do so. However, I have three major issues.

1) The guidelines are not exactly clear. (as is evidenced by the above awkward wording and references.)

2) We are describing a virtual location that lots of users reference. When referring to other trademarked terms a person can a say I love company A and I hate company B and I work for company C and not be violating trademark, even if it they do so in their personal blogs. The new branding rules are very confusing. I've studied law and I find it confusing. The not so great with legalese users are going to get lost in the pages of requirements. I'm not sure how to find the balance between protection of trademark and reasonable use but I can tell you it isn't there yet.

3) This is my biggest complaint. These do not belong in the TOS. Yes, trademark should be defensible, but when it remains trademark law it means if you flub up you will get a cease and desist notice first and you can fix the problem. Sometimes it is an innocent mistake or a use from a time previous to the branding documents. When it goes into a TOS it means that a violation of these rules can result in a summary cancellation of the users account and a forfeit of all of their intellectual property and investment in the world with little or no recourse.

Now, I am not a lawyer, I could be misreading these things. Also it is likely a legitimate thing to put into a terms of service. If I object I am free to remove my account.

That said, it seems to me that it is a valid complaint and a cause for unease that these trademark laws are appearing in the Terms of Service. I know of at least one person who is canceling a project. It certainly has caused me to pause and consider the risk of the projects I am proposing.

Are there any lawyers out there who would care to comment?

P.S. Finally found a 9th page 3 links down from the page referenced in the Terms of Service with the chart of usages, I can now tag my post appropriately.

Free Ingrid Betancourt

I just watched this video about and responding to the kidnapping of Ingrid Betancourt. It really touched me and if you haven't seen it yet I think it is important to watch.




To do more you can go to the Agir pour Ingrid Betancourt website. I don't know of an English website supporting this cause, but if you do please let me know and I will update this post.

An Autonomous Metaverse - in Text

The video in the previous post seems to have disappeared so I will try to recap what I discussed in the previous post.

First there is the general lay of the land in law and virtual worlds. Since the people behind the avatars live in a physical space those people will fall under the jurisdiction where they live. What is legal or illegal in their country or city or etc. will likely apply to them in the virtual world.

The place where this begins to get interesting is really in the Virtual World provider space. While the provider is bound by the laws of where they and their machines reside there still is a question of how does the provider interact with the laws that apply to those that use their worlds. Although this has been dealt with to some extent by the Internet, there are many areas that are different as there are actions within a virtual world that do not exist on a relatively static web page. One would hope that providers will spend some time looking at the international legal spectrum and come up with a plan of how to handle these rather than just reacting to the cases as they are presented, but predicting how those laws will apply or appear even is not an easy task. (How many thousands of conflicting laws are there?)

So that is the obvious case - laws of the physical worlds will come to apply in the virtual worlds. But...what if the virtual world could be sprung free from the legal jurisdiction of the existing legal systems. What would you view as a "legitimate form of government" in that world? What kind of laws would develop?

Now at first glance it seems like that is a pointless question - how unlikely is an autonomous world. Well I don't know how likely, but to me it doesn't seem impossible. In fact, using existing technologies and legalistic oddities I could see how such a virtual world - or grid - could be created. Let us call this virtual world the autonomous metaverse. There are three components that I think are necessary:

1) Places for the servers
2) Anonymous network access
3) A way to get money in and out of the system and to the physical person

For the servers, having watched the legal dances of services such as bittorrent there are legal jurisdictions that are fairly hands-off on what is served up on the network from their locale. This would be the place to start for hosting the autonomous metaverse.

For the networks, on the video I was postulating that something along the Freedom network that Zero Knowledge Systems had created would work. But the Freedom network has since disappeared. Since then I have found out about the Tor network which provides anonymous communication on the network (and seems to have built upon the work that was done on the Freedom Network. Connectivity to the autonomous metaverse would be through Tor or networks like this - and be restricted to access through such trusted channels.

The money at first seemed to be a hard one, until I started thinking about what in the US we call "offshore banking". Either offshore banking or other anonymous banking methods could allow money to go in and out of the autonomous metaverse and be placed in some account that the physical person could access. The legality of this may be questionable for the person receiving the money, although I suspect there are legal means that could be used as well.

Using these three components the autonomous metaverse could work outside of other legal jurisdictions.

It would be interesting to see how law would develop, what laws would develop, how they would be enforced, and what would happen if one could cross from the autonomous metaverse to the standard worlds.

An Autonomous Metaverse

I have been involved in a discussion over on Virtual Worlds Connect about how law applies to cyberspace. Some side discussions got me thinking about how one might go about creating a virtual world that could have an independent legal system. I thought I'd capture the general ideas in a video.

After the introduction to the more practical aspects of law and the metaverse, the alternative metaverse idea begins at about 2:20 on the time-line.

The video associated with this post seems to have disappeared. For the ideas contained in the video please see the post "An Autonomous Metaverse - in Text"