Nina obviously had no ill intentions, but not everyone is the same, of course. I'm not really sure what can be done about it though.
I know if I owned something like openlife, I would love to be able to find a way to reserve avatar names for their namesakes in
SL, but the logistics would totally frighten me off. There may be no easy solution, and we may have to view it as being similar, for example, as not being able to register your MSN ID with Yahoo.