Quote:
Originally Posted by Archer Braun  I will fully admit to feeling a bit trollish as of late, but I can't say I find any of this very surprising.
LL is taking steps to protect its trademark and IP rights for the strategic health of its business, and everyone's up in arms.
For a number of reasons I just have to shake my head. You pin your star to someone else's product, refer to it by name, begin making an income, and then get upset with the creator of that product decides to start flexing its own IP muscles?
This may have been inevitable. And it may actually not turn out to be as bad as some people think. But it is the result of inviting RL legal scrutiny into SL.
You'll never be able to stuff that genie back inside the bottle. Not ever.
And as far as this being cruel? A 90 day minimum is hellagenerous...especially considering they could have gone the true bastard route and started sending out C&D letters, instead. |
Well, no. The "star" that was pinned was not something having nothing to do with
SL, and then "pinned" to the
SL product, thereby affording the pinner an income which it is implied he doesn't particularly deserve.
The "star" that was pinned to
SL . . . in fact . . . IS . . .
SL. It exists only within or because of
SL; it has to do only with
SL; and without many such stars
SL itself would not exist.
The whole thing is sort of like inviting a bunch of people to participate in a trade fair convention.
So they do, and indeed, without their booths, there would be no such convention.
And indeed, without the convention, the products ("stars") would not even exist, as they are sold only INSIDE the convention!
For years, they were told that they could make fan sites about the convention, refer to the convention, and so on and so forth, considering that the products only ever appear IN the convention itself, and considering that without the products ("stars") there would BE no convention.
So it's not a matter of people saying, well, hey, now I'm going to use
SL to promote my new kitchen slice-and-dice-o-matic machine, which I am also selling on QVC and in supermarkets everywhere, for use in real-life kitchens.
To heck with the analogies. Point is, nobody has been taking advantage of
SL, in building fan sites, shopping sites, or anything else. None of that could exist WITHOUT
SL; none of it is being sold OUTSIDE of
SL; and
SL couldn't exist (at least not as it does now and has all this time) without the people making the fan sites, etc., and their products.
Point is, LL has been taking advantage of its residents all this long while - getting them to make stuff and sell it; charging them for exchanging currency in selling it (GOM, anyone?); and getting the windfall of promotion from the residents and their web sites.
Now they are taking it all back - at a late stage - as if to say, "OK, we got a lot of good out of them, but we don't need those people any longer." And then threatens to sue anyone who doesn't go along with the new rules.
I'd say the "taking advantage of" thing goes in quite the opposite direction, actually, and it is they who have been pinning their star to us.
coco
P.S. The divorce analogy is really just a heck of a whole lot better. (Not to mention shorter.)