Tag: Virtual Worlds
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Ninth Circuit Ruling in MDY v. Blizzard
The Ninth Circuit has ruled on the MDY v. Blizzard case, which involves contract, copyright, and DMCA claims. As with the district court ruling, I’ll withhold comment due to my involvement as an expert in the case, but the decision may be of interest to FTT readers. [Editor: The EFF has initial reactions here. Techdirt…
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District Court Ruling in MDY v. Blizzard
Today, an Arizona District Court issued its ruling in the MDY v. Blizzard case, which involves contract, copyright, and DMCA claims. The claims addressed at trial were fairly limited because the Court entered summary judgment on several claims last summer. In-court comments by lawyers suggest that the case is headed toward appeal in the Ninth…
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On digital TV and natural disasters
As I’m writing this, the eye of Hurricane Ike is roughly ten hours from landfall. The weather here, maybe 60 miles inland, is overcast with mild wind. Meanwhile, the storm surge has already knocked out power for ten thousand homes along the coast, claims the TV news, humming along in the background as I write…
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Second Life Welcomes Bank Regulators
Linden Lab, the company that runs the popular virtual world Second Life, announced Tuesday that all in-world “banks” must now be registered with real-world banking regulators: As of January 22, 2008, it will be prohibited to offer interest or any direct return on an investment (whether in L$ or other currency) from any object, such…
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Workshop: Computing in the Cloud
I’m excited to announce that Princeton’s Center for InfoTech Policy is putting on a workshop on the policy and social implications of “Computing in the Cloud” – the trend where companies, rather than users, store and manage an increasing range of personal data. Examples include Hotmail and Gmail replacing desktop email, YouTube taking over as…
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Chinese Gold Farmers: Work or Fun?
Julian Dibbell had an interesting article in yesterday’s NYT, profiling several Chinese gold farmers, who make their living playing the massive multiplayer game World of Warcraft (WoW) and accumulating virtual loot that is ultimately sold for real money. If you’re not familiar with gold farming, or virtual-world economies in general, it’s a nice introduction. Even…
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Duck Amuck and the Takedown Gun
I wrote last week (1, 2) about the CopyBot tool in Second Life, which can make an exact lookalike copy of any object, and the efforts of users to contain CopyBot’s social and economic effects. Attempts to stop CopyBot by technology will ultimately fail – in a virtual world, anything visible is copyable – so…
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Will It Copy?
In the spirit of the cult “Will It Blend?” videos, today’s question on Freedom to Tinker is “Will It Copy?” As we saw with the CopyBot in Second Life, when something becomes easily copyable, the economics of its production change: users benefit more from already-existing objects, but the incentive to make new objects decreases. This…
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CopyBot Roils SecondLife Economy
Here’s one from the It-Was-Only-a-Matter-of-Time file. Somebody in SecondLife, a popular multiplayer virtual world, created a gadget called the CopyBot, which can make a perfect copy of any object in the SecondLife world. (Here’s a Reuters story.) This raises some interesting technical issues, but I want to focus today on how it effects SecondLife’s economy.…
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G-Men Called on W-Hats for WMVD
[Despite our recent focus on the SonyBMG CD flap, our mandate here at Freedom to Tinker covers infotech and policy generally. So I hope any Sonymaniacs in the audience will forgive me for posting about something else today. (If you need a Sony fix, Bruce Hayden can help.) Regularly scheduled Sony-related programming will resume next…