Police blotter: "using Church of Satan registered trademark logo"

This strikes me as funny for some reason. Wouldn't want to have the Prince of Darkness take legal action against LL. Or would you?

Satan + lawyers = 2 * BadMojo

Apologies to any members of the Church of Satan.

This is serious?
LOL you'd think a little advertisment couldnt hurt.

Yeah, btw L. Ron got me

Damn thetans.

Disclaimer: All of the above is in humor, I really do love L. Ron Hubbard, he is the greatest sci-fi writer in all of human history and his regligion is one of love and peace. I am also a fan of Tom Cruise, I have his poster right in front of me which I daily worship to remove my body thetans.

You're being suppressive.

I was told I was historically redundant.

Wouldn't it be against their religion to ask for permission first?

Just say'n.

What I find more interesting is that, does this mean an actual representative of the Church of Satan contacted Linden Lab to enforce DMCA?

-Ghoti

Makes me wonder if someone at LL is a member of Church of Satan.

And next, how the hell is a pentagram an enforceable trademark?

These things, and the goat head existed prior to the existance of the Anton LaVey's Church of Satan.

Huh. What do you know, this IS trademarked.

I rather suspect there could be a case of prior art made somewhere here. Isn't that image RATHER old?

I don't think that the trademark owner has to contact LL if it is indeed "Trademarked" DMCA is for copyright issues only. I think that LL just removes trademarked content when it is brought to their attention. I am not certain, but I believe that is was written/said somewhere.

Yeah, that's called the Sigil of Baphomet, and it's been in use since the middle ages.

But, I strongly believe the Church of Scientology is more evil than the Church of Satan.

ps: My Disclaimer above is still in effect.

At least back to the knights templar Amy.

DMCA is for copyrights, not trademarks. Lindens will take down trademark violations when they see them or when you report them, if they are in the mood.

There are also the following trademark violations showing in the police blotter at the moment:


This seems like a lot of trademark violation disciplinary action to me.

Oh I know exactly where some of those might be. I saw some drink machines for sale in-world and was tempted to buy some for my sim. But seeing the logos on them didn't give me that warm and fuzzy feeling I was looking for. So I passed.

Never been a fan of Scientologists, and plus they got Slashdot to censor and remove some of my comments way back in 2001 or 2002.

The coke, pepsi vendor, I've seen them since early this year, wondered why they still existed then.

I don't see how a trademarked Sigil of Baphomet could be a violation, unless the violation refers to a product that was being sold in SL in reference to Satanism. If it was just part of a building or texture, that was not for sale, I doubt LL would have cared.

Heh. The black house was in SF, so it's a possibility. It's more likely that LL is clearing the way for friendly investors to imagine SL as

Weeding out trademark violations and closing the wild forums might be connected.

Well, maybe, but it might also be that somebody was bored. It's always seemed to me that blotter entries indicate sudden bursts of activity - "today it's yard sale day", "now I'm going to take out all the overactive security scripts" etc. A number of entries in one class and then you don't see it again for ages.

Quite possibly. Could be the result of bursts of abuse report activity too, some user gets a burr in their pants about trademark violations and runs around reporting a bunch of them.

It could just be like getting a run of 12s when you roll dice.

There has been talk of SL being used by educational systems. This seems silly to me, since SL takes good computers and high speed internet connections, is hard to use compared to normal 2D text chat, forum, voice, and video communication systems. There is no vast body of educational material already in existence in SL format, no plethora of sources like popsci.com or CNN or thousands of other websites. In short SL is at present a bad and expensive educational tool.

These characteristics, unsuitability and expense, cause me to suspect there might be some big government educational investment ijn SL on the horizon, or at least the hope of it at Linden Lab.

Marketing to U.S. educational systems might require toning down some aspects of SL, or hiding them.

This is just an idle thought, it took much too long to write this much on this thought, and I ain't writing another word on it at the moment.

I agree, but not necessarily for the same reasons (I say this because I haven't read all of your posts and don't know your complete view, sorry I know, I know, it's a shocker that someone on the forums didn't actually read something.).

I imagine closing the wild forums was done with more fiscal foresight than concern for negative PR (as some are suggesting). If SL keeps growing, so too will the forums. That's a lot of extra manpower being wasted when the "asynchronous community" is organized enough to manage itself.

I also believe that trademark violations are being nipped for financial reasons. Even if the TOS somehow absolves LL of the responsibility of policing trademarks, the lawyers it takes to argue that to an external company still cost money (and those external companies can probably pay more for theirs).

Neither of my two views are nearly as exciting as other options I have heard, but they seem the most reasonable to me.

There's a first time for everything.

At least the reply was there to the problem giggles...I get emails telling me my AR was resolved but for the life of me i cannot find it on the blotter....


rain
maybe they should close the police blotter instead of the forums

This is exactly the reason they gave. We do have very useful threads in here but often our comedy threads, debate threads, and the whiner threads just crowd the place. While the comedy and debates are great interactions, they are also messing up the place.

A centralized board does not have scalable management, I'd rather a centralized board, but I also know it's just not possible to scale it up. Hiring a staff with exponential growth is a really bad idea.

The term used was "noise ratio." Signal-to-noise ratio is an important measure in electronic communication. It determines how well you will be able to separate the information from the noise/clutter. Noise is composed of all signals other than the important signal.

I do have to admit, we make the forum pretty noisy. A lot say it's stifling dissent, but the noise LL actually refers to is not dissent.

1. When a lot submit bugs, LL can't reproduce them. Bugs need solid repro in order to be worked on (this is standard in the MMO industry). You can't expect the gamehost to always be able to repro the bug because some of them are caused by problems or some specs of the player's computer. (e.g. I and my teammates had this problem before where a game crashes only on 6600GT vidcards or higher).

2. When someone has a problem, often it's not articulated well and is frequently in the wrong forum.

3. When there's the slightest snag, a dozen whiners yell all over the boards.

4. We have so many comedy threads. These have given me much laughter, but it still falls under noise if it's off-topic.

5. We really are off topic so much. While it's fun, it is also noise.

6. A lot of threads start out imformative, the discussion goes well and suddenly intolerants and whiners start flame wars, causing what was a useful thread to become noise.

When I first arrived I was actually shocked at the percentage of off-topic threads. It's really high.

I'd read Robin's reply and LL has stated more than once that they actually have been getting the bulk of useful comments (and possibly bug repros) from outside the message boards already.

I have to admit. Except for places like land management and answers, we've made the boards pretty useless to LL with all our clutter.

LL does need our comments (even the dissent). What they don't need is the clutter, like scattered prims on Linden Land.

I don't like the idea of LL closing the forum. However I can see exactly why the Lindens are doing it. It's painful to admit it. But they really have no other choice.

It was never a matter of censorship or silencing dissent. If you project where they plan to go, they have to either close the forum or reduce its coverage drastically. The forum's function has to get farmed out to a truly scalable structure, which is user-driven third party sites. It's the very reason the internet works at all.


ON TOPIC:

It looks like someone did a sweep. Maybe someone from LL, or maybe a resident. I don't think LL is clamping down ... too few entries on the blotter. I think they should, but I don't think that's what happened here.

On the subject of CoS pentagram. Despite its age is possible that it never got trademarked. An old item that never was trademarked and is obviously not a trademark AFAIK can still be trademarked.

MORE:

http://www.churchofsatan.com/Pages/BaphometSigil.html

Sigil of Baphomet must be used with "Church of Satan" (or one of their other published variants) to fall under the trademark. The sigil itself, independently rendered, is open.