Intellectual Property / Legal Question

First of all, I'm just throwing this out to get opinions for a friend of mine. I know that for legal issues, she would need to contact a lawyer, but my question is whether her ex has a leg to stand on in court.

The issue is, my friend and her ex started a SL business that provides a service. This business does not net a profit. The ex built it, and they rent on a sim. There really is not much of anything worth RL dollars, that I can see. They do get very good traffic, and it pays the rent, so to speak. But it does not generate anything close to a RL income. There is no content creation involved as it is a service.

When they broke up, he gave her the business and she has an IM stating as such, though we all know that it is not admissible evidence. Now, months later, he is threatening her with legal action to secure his "intellectual property" rights. The guy does not appear to be too incredibly bright, and that was my opinion before this happened.

Does she have anything to worry about?

Thanks in advance!!

Yes and no. He may not be able to win a case, but he may have enough that he won't be found guilty of filing a frivolous law suit. Beyond that, it would help to know the nature of the intellectual property that he's talking about. If it's a service, what exactly does he want her to give him?


You may know it, but I don't. What makes you say that? Wouldn't it depend on whether or not she could prove the authenticity?

1, I Am Not A Lawyer...any opinion you get from me means nothing.

2. Anyone can sue anyone at any time for anything, however silly.

3. IMO, no, your friend's opponent has nothing. "Intellectual property" is not just ideas. The idea must have a concrete expression...words on a page, pictures, images, sounds. If, for example, he created the logo for the business, or made original textures or builds for the sim, then he has IP rights to those creations. If, as you say, he is claiming IP rights to the concept of the service being offered, then *pffft.*

sweet, I hope it goes to court and hits the news - i'll make a comic out of it.

OK seriously, 9 times in 10 people threaten court action without having a solid case, of those that do go to court, many reach court still without a solid case but just out of spite.

In business it makes as much sense to manage the relationship as managing the business. All businessess built around a love interest are subject to failure at x point in the future, usually with no prior agreement.

As such it's going to be hard to convince any judge to do anything other than split it down the middle. You need evidence to sway it this way or that, or a lawyer with a posh accent.

He walked away, yes? She did not ban him from the club or take any means force him to give up his portion of the business, correct? If he just walked away and left her holding the reins of the business then my advise to her would be to tell him. "Go! Sue! have fun." He will run up a mountain of legal fees and she can defend herself and just say "He walked away freely with no coercion."

IMs can be altered

Anyway, I do appreciate the input from you guys. I've talked with someone and she is now consulting a lawyer.

Thanks again everyone!

Who's land is it on? Who owns/founded the group? Did he remove himself as owner of the group? If Her name is all over the ownership of all properties then he doesn't have a leg to stand on in court. I would call his bluff. Would be pretty stupid to pay 5 grand for a lawyer to recover a non profitable business.

Group Owners have to remove them selves. If in fact he removed him self is clear evidence he walked away without contract.

I'm guessing the IP in question is the build, not the service. You said the ex built the island, correct? If that's the case, then I'd say return his stuff to him, rebuild the place differently, and call it a day. Right or wrong,That's probably the fastest way for your friend to get him out of her hair.

If the IP is the service itself, that's a little different. Without knowing the details, it's impossible to say whether he might have a rightful claim or not. Does the business depend on processes this person invented? If so, has he applied for any patents? And do the processes exist entirely in-world, or do they have RL components to them? The reason for the latter question is that part of what we all agree to in SL's TOS is the abandonment of certain patent rights with respect to processes that exist entirely within the system. To retain exclusivity of patent rights on any processes for SL, the processes can't be in-world.

For example, a friend of mine was able to patent a pay-per-view system for movies in SL, since the process that makes it work happens on external servers. All SL itself does is connect to it. Something entirely SL-dependent, though, like say some nifty new vehicle that no one ever thought to make before in-world, would not be patentable because all the processes that make it work would be part of the SL system, not anything external to it. (The LSL scripts would be copyrightable, though, as would the modeling and texturing, but that's a whole other subject.)

So the answer here is a definite maybe. Your friend is doing the right thing by contacting a lawyer. The only advice I would add is that she make sure to pick someone who specializes in new media IP. Not every lawyer really understands this stuff. All have different specialties.

So can emails, documents, pictures, recordings, etc. It's easier to tamper with some forms than others.

I'm not an attorney, and I don't know very much about the rules of evidence. But I'm pretty sure that I've read of cases where emails were put into evidence, and I'm pretty sure I've seen IM systems that are specifically designed to maintain logs for legal purposes. But even without independent proof, one party can submit something as evidence, and it's up to the other party to come up with either the legal reason for excluding it or the factual basis for discrediting it. Or they may accept it, and put a spin on it to support their case.

So what I'm getting at is that you shouldn't make assumptions. That's what attorneys are for. If nothing else, they'll give the attorney a better picture of what actually happened.

IMs can be altered, but Linden Lab has a log of all those IMs. (They record everywhere your avatar moves to, what you do there, what you say, what you IM.) So you could subpeona those records for an accurate history of what happened.

They have a policy of some minimum length of time they keep the logs - was it 3 months or 6 months? Something like that. But I think they also once said that in fact they haven't actually ever deleted any of the logs, so they probably have everything from the beginning of time.

All that being said, it's not at all clear what the guy is suing over. Sounds like it could possibly be an interesting case, determining who actually has what rights to whatever IP he's talking about. If this goes to court, I hope we all get to hear about it! (But it's probably just a random empty threat.)

I don't know how patentable a PPV SL system would be, depending on how quickly they got out of the gate, I may have publicly posted prior work. You know me, I have a copyleft leaning.

As to the OP:
I would say contact a lawyer.
A good lawyer should be able to argue that the IP he provided is actually owned by the business that he walked away from. In my mind the important thing is to have it always discussed and classified as a business and not as a joint venture. If it were a joint venture there would be some expectation that the creators would still own the IP. If it were a business then you could say that it's work for hire and owned by the business. Of course unless there are witnesses to any verbal contracts it's a he-said-she-said.

The right thing to do is to document all his IP and purge as much of it as you can from the business. That way if he does sue, you can give the above arguments and then say "In good faith and respect to his position, we did stop using as much of his IP we could without excessive burden."