Second Life Sued For Allowing Sale Of Impostor Virtual Goods

my question is , will LL allow additional profits to be made by a person who is suing them when they are clearly in the right to delete anything and everything ever created by them.

Given the plantiffs demonstrated willingness to file lawsuits I think LL would be unwise to shut Stroker or Munch down until this thing is finished. At the very least it would be a field day of bad publicity at the worst additional lawsuits.

Depending on how this suit works out they might or might not consider it but were it me I'd still tread carefully. This suit is going to rock the SL world no need to sucker punch it when its teetering.

Well, I, for one, am not going to worry about some kind of "implication" which isn't actually present in a suit. If it isn't there, it can't be ruled on by a judge/jury, and will have no impact on any of his competition.

With THIS lawsuit, the only competition who has to worry about it are those who are already doing something they shouldn't -- using his IP illegally. Everyone else can simply be amused and placated that those who are up to no good are being put on notice that someone is attempting to get LL's attention to wake up and do something about it.

The class of people whose IP is infringed could be in the thousands. I doubt it, myself, too, but the class isn't just about sex beds and SexGen trademark infringement; it is infringement in general where LL has not fulfilled their obligation under the safe harbor provisions to take down infringing content when properly notified of it.

I don't find it scary at all, really. This isn't about over-reaching protections. It is more about following the law the way it was intended.

People kept infringing on Eros et al's IP, even after they duly notified LL of it, and they followed through, filing suit against LL for their part in neglecting their duties under the copyright and trademark statutes. LL most certainly won't be guilty of direct infringement, but probably of vicarious and/or contributory infringement.

Someone defending their copywrite infringement is not the scary part, but the fact that someone named in such a suit can be obligated to show up, no matter how impractical, or be declared guilty be default.

Of course there may have been a different result or at least some recourse if the defendant had at least responded formally, even if only by statement, but still....

How many of us could afford to properly defend ourselves in florida? Or whereever?

Edit: Or to put it differently, what is to stop someone from shutting down competition purely with nuisance suits based on trumped up facts?

You don't have to show up in person; you simply have to respond. You can file all kinds of motions related to your ability to appear in a remote court. In Leatherwood's case, he dared Eros to figure out who he was, and then ignored the court summons, thinking it wouldn't go anywhere. When the default judgment was rendered, and then registered in his Texas jurisdiction, he woke up out of his stupor and realized that it was serious, and that he was in trouble, then opted to settle with Eros.

Here's a blog with some of that information:

http://virtuallyblind.com/2007/11/29/eros-leatherwood-default/

To put it simply, he was young, ignorant of the law, and arrogant. A perfect mix of ingredients for the ultimate ZOMG! RL DramaCake.



Oh, there's all kind of nice, juicy things you can do to someone who is improperly targeting you with litigation. If Leatherwood had asked a lawyer, he could have tied the Florida case up in knots for some time.

Here's an article on some of the remedies for such situations:

http://www.splcenter.org/intel/intelreport/article.jsp?aid=247

The one thing you CANNOT do is ignore a summons. You must respond. If not, you risk exactly what Leatherwood did; a default judgment. The only option at that point is an expensive appeals process.

The risk of losing, and having to pay damages for filing frivolous suits?

Jumpy must be a Gemini.

This is the guts of it. Should the case go against LL it will be because the measures that LL currently take to stop the distribution for resale of stolen property are inadequate, in that LL simply rely on the residents to report alleged crimes and do not police this actively themselves.

Policing is something that providers really don't want to do given all the hassles and costs of this. However, as digital content for sale becomes more prevalent, I think that civil courts are going to address this aspect in judgments they make.

So where do the knockoffs fall in there? Or the pirated items. Actually I do not recall seeing the word copyright mentioned in the documents but I may have missed that part.

the knockoffs are mentioned in a roundabout way but not directly as infringing his trademark. The Copyright side of it seems to deal with Munch's stuff exclusively.

If you know that your competitor lives in another jurisdiction, though, and are dealing with relatively small numbers... the original suit was over only about $4k in sales, wasn't it? That is only small claims.... costs if you live in that jurisdiction would be low compared to the costs for the other party.

Copyright is a Federal issue. I don't think it can be heard in state court, let alone small claims. I think trademark cases can be heard in state courts, but I'm not positive.

However, unless the defendant has a local nexus of some sort, or some other exception applies, you'd usually need to file the suit in the defendant's jurisdiction, not your own. There's a very recent case that made it a bit easier to sue locally, under specific circumstances, but so far that precedent is only binding in California. (See http://www.digitalmedialawyerblog.com/2009/08/brayton_purcell_v_recordon_rec.html .)

So in general, your point is moot. It can't happen, because the plaintiff's local court doesn't have jurisdiction. But suppose it did, the case gets dismissed for frivolity, and the defendant gets damages. Instead of a few hundred dollars in a legal fees, the plaintiff is now stuck paying the defendant's costs - legal fees, travel, etc., several thousand dollars worth. How many people would be willing to risk that, in the hope that the defendant will default instead?

Well, in this case, the plaintiff had what looked like a solid case. They had ties to a defendant, the defendant was identified had allegedly taken specified actions that caused the plaintif damages, and those damages were measurable. On the face of it, that is not a frivolous case.

But that does not mean the evidence is accurate or sufficient to be a judgement in the plaintif's favour if defended.

In other words, something can be trumped up or a case of mistaken identity yet still appear a viable suit and not revealed unless defended.

I stand corrected on jurisdiction though..

The states with which I am familiar, and I presume most or all states, have statutes that allow even a default judgment to be overturned if the judgment was obtained through fraud on the court. So if you lie to the court to get your default judgment, you go to try to collect on it, the defendant finds out about it, brings your lie to the court's attention, and the court not only overturns the default judgment but now you are facing perjury charges.

That is back to the defendant having to prove the misinformation though (keep in mind it may not be deliberate on the part of the plaintif. They could really beleive they have the right information).

If the information is trumped up, how it is a problem for the defendant to prove it isn't true?

Instead of being frightened of a generalized possibility of abuse, try to put some hypothetical facts to it. There are too many hoops and protections to navigate for someone to use small lawsuits as a tool to abusively get default judgments against business competitors too poor to defend themselves.

Now, you shoud be concerned about big companies stealing your money or damaging you financially, and denying your right to sue them under a contract-of-adhension you clicked through that says you may only arbitrate your claim in the business's home state.

I expect a lot of prices will increase soon to cover the feeding frenzy of lawyers as they enter SL.

Ahh, but he has committed the cardinal sin of being successful in SL, and that is enough for many in this forum to get their knives out.

Rock

Better we pay for a legal precedent to be set against copy-botting and thievery than paying for moral costs like Zindra.

QFT

Isnt that the saddest truth? the green eyed monster raises its ugly head, thats what I was thinking yeterday reading everything

If the suit is for 4k plus costs, but it would cost more than that to even attempt to fight it, then the defendant loses regardless.

This is especially true since court awards of costs are usually far less than actual costs, but are on a statute defined scale used to estimate costs.

Trumped up does not neccessarily mean easy to defend against. Proving evidence is false is a lot harder for many as not everyone keeps adequate records, and that is not even taking into account time and/or legal costs of fighting it, and the fact that you still might not win.

This is getting rather off topic, though in that (appearantly) the evidence suggests that the defendant was guilty. It is interesting to note that the plaintiff was appearantly able to get the defenants IP's and through them was allegedly able to prove that the defendant was who he was claimed to be. Not sure how that would have been possible without Linden cooperation... in which case, does he really have a case that LL did nothing?

It is also interesting that reuters appearantly confirms the information, but how could they confirm it? Are the ISP's providing confidential information to news agencies now rather than just to the accusers?

Yes. In fact Copybot was written before the viewer was open sourced. The protocols were reverse-engineered already. But you don't need to run a modified viewer, anyway -- you can just run the normal viewer with some separate software sitting between the network and the viewer. As for capturing textures, that can be done by simply looking at the pixels, without involving the Viewer at all. And in fact all those things I've said have already been done, years ago. There's really no way to get around the fact that when you see content on your screen, that means it can be copied.

The only solution would be encryption-based DRM, but that's already been attempted by the movie industry, and it was cracked in about 10 minutes.

Copying is very difficult to prevent, and trying to prevent copying will always be a losing battle. However, there are solutions to this problem out there, but would require a step change in platform functionality.

The main achilles heel in combatting copying in SL is the use of inworld building and scripting tools, and the anonymity afforded by 'No Payment Info on File' avatars with throw-away yahoo and gmail email addresses.

Another approach, which I sincerely hope that SL considers for SL 2.0, is the concept of offworld creation. One of the key benefits of this approach is that it affords an effective way to combat copying, not by preventing copying per se, but by making the reintroduction of the copied content into the VW a real danger to the copier.

If all content uploaded into a VW was limited to those who pre-registered as content creators (and this would be open to all) but who had to provide verifiable RL information to register, such as name, address, tel no, credit card details, etc, then the copier who was then found to have uploaded infringing content would be placed in a very dangerous situation indeed. Instead of an anonymous avatar, with a throw-away email address being banned (who would just create another alt with another throw-away email address and start again, as is the case now in SL), it would be a RL person, with RL info on file. Getting multiple credit cards is a whole different can of beans to getting multiple email addresses.

As content is uploaded it is entered into a registration database, to show who uploaded any particular content first, not 100% foolproof, but disputes as to who created a particular texture first would then legitimately be confined to an off-world dispute in the RL courts.

This approach to combatting content copying/theft, by tackling the means by which infringing content is reintroduced, has a much better chance of success than trying to prevent actual copying.

Rock