You are currently browsing the monthly archive for May, 2007.
I’ve 
posted a bunch of pictures on Flickr from the trip Eileen and I recently took to French Polynesia in the sunny south Pacific for those interested. Gorgeous places there I have to say, but the food is so mediocre as to make one want to weep. We lived on trail mix and energy bars on Tikehau, where there is only one restaurant (very overpriced, very blah), but there is nothing like places so far away from the rest of humanity as to feel almost a different planet. Highlight of the trip was definitely the diving. We did eight dives, and saw all sorts of things, including dozens of sharks (some 10 foot+), turtles, eagle rays, spotted eels, lionfish, huge Napoleon fish, and so on.
The only thing that sucks about flying to go experience nature is knowing that flying on a jet airplane is just about the most environmentally irresponsible act an individual can commit. Oh well. If we’re going to fuck up the environment, I just want to enjoy relatively undisturbed bits before it all goes pear-shaped I guess. How selfish of me.
This is an amazing day for virtual worlds legally. First the Bragg vs. Linden order basically cutting down Linden’s ToS. Now we have a class action suit brought by a player of WoW against IGE for encourging gold-farming. You can find the order here, helpfully posted on Terranova: http://terranova.blogs.com/ige-classaction.pdf
The claim is that IGE encourages actions that substantially impair the enjoyment of the plaintiffs. Scanning this, it reads like someone bitching on a forum, not a serious lawsuit, but I’m not a lawyer. It’s not nearly as interesting as the Bragg vs. Linden order but it’s still a fun read.
Makes me wonder if the plaintiff planned to sue before Affinity Media sold IGE a little while ago. Raph has comments on this as well.
I’m just reading the latest in the Bragg vs. Linden case. I didn’t realize that Bragg was also including Philip Rosedale personally in the suit. Apparently Philip filed a motion to dismiss based on lack of jurisdiction, and Linden filed to compel arbitration but the judge has denied them both. This has incredible implications for the Terms of Service of virtual worlds, and I bet there is a lot of concern over at Linden right now.
Apparently, in order to have personal jurisdiction over Rosedale, the court needed proof that Rosedale interacted substantially with the forum that the court has jurisdiction over. In this case, that’s eastern Pennsylvania. Judge Robreno ruled that the fact that Rosedale had personally engaged in a national effort to induce people to buy property in Second Life and even made himself available for interaction via his avatar in SL (Bragg claims to have been at a “town meeting” style meeting in which Rosedale talked about buying land) together come together to create sufficient action within the forum/state such that the court can have personal jurisdiction over Rosedale.
I’ll admit that I don’t spend my days reading court cases for the most part so perhaps this isn’t odd but the way I read it, the judge sounds very hostile to Rosedale and Linden. He writes, of Rosedale,
“He was the hawker sitting outside the circus tent, singing the marvels of what was contained inside to entice customers to enter.” Ouch. Rings a bit true though.
The arbitration bit is also interesting. Agreeing to arbitration is part of the Terms of Service for using Second Life, and Bragg admits he clicked ‘accept’ on the ToS screen before accessing SL. The judge launches into an attack on multiple parts of Linden’s ToS, saying that they represent a contract of adhesion by virtue of the one-sidedness, the inability to negotiate an alternative with Linden Labs, and the fact that Linden’s ToS says arbitration only for the customer, but that Linden can ban people at any time, for any reason (that is effectively what virtually every ToS for every MMO says).
(At that point, I started getting a little scared as a virtual world operator but Judge Robreno does mention a couple times that Second Life is distinct from most other virtual worlds in that it explicitly tells people they can make money with the service and that they own the things in the service.)
His conclusion regarding the arbitration clause in the ToS reads:
“When a dispute arises in Second Life, Linden is not obligated to initiate arbitration. Rather, the TOS expressly allows Linden, at its “sole discretion” and based on mere “suspicion,” to unilaterally freeze a participant’s account, refuse access to the virtual and real currency contained within that account, and then confiscate the participant’s virtual property and real estate. A participant wishing to resolve any dispute, on the other hand, after having forfeited its interest in Second Life, must then initiate arbitration in Linden’s place of business. To initiate arbitration involves advancing fees to pay for no less than three arbitrators at a cost far greater than would be involved in litigating in the state or federal court system. Moreover, under these circumstances, the confidentiality of the proceedings helps ensure that arbitration itself is fought on an uneven field by ensuring that, through the accumulation of experience, Linden becomes an expert in litigating the terms of the TOS, while plaintiffs remain novices without the benefit of learning from past precedent.
Taken together, the lack of mutuality, the costs of arbitration, the forum selection clause, and the confidentiality provision that Linden unilaterally imposes through the TOS demonstrate that the arbitration clause is not designed to provide Second Life participants an effective means of resolving disputes with Linden. Rather, it is a one-sided means which tiles unfairly, in almost all situations, in Linden’s favor. As in Comb, through the use of an arbitration clause, Linden “appears to be attempting to insulate itself contractually from any meaningful challenge to its alleged practices.”
The Judge allows that the fact that Bragg is himself an experienced attorney mitigates the concerns with procedural unconscionability somewhat but writes that “because the unilateral modification clause renders the arbitration provision severely one-sided in the substantive dimension, even moderate procedural unconscionability renders the arbitration agreement unenforceable.”
So there we have it. The ToS is not a holy document in Second Life and it is hardly a stretch to say that much of the same logic can be applied to the ToS of many virtual worlds. I just hope that whoever hears the next case on a ToS is going to be willing to make a distinction between worlds offered for entertainment and worlds in which people can make investments into (which should and will be regulated). I can’t help but feel that this is an extremely important ruling for virtual worlds (for good or ill depending on your point of view, most likely), and the case hasn’t even really begun yet.
TechCrunch reports that Sony is in talks with Club Penguin to buy the latter for upwards of half a billion! The article says 500,000 active users but I know that’s low by at least a factor of two, $65 million in annual revenue and $35 million in annual profit. Those numbers make half a billion seem almost reasonable. That’d be a P/E ratio (price/earnings) of about 14, which is not outrageous at all for a growing company.
I know Jagex (creator of Runescape) has turned down offers exceeding $100 million, which I thought was a bit insane when I heard it (from the would-be buyer) and it is clear now that they were probably right to do so.
I’m unplugging this evening until the 29th of May and heading on a dream vacation with Eileen (but not poor Nixon, who will be despondent at our absence) to French Polynesia in the South Pacific. Specifically, the island of Tikehau (with a whopping 400 people on it and not a single car) in the Tuamotu Archipelago and then Bora Bora in the Society Islands. I am heartened to note that Tikehau is far enough off the beaten path to lack an entry in Wikipedia, though oddly its airport has a one-line entry. Bora Bora is also in the middle of nowhere but is a major south seas tourist destination (for good reason…that’s a picture of Bora Bora below). I plan on spending the 11 days scuba diving, snorkeling, windsurfing and reading, and generally staying as far away from the internet as possible.
One of the reasons I’m quite excited to go is that, worldwide, coral is dying off at an alarming pace due to a variety of factors (all likely caused by man) from global warming to pollution in the oceans. A few years ago a comprehensive study of coral in the Caribbean was released showing that about 80% of the Caribbean’s coral had died off in the last three decades, for instance. Last time I was in that part of the world (on St. Martin/St. Maarten) I saw huge regions of dead coral when diving and snorkeling. The South Pacific has managed to stay relatively untouched by these phenomena at this point, though Tikehau is likely to be wiped off the face of the earth within 100 years by rising oceans (unlike Bora Bora below, Tikehau is very flat and very susceptible to rising waters).
We released the first video for Earth Eternal today! It shows three of our NPCs (Dragon, Treekin, Shroomie) and a Feline (one of our sixteen player races) geared up for battle. It all takes place in a test area and shadows are off so don’t be too harsh on the environment, which isn’t the point in the video. We just hope this gives a sense of the ‘flavor’ that EE’s characters will have.
There is a movement (of uncertain size) in Belgium that’s putting for “candidates” for June 10th elections. I put quotes around the word because a vote for the NEE party is a vote to leave that parliament seat empty. It’s a protest vote against the government, essentially, saying, “All the real candidates suck.” I’ve long wished for a “None of the above” option in American elections, as that’s usually what I’d choose given the choice.
Anyway, there’s a hot female “candidate” for the NEE party that is offering 40,000 blowjobs, to be delivered with physically or in Second Life. The funniest part are the terms of service. They include,
“any attempt to influence the depth of insertion by the user will result in immediate end of service”
along with
“Services for female applicants can only be provided in Second Life if the applicant has the necessary avatar modifications“
Summary: A school in Texas has been expelled from his school for playing a Counterstrike mod that took place in a modeled version of his school. Coincidence that he’s Asian and this was so close to the shootings at Virginia Tech? Perhaps.
The police even searched the kid’s home, with consent. What’d they find? A hammer. Clearly, a terrorist. No charges were filed but the school is still refusing to let the poor kid attend graduation ceremonies with his classmates.
Someday I hope to have enough money to tweak the nose of jackasses like the school administrators there. My first reaction to reading this story was to be filled with a desire to pay people to create Counterstrike models of every school in that school district and then offer them up for download. Perhaps locate the blueprints for the houses of the individual administrators and do the same thing for their homes.
I’m not a fucking terrorist because I’ll be playing Spiderman 3 next week (takes place in a virtual NYC) and neither are the developers. This kid isn’t a terrorist and he should be praised for his creative efforts not expelled from school. I hope his parents sue the living hell out of the school district.
A handful of hours ago, the users of Digg collectively revolted, as reported by Mashable in a series of posts this evening. A story containing an encryption key for HD-DVD had been published on the site by a user but Digg received a cease-and-desist from, I gather, a powerful consortium called the AACS saying, presumably, that under the DMCA they need to take that key down. Digg did so, but another user submitted another story about the key. Digg took that down too.
And then all hell broke loose. Users of Digg collectively revolted against the management and posted the number millions of times across the site. At one point, every story going back five pages was apparently there to spread the encryption key. Digg’s servers also reportedly had trouble keeping up with the assault the users were giving them.