Virtually Blind has a very readable interview up with Jason Archinaco, Marc Bragg’s lawyer in the case. For those unsure about the details of the case, I’ve covered it before here and then here.
Not much to comment on from the interview. Bragg’s lawyer says what you’d expect him to say, just as no doubt Linden’s lawyer would say what you’d expect him to say. I find Bragg’s arguments in general to be fairly compelling though. Linden Labs and Philip Rosedale (its CEO) pretty clearly (to my mind at least) misled consumers by repeatedly assuring the public that what you buy in Second Life is, in fact, your property, while now they’ve decided that it’s actually still Linden’s property after all and that they can take it back from you at any time. That the idea of “land” in Second Life as an object to be owned rather than a server to be accessed is fallacious to begin with doesn’t matter much to my not-a-lawyer eyes, especially when Linden made 10s of millions of dollars selling this land until radically false pretenses.
Thus, I find this line of reasoning by Mr. Archinaco to be fairly compelling. He writes, in the interview:
“Let’s say you just assume Bragg’s a bad guy. I don’t think he is, of course, but let’s just assume he is. Who cares? If somebody steals from Wal-mart, can Wal-mart’s security guys come to his house and repossess everything else he bought from them over the years? Of course not. If you have an investment account with Vanguard and there’s a mismarked stock – which happens – where you know it’s worth $50 but it’s listed at $1 and you buy all you can, they’re not going to honor the buys, but they aren’t going to say, “Yeah, we’ll keep that, and we’ll take this other $100,000 you’ve deposited with us too. See you, thanks!” For Linden Lab to point to the Terms of Service and say “Look, we have a forfeiture clause,” well, that clause is outright unlawful.”
In other words, I’m certainly willing to be convinced that Bragg has no right to the land that he “purchased” from Linden using an…unorthodox…method, but Linden seized the rest of his in-game assets as well, and since Linden had been loudly proclaiming to the world for years that what you buy in Second Life is yours I think it’s fairly outrageous for Linden to seize Bragg’s other assets.
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August 30th, 2007 at 2:28 pm
Benjamin Duranske
Thanks for the note. I’ve noted this in the comments there, but I should point out that I’ve offered a similar interview to lead counsel for Linden Lab, but haven’t heard anything back yet. Not that surprising, as a lot of firms have policies against that kind of thing, but I want to make it clear I gave both sides a shot here.
I think that the passage you picked out is key. If they try too hard to paint Bragg’s actions as reasonable, they risk alienating a potential jury (assuming this gets that far). I got the impression (this was by voice, so he was responding off the cuff) that Archinaco was pretty comfortable just saying, “hey… so what if he was doing something shady, they did something much worse in taking the rest of what they’d previously sold him legitimately.” It will be interesting to see how it plays out.
August 31st, 2007 at 5:54 am
Andrew Crystall
“That the idea of “land” in Second Life as an object to be owned rather than a server to be accessed is fallacious”
And that’s where I shake my head. I have remote storage, in which I have several sealed containers. I can send them more sealed containers, and pay more, or have some sent back, and pay less. This is…remarkably like web hosting.
In any case the next time this comes up, if Bragg wins you won’t see a terminated account, you’ll be seeing a fraud lawsuit….
August 31st, 2007 at 10:10 am
Matt
You don’t own your web hosting account either. You might own what you put there, but the actual web hosting account you don’t own. Web hosts don’t induce you to use them by telling you that you own the web account either, unlike Linden.
September 3rd, 2007 at 4:27 am
Andrew Crystall
Heh.
It’s a point about standards of proof.
Web hosting, very easy to take someone’s down.
Remote goods storage, only the government is allowed to confiscate it.
I’m not seeing why there should be a difference. The concept that an item is treated differently simply because you can only access it through an interface is… interesting. Because y’know, you access your bank account through an interface.