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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.
A month ago I blogged about what is shaping up to be an interesting virtual world law case between an ex-Second Life user (Bragg) and Linden Labs (SL’s developer). I summarize the case at the very bottom of the post if you’re not familiar with it. That post talked about Judge Robreno’s ruling that he was declaring part of Linden’s ToS invalid, among other things. Linden has now filed its response to Bragg’s claims, as well as its counterclaims (they are suing Bragg now). You can find the court filing here.