Jack Balkin

...statutory protection of free speech rights by players may conflict with the platform owner's constitutional right to design. The objection is not simply based on the platform owner's property rights in the game space; rather, it is based on the platform owner's constitutional interest in creating and overseeing a collaborative work of art, somewhat like the First Amendment interests of a director of an improvisational theater. In assessing this conflict, everything depends on the nature of the virtual space that the platform owner has created.

In the context of SecondLife...

Free speech and copyright/trademark may conflict as Balkin said (ibid):

If a platform owner allows the players to hold copyrights in their own designs, the game owner is inviting the law into the game space, and the problems of enforcing intellectual property rights are greatly multiplied. For example, people may have intellectual property interests in the design of virtual items. Taking a screenshot of the game that displays these items makes a copy of the surface pattern, and thus may violate the owner's intellectual property rights. All of the emerging conflicts between freedom of expression and intellectual property law are present in virtual worlds. In fact, because so much activity in virtual spaces involves copying and building on existing elements, and because the entire space is a set of representations, the conflicts between freedom of speech and intellectual property are further heightened; in some respects, virtual worlds constitute a perfect storm.

Thus, the question becomes whether the platform owner is the real platform owner - when all copyrights belong to residents. It also leads to the question as to whether a person can revoke their copyrights in the virtual world...

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