Recently the The Second Life® Brand Center opened up with Guidelines for Using Linden Lab's Trademarks. The response to this from the Second Life community was mixed. Ciaran Laval at first thought it was Newspeak, and later wrote Branding - It's much ado about nothing. Second Life Offers inSL(TM) Brand for User-Created Content; Restricts Second Life(R) is also useful.
I honestly didn't get around to looking through the new branding stuff until after Ciaran's second post - it is important, but because it is important I wanted to dedicate some time to it. And because it has implications that I feel are above and beyond just one synthetic world, I'm writing about it here.
The Second Life Context
The article, Proper Reference to Linden Lab's Brand Names in Text is useful in many regards. Take for example these references from the article:
This is OK:
the Second Life® virtual world
the Second Life® world
Second Life® residents
the SL™ community
an SL™ account
Linden™ dollars
the LindeX™ exchange
a SLurl™ linkThis is NOT OK:
a Second Life
my Second Life
your Second Life
Second Life's
Second Lives
Second Lifing
Linden Labs
First off, there's a lot of '™' and '®' running around but no '™' or '®' on my keyboard. This, of course, is not Linden Lab's fault - but what it also means is that for writing and so forth, people have to keep those keys around. Indeed, the way trademark law is going, someone should put those keys on the keyboard. There would probably less worry over the '™' and '®' if they were actually keys on a keyboard for people to use.
Next, the things that are listed as 'not OK' are almost standard and do alter the way language is used. For example. Second Life's could be used by a writer to denote a form of ownership - such as 'Second Life's de facto digital rights management'. The 'proper' form now would be 'The de facto digital rights management of Second Life®'. And the misuse of 'Linden Labs' is, quite simply, an honest mistake most of the time. I've made it on occasion and even got corrected by Robin Linden (®?) in a phone conversation a few years ago.
It isn't very clear cut. And there's no real way to grandfather things in easily other than search and replace, which makes everything written about them to look like a legal document.
License for Press Use of the Second Life Eye-in-Hand Logo is useful for people who want to use the logo - I've never done so, and it is unlikely I will want to. Some of my clients may wish to, but - that will be dealt with as necessary.
The license to use their new logo requires just about everything short of your blood type and a copy of your latest HIV testing information. I was in the process of applying, but saw that they had automatically filled in my address information from my payment information - and that information is actually inaccurate since it is a kludge around their inability to handle me using a bank in one country while living in the next. To change that information might screw up my billing for months, which I don't want to have to deal with. And I am leery to test their systems for the same reason.
The New Logo
As I commented here, the new branding seems mainly to be about advertising products and services in conjunction with their stuff. Most people don't use that. I have no need to use their logo. In fact, for my consulting I am actually more of a synthetic world/virtual world consultant than anything else. Consider this image:
There is actually no reference to them in it. This is because, as a consultant/developer/solution provider, I know the future is better than just them alone. Your2ndPlace.com, which retains a bias toward their products, also includes news of other synthetic worlds - and the tagline 'Our Realities. Our Worlds' is meant to allow for that as well.
In essence, I don't see using their branding to be something I want to use at this point - rather, it is something I would like to avoid if possible. It isn't just the matter of all the legalities that they have finally addressed - it is a matter of not just dealing with them. They may be 'it' right now, but they are by far not all there is. And this is where I drag this into the larger context.
Synthetic/Virtual Worlds and Trademarks
It isn't a secret that I am not a lawyer and I'm not giving legal advice, but I'll mention it here for those that just hit this one entry.
When it comes to different worlds created on a layer of the Internet, it becomes very difficult for anyone to manage a trademark. For example, when does 'Second Wife' become a parody of 'Second Life'? When is it not? When do culture and Law collide? And how does this affect people within the worlds themselves? Is everyone going to get a lawyer when they enter a synthetic world so that they can negotiate meaning out of the necessarily legal documents out there?
For a single user, or a small website owner, it is easy to get steamrolled because of the balance of financial strength between a synthetic world owner and a user of the synthetic world. Parody, which itself is one of the defenses of trademark infringement, is a difficult thing to prove in a courtroom. Having a court determine if something is witty or not seems to be a ludicrous way to define what is witty - but that is exactly what a parody defense is. So the safe road is simply to avoid using trademarks and coming up with subversive ways to avoid trademark infringement claims. In the end, subversive manner of avoiding infringement are pretty straightforward and actually work against the branding that a company may be trying to establish.
And as far as bloggers - most unfamiliar with trademark issues themselves - if they become cautious about this, it means that there will be less of a presence visible from a synthetic world on the Internet. That, too, seems to work against the concept of branding. And then there are imbalances in Terms of Service/EULAs which could be seen as contracts of adhesion when it comes to the trademarks and copyrights of users being infringed upon or used by the entity that owns the world. Their world, their terms of service - it really is that simple on the surface.
In the long run, it is difficult to say that the push by a synthetic world owner to create branding is a positive thing for the synthetic world owner. Is it fair? And is it truly global, where compatibilities in Law are still to be negotiated in meaningful ways for many of these instances? There are difficult questions in all of this that it will take a lot to sort out.
Back to Them
In the context of Linden Lab®, who knows? It does seem that this is a preparation for something, or that the lawyers are beginning to run amok. It seems like a company trying to seek further investment - not unlike SCO's use of 'owned copyrights' making it look bigger than it was (and they're back, by the way).
Personally, I see it as part of an expansion to physical products. The cost of this sort of branding is yet to be determined, and will largely involve community response... or lack of it. It is difficult to gauge what they are trying to be successful at... If it was a means of removing criticism, it may well be something that blows up in their face.
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As I've said elsewhere, this
As I've said elsewhere, this is a classic example of Linden Lab doing the right thing, but messing up the messaging about it because they really don't work with communities very well.
The branding programme is basically about providing a set of tools and licenses for companies to use LL trademarks ("Second Life", etc) as part of their own marketing materials, so they don't have to go to LL for approval for everything they do. That's A Good Thing, as it will make it much cheaper for real world businesses to do things in SL without involving lawyers.
However, how it has come across is "every blog, web page and news site on the net will now have to put TM after every mention of our trademarks, or we will sue". Of course, that's nonsense: fair use for trademarks is clear and easy to understand (much more so that for copyright, I'd say) and means you don't need any license from Linden Lab to write about "Linden Lab". As long as you're using the trademarks in a nominative way (ie to refer to the actual product, not to a generic product type) and not in a way which suggests you're affiliated with the trademark owner, you're cool - no TM required.
Yeah, I suspect that BUT...
They didn't say that. And when you play chicken with Law, you better be ready to swerve quick. ;-)
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