SecondLife

My abstract for the Prato 2008: ICTs for Social Inclusion: What is the Reality? has been accepted - so I'm trying to get everything together to head to Prato, Italy for October 27th through 31st. I'm hoping I can spend a little extra time exploring Europe, but that has a lot to do with finances and scheduling - both of which are on an upswing but are a bit unpredictable at this point.

My paper, Inclusion in Synthetic Worlds, will deal with inclusion issues in (you guessed it) synthetic/virtual worlds that affect participation and determine how the worlds themselves are used. The abstract, which was accepted:

An interesting video posted by Annie OK , shown at left, is funny for people who actually participate in the synthetic world of Second Life and could be taken too seriously by people who are unfamiliar with Second Life - or other virtual worlds.

The video is exceedingly well done - and there are highlights of it that really tease out some of the problems of real world sweatshops. There is a grey middle area that the video neglects - purposefully, I am sure. The virtual sweatshop in the video isn't really practical for some obvious reasons. Paying someone 90 cents per hour may be a corporate dream, but the reality is that anyone with the broadband access and so on would have to be making substantially more if they are paying their own real world bills. Electricity, internet costs, food, water, shelter... even in the developing world, it is unlikely that working in a virtual sweatshop would be anything but a net loss for an 'employee'. But who cares about the employees, anyway? That is, after all, an implicit callousness that creates what we would call a sweatshop.

In November, 2006 I wrote Virtual Sweatshops Or A Digital Solution for People in Developing Nations? - pointing to how China, for example, is using synthetic worlds to employ people in the real world to create virtual items. In worlds other than Second Life, this is generally known as farming.

Farming, in and of itself, is an area of great debate. Edward Castronova accidentally started the glorification of farming before he wrote Synthetic Worlds: The Business and Culture of Online Games. He simply noticed something and wrote about it. Authors such as Julian Dibbell later came along and, in a seemingly purposeful way, glorified farming. The trouble some have with farming is that in MMORPGs, farming can destroy the very context of the environment. References to RMT (Real Money Transactions) being bad for such games are easy to find - the basis of the criticism is fairly solid: If you can just buy improvements, then what reason is there to do tasks required to get the items? Of course, this may simply be a matter of people who are unwilling to do their own tasks and are willing to pay others to do them. The premise of farming is built on that.

Virtual Law: Navigating the Legal Landscape of Virtual Worlds, by Benjamin Duranske (VirtuallyBlind.com) is now available for purchase from the American Bar Association.

You can find it here. If you missed my review of it, you can read my review of it here.

It is one of two books that has scored a 10/10 on the KnowProSE.com scale - and not as a book for lawyers, but as a book for users of virtual worlds.

My review is even quoted below that of Edward Castronova, who had this to say:

Ben Duranske hits the mark again and again with this clear, straightforward overview of legal issues in virtual worlds. All of the main arguments are here, in a single source, allowing the reader to balance the claims of contract law against those of property law in regulating the toughness of the magic circle. Woven together, these arguments constitute a desperately-needed consensus, one that recognizes the inevitable influence of real-world law on the future of this critical medium, but also its limits.

It is cool to have a quote from myself near one by Castranova. Poor fellow must be thinking, 'There goes the neighborhood...' :-)

Virtual worlds have survived their initial success and have become more grounded in the minds of the increasing number of people who use them. As such, it makes sense that businesses, ,non-profit organizations and even governments would be interested in how to leverage these synthetic worlds to their own purposes.

There are many lively weblogs to read on the topics of virtual worlds. Some are fan sites, and some tease at the importance of aspects of virtual worlds as diversely as the authors approach them. This can be very confusing to follow for someone who may not have time to follow the google or yahoo of hyperlinks scattered across another synthetic world of perspectives propped up with observation and opinion of many authors. There should be an easier way for someone unfamiliar with virtual worlds to get an idea of what is important for them to know.

Enter Virtual Worlds: A Business Guide.

As one would expect, the synthetic world of Second Life® occupies a large portion of the work - roughly half of it. This is because, at this point, Second Life is the leading synthetic world when it comes to business - some say that this is even to the detriment of Second Life, though whether that is a widely accepted opinion is different to gauge. Many residents do not actively participate in discussion on the Internet, and so their own opinions may be lost in the flotsam and jetsam of opinion tossed out into the blogosphere by those, such as myself and others, who do.

4/10/2008: The book is now available here.

I was fortunate enough to get a review copy of Benjamin Duranske's Virtual Law: Navigating the Legal Landscape of Virtual Worlds, which is available for pre-order at this time. Since the author has been following Law in more than virtual worlds at VirtuallyBlind.com, it is written by one of the very few intellectual property attorneys actively involved in this new method of entertainment, business, education and communication. Being someone especially interested in Law as it pertains to technologies, I was very happy to get the review copy.

To give this all context for those unfamiliar with virtual worlds, here are a few things that have happened over the last year:

• The first trademark of an avatar has happened.
• Pseudonymity of an avatar was verified through payment information subpoenaed from PayPal and Linden Lab in a case of copyright infringement enacted in a virtual world.
• The Terms of Service of a virtual world service provider were ruled a contract of adhesion in a lawsuit that was later settled.

That is a very small taste of what has happened in the last year within virtual worlds - and these only relate to one virtual world. Obviously, despite what many people who use virtual worlds may think or hope, Law is playing an increasingly significant role in synthetic worlds just as much as it does on the Internet - if not more. Since this is the first book on Law as related to virtual worlds, it has a lot to live up to.

On to the review.

The first chapter, Introducing Virtual Worlds and Virtual Law, explains virtual world to those who may be completely unfamiliar with virtual worlds themselves, and introduces 'Virtual Law'. As Benjamin Duranske writes (Chapter One, 'What Is Virtual Law', p 14.):

Virtual law is like "Internet law," in that it refers to a wide body of generally preexisting law that is applied somewhat differently in a new context. In fact, much of what we think of as "Internet law" applies to virtual worlds. In sum, virtual law is the statutory and case law that impacts virtual worlds and the application of that law to these spaces. It also refers to the internal governance structures that are beginning to appear in some virtual worlds...

... Virtual law includes aspects of civil procedure, constitutional law, contract law, copyright law, criminal law, tort law, patent law, property law, publicity law, securities law, tax law, trade secret law, trademark law, international law and Internet law. In each area, questions similar to those that arise in relation to real-world activity arise when law is applied to activity that takes place in virtual worlds, though with different, sometimes surprising, implications.

Therein lies not only the premise of the book, but the promise of the book.

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™ link

This 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.

Based on their previous success in Second Life, IFAW has built IFAW Island (111,179,37).

The launch of the island happens on March 27th - details here. My favorite Second Life Consultant is running the event; he didn't get to play with the prims on the island, though. And AmplifyPublicAffairs is coordinating things as well.

The Wandering Penguin already put his flippers on the ground there. He advises staying away from hungry hippos and also using your survival instincts.

The whole place is really worth exploring. There's a nice 'feel' to the whole place.

Here's the official press release:

Mitch Wagner's article, CNN Creates Citizen Journalism Channels On Web, In Second Life , has a pretty robust bit of branding in the title. After all, citizen journalism doesn't come from Big Media - Big Media is just trying to remain relevant in a period where they cannot compete with all the people out there who are doing their bit in talking about the world. And the headline, therefore, is misleading - CNN didn't create any citizen journalism channels on the web. That's like claiming to have invented jump-rope. The only ways I can rationalize that headline are:

• Hubris
• A desperate attempt to stay relevant.
• A desperate attempt to get page views on an article.
• Any combination of the above.

Let's be serious. There are many bloggers out there who have been in aggregators before. And to say it is 'uncensored' simply describes most of the reblogging web that actually requires less work. Any idiot can turn a website into a centralized aggregator- in fact, many do.

So what is the point? Second Life has many blogs out there; just take a look at the sidebar on Your2ndPlace.com - it's so long that I may have to rethink how I handle it, yet it is incomplete. I try to add people as fast as I find them, but... its like trying to drain a river with a tin cup. And what are the benefits for the participants in CNN's 'new and improved' stuff? A little exposure? They already had that through Google, Technorati and fellow bloggers - not to mention word of mouth.