Organization of Second Life Article

I decided to organize the article as follows-

• Introduction to Second Life and the health of its economy
• Creation in Second Life-
  
• no copy, no transfer rights within the world
• users retain full intellectual property rights
• The Architecture of Second Life-
• similar to an MMORPG
• client program and host/server program
• how actions inputted into client program are processed by the host/server program
• Second Life Copyright problems and Lawsuits-
• Copybot
• the use of rollbacks
• Thomas Simon/Rase Kenzo lawsuit by six copyright holders that resulted in a
  
• the Alderman vs. Volkov Catteneo/Robert Leatherwood lawsuit
• Linden Labs' usage of contract law to resolve copyright disputes-
• discussion of clauses 4.2, 4.1 and requirements to comply with the DMCA
• Copyright Analysis of Second Life-
• two-tiered nature of these items- graphic representation and the underlying software code
• fixation requirement-
• MAI v Peak
• conceptual separability-
• splitting function of SexGen bed from its appearance?
• substantial similarity-
• abstraction filtration comparison test of Computer Associates International v Altai
• derivative works analysis-
• Microstar v Formgen

Virtual Legality- Copyright in Second Life

The link to my article about Second Life is now in the upper right hand corner of the blog. I am going to be finishing up the copyright analysis sections today. If anyone has any feedback or suggestions, please shoot me an email.

Second Life Panel with the Copyright Society

After my enjoyable experience of coordinating panels at my school last year, I joined the New York Chapter of the Copyright Society's Planning Committee. As part of my responsibilities, I have been coordinating a panel about the virtual world Second Life.
The roster for the panel is excellent and includes-
-Professor James Grimmelmann of New York Law School (who specializes in virtual world law)
- Mark Fischer (of Fish & Richardson, who will moderate)
- Stevan Lieberman (a lawyer who practices on Second Life) and
-Frank Taney Jr. (the lawyer who is representing the plaintiffs in both Second Lief copyright infringement lawsuits)

For those interested, the event will be held at the Princeton Club in New York, on February 27th at high noon. I am also working on an article about Second Life, and I will post a link to the in-progress article at some point soon.

Great New Feature

I am proud to announce a useful new feature that I have added to the blog. On the upper righthand corner I have inserted a feed of interesting blog posts that I have tagged in my Google Reader. The feed will only show the most recent items that I have shared. If you are interested in seeing the entire list of shared items, I have inserted a link in the section entitled "More about Me" called "My Shared Items." If you want to subscribe to a feed of this so I can do all the searching for content for you, there is also "My Shared Items Feed" right here. Now when I find an interesting post somewhere I don't need to put it up in the blog itself, and I can just tag it in my Google Reader. Thanks Google.

Oddly enough...

Mere days before my posting about trademarks as keywords, my chosen example American Airlines actually filed suit against Google over the practice.

A Thought on Trademarks as Keywords

On my Advanced Trademark final during my last semester at Cardozo, there was a question regarding the use of trademarks as keywords for purposes of banner advertising. The cases that exist hinge on whether or not such a sale constitutes a "use in commerce" for the purposes of trademark law. If it is a "use in commerce" then the practice should be considered trademark infringement. When thinking about the issue, I decided to take a step back and ask what the possible effects would be if the practice was prohibited. One of my conclusions was that banning this practice would result in favoring fanciful marks above all other kinds of trademarks.

To illustrate, let's take a fanciful mark like a drug name such as Viagra. In a world where TM as KW sales are illegal, you would type "Viagra" into Google and no banner advertisements would exist. Pfizer would possess a monopoly over the upper portion of the search results because no one could buy advertisements. However, a company that uses a non-fanciful mark, like American Airlines, could clearly not prevent the sale of "American" as a keyword considering the other uses of the word. This example also proves the difficulty of the implementation of such a plan. Would it just be prohibited to sell the words "American Airlines" in conjunction as a keyword? Could competitors buy the rights to have advertisements pop for the word "American" by speculating that a majority of the searchers will be looking for American Airlines? I have of course picked a grossly oversimplified illustration, but I feel that it demonstrates the issues with such a prohibition and its implementation.

From my perspective, it is preferable to retain the TM as KW practice for several reasons. First, as I demonstrated, a prohibition would result in unequal treatment of trademarks. Second, I believe the practice is a direct analogy of the real-world practice of placing generic products next to their legitimate counterparts on a CVS shelf. This is one of the contexts where the Internet should not be treated differently than its closest real-world analogy. Third, just like the CVS scenario, this encourages more direct competition which is theoretically supposed to benefit consumers.

Report on RIAA's Litigation Campaign

The Electronic Frontier Foundation (EFF) has published a report on the RIAA's four year litigation campaign waged against college students and other alleged copyright infringers.