[sldev] My question about intellectual property and Second Life

[Argent Stonecutter]

On 2008-08-28, at 20:44, Jan Ciger wrote:
> The trouble with the "blanket term" you would like to have is that  
> it is
> legally meaningless and completely misleading for the lay people.

I entirely agree, BUT...

English is not a tame language, it evolves out of control of people's  
wills and wishes. It can't be trapped nor fenced. It can be  
encouraged to nest where you want it, but it takes a lot of work, and  
you have to build a new burrow... just filling in the old one will  
not work. Consider how many years the US government has been trying  
to suppress derogatory terms for people from certain parts of the  
world, to no avail.

If you want to abolish the term, you have to at the very least come  
up with a better blanket term and popularize that.

> Finally, for the people pushing for various "EULA"-like fields in the
> object properties - you do not know what you are getting yourself  
> into.
> Your license may not even be a valid license in many places [...]

It only needs to be a valid license in California and Texas.

Your idea of using German cut-outs is charming, but the law does not  
work that way. Perhaps you can ignore the GPL in Germany, but you  
can't sell your GPL-violating products back to someone in the US.

Second Life operates out of California and has an office in Texas.  
When you log in to SL, your "property" is in California and Texas.  
Not Germany or Japan or India or China.