[sldev] My question about intellectual property and Second Life

[Jan Ciger]

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Argent Stonecutter wrote:

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

The idea is not to abolish the term, but the concept. There is copyright
and there are patents and other things, but not one umbrella thing -
that is the misleading part of it.

| 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.

Well, many European courts will strongly disagree with this notion. Once
you are offering the product on their "territory", you are covered by
their jurisdiction. I do not necessarily agree with this notion, because
it could unleash lot of other problems, but this has been a position
courts have taken before.

Also, saying that I am bound by Californian/Texas law when I commit a
crime/tort in Germany and have never set a foot on the U.S. soil will be
interesting. You may get a default judgement, but how are you going to
enforce it? Forget extradition - and the act may not have even been
criminal/tort in Germany to start with.

Overall, international law is an extremely complex issue and trying to
"simplify" the matter by using misleading "simple" terms like
intellectual property only murks the water more.

However, I suggest we move this discussion elsewhere, I think this is
not an appropriate forum for it.

Regards,

Jan


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