Year: 2007

With the settlement of the ‘Rase Kenzo’ case in Second Life, we now have a precedent for calling virtual goods “merchandise.”

Although the claims largely centered on intellectual property, if the judge — the Honorable Sandra Townes, in the Eastern District of New York — enters the consent judgment as written, including its reference to copying of “merchandise,” the judgment will stand as the first formal, if tentative, recognition of virtual property by a U.S. court. Though the judgment will not have as significant a precedential value as a contested decision on the merits would have had, it will be cited for the foreseeable future.

The legal documents are quite short and very clear — the key bit is that throughout, the copied digital items are referred to as “merchandise.”

This is not the same case as the Eros case I referenced just a few days ago, but Eros is one of the plaintiffs. This case centered on copyright and trademark — Rase Kenzo was accused of infringing upon the creators’ rights by duplicating and selling copies of the items that they create and sell within SL.

Japanese Schoolgirl Watch: OMG! MMORPG on My Cell Phone!

Mobile tech company Media Groove just launched Chipuya Town, a virtual world accessible on any Flash-enabled keitai. Users create a custom avatar, then step into a cute-ified version of Tokyo’s Shibuya shopping district that’s accurate right down to the advertising overload. (Companies pay up to $4,000 a month for ads on in-world billboards.)

Part of the reason this works in Japan is the many hours spent on trains, plus of course the radically better phone infrastructure.

Behind the Activision-Blizzard union – page 2 | CNET News.com

Q: So will all Activision Games be branded with a new Activision Blizzard logo?
Morhaime: I’m not sure about a logo–that’s something we’ll have to discuss. But I think this issue is very important from a consumer-facing standpoint, so I want to emphasize it: The Activision and Blizzard brands will remain. We’re not going to put Blizzard Entertainment logos on Guitar Hero boxes, and we’re not going to put Activision logos on World of Warcraft boxes.

A few years back, I had a proposal for an MMO project called “Stages.” It was the idea of using virtual worlds as essentially communal audience spaces.  If you could get a live act or a video going in a virtual world, you could then offer virtual stages where the audience could actually mingle and chat with one another while watching the performance.

Of course, this is not really anything new — on a small scale, it’s happened for a while. But what I was envisioning was a platform basically built for the purpose, stripping away all the other stuff that comes with a virtual world by having the showing happening within an instance.

Read More “Sony invests in Gaia and virtual movie theaters”