Facebook deletes account with pseudonym; Second Lifers could be affected.

Well well well...fancy seeing you here, Moo. ;-)

Even though John Swift got away with it I'm not so sure SL residents will fare the same. What Facebook doesn't want are folks using false identities, and sometimes it may not be easy to tell a person roleplaying a fictional character from a person simply using their SL name as a nom de plume. They may not care and just place a blanket ban on using your "game" name in a profile.

Of course, I don't understand why you'd want to put an elf or other fictional character's profile up on a mundane service like Facebook, anyway. Perhaps just me... :-)

Anyway, if this is the new home of SLIers that was alluded to then welcome and best of luck!

Thor / Jim

Please bring the old format back, This is shocking.

I'm swamped with pictures and ads for worlds inhabited by pimply faced youths. Please please please go back to our nice clean dedicated site.

Depends what facebook wants to be. I really wouldn't mind either way as long as they are consistent. Thing is, if they knock down pseudonyms they should delete fat girls who only take a picture of their cleavage or eyes or do some weird angle to hide their flub.

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It's hard to say - according to (for example) the myspace terms of service, they don't permit entries that don't represent individuals (ie: They don't want bands, companies, promotional faux-entities and so on) - yet myspace is replete with them.

Perhaps it just gives them an avenue for selected enforcement. How the heck would they know if my real name is Tateru Nino or not?

I had the same issue a few weeks ago and blogged about it. My view was that Facebook needed to adapt to virtual reality and do a special "avatar" status that was not on by default, like Flickr did for "computer generated/illustration" filter.

Yeah, this is even a bit bigger than just virtual worlds - think about it there are a few writers out there who operate on pen names, people who have nicknames they rather use or are better known by. This can become a REALLY bad practice - as a social network places like Facebook need to realize that there are other avatars out there.

Not to mention all those other social networking sites which aren't quite the same thing as Facebook: LiveJournal, BlogSmith, and so on. I know many SL residents on those as well.

I would hope that BlogSmith wouldn't delete me, considering that Massively uses it to blog. *cries*

I've added a few comments on Jon Smith's blog... basically, the issue is complex, and there is no "right" and "wrong" here, but a grey area which is better left for judges and lawyers to figure out.

On one hand, Jon Smith did break Facebook's ToS, and so Facebook "rightfully" excluded him from their service, as they should technically exclude people like me. In fact, just because I've got more documentation proving a claim to "Gwyneth Llewelyn" (it's a registered pseudonym with the local IP office; it's a trademark; it's the business name of my consulting business as freelancer), it is (not yet, at least :) ) my "real name", although I believe I can build a very strong case of being the name of a real, legal persona (that claims intellectual property rights, gets invoiced and pays the invoices, bills others for work and gets payments, and pays taxes on them), I might not be able to prove, in a court, that I'm not violating Facebook's ToS beyond a shadow of a doubt. It would require a very talented (and highly expensive!) lawyer for that.

On the other side of the issue, even in the quasi-libertarian United States, you cannot write up a binding contract that violates state, federal, or international laws. In effect, refusing the right to claim intellectual property rights on content under a pseudonym is breaking the regulamentation of the Berne Convention on Intellectual Property of 1866, of which the US are a signatary. This basically means that you cannot write a contract that has force of law by refusing someone the right to create content under a pseudonym, and claim IP rights on that content for the pseudonym they've picked. Under most jurisdictions — and I believe this applies to the US as well (I'm not an expert!!) — an invalid clause on a contract (ie. because it violates existing regulamentation or legislation) does not invalidate the whole contract. So Facebook's ToS is still valid for all other clauses except that one.

In real life, of course, it takes a lawyer and a court of law to demand precisely that understanding from a judge in written. This, obviously, makes the matter quite more complex, since not everybody has access to a highly qualified lawyer to make that claim (they're expensive!) — and obviously Facebook's lawyers will be quite good at defending the opposite view. In fact, if I were Facebook's lawyer, I would simply claim the precedent that many RL media (newspapers, radios, TV) refuse to publish a letter from a pseudonymous user, which would be the same issue. Nevertheless, as you all know, people like Marilyn Manson, Eminem, or even Mr. T, get quoted on the media using their pseudonyms, never their real names.

So the issue is far from being "black" or "white".