Linden Lab alters stance: will ban

It is my understanding of the nominative use the labs permits with TOS requires the first occurrence of the product name (You used it as the third and fourth words) have the ® symbol, thereafter you are free to use those two words free of such encumbrances.

The only exception to this is if you include the "The Second Life® World" in your byline and your blog is substantially or in whole dedicated to Second Life®

I believe you are breaking the TOS Tateru, be careful you are not banned!

No, this strike thing was awful, see? Because it pushed LL into making a *worse* and more narrow and destructive interpretation than we had before. Thanks a lot! Before this nonsense, we had a badly written blog that wasn't a ruling or pre-ruling -- yet. Just a ham-handed attempt at overreach on to third-party sites, and overreach beyond what trademark law in fact demands or can enforce legitimately. When you get a thing like that, your best counsel is: do nothing. Wait. Wait to see if they come after you. Don't go asking for trouble in advance by urging them to make interpretations.

Bloggers and journalists don't write "IBM (TM)" at the first appearance of a story about IBM, that would be absurd. Blogs that regularly write about World of Warcraft don't dot their site with TMs. Please. This is insane. It should never have been cause for alarm, no one should have ever started doing this, it's not even parody but idiocy. Now they are stuck with an actual ruling that mandates blogs using SL in the name in particular to have to put these disclaimers beyond what the normal fankit sort of usage is everywhere.

Furthermore, the disparagement clause is now understood very overbroadly. If at one point it was disparagement in conjunction with the use of the INSL or SL THIS THAT marks, narrowly understood when referring to the product as a product, now it's understood to mean "anything disparaging about anything to do with the Second Life sphere all over as anyone understands it and as LL wishes to interpret it".

What these bloggers should have done was taken their time to build up a solidarity movement with bright red lines about what they would not do, bolstered by very good legal advance on First Amendment issues. They would have very good foundations in the First Amendment when operating on third-party sites. They'd strengthen their case by not refusing to honour the SL trademarks, but by refusing not to cave to overreach, or beg for interpretations of exceptions that involve in fact bolstering that overreach.

You see what happens when you strike over something this ridiculous? You just end up undermining the principles of freedom for everyone, and only land yourself worst conditions. Struggles against arbitrariness and abusiveness are just, and are a good thing, but they have to have some common sense to them, some sense of independence and spine. I've been very dismayed to see the strikers begging for permission to put on a demonstration in front of the Governor's Mansion, or begging for pre-exoneration from banning if they have a trademark dispute. This puts the entire civil society of SL, such as it is, in a terribly weak place.

What happens when your avatar gets banned though Tateru?

And why does this site not let me reply to your post?

If the likes of Information Week and Scoble were bound to such trademark restrictions (and they exist for other companies, not just Linden Lab) then we'd have examples galore of how this applied, but they simply don't abide by these rules. The mainstream press, the professional writers, are not bound by conditions such as this and this is where the whole process has been made extremely messy.

This is intended to stop people infringing on Linden Lab's trademarks in relation to business, it's to stop other virtual worlds using Second Life, it's to stop business pretending to be Linden Lab and trading off their name. If you're selling products inworld or outside of it via websites that offer such services then you should be following these trademark guidelines to the letter.

However if you're simply writing about your adventures inworld, questioning policy, praising policy, then you shouldn't have this big stick hanging over you.

This whole thing was a tempest in a teapot. Those guidelines are standard issue corporate fare that you issue to your BUSINESS PARTNERS. That clarity should have been there at the beginning. No game company in their right mind will care if some fan site is not putting a (TM) after their effing name, least of all the Lindens.

Now if you had a domain name, that is another story, and you might be quite irate. Those people should've been compensated somehow.

You can never please everybody, but with a little forethought and sugar you can keep most people on board, instead of cause all this fear and doubt.

Silly hippies, PR is for real.