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.