Last month, six content creators in Second Life filed suit against another user named Thomas Simon (or, as he's known in the virtual world, "Rase Kenzo") for allegedly duplicating and selling thousands of products inside Second Life. Yesterday, a judgment of consent was filed in the case, which means the content creators effectively win. Because the settlement refers to the virtual items as "merchandise," as soon as the judge enters the settlement and makes it all official, the US government will have officially recognized virtual property.
If you're not familiar with Second Life—I spend my days covering the metaverse industry—it's a virtual world created by California-based Linden Lab that lets user ("residents") interact in a 3D environment, build virtual goods, and buy and sell them. And, of course, there's sex—one of the plaintiffs in the suit made his name by creating the most popular "sex bed" (a bed that animates multiple avatars in, well, sexual positions) in the virtual world.
There's also a whole lot of really wonderful thing going on in art, science, politics, etc. But a lot of people would rather talk about sex.
Regardless, that world is about to get more real. While Simon will only pay out $525 in damages, under the oath that that's all he profited, this is a fairly large precedent.
Benjamin Duranske, a lawyer who blogs about virtual worlds and co-chairs the American Bar Association's virtual worlds committee, observed that "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 government has been investigating virtual worlds for a while now, though, just like with the plain ol' 2D Internet, it's having a tough time keeping up. But Dan Miller, a senior economist for the Republican side of the Congress' Joint Economic Committee, has been putting together a research brief and holding sessions with virtual worlds developers from around the real world to start hammering out policies. Likewise, the Federal Consortium for Virtual Worlds just had its inaugural meeting.
What all this means for the users—and some analysts predict that by 2011, 80% of all Internet users will be in virtual worlds—is that the bits of code that represent our virtual property will have about as much meaning as our real property. It makes sense (the software industry makes a fair chunk of change after all), but this is the first formal recognition by the US. Probably.
I'll see you all in the Black Sun.
[via Virtually Blind via Virtual Worlds News]
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