You knew it had to happen, but are still surprised when it does. In what may be a first-ever, a lawsuit has been filed against a defendant that doesn’t really exist, over a non-existent furniture line. Yes, you guessed it, a bed with special embedded animations that allow participants in Second Life, the virtual reality world established by Linden Labs, to essentially recreate an adult film with their virtual persona—avatars.
For the past few years, Second Life’s approach to IP protection has been to allow players to keep rights to programs, animations and objects they create—although many of the tools (programming scripts, etc.) are Linden’s and are provided to enable players to build things in this virtual world. Much like user-generated content in the world of multimedia audio-visual works, creativity and innovation is creating virtual content by the boatload and creating virtual objects and businesses is not simply a recreational pastime, but also a source of entrepreneurial glee and money for many. Clothing, real estate, automobiles, virtually (pardon the pun) anything, becomes the object of virtual purchases, sales and licensing.
Well, the law has caught up with reality. One player, whose avatar is selling virtual items under the brand “SexGen” bed, is suing another avatar for selling fakes for less—undermining the business. Since you have no obligation to disclose your true identity in Second Life, who do you sue? Well, first you try to get information from Linden, presumably because their computers house the underlying registration and information that would disclose who is behind the knock-offs. But, if the alleged infringer has not registered a real name, credit card or other “real world” items to enable identification, you might only get an IP address.
So we’ll keep you posted on developments, but who knows where this will go. Will a court entertain the case? Will they discover the identity of the alleged infringer? Will copyright infringement principles apply in a virtual world? Perhaps the plaintiff will try to enjoin Linden from allowing or enabling the fake products, or send them a virtual Digital Millennium Copyright Act (“DMCA”) “take-down” notice.