Matt Mihaly (CEO of Iron Realms, developer of numerous highly-polished MUDs and now working a graphical one called Earth Eternal) has written about a very interesting case between Linden Labs and an ex-user of Second Life.

In short: Marc Bragg bought quite a bit of virtual property in Second Life (through the official Linden Labs auction system). Later, Linden found out that Bragg was guessing at the URLs for various auctions that hadn’t been publicized yet. Linden banned his account and re-auction his properties. Bragg is suing for damages.

Linden has actually been taking a beating. First, the judge invalidated their Terms of Service. Then, in response to Linden’s assertion that the defendant was just buying bits of “memory allocation and computational resources”, Marc Bragg brought up this public statement from Linden’s CEO:

We launched Second Life without out of world trade and after a few months we looked at it and thought, ‘We’re not doing this right, we’re doing this wrong.’ We started selling land free and clear, and we sold the title, and we made it extremely clear that we were not the owner of the virtual property.

Ouch. I’ve always assumed that most virtual world companies were pretty well in the clear with virtual goods, and could handle their users however they chose. This case will be interesting to watch, because Linden may find they’ve promised a bit more than they want to deliver.

This entry was posted on Thursday, July 5th, 2007 at 5:51 pm and is filed under Game Discussion. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. You can leave a response, or trackback from your own site.