On IP, Legality, And Virtual Worlds

Posted by ryuzaki0 on Thursday December 4, 2003 @05:59AM from the my-brain-hurts dept.

Thanks to LawMeme for their complex article discussing how to regulate player content in virtual worlds, with particular relevance to the recent announcement that MMO Second Life "now recognizes the ownership of in-world content made by subscribers." The author starts with a question posed by a third party at the time of the announcement: "You're creating this world in which people come to play and be creative, and yet you've given this world a system that has been extensively criticized as limiting creativity. Haven't you just given them a new set of hurdles to creativity?" He then outlines his worries: "If your game platform - your game's rules and infrastructure - is non-coercive, then your game is going to have a serious problem resisting the intrusion of decidedly unfree real-life values as soon as your players start to care greatly about it. Only if your game is so trivial and so boring that no one attaches any significance to what happens there will the sense of play survive unaided."

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Re:YAHOOO by ITman75 · 2003-12-04 06:28 · Score: 2, Informative

yeah, but the only diff between SWG and THERE or SL is that SWG has goals where There and second life is more of a chat room with fashion or building things. No killing or points system really