Linden Labs Sends "Permit-and-Proceed" Letter

linuxwrangler writes "In sharp contrast to the incidents chronicled at Chilling Effects, Second Life creators Linden Labs have sent the parody site Get a First Life a proceed-and-permit letter. From the letter: 'Linden Lab is well-known for having strict hiring standards, including a requirement for having a sense of humor, from which our lawyers receive no exception. In conclusion, your invitation to submit a cease-and-desist letter is hereby rejected.' The letter also grants permission to use the parody logos."

Comments

Yay linden labs

[ocelotbob]

Now if only other people could be so lenient towards copyright...

Re:Dangerous precedent being set

[Tom]

The law does have quite a bit of humour, you just have to be a lawyer or someone with legal training to appreciate it.

For example, a workers law here in Germany requires the top boss to talk to the elected workers' council at least once a month. Let me skip the why and boring details. One company persistently rejected to even acknowledge that elected body even existed, much less deal with them.

So one court case later, the judgement was to take the offenders into custody. It's called "Beugehaft" in Germany, the idea being that for minor crimes where fines aren't the proper punishment because what you want is someone to do something, you take him into custody until he says "ok, ok". Now here's the joke: The judgement called for this punishment to be levied on the entire board of directors, and immediately due to the danger of them fleeing. The people who thought they were above it all were in immediate danger of being put behind bars within the hour. And sure, they could call for revision, but they'd still be taken from their office by police and spend at least one night in jail.
A bunch of frentic phonecalls later, the CEO had binding instructions to cooperate fully with the workers council.

Lawyers laugh as much as anyone. It's just that most of their jokes are as puzzling to us as C++ jokes are to your grandmother.