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Fahy vs Linden Lab: No case to answer?
Last week, on Thursday 8 April, Corey Fahy in Philadelphia filed a lawsuit against Linden Lab and more than 25 others, in the Pennsylvania East District Court (case number 2:2010cv01561, assigned to judge Joel Harvey Slomsky). Fahy alleges that an algorithm in one of his Second Life products has been subjected to copyright infringement, accompanied by the usual requests for damages, statutory damages, ten times damages, attorney's fees and all that. Where do we even begin? We'll spare you most of the cruft and go straight to the heart of the problems that we can see with this particular lawsuit.
Second Life third-party viewer policies get an update but still fail to do the job
Last week, the promised update of Linden Lab's Third-Party Viewer (TPV) policies crept out onto the Second Life Web-site with little fanfare. After the fuss caused by the tangle of legal incompatibilities, muddled terminology and ambiguous phrasing in the first version, the Lab said it would go back and address the problems, and get the policy document fixed. So, you'd think they'd have gotten it right this time around, right? We certainly did. We were wrong.
Second Life third-party viewer policies not well received
The hallmark of a good license is that it is clear, easy to understand and unambiguous. The gold-standard for a good contract is that it is all of the above and provides all parties with equal amounts of protection. There are bonus points for not conflicting with rights guaranteed by law, or with other prerequisite licenses or agreements. Linden Lab's Third Party Viewer (TPV) policies, as published on Tuesday, regrettably reflect none of these ideals. We'd go so far as to say that it's the worst day's work that we've seen come out of the Lab to-date. So much so that almost immediately after publishing them the Lab has sent them back to legal for both clarification and rewriting.
Electric Sheep looking to contribute portions of OnRez viewer
According to Chris Carella and Giff Constable, both of the Electric Sheep Company, have indicated today that the Electric Sheep Company is looking to contribute bug-fixes and some modifications back to the open source Second Life viewer. While the Second Life viewer source code is mostly under the GNU Public License (version 2), however the viewer is actually dual-licensed, with proceeds from the commercial license being used to help fund further development.
