intellectual property rights
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Amazon and the US government team up to thwart online counterfeits
Amazon and the US government's IPR Center have launched Operation Fulfilled Action in a bid to stop counterfeits from going on sale.
Portions of Twinity virtual world taken offline
Twinity users are experiencing a bit of lawyerly inconvenience according to virtual world blogger Tateru Nino. Portions of the Metaversum GmbH sim have been taken offline for unspecified reasons, and Nino speculates that "someone's team of undead zombie lawyers woke up and started asserting intellectual property rights and licensing restrictions." The Twinity project makes use of both Google Maps and 3-D data to recreate cities like Singapore, London, Miami, and New York, but patrons will need to put their online party plans on hold for the time being. Twinity's dev team posted a cryptic explanation, along with its intent to "try to reactivate the cities in the future."
[UPDATED] Playtime over for You Play or We Pay
In what seems to be an inevitable move, Blizzard has ordered the controversial and too-good-to-be-true services of You Play or We Pay to stop operations. According to their website, Blizzard found YPOWP's offering to be a violation of their intellectual property rights. You Play or We Pay, which stirred up a bit of controversy and a lot of skepticism when it first launched, aimed to compensate players whenever the World of Warcraft had unscheduled downtime. Essentially, it was insurance for WoW game time.Initially, the site planned to charge for their service but eventually moved to a free model after some mysterious downtime of their own. It was such a novel idea that WoW Insider even interviewed the site's founders, George Tung and Milos Golubovic. It seems that this bizarre saga has at last come to an end, and questions of whether the site was for real or not (did anyone ever get compensation?) will never be answered. [UPDATE: Several readers chimed in to answer that question -- apparently YPOWP sent its members 30-day game cards as compensation for lost play time. This indicates that the service, even after going to the free model, was for real. It also isn't against the TOS. That service was frowned upon by Blizzard legal, though, and YPOWP was taken down because of intellectual property rights issues instead.]
