The Voices in My Head

Over on the Linden Lab blog, they have finally made a public posting about a certain legal case.

While I probably have the details wrong somewhere, rumour and hearsay being what it is, as I understand it from those sources I have been able to find, Bragg (a lawyer in real life and representing himself in this case) discovered a method of locating the web address of auctions for servers before LL had formally opened the auctions.

Essentially, he discovered that the URL for a given auction was composed of the root, plus a string that varied for each auction. It turned out that those strings were publicly available by looking at the sim within the SL virtual world. Essentially, the “secret” urls were easily discovered from publicly available data. All he had to do was type them.

At least where I come from, typing in an URL by hand is not a crime.

Linden Lab’s complaint against Bragg is that he then used the interface on these URL’s to place bids to buy the servers in question. He won these bids easily, because apparently no one else was sufficiently motivated to locate an URL and bid the same way he did. It was at this point apparently, that LL decided to freeze his account and confiscate all his in-world assets, which are apparently being held in some kind of limbo pending the results of the court case.

As far as my (admittedly shaky) understanding of the law goes, LL doesn’t really have a case here. Under various laws broadly described as “invitation to treat”, it can be said that LL put a product out for sale, he purchased it, and then LL reacted by cancelling the sale and confiscating all his other inworld assets (including servers previously purchased by the more traditional method).

At one point, some people were even claimed that he had “hacked” the server. That’s nonsense. Last time I checked, typing an URL from publicly available information (or even at random) is not a crime.

So who’s side am I on?

Well, I know if LL loses, it will hurt them. How badly is hard to say, and a lot depends on whether they are forced to fix certain things as a consequence of the case. At the very least, some clauses in the ToS document have already been struck down by the court and declared invalid. I don’t want LL to be weakened to the point of affecting their bottom line, since I have money tied up with them, and I’d hate to see them go bust.

On the other hand, that ToS document needs to go, and they need to know that they can’t just ignore rules. A do-what-you-want anarchy might work for their corporate structure, but the rest of the world, and certainly not me, isn’t ready for that yet.

So, I’m just watching, fascinated. It’s like driving past a train wreck in slow motion as it’s about to happen. You just have to put on the brakes and watch, and grab your camcorder if you have it handy.

This entry was posted on Sunday, July 1st, 2007 at 12:43 am and is filed under Linden Lab, Warda. 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.