Copyright Infringement
Even in the most realistic simulations in Second Life, the virtual environment looks like a low budget, animated children’s cartoon. Even if the artists are highly skilled, the tools to build objects in Second Life are so crude that even the best objects are only a poor representation of what they look like in real life. There are only very simple primitive shapes available to build with. Even if you can assemble just what you want to make the graphical shading, Second Life is not realistic, having no reflection and a poor approximation of shadow.
Despite the fact that their virtual world looks so crude, it is against Linden Lab’s Terms of Service to create anything in Second Life that is copyrighted in real life. As I understand it, their rationale is that they do not want to be responsible for the liability of copyright infringement. However, like all other customer relationship issues, Linden Lab enforces their Terms of Service in such a way that it alienates and ultimately drives away many previously loyal Second Life users.
There is one Second Life user that I used to know who worked with a friend of his to create a virtual one man fighter spaceship. Creating this spaceship was difficult because it was limited to having the very few graphical primitives that Second Life allows for something that will fly with an avatar controlling the flight. They did a nice job building the model and a beautiful job on creating the graphics to make it look as realistic as possible. They also worked with a third creator who wrote a script for the behavior of the object in Linden Scripting Language (LSL) to make the spaceship fly, bank, and dock under user control. Even though it didn’t look like the spaceship in the TV show or the movie, they named their ship the Viper like the fighters on Battlestar Galactica.
After the months that they put into making their ship look and fly as well as they could, they then tried to sell copies in Second Life. They put it in commercial areas where it could be found and sold quite a few copies of it. The guy I knew told me they were making about $150 US dollars every month from the sale of their spaceships, that is until Linden Lab decided to delete his spaceship from his Second Life inventory. Even though it didn’t look like the fighters in Battlestar Galactica Linden Lab said that since they had called their ship a Viper that it was a copyright infringement against Universal Studios and that they could not longer sell it in Second Life. This skilled builder never built anything else in Second Life. He told me his friend who did the scripting for his spaceship had his account deleted because of his help on the fighter. He lost hundreds of dollars of inventory and hundreds of dollars worth of credit in Lindens that he hadn’t been able to cash out before his account was terminated.
In a worse case, there is a woman who I met in Second Life who designed and made attractive virtual women’s clothing for avatars. Her virtual clothing designs were so good that her customers in Second Life asked her if she could have real versions made that they could actually wear. She had her own shop in Second Life and it was very popular. She told me she was making over $1500 per month in US dollars from the sale of her clothing in Second Life. Displayed in her shop were several hundred of her designs that she had created over the years.
She told me that there was another vendor who accused her of stealing one of her designs and selling it, even though it was clearly something that she had created. What happened was that Linden Lab sided with her accuser and deleted her store and deleted her account. After this loss, months later she created another avatar and found that the woman who accused her was still selling and making money from her designs. All that Linden Lab would have needed to do was to check their server logs for the date of creation of that virtual dress design. The woman who did the dress design told me that she had no opportunity to communicate with her accuser or Linden Lab, just one day her account was deleted and her store was gone. It was only after many phone calls to Linden Lab that she was even able to learn why, and she has never been able to get the account back or the thousands of dollars she had not yet exchanged out of Second Life.
It is this kind of incompetent policing that has caused many content creators to permanently leave Second Life. From personal experience, both the success and failure of Second Life is that a user can create an avatar that is an extension of their personality. Part of what makes Second Life compelling to participate in is developing and refining this alternate personality. However, once one learns that the time, money, and emotional investment one puts into their avatar can be trivially and irrevocably destroyed by Linden Lab, the experience is a personal loss that goes beyond just starting another account. I know that in my case I will never put that time and investment into creating another avatar again. Further, I now view it as my responsibility to drive people away from Second Life so that they will not experience this loss themselves.