Hi. I'm Joe. I like law, tech, and stuff for geeks. I'm an Associate Editor at Phillyist and a contributor to Geekadelphia. I judge people loudly in public but other than that I'm a nice guy.
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Go! It's free! And fun! And full of Philadelphians! All alliteration aside, folks, commence the reading of the deets:
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Source: Phillyist
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The users are claiming that Linden Labs and Founder Philip Rosedale persuaded them to invest money and pay a sort of “property tax” with the promise of actual ownership of virtual land. Now, the users say, the terms of service have been changed without their prior knowledge or consent. They say the new terms “state that these land and property owners did not own what they had created, bought and paid for, and that these consumers had no choice but to click on a new terms of service agreement or they could not have access to their property.” Moreover, the group alleges that Linden Labs froze user accounts and deleted or converted non-virtual currency and virtual property without giving any explanation or avenues for recourse.
This class-action case, Evans v. Linden, was filed close to home, in U.S. District Court for the Eastern District of Pennsylvania.
Would notice have been enough to avoid liability, if there is any liability to begin with?
Could they just grandfather previous purchases so they are not affected by the new terms?
This will be an interesting case to watch.
View the suit's website:
http://www.virtuallanddispute.com/
The filing cites as a related case Bragg v. Linden Labs, a case brought by a lawyer/user of Second Life, also in the Eastern District, regarding his termination from the virtual world for his method of buy virtual land at less than cost.
The case ultimately settled, but the court called the mandatory arbitration clause in Linden Lab's terms unenforceable, and said in-game interaction was enough to meet the minimum contacts requirement for personal jurisdiction.
While Bragg does seem related, in that it touches virtual world litigation generally, Evans v. Linden is more focused on the property issue.
More on Bragg v. Linden Lab:
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Bragg_v._Linden_Lab
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I'm going to start off by giving all the credit for aggregating these to Mashable. I haven't watched them all yet, but I thought it would be convenient to have them all embedded in my own corner of the web. So, without further adieu.
Source: http://mashable.com/2010/02/08/super-bowl-ads-2010/
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New ICANN rules allowing the use of non-Latin characters in domain names will enable the sort of fake-out you see above, which could be used by "phishers" to trick you into logging into a cloned version of, say, PayPal, unknowingly handing over your private data to malicious third parties. Mashable found the story over at the UK's Times Online.
Source: http://technology.timesonline.co.uk/tol/news/tech_and_web/article6971724.ece
