SL business sues for copyright infringement
SECOND LIFE, July 3 (Reuters) - Second Life entrepreneur Kevin Alderman filed a copyright infringement lawsuit on Tuesday against Second Life resident Volkov Catteneo, and Alderman's lawyer said he plans to subpoena Linden Lab to force it to disclose Catteneo's real-world identity.
Context & Ripple Effects
The lawsuit lands where Second Life watchers said it would. A November 2006 CNET report warned that the world's economy was exposed because creators of virtual goods had no practical way to stop copying — and that threat to its virtual economy is what Alderman, a seller of in-world content, is now answering with a federal-style remedy: a copyright suit against an avatar.
It also extends the legal-real convergence Valleywag flagged in May 2007 when it observed the virtual world just got a little more real under Linden Lab's tightening governance. The confirmed plan to subpoena Linden Lab for Catteneo's real-world identity makes the platform itself the hinge: pseudonymity holds until a plaintiff's lawyer asks a court to lift it.
First-order effects
- Linden Lab is pulled directly into the dispute as subpoena target, forced to choose between its residents' anonymity expectations and compliance with a court order naming one of them.
- Volkov Catteneo faces real-world legal exposure — attorney fees, possible damages — for conduct that previously carried only in-world consequences like account suspension.
Second-order effects
- Other Second Life merchants who sell original content gain a template: if Alderman's suit proceeds, copycat enforcement by residents becomes cheaper than waiting for Linden Lab's internal dispute tools to act.
- Linden Lab's identity-disclosure posture becomes a competitive and trust issue — every platform hosting user-generated commerce must decide how readily it hands over real names behind avatars.
Third-order effects
- If avatar-to-avatar IP suits become routine, virtual goods harden into legally recognized property, and the burden of policing infringement shifts from platform moderators to courts and rights holders themselves.
- Pseudonymous participation in commercial virtual worlds comes under structural pressure: the more real money changes hands, the weaker the case for letting avatars operate beyond the reach of civil process.
The trend: Virtual-world commerce is crossing from platform self-policing into real-world litigation, with courts and subpoenas doing what terms-of-service enforcement cannot.