Jackbooted copyright enforcement hits Second Life
Last month, virtual land owner Anshe Chung in Second Life was attacked by flying penises during an interview with CNET. Now, the video has been forced off of YouTube thanks to threat of lawsuit under the Digital Millennium Copyright Act. Apparently Ailin Graef (the actual person behind Anshe) claims that her likeness and her property in the game are copyrighted, and that derivative screenshots and videos are infringing her copyright.
What’s really worrying about this is that some of the material that was removed was legitimate reporting. What happened to Anshe was notable within the game world, and it is within fair use rights to distribute images of the event. Graef was obviously embarrassed by this attack, but I don’t think she’s doing anyone any favors by using legal threats to try to pretend that it never happened. Now it’s just going to create a fresh wave of publicity over something that was largely forgotten, and it may also be bad for her business, as the kind of people who play Second Life are a bit more liberal about copyright issues than the public at large.
