Second Life and Virtual Worlds
Well, the Lab proved me wrong. A couple of hours ago the Lab apologized to Strawberry. An Apology to Strawberry Singh & A Call to YouTubers: “Un-Cease & Desist”.
This is a legitimate apology and a promise to change company policy. Worth your time to read.
I am actually quite proud of Linden Lab.
Strawberry Singh is dealing with the Lab banging on her for a copyright violation at YouTube. See: Trademark Complaint Received from Linden Lab.
Strawberry writes, “I didn’t think that would be an issue as it says on their Trademark Guidelines page that journalists and media outlets have special permission to use it in blog entries etc…”
I’ve read that. I understand the rules to be pretty clear the problems are about impersonating Linden Lab or Second Life, doing something to make the people seeing the logo think you are associated with the Lab, a product is made by the Lab, you are some part of the Lab or represent it in some way.
Strawberry is not doing that. While I can suppose someone might make that mistake watching Strawberry’s video tutorial, I do NOT think it a reasonable conclusion.
So, I understand the information the same as Strawberry does. So, what’s up? We don’t know. Of course, YouTube isn’t waiting around. The Lab complained and YouTube loaded the 12ga and said move it. With almost no time and the Lab doing the old single lame answer and then stonewall, Strawberry had had no choice but to take down her 2 SL intro videos.
If the Lab provides no discussion or clarification, this will through a chill on people making SL tutorials that show how to join or use SL. F______g dumb. People use logos and trademarks in all sorts of stuff. Admittedly with permission, which the LL Trademark Guidelines give and the context in which they can be used. Companies like CokaCola allow broad use of their trademark on just about anything but a competing can of soda. They understand the importance of having something promoted.
I suggest you jump over to twitter and pop off a tweet to @ebbealtberg. Give him a link to Strawberry’s blog and ask, what’s up with that?
May be use the hashtag #berryCopyright.
…or maybe this is some devious plot by Drax… 
naw, he likes Berry. No matter how many more viewers she gets than he does.
It is the holidays and everyone is busy. Plus we are coming up on the No-Change-Windows. So, while there is some news, things are slow.
Last week the email update rolled out. So, if you haven’t verified your email address, you have stopped receiving your offline emails of IM’s.
Main Channel – We get an update to version #17.12.01.511131. All we know about this version is there are internal changes.
If you think about the usual pace of server development at the Lab, which we see when shinnies are in progress, and the months of ‘internal improvements’, where we aren’t seeing much change, you start to think the Lab is slacking off. I doubt that.
Since the community is complaining about content theft, we’ve had a few hints they are dealing with it, and we know the Lab doesn’t talk about security fixes… I assume there is quite a bit of work going on to fix exploits. But, we can’t really know.
RC Channels – No update this week. The RC’s will continue to run last week’s version #17.12.01.511131. Mazidox Linden found a bug in the planned updates and stopped the release. So, next week… probably not. That is the start of a no-change-window.
Inara Pey has apparently sat through a dry video of Tara Hernandez’s, Senior Director of Systems and Build Engineering at Linden Lab, presentation at Amazon’s Las Vegas promotion for their services. She has written about it here: SANSAR AND SECOND LIFE IN THE CLOUD: LL SPEAKS AT AWS RE:INVENT. The video is here:
That is a 34-minute video on YouTube. There are some gems in the video that interest Second Life™ people.
I had not realized the first iteration of SL used a graphics engine designed to circumvent the Windows graphics and go directly to hardware. This go-to-hardware was the early game-graphics optimization used by most of the industry. That is long gone. Now OpenGL is the optimization that interfaces with all the various graphics systems in use with SL.
Inara covers the main parts SL’ers will find interesting. But, the video is loaded with tidbits about Second Life and how they are changing away from the problems with ideas for Sansar. So, some seldom talked about SL things are described in the video.
There is about 10+ minutes of tech description on Sansar and how it works. And toward the end some words on how they plan to adapt Second Life for life in the cloud.
Pine Lake is a post-apocalyptic build in Second Life™. I’m not that much into doing travel guide stuff for SL. But, occasionally I find a place that is like… Wow! Pine Lake is such a place.
You can get a kinda lame idea of what the place is like from their Flickr Group. The images there today do not do the build justice.
It is the attention to detail that impresses me. Wow! Just wow. The amount of detail is incredible.
This Friday 11/10 was the first meeting of a new user group, Web. This meeting is for discussion of all the Second Life™ web properties.
I’ve combined the summary and index.
03:45 – Getting Started. Welcome.